Building a flying car was a dream for auto makers. However, many companies are working for flying cars. Companies such as General Motors, Uber, Toyota and Hyundai have been active in building fast cars.

 

 

General Motors unveiled a driverless flying car at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2021. The company had come up with such a concept in view of future needs. The name of the concept car is Cadillac. The car has the ability to take passengers from one place to another without a driver. Due to the Corona epidemic, the CES project was held virtually this year.

According to General Motors, the car can carry one passenger.  For this, it is possible to fly directly from the ground and land from one roof to another. The speed of the car is 88.5 kilometers per hour. The Cadillac is an electric car with a 90 kW motor.

The body of the flying car Cadillac is very light. It includes a GM Ultium battery pack and four rotors. The front and rear sliding doors of the car are connected. The car features biometric sensors, voice control and hand gestures. When the video of the car was made public, it was announced that the car would be launched soon.

Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say, there will be driving drones in every home in the future. A team from the university's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab is testing driving and flight by connecting tires to eight mini quadcopters. The little drone, made of cardboard and fabric, flew around the city.

According to the institute, a drone without a wheel can cover 14 percent more distance than a flying car. Scientists have also acknowledged that drones are a better option than flying cars.

The Hag 184 autonomous aerial vehicle developed in China is a quadcopter-like all-electric aircraft.  It has only one seat. Especially battery-powered drones are compact and environmentally friendly, as well as suitable for urban environments.
 

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Hyundai Motor Company and Uber have announced a new partnership to develop Uber Air Taxi for a future aerial rideshare network and unveiled a new full-scale aircraft concept for this flying taxi at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2020.

“Through the partnership with Uber, we will accelerate efforts to harness Hyundai’s businesses and technologies to deliver true freedom of mobility,” said Euisun Chung, Executive Vice Chairman of Hyundai Motor Group. “We will innovate tirelessly to redefine the boundaries of mobility and provide quality time to customers.”

“Hyundai’s large scale manufacturing capabilities offer a major step forward for Uber Elevate. As Hyundai taps its automotive industry experience to mass produce air taxis, we will be able to more quickly take Uber's platform into the skies developing Uber Air taxis, expanding affordable and seamless transportation in cities around the world," said Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.

The decades-old dream of zipping around in the sky as simply as driving on highways may be becoming less illusory. Japan’s SkyDrive Inc., among the myriads of “flying car” projects around the world, has carried out a successful though modest test flight with one person aboard.

In a video shown to reporters on Friday, a contraption that looked like a slick motorcycle with propellers lifted several feet (1-2 meters) off the ground, and hovered in a netted area for four minutes.

Tomohiro Fukuzawa, who heads the SkyDrive effort, said he hopes “the flying car” can be made into a real-life product by 2023, but he acknowledged that making it safe was critical.

“Of the world’s more than 100 flying car projects, only a handful has succeeded with a person on board,” he told The Associated Press.

“I hope many people will want to ride it and feel safe.”

The machine so far can fly for just five to 10 minutes but if that can become 30 minutes, it will have more potential, including exports to places like China, Fukuzawa said.

Unlike airplanes and helicopters, eVTOL, or “electric vertical takeoff and landing,” vehicles offer quick point-to-point personal travel, at least in principle.

They could do away with the hassle of airports and traffic jams and the cost of hiring pilots, they could fly automatically.

Battery sizes, air traffic control and other infrastructure issues are among the many potential challenges to commercializing them.

“Many things have to happen,” said Sanjiv Singh, professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, who co-founded Near Earth Autonomy, near Pittsburgh, which is also working on an eVTOL aircraft.

“If they cost $10 million, no one is going to buy them. If they fly for 5 minutes, no one is going to buy them. If they fall out of the sky every so often, no one is going to buy them,” Singh said in a telephone interview.

The SkyDrive project began humbly as a volunteer project called Cartivator in 2012, with funding by top Japanese companies including automaker Toyota Motor Corp., electronics company Panasonic Corp. and video-game developer Bandai Namco.

A demonstration flight three years ago went poorly. But it has improved and the project recently received another round of funding, of 3.9 billion yen ($37 million), including from the Development Bank of Japan.

The Japanese government is bullish on “the Jetsons” vision, with a “road map” for business services by 2023, and expanded commercial use by the 2030s, stressing its potential for connecting remote areas and providing lifelines in disasters.

Experts compare the buzz over flying cars to the days when the aviation industry got started with the Wright Brothers and the auto industry with the Ford Model T.

Lilium of Germany, Joby Aviation in California and Wisk, a joint venture between Boeing Co. and Kitty Hawk Corp., are also working on eVTOL projects.

Sebastian Thrun, chief executive of Kitty Hawk, said it took time for airplanes, cell phones and self-driving cars to win acceptance.

“But the time between technology and social adoption might be more compressed for eVTOL vehicles,” he said.

Source:IndiaTV

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