Uber Flying Cars May Be Only a Decade Away

Is anyone out there thinking about how to toll the air space over America’s highways?

That question may be a lot more timely than you think, after Uber released a white paper last week that envisions a fleet of small, on-demand, electric commuter aircraft within a decade. The fixed-wing, tilt-rotor aircraft would fly at an altitude of a few thousand feet under the Uber Elevate flag, making the trip from San Francisco to Silicon Valley in just 15 minutes. See video.

“Believe it or not, building a flying car isn’t the hardest part of this scheme,” Wired reports. “Within five years, according to the white paper, Uber expects the market to produce a fully electric, vertical-takeoff-and-landing plane that can fly 100 miles at about 150 mph, carrying multiple passengers and a pilot.”

This Isn’t April Fool’s

The story can now be told…Tolling Points saw this coming. A couple of years ago, we celebrated April Fool’s Day by roughing out—but never publishing—a post about a technologically daring transportation agency that set out to toll the air space above its roads. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had raised the prospect of deploying delivery drones to replace conventional highway shipping. So, we situated ourselves a few years in the future and imagined what tolling agencies could do to help Bezos’ plan take shape.

“Safe, reliable air freight needs good infrastructure, and good infrastructure costs money,” a fictitious tolling agency executive said in our spoof. “Without continuing care and maintenance, the electronics that support the air lane will collapse, and shippers will have to return to ground delivery. That makes air tolls a great investment for our customers, and a necessary expense for their users.”

That announcement earned rave reviews from the International Bridge, Tunnel, Turnpike, and Airlanes (IBTTAA) Association, in a voice that sounded suspiciously like the executive director and CEO of our own IBTTA, Pat Jones.

“Many users remember the days when air delivery meant loading piloted aircraft with bulk freight and routing them through busy, overcrowded airports,” tomorrow’s IBTTA representative stated. “Old-style air freight meant stop and wait. But today’s all-electronic, interoperable airlanes mean ‘go, go, go.’”

Truth Imitates Fiction

But it must be tough to be a science fiction writer these days. Real life is pushing farther, faster than your imagination can keep up. Just ask the aviation experts who told Wired that Uber’s timeline makes sense to them.

“Battery power has no hope of running a 150-passenger jet at Mach 0.8, but it could work for these slower, lighter aircraft,” the magazine reports. “Boeing and Airbus have already introduced lightweight, composite materials and fly-by-wire systems to commercial aviation. Consumer drones have proven sophisticated software that can make flying a multi-propeller aircraft as easy as thumbing an iPhone. Computers and electric cars have pushed battery technology forward, and the U.S. Department of Energy is spending tens of millions of dollars to accelerate research.”

The big limiting factor may not be the technology, but the regulatory process that would clear Uber for takeoff. “From a certification standpoint, it’s a humongous stretch,” Richard Pat Anderson, director of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Flight Research Center, told Wired. “You’re talking about multiple novel technologies, and the last word the [U.S. Federal Aviation Administration] wants to hear is ‘novel.'”

But Uber Chief Product Officer Jeff Holden said he takes encouragement from a consensus-based standards system, in place since the mid-1990s, in which the FAA lets private firms develop regulations for new types of aircraft, then tweaks and approves the drafts. “I feel like we can drive a lot of the thinking, and marshal people to put together a compelling proposal for the standard,” he said.

Back Here on Earth

While Uber sets its long-term gaze on the sky (and eventually the stars?), the company is also shaking things up on the ground, Grist reports, using an autonomous truck to deliver 51,744 cans of Budweiser from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, CO. During the ride, trucker Walter Martin sat in the passenger seat, apparently thumbing through a Patagonia catalogue.

Uber’s video announcement drew a sigh from Grist reporter Heather Smith. “Do enjoy that country guitar soundtrack,” she writes. “And try not to think of the irony of a technology that could replace so many blue-collar jobs being used to deliver the ultimate blue-collar beer.”

Stay up to date! Autonomous and connected transportation was one of the big topics at IBTTA’s 2016 Summit on All-Electronic Tolling, Managed Lanes and Interoperability, July 24-26, 2016 in Boston.