The CEO of Airbus Group Tom Enders recently announced that the company is planning to start testing its self-piloting flying cars by the end of the year 2017. The company also plans to make the aircraft ready for short trips by the year 2021.
The airborne transportation vehicle maker is designing the vehicle for only single-passenger travel. The company has been working on its autonomous Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) concept through Project Vahana, which is an internal project designed to test viability and refine a prototype for urban air transport.
During the DLD tech conference in Munich on Monday, Enders said that Airbus is taking the project "very seriously" because the airborne transit for goods and individual passengers can be tremendously beneficial for alleviating urban congestion, and reconfiguring urban planners' ideas about designing cities.
However, this is not the first time the company has made such an announcement. Airbus previously said that it was hoping to deploy a full-scale prototype sometime in 2017, including the active flight testing, meaning that the company is working hard to execute its plans under the sought-after timeline.
About The Vehicle:
The vehicle is likely to use a four-rotor design with variable positioning for vertical take off, and then shift to propel the craft through the air. The design process takes into account feasibility and efficiency. Airbus is focussing on electric motors so that the fleet of vehicles will not have a worse ecological impact than ground-based transportation in terms of contributing to air pollution.
According to TechCrunch, if Airbus can pull off the prototype, the biggest hurdle might be regulation because transporting humans by drone is still a big legal issue in dense metropolitan areas. It will be a huge challenge to prove the safety of the vehicles both to users and municipal regulators.