• 29 Sep 2016 10:26 AM
• 0

Uber Announcement on Electric VTOL

During the AHS-sponsored reception, Nikhil Goel, a product manager of special projects at Uber Technologies, commented on Uber's plans for moving urban transportation to the skies with electric VTOL. A transcription follows:

At Uber, we are super obsessed with cities, improving cities, unlocking their immense value through urban mobility.And to us urban mobility means a couple of things. One, it means cutting congestion. It means eliminating parking, which can take up to a third of urban real estate, and dramatically reducing pollution. It means giving people their time back. To us, urban air transportation is simply a continuation of our mission, right? Not only because it can cut congestion — it's got massive potential to do that — but it allows us to move people from Point A to B much, much faster than you would otherwise.

If you do it in all-electric vehicles, you can do it with zero emissions, and so we're super excited about that. But as I look around, I think I've seen today, yesterday and this week that a lot of you guys are equally as excited about that. There's clearly a lot of really creative work going on in this space.

So at Uber, we're super excited about figuring out how we can fast forward that entire ecosystem of that future version of cities that we all kind of share, right? So right now we are in learning mode. We're trying to figure out how we can most effectively do that. And so we're just really excited to be here amongst the flight experts and hopefully getting the opportunity to collaborate with a few of you going forward.. 

Update, Oct. 27: Uber Unveils Electric VTOL Plans 

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With more than 125 attendees, the workshop also featured guest presentation by leading electric VTOL innovators like e-volo GmbH (Volocopter) and Aurora Flight Sciences (LightningStrike), as well as six presentations relating to NASA’s high-speed On-Demand Mobility (ODM) air transportation.

The key product of the workshop was to develop the next iteration of an industry roadmap to aid in the advocacy and pursuit of emerging technologies and approaches.

Go to www.vtol.org/transformative to download the presentations and other materials from this and the two previous Transformative Vertical Flight Workshops.