Uber Air will start test flights of its aerial taxi service in 2020, and move to commercial operations by 2023, the ABC reported. Melbourne, Dallas and Los Angeles have been named as three test cities for the trial.
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In the not too distant future, you will be able to order Uber Eats that will be delivered to you by drone, as the ride-sharing company announced a pilot with McDonald’s in San Diego. Using a current commercial drone Uber has been testing deliveries with the hamburger maker in the California city. Ultimately it plans to create a custom drone for delivering food in a custom box.
If you were paying attention at any point in the past 24 hours, you’ll have noticed that Uber has announced something… new. That is, the first of its Uber Air vehicles, which will do just what your standard Uber will. More or less. Only, this time, you’ll be flying. As opposed to how you often feel when in an Uber at 4AM on a weekend.
Driverless cars could revolutionise people’s lives. By the end of the next decade, or perhaps even sooner, they could radically transform public spaces and liberate us from the many problems of mass car ownership. They’ll also be much better behaved than human drivers.
The end of humanity isn’t going to come as a result of military robots taking it into their silicon heads to wipe us all out. It’s going to be the result of domestic robots doing that very thing. At least, that’s how the science fiction goes. And seeing Digit, the creation of Ford and a robotics startup called Agility Robotics, hasn’t really assured us that things will go otherwise. But that’s mostly because we can see this bipedal critter being really useful.
While the look and feel of our cars has changed in the past 100 years, the way we drive them hasn’t. But fundamental change is coming. In the next decade, not only will the way they’re powered and wired have shifted dramatically, but we won’t be the ones driving them anymore.
Elon Musk recently tweeted that Tesla is busy porting Unity and the Unreal Engine that’ll allow the centre console of its cars more gaming power.
Rightly or wrongly, billions of dollars are being poured into autonomous vehicle research and development to pursue this autopia. However, barely any resource or thought is being given to the question of how humans will ultimately respond to the AV fleet. In a city full of autonomous cars, how might our behaviour and use of city streets change?
As Harry Potter’s encounter with the Whomping Willow reminds us, flying cars can be dangerous. Before futuristic visions of three-dimensional sprawling city traffic can approach reality, there are some serious safety issues that need addressing.
When Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was released 50 years ago, flying cars were a flight of fancy. Now, these futuristic vehicles are entering the outer fringes of reality. According to a new study published in Nature, for some journeys flying cars could eventually be greener than even electric road cars, cutting emissions while also reducing traffic on increasingly busy roads.