Airtaxies — the next grand challenge
Let’s have a laugh together: flying cars 😂. The very concept has become amusing to some. Others just smile knowingly. Because the concept is attractive, isn’t it? We sit in our cars every day, crawling along the road and we fantasize about just taking off into the sunset. That’s why so many inventors have promised it for such a long time that it’s become a running joke.
We could go into a laundry list of reasons why a flying car is a bad idea, but this article isn’t about flying cars. The basic design paradigm of cars does not apply to the topic at hand. Instead this article is about heavy-duty drones. Specifically AI-piloted multicopters that are so powerful that they can lift a large payload. That payload can also be a person. They’re almost a reality, they’ll eat the flying car’s lunch and they will change something that nobody expects.
First of all let’s make one thing clear: these drones won’t have a pilot. Two very important reasons for this are regular humans have an uncanny talent for crashing into things and electric multicopters have a very limited range. It would be impractical to train humans to be great multicopter pilots and take away the flexibility to plan their own flightpath. In order to make perfect use of the batteries and electric motors of a large multicopter we’d have to have an AI fly from point A to B completely autonomously. But let’s get back to the basic idea before we get ahead of ourselves.
One man’s incremental improvement is another man’s revolution
You may be saying “multi-what? this article is getting too technical” but I promise it’s not. I’m pointing at different technologies from different fields because that’s how revolutions are born. The AI revolution was fueled by gaming graphics cards. Dedicated graphics processors had evolved for years inside the PC gaming niche until one day researchers figured out, they could do so much more with them. The relentless march of smartphone generations, each one slightly better than last years model, sparked the VR renaissance. Even the self-driving car revolution is not based on improving cruise control but the result of crosspollination with autonomous robotics research. A self-driving car is the hyper-advanced son of your robotic vacuum.
Somebody makes a ton of little improvements in one field and that unwittingly solves the big problems in another field. I wrote a tiny article about that too if you want to know more. The point is that it’s happening again and if you pay attention you’ll see it live.
Toys, electric cars and film makers
You’ve seen a toy drone before. Regardless if you love them or hate them in the last 15 years we’ve been witness to their rise from curiosity to mainstream adoption. This coincides with the rise of the smartphone and it isn’t by chance. The concept of a multi-propeller helicopter has been around since the start of the 20th century but it was always too hard to implement. Precisely controlling 4 independent spinning blades is hard but if you do it right it allows for amazing maneuverability permitting the aircraft to execute impressive maneuvers. To do that builders needed fast tiny computers and sensors powered by light batteries. Kind of like the ones that allow you to rotate your phone and watch an HD video anywhere you want. The huge smartphone market directly fueled the drone evolution and soon other people noticed the potential of these new high tech toys.
Film makers loved the idea of having a nimble floating camera so the drone market evolved to cater to that desire. Mini cameras like the gopro had already sprung up. So drones focused on becoming smarter to be more stable, long lasting and even self-flying. This brings us to today when you can see drones whizzing around the sky doing any job that requires an outdoor camera. The market is big but it’s hard to call it huge.
Turn your imaginary gaze back down for a second. You can see electric cars and scooters whizzing around the ground. Motors and batteries are getting better. The natural question arises: what can a drone do with better motors and batteries?
The proposal
Take out your phone, enter your destination and proceed to the pickup spot. A drone, slightly larger than a car, lands there and waits for you. There’s no pilot. There are no controls. The software handles everything and is ready to take you anywhere within 100km (~60 miles). It has to do everything autonomously because there’s very little margin for error. It knows when to go charge itself. It knows what to avoid in the sky and where it can land. It can easily land in any parking lot. In fact the software is simpler than what runs in your average self-driving car. There’s fewer obstacles to avoid in the sky. Roads? It doesn’t need roads. It flies above them but under the altitude of planes. It syncs with the air traffic control AI to keep everyone safe. Just like that it leaves the urban sprawl behind, crosses the river with no bridges and lands in the meadow you wanted to go to. After it drops you off it shoots up into the sky and it’s all quiet again. The drone reflects all the sound it makes up into the sky.
When will this happen? If everything goes smoothly: in the next 10 years. But does it ever go smoothly?
Why now?
Half the readers will think this is outrageous, while the other half will wonder why this hasn’t happened already. The main reason is the technological confluence. All those separate technologies needed to build an autonomous airtaxi are just now ripening. Secondly society is barely warming up to these ideas and it will take a long time for them to be accepted in some places. On demand air travel is still in its infancy as is electric flight. Highly regulated markets are resistant to new ideas not only because of the laws they enforce but also because society is content with the status quo. For example ridesharing companies are forced to fight hard battles with politicians in the big cities of America and Europe with no end to the conflict in sight. Everybody talks about disruption but it needs to be highlighted that acceptance is a process, not a switch. Sometimes it takes many years and multiple waves of change.
Blue sky race
A number of companies are already trying to get into this space, each for very different reasons. Amazon wants to deliver some of their packages by drone. It’s not that outrageous since in Africa DHL is already delivering critical supplies in rough terrain by drone. On the same continent startups like Zipline are using innovative drone delivery setups to solve blood shortage problems.
Ok that’s cargo but what about person sized drones I keep mentioning? Boeing is actually testing an ambitious airtaxi. Chinese drone manufacturing leader Ehang has restructured itself completely to pursue airtaxies and they’ve already tested their prototypes in crowded cities. Japanese giant NEC has also unveiled their prototypes. This is a mobility problem after all so Uber is pursuing airtaxies as a long term project that will enable future growth. They’re not the only mobility company interested in it. Daimler is funding startups like Volocopter with the same goals.
Is it only for the big players? No. Technological confluence brings breakthroughs within reach for everyone. Small startups can explore radical ideas like flying motorcycles but even enthusiasts are getting into the game with dangerous prototypes for personal use or just for fun.
Does all this mean the field saturated? Not even close. Things are just getting off the ground. No company or individual has yet figured out the right approach to surf the wave of this new revolution. There’s great fear tied to the idea of using a heavy duty drone to transport people but it needs to be overcome. To quote an industry insider “there’s great opportunity here with unmanned cargo aircraft to start proving out some of the technologies in a lower-risk environment without people on board, and these same technologies can eventually be introduced to the aircraft that we will use for flying around cities to and from work”.
Just “why?”
Is it really worth it though? Do we actually need to zip around the sky when crawling on the ground seems to have served us well so far? We’ve gotten good at shaping the ground to help us crawl faster. Is there a need for this?
There’s a few different perspectives to consider. Everyone has had that moment, sitting in traffic, daydreaming of flying, getting away from the crowds and soaring directly to their destination. It’s this specific daydream that’s being addressed by all the companies proposing airtaxies. The vision is the upper classes of big cities like Dubai or NYC paying a premium to float above the traffic of the commoners. But this is a really fragile business model, relying on very few high-paying customers that might be willing to risk a new flight to save a little bit of time in traffic. These same people can afford to be chauffeured everywhere. With self-driving cars appearing shyly on the market, taking an airtaxi might be an even harder sell if all it does is help you skip traffic.
A better value proposition lies in the places that are currently inaccessible by road. To better understand what I mean think of how a city grows. Everything really grows along the path of least resistance. In the case of cities this resistance comes from the natural geography and this is why we rarely see cities growing equally in all directions. National Geographic did an amazing series of animations showing major cities growing. Bridges, tunnels, highways, trains and other extraordinary infrastructure projects are meant to break through the resistance created by geography. They accomplish that very well but they quickly become chokepoints. After all, there can only be so many bridges and tunnels. They’re expensive and difficult to build.
On the other hand if you can fly over the landscape then geography isn’t much of a problem anymore. You can live on the other side of the river and fly to work in the city center. It’s a bit of a far fetched idea so let’s take an example that’s closer to everyday life: suburban sprawl.
The multitude of tiny streets of residential neighborhoods seem nice at first glance but the reality is that they make transportation a nightmare. It takes forever to go anywhere even if there’s no traffic and the drive is usually extremely stressful. Once out of suburban roads drivers are forced down congested highways all the way to their destination. Wouldn’t it be simpler if everyone just called an airtaxi directly to their home and flew directly to wherever they need to go?
When I started evaluating this I worked with time-distance maps and wrote my own scripts to make comparisons but it’s really easy to see for yourself how big the airtaxi potential of a city roughly is: put a pin in the center and draw a circle with a radius of 20km (that’s the range most airtaxi producers are aiming for with prototypes), now go to google maps to type the name of city in the searchbar, load the current city limits and compare the two shapes. See the difference? It’s just a rough estimate but those areas that are within the circle but outside the city limits are underdeveloped.
If you want to do it more accurately compare an isochrone map of 20 minutes to a 20km circle from the same point. Here I made some fancy visualizations for a few cities using this technique:
What does this mean to you? Consider also that it’s not just big cities. Any human settlements in pesky terrain would benefit from having airtaxies. A mountain valley with isolated houses can become accessible. Two cities separated by some steep hills can become one.
This isn’t just a theory. Drones have already proven to break geographical limits of delivering packages in some places. Ukerewe island in Tanzania is home to 400 thousand people and the nearest major city Mwanza is only 60 km away but they’re separated by the water of lake Victoria. Boats are slow and cars need to travel 240km around the lake to reach Ukerewe. For medical packages this was a terrible problem so DHL started delivering medical cargo from Mwanza to Ukerewe by drone. The flight only takes 40 minutes and it’s more eco friendly than any alternative since the drones are electric. It’s far from an airtaxi but the foundational concepts are the same.
That suprising change
At the start of this article I mentioned the unexpected effects of airtaxies. After seeing those example maps you’re probably already thinking about the impacted industry: real-estate. If airtaxies are widely adopted a lot of land will become a lot more easily accessible. Does this mean land supply is going to skyrocket and plunge prices or is demand so inelastic that land value will just go up across the board? That really depends on the area but one thing is for certain: airtaxies are going to be radically disruptive to the realestate industry even more than cars and highways were. Airtaxies don’t need much infrastructure other than an area to land in (roughly the size of two parking spaces).
Overcoming fear
Earlier I threw out the 10 year estimate for smooth development but the picture of how that would play out is fuzzy. The research efforts have to be supported by demand plus some favorable economic and regulatory climates. As it stands now there isn’t a very widespread demand for such a service. People want to skip traffic but they’re skeptical of on-demand airtravel. When confronted with the idea they think more about crashes, noise and other problems than they do about the advantages. This is fear. It’s not rational. It isn’t backed by data or experience. It’s just the manifestation of a collection of primal instincts.
There’s a reason why drone delivery is a hit in Africa though. The continent has insufficient infrastructure to sustain the growth it’s experiencing. Greater need overcomes the fear whether it’s for the big players or local startups.
Fear permeates the zeitgeist at all levels of discussion about airtaxies. I dare say that it is the single biggest problem faced by the developers at the moment. Fortunately they’re not the first to face such a problem.
Grand Challenges for simple ideas
While I was writing this article Gartner put “flying mobility vehicles” on their famous hypecycle chart giving them more than 10 years to maturity. According to it airtaxies are in the “innovation trigger” phase but how will they climb that slope?
It’s hard to remember now but the idea of self-driving cars used to inspire as much ridicule as flying cars. Even in science fiction it was rare to see any kind of autonomous land vehicle. That impression only changed after the DARPA grand challenge. From 2004 to 2007 teams competed on private roads in fake towns to prove that making full self driving cars was a serious proposition that was within reach. Initially, the attempts were amusing for everyone involved, but soon the tide turned. After the groundbreaking successes of the grand challenge everyone envisioned a near future in which every car would drive itself. Some were euphoric about the possibilities, while others preached doom and gloom. Regardless of outlook everyone agreed: the self driving cars were now coming. Most predictions put their arrival around 2020. Making self-driving cars into a sellable product proved a little more difficult than anticipated but that’s just the nature of the hype cycle.
Airtaxies need to prove to the world that they’re coming in the same way that self driving cars did: a grand challenge contest.
Pick an empty city or a designed community where the airtaxi projects can compete safely. Once the success of the competition makes them famous start deploying airtaxies to developing economies. Wherever there’s growth but inadequate infrastructure you’ll find clients. These successful deployments will prove that this radical new form of mobility can fuel growth. Only then will airtaxies start to be accepted in already developed areas.
Did you like this article or did it change your opinion? Leave a comment. I love discussing my articles with readers.
