Can you imagine travelling from Newcastle to Sydney in a flying car?
We used to imagine a future of flying cars, zooming along sky highways.
Like that scene in Back to the Future II. And like in the cartoon, The Jetsons.
For some reason, this future never eventuated. But could it still happen? Uber seems to think so.
Let's step back a bit. First things first. Uber is pretty big in Newcastle. The city's trendsters have embraced the "ride-sharing" service. Just don't call it a taxi (even though it is one).
Anyhow, Uber announced last week it was expanding to Maitland and Cessnock.
Uber NSW general manager Henry Greenacre said the service "has been incredibly popular with riders and drivers in Newcastle and the Central Coast".
"We're excited to bring the benefits of ride-sharing to Maitland and Cessnock from next month," he said.
Henry, we're excited too. We love it when people are excited.
We're also excited about the prospect of an Uber service for self-driving cars. Uber has partnered with Volvo and Daimler to invest in this concept.
It's already rolled out self-driving cars in Pittsburgh. It also began a service in San Francisco, but was forced to cease operating after the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) said the company did not have a permit for such activity. Bloody bureaucrats, eh.
Uber is looking for other areas to launch self-driving cars. (Can Newcastle be next? Please? Pretty please?)
Anyhow, back to this flying-car business. We're very excited about the prospect of an Uber flying-car service. (Actually, we're very excited about the idea of flying cars, full stop.)
But it's Uber that is driving the idea (pardon the pun). The San Francisco-based company has picked up the ball and is running with it. It has hired a former NASA engineer to help its research into flying cars.
The company said recently that on-demand aviation "has the potential to radically improve urban mobility, giving people back time lost in their daily commutes".
"Just as skyscrapers allowed cities to use limited land more efficiently, urban air transportation will use three-dimensional airspace to alleviate transportation congestion on the ground," it said.
Its vision features electric aircraft that could take off and land vertically and reach speeds of 250km/h. Uber calls this project "Elevate".
It believes this can happen within five years.
There's also this company called Terrafugia, which is planning "the world's first practical flying car".
Named Transition, it would be designed to fly like a typical light aircraft in the air and drive like a typical car on the ground.
Another company, AeroMobil, has created a flying car that it says "perfectly makes use of existing infrastructure created for automobiles and planes, and opens doors to real door-to-door travel".
Dutch manufacturer PAL-V says it has produced the Liberty – which it claims will be "the first commercial flying car on sale". The cost: $690,000. A cheaper version will cost about $410,000.
That's a bit rich for our blood. Nevertheless, we cannot wait for the day when we can use a flying car to travel from Newcastle to Sydney. If this happens, would we need a high-speed train? Could we have a flying train service, too?
Source: www.bing.com