Can flying taxis solve our cities’ traffic woes?
Is it a car, is it a plane? No, it’s a flying taxi. Jetsons technology is upon us, and it may be the future of our congested transport infrastructure.
You might have noticed this yourself, but traffic in Australian cities is getting worse, and it’s never going to get any better (sure, while you’re sitting in a jam, you can try to feel smug by recalling that the average speed of traffic in London is just 17km/h while Sydney’s is closer to 60km/h, but it won’t work).
The way to fix the problem is right in front of us, or all around us: “The only way to improve mobility is to head for the sky,” according to Nikhil Goel, chief commercial officer of Archer, one of the world’s biggest, and most bullish, flying car companies.
Goel was recently in Australia, where he says he found the authorities open to his plan to certify and sell a fleet of branded flying taxis to either Qantas or Virgin, who would then use them to zap passengers from Melbourne’s CBD to its airport in less than 10 minutes, for example.
Goel’s goal is for those flights to be price competitive with “ground transport”, such as an Uber, and eventually – once the aircraft become fully autonomous – even cheaper than it.
“We see a lot of potential here and we are well on track to be commercially deployed globally by 2025, and could be in Australian skies any time in the latter half of this decade,” he enthused.
If flying cars still sound like the kind of pie in the sky beloved of Marty McFly, consider that Archer has already raised $US1 billion in capital, including $150 million from car-making giant Stellantis (owner of Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Jeep and more), which will help with manufacturing capabilities, and is also partnering with United Airlines, which is keen to start using the company’s electric vertical take off and landing (eVTOL) craft in New York at first, and then for other airport transfers around the world.
“If you look at New York City, getting to and from the airport – it’s probably one of the most time-consuming, frustrating and laborious routes in the world, and we have an opportunity to start flying United-branded electric aircraft there in the next two years. Customers are very excited about being able to save hours of their lives because we can do that journey in just seven minutes,” Goel explains.
“If you look at the numbers of people moving into our major cities – particularly Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane – the infrastructure simply isn’t able to keep up with that. Fundamentally, there just isn’t enough space, so it’s only natural to go into the air; ground-based networks simply aren’t able to scale with population growth.”
As far back as 2018, traffic congestion was costing the US economy alone nearly $87 billion a year.
Morgan Stanley has predicted that “urban air mobility” will be a $US29 billion a year market by 2030, and worth $US1 trillion-plus by 2040.
Flying cars, and taxis in particular, have been touted before, of course (Goel himself was one of the founders of Uber Elevate, which Uber sold out of in 2020), with Chinese company EHang completing more than 37,000 test flights of its two-seater eVTOL, which looks like an oversized drone designed only for the very brave, or foolish.
This story appears in the October issue of WISH Magazine, out October 6.
Archer’s vehicle, dubbed Midnight, is far, far larger (with 12 electric propellers attached to its 14m wingspan, a 160km range and a top speed of 241km/h), and has room for four passengers and a pilot.
While you might think a flying car of that size, with a dozen propellers, would sound like an armada of wasps coming for your ears, Goel claims it is actually “100 times quieter than a helicopter” because of its fixed-wing design. “Those drone-based vehicles, they don’t have wings – they’re like mini helicopters, so they have to spin really fast to stay in the air, which is why they’re so loud. But our aircraft has a wing, so when you’re up in the air it’s flying on that wing and it’s virtually silent,” Goel claims.
“And from a safety perspective, the size of that wing is important. It’s no larger than the total rotor span of a helicopter, so it can land anywhere a helicopter can. Making the aircraft larger means it makes commercial sense because it means it’s the size of a car, so you can take four people and split the cost of that ride between four people.
“It’s going to be comfortable inside; not opulent, but optimised for you to take in your surrounds and see the traffic that you’re flying over.”
Archer’s plan has two prongs, with one being to set up its own short-hop flying taxi services in several markets, and the other being to sell them to major players, such as Qantas or United, that want to set up fleets of their own.
Goel predicts that, at first, a flight from your local CBD to the airport (obviously a good place to land) will cost about the same as a premium Uber Black, but the goal is to get the cost down to a level where it competes with a normal ride-share trip.
He says the eVTOLs will be cheap to build and run, as they can be powered by renewable sources and are constructed out of super-light carbon composites.
Price parity with a humble Uber still seems hard to compute, because the trained and certified pilot required for a flying craft is going to be more expensive than a relatively unskilled driver, but Goel points out that the goal is to get rid of that pilot altogether, opening up space for a fifth paying passenger.
“The thing is, these aircraft are already so much easier to fly because of all the software; we have 12-year-olds who come into our simulator and they can fly the Archer aircraft, easily, within 10 or 15 minutes,” he says.
“But we are also working towards making them fully autonomous and we’ve recently signed a partnership with Boeing to work on autonomous technology. That tech, which will also increase safety levels, will be integrated into future versions of Archer, although it won’t be in version one.”
So what, essentially, makes Archer so different from other flying taxis that have failed to get off the ground – commercially, if not literally?
It’s a question that gets Goel genuinely animated. “The good news is we’re already flying, every single day, and if you were in California I could show you this aircraft today. Plus we’re already on the brink of being certified by the regulatory authorities – the FAA [Federal Aviation Authority] in the US, and the authorities in Australia have told us they’d be keen to replicate that certification. The regulatory environment is quite favourable here [CASA would not comment for this story]. But we’ve also seen interest and demand from more than a dozen countries.”
Looking at the Archer Midnight, with its many moving and spinning parts, this left just one question: exactly where will all these flying cars be vertically taking off and landing? Because I can’t see one fitting in my driveway.
“The fact is most cities already have a lot of take-off and landing infrastructure that is not very well used today,” says Goel. “There are heliports, and we can land wherever a helicopter can, but over time, as we see massive adoption, we will need more landing spots and we will work with our partners to build out those take-off and landing sites,” Goel says.
This story appears in the October issue of WISH Magazine, out October 6.
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