Germany automaker Audi, Airbus and Italdesign presented Tuesday a scaled-down version of its vision of the future: a drone that can pluck the cab off of an autonomous electric vehicle and then fly off to its intended destination.
The companies showed off the flying taxi concept Tuesday during Drone Week in Amsterdam.
You can watch the whole video below that shows the different steps in the process.
To be clear, what the companies showed was a working prototype and one that isn’t big enough for human being to ride in. The prototype of “Pop.Up Next” was a 1:4 scale model.
Still, the companies provided a bullish vision of the future that they say could be just a decade away.
“Flying taxis are on the way. We at Audi are convinced of that,” Dr. Bernd Martens, Audi board member for sourcing and IT, and president of the Audi subsidiary Italdesign said in a statement. “More and more people are moving to cities. And more and more people will be mobile thanks to automation. In future, senior citizens, children and people without a driver’s license will want to use convenient robot taxis. If we succeed in making a smart allocation of traffic between roads and airspace, people and cities can benefit in equal measure.”
Audi said in a description under the YouTube video, that the flying taxi service could be deployed as “soon as the coming decade.”
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