When someone intelligent sounding teams with one of the largest tech transportation companies and Uber announces that flying cars are just “one to three years” away, it’s hard not to perk up. The possibility of airborne automobiles have tantalized our imagination since the idea entered popular culture yet always seemed so far away.
Former NASA engineer Mark Moore disagrees. He was just hired by Uber to become the ride-sharing company’s director of engineering for aviation. That is to say, he’ll spearhead Uber’s efforts to develop the flying car, in addition to the company’s driverless cars.
“I can’t think of another company in a stronger position to be the leader for this new ecosystem and make the urban electric VTOL market real,” Moore told Bloomberg.
Uber Chief Product Officer Jeff Holden laid out the company’s Elevate ideals in a white paper last year, where the company envisioned the possibilities of “on-demand urban air transportation.” This hire seems like a step toward those goals.
[Moore] also predicts we’ll see several well-engineered flying cars in the next one to three years and that there will be human pilots, at least managing the onboard computers, for the foreseeable future.
Other companies have been working on VTOL aircraft (vehicles that utilize propulsion to elevate and land vertically) and so Moore’s and Uber’s goals aren’t new. Neither is their timeframe, as Gizmodo points out, as the flying car perpetually seems two years away.
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Whether this time it comes to fruition won’t play out for another two years or so. With the way things are going, let’s hope we all make it that long.
