Where Uber is going, it won’t need roads. According to a report from Bloomberg, the ride hailing company has tapped a former NASA engineer to help work on a flying car initiative.
Engineer Mark Moore will be bringing his more than 30 years of experience at the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration to Uber—and along with it, his history of interest and insight into the possibility of a flying car.
Moore will take up the title of director of engineering for aviation while working at the ridesharing service, and will head up a project called Uber Elevate. Uber started laying the groundwork for its possible interest in flying cars in October 2016, when the company published a white paper detailing its vision of the future.
Now Moore, who published his own paper on the possibility of an automobile capable of vertical takeoff and landing back in 2010, will be tasked with seeing that concept through to completion.
In Uber’s version of the future, where ridesharing rules the roads, passengers would catch a ride to a neighborhood “vertiport” where flying taxi rides would take off and land. Those ports would be scattered around major residential areas and would offer speed, off the ground rides to other ports nearest a person’s destination.
The trips would be short—between 50 to 100 miles at maximum–but would drastically change the shape of a person’s commute. There’s even if Uber were to popularize the flying car, the sky is still much less congested than the roads.
Uber isn’t alone in its wish to craft flying cars. Google co-founder Larry Page has started and financed two startups aiming to bring the vehicles to life, and a number of automakers and other companies have patented their own concepts but have never been able to make good on the ideas.
Where Uber may be better positioned than those other companies is in the service it provides. If you’re an automaker and you’re exploring the possibility of a flying car, the focus is on consumers so the car has to sell. For Uber, it’d just be another option for its 55 million active riders to jump into.
Making good on the promise Back to the Future II made won’t be easy. Companies interested in the idea—including Uber—will need to figure out how to build the vehicle and then secure the ability to actually fly it. It’ll require as much effort to manufacture as it will to lobby for its use, but perhaps that’s just one of the many reasons Uber brought on someone with tons of experience in the bureaucracy.
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