Airbus develops unmanned flying taxi to be tested next year

Aerospace giant Airbus is designing an unmanned flying taxi that will be accessible via a smartphone app in the future. The company believes that the global demand for 'flying cars' will reach millions, which will help reduce development costs. In an article on its website, Airbus said it could design and test its first prototype as early as late next year as part of a project called Vahana. The unmanned flying taxis 'require a lot of technology, such as batteries, motors and avionics,' Rodin Lyasoff, Airbus' project director, said in an article published Wednesday in the company's online magazine. “It will take at least 10 years for a product to revolutionize urban mobility for millions of people,” says Lyasoff. He also said that a major challenge for such vehicles is to find reliable technology to ensure that 'robot taxis' can sense other objects and avoid them. Airbus also wrote in the article that the company is also developing a drone-like helicopter that can carry multiple passengers around the city. The article said that the unmanned helicopter called 'CityAirbus' has been developed by French and German engineers two years ago. The CityAirbus will initially be operated by a single driver, but will transition to fully autonomous driving as the technology matures. Airbus CEO Tom Enders said in the article. 'In the not-so-distant future, we will be able to use a smartphone to call a fully automated flying taxi that will deliver passengers directly to the door without any driver.' According to media reports, last month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, China's EHang plans to test unmanned flying cars in the US state of Nevada, hoping to make unmanned flying taxis a reality in the future. 184 manned drones from EHang.