China reveals fleet of flying taxis for its futuristic transportation system

A Chinese company called EHang has just unveiled an entire fleet of flying taxis.

Flying taxis, technically known as eVTOL, are all the rage at the minute.

And, based on what we’re seeing, it’s clear that Chinese manufacturers are one step ahead.

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The industry came up with an acronym for these vehicles.

They’re called ‘eVTOL’, which stands for Vertical Take-Off Landing, in that they can take off and land on the spot, without a runway.

The ‘e’ stands for electric but we could probably get rid of it, to be fair, simply because there’s basically no such thing as a non-electric VTOL.

The idea is simple: eVTOLs are designed to soar over traffic to get from A to B faster.

In the case of the EHang eVTOLs, they’re also autonomous.

Countries where you can use flying taxis these days

It’s going to take years, maybe decades, for this idea to catch on a global scale, but there are places where they’re already a thing.

Largely due to legislative reasons, flying cars are only present in a handful of countries, but the list will no doubt include more locations in the future.

Sooner or later we’re also going to have to address another elephant in the room, because what’s the point of easing traffic down here, only to create traffic jams up there, in the sky?

But that’s a question for later.

Who’s leading the pack?

Even though Elon Musk implied that the upcoming Roadster may be capable of flying as it ‘won’t really be a car‘ (whatever he means by that), Tesla isn’t working on flying taxis at the moment.

The Cybercab, the long-awaited autonomous taxi that Musk has been talking about for years, will be unveiled in August, but it’ll be a ‘normal’ cab for the road, not for the skies.

This particular domain seems to be entirely dominated by China at the moment.

Apart from EHang, another company that’s heavily invested in flying taxis is Xpeng through its sub-brand AeroHT, whose vehicles are apparently going to be certified airworthy either this or next year.

Chinese automakers could probably do a bit better when it comes to naming these brands and vehicles – EHang and Xpeng aren’t what you’d call catchy – but other than that, they seem to be well ahead of anyone else.