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Uber shows off its latest concept for air taxis

Uber says it’s on track to start flying its first all-electric air taxis on a demonstration basis next year, with commercial service due to begin in the Dallas-Fort Worth and Los Angeles areas in 2023.

It’s also planning to focus on Australia’s tech capital, Melbourne, as its first international air taxi market. That’s a change from previous plans, which looked instead in Dubai’s direction.

To give potential riders an idea of what they’ll be climbing into, the rideshare company took the occasion of its annual Uber Elevate conference in Washington, D.C., to show off a mockup of the aircraft’s passenger cabin and a new video.

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Uber CEO touts flying cars and change in attitude

Uber air taxi
This artist’s conception shows the reference model for Uber’s future air taxis. (Uber via YouTube)

Uber executives are providing an update on their plans to put flying cars in the air by 2020, with commercial rides beginning in 2023, but the most pointed comments from CEO Dara Khosrowshahi address the rideshare company’s present challenges.

Khosrowshahi’s interview with CBS News came in conjunction with today’s kickoff of the second annual Uber Elevate summit in Los Angeles, which focuses on Uber’s plans to operate fleets of electric-powered, vertical-takeoff-and-landing air taxis.

“We want to create the network around those vehicles so that regular people can take these taxis in the air for longer distances when they want to avoid traffic at affordable prices,” Khosrowshahi told CBS.

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Uber CEO and Elon Musk clash over flying cars

Musk and Khosrowshahi
Elon Musk and Dara Khosrowshahi differ over flying cars vs. tunnels. (Photos via Twitter)

Pop up some more popcorn: Billionaire Elon Musk has gotten himself into another CEO vs. CEO challenge, this time with Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi over air taxis.

Uber and many other companies are working on electric-powered, flying vehiclesthat could carry passengers autonomously between landing pads, circumventing traffic jams. Uber has said it could start testing what are basically flying cars by 2020in Los Angeles, Dallas-Fort Worth and Dubai.

Khosrowshahi — who left Bellevue, Wash.-based Expedia last year to become Uber’s CEO — is sold on the idea. Musk isn’t. Instead, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is partial to tunnels that let cars or electric-powered pods zip beneath surface roads. Musk’s tunneling venture, The Boring Company, is involved in experimental projects in the L.A. area as well as Chicago and Baltimore-Washington, D.C.

Other ventures, Virgin Hyperloop One and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, are following up on Musk’s Hyperloop concept for near-supersonic travel through low-pressure tubes.

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Uber’s flying-car program gets a lift from NASA

Boarding an Uber air taxi
An illustrative video clip shows a passenger preparing to board an Uber air taxi. (Uber via YouTube)

Thanks to a lift from NASA, Uber says it’ll be testing its flying-car prototypes in Los Angeles as well as Dubai and Dallas-Fort Worth in 2020.

The UberAir transport system will take advantage of the unmanned aerial vehicle traffic management system, or UTM, which is being developed by NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and other partners.

Uber and NASA have signed a Space Act Agreement to formalize their partnership, Jeff Holden, Uber Technologies’ chief product officer, said today at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal.

“We need a foundational reboot of the airspace system,” Holden said. “With NASA’s cooperation, we’ll work with the FAA, airports, we’ll be able to actually introduce this quickly and grow it into a completely new, very autonomous air transport system.”

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Waymo opens up self-driving test in Phoenix

Waymo family
Waymo’s call for early riders highlights Phoenix-area families who are already participating in the company’s autonomous-car trial. (Waymo via YouTube)

It’s been a good day on the streets and in the courts for Waymo, the driverless-car company that was spun out from Google as another Alphabet subsidiary last year.

First off, Waymo opened up its closed trial for autonomous driving in the Phoenix metropolitan area for public signup. This means Arizonans can apply to become “early riders” in the self-driving minivans and SUVs that Waymo is testing.

In a blog post, Waymo CEO John Krafcik said the rider pool will be expanded from a handful to hundreds over the course of the trial. “The goal of this program is to give participants access to our fleet every day, at any time, to go anywhere within an area that’s about twice the size of San Francisco,” he said.

The cars will be made available for free to the households of applicants selected for the trial, with rides provided in an area including Phoenix, Chandler, Tempe, Mesa and Gilbert. To accommodate the extra riders, Waymo’s fleet of self-driving Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans will be expanded from 100 to 600 vehicles, Krafcik said.

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Uber will bring flying cars to Dallas and Dubai

Uber concept for flying cars
http://www.geekwire.com/2017/uber-flying-car-2020-dallas-dubai/

Uber has been talking about flying cars for months, but today the ride-sharing company fleshed out its plan to become a flight-sharing company in 2020.

“We actually get to live in this era of flying cars,” Jeff Holden, Uber’s chief product officer, said today at the first-ever Uber Elevate Summit in Dallas. “I hate that term, by the way, but we’ll have to live with it.”

The Dallas-Fort Worth region in Texas and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates have been targeted as the pilot cities for the Uber Elevate Network, Holden said. Eventually, the company sees urban aviation as a service that can roll out to the hundreds of cities that Uber serves around the world.

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Uber powers ahead on autonomous vehicles

Image: Volvo for Uber
Uber plans to use Volvo XC90 cars that have been modified for autonomous driving. (Credit: Uber)

Uber says it’s acquiring Otto, a venture working on self-driving trucks, and starting up an autonomous-vehicle experiment with Volvo in Pittsburgh.

The moves by the ride-share trailblazer, announced on Thursday, came just days after Ford laid out its plan to put autonomous ride-share vehicles on the road by 2021. Such moves signal that ride-sharing and ride-hailing will loom as a major frontier for automotive autonomy.

In a blog post, Uber CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick said that Otto’s co-founder, Anthony Levandowski, would lead the company’s self-driving efforts in the San Francisco Bay area as well as Pittsburgh. “If that sounds like a big deal — well, it is,” Kalanick said.

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Airbus and Uber plan on-demand copter rides

Image: Airbus H130 helicopter
Airbus says its H130 copters will be on duty for the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. (Credit: Airbus)

Independent films aren’t the only things that’ll be previewed at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah this week: Airbus Group and Uber Technologies are launching a pilot project that offers on-demand helicopter rides to the show.

But if the project gets picked up for further development, it may require some tweaks to Uber’s standard rideshare model.

Airbus Group’s CEO, Tom Enders, provided a teaser over the weekend at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich, Germany. “It’s a pilot project, we’ll see how it goes — but it’s pretty exciting,” he told The Wall Street Journal.

The Journal quoted an Airbus spokesman as saying that the flights will be provided by Airbus’ H125 and H130 helicopters, in partnership with a Utah-based helicopter operator named Air Resources. Uber would dispatch cars to pick up clients for the rides at Sundance.

Uber has been testing an on-demand helicopter service called UberChopper for about three years, primarily for vacationers or for special events where traffic gets tangled.

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