Of course Uber is working on a flying car project

Uber just published a massive white paper detailing its plan to launch an “on demand aviation” service called Uber Elevate. Yes, that’s right. Uber is working on a flying car project.

We should have seen this coming.

The ambitious project, which was first reported by Wired, would be a giant leap forward for a company that has already fundamentally altered the way we think about labor, transportation, and startup valuation. But more importantly, it could prove to be a way to literally transcend the daily headaches of intercity travel. A two-hour-and-12-minute slog from San Francisco to San Jose would become a breezy 15 minutes by flying car, Uber theorizes. A two-hour-and-10-minute battle through Sao Paolo gridlock would be transformed into an 18-minute pleasure ride.

According to a Medium post accompanying the white paper, Uber envisions its flying taxi service to be a network of lightweight, electric aircraft that take off and land vertically from preexisting urban heliports and skyscraper rooftops. These VTOL (vertical take-off and landing, pronounced vee-tol) aircraft would operate using fixed wings with tilt prop-rotors. There will be no need to wear any noise-canceling headphones. Uber says its VTOLs will be 15 decibels quieter than helicopters. The aircraft will be able to fly 100 miles on a single charge at up to 150 mph. Pilots would be required in the near-term, but eventually Uber envisions the network operating autonomously.

In a lot of ways, getting society ready for personal autonomous aviation is simpler than driverless cars. Most commercial airliners already spend most of their time being controlled by an autopilot. There is already a system of air traffic controllers and government agencies who can monitor takeoff, landing, and flight paths to ensure autonomous aircraft don’t collide. And once you’re in the air, the chances your vehicle is going to run into an unexpected obstacle are much smaller than they are on busy city streets.

Chinese drone maker Ehang, which showed off personal autonomous helicopter at CES earlier this year, sees luxury rides for rich folks as the first phase of this new market, with autonomous aircraft becoming more widely available at lower prices after fleets and flight paths have become well established, and of course once the cost of having a human pilot around is eliminated.

Ehang didn’t actually show its unit in action at CES, but the technology for an autonomous helicopter is not fantasy. The military has plenty of working examples, and the fundamental technology is already being used every day inside commercial drones from DJI, Yuneec, and others.

Flying cars have lurked in our collective imaginations for decades, but the idea of personal, roadable aircraft took on renewed emphasis this summer when it was revealed that Google co-founder Larry Page was funding a pair of flying car startups, Kitty Hawk and Zee.Aero. Dozens of other companies are working on their own prototypes, though some probably don’t qualify as flying cars. Some are just tiny personal aircrafts, while others look like drones on steroids. Airbus recently launched its own project, dubbed Vahana. Suddenly, the flying car market is an extremely crowded space.

There are technical challenges to building an all-electric version of these aircraft that can cover serious distance, but Uber could easily get a beta version going with gas powered helicopters flying autonomously over preset paths. In its white paper Uber says it plans to have pilots onboard for backup until the technology proves itself fully in the field. Having a human in the loop would make it much easier to get support from the FAA during initial trial periods. And NASA is already working with the FAA to design a next generation air traffic control system specifically for this kind of autonomous aviation.

Uber is trying to take a more collaborative approach with regulators than it is traditionally known for. The company says it will reach out to stakeholders to “listen, learn, and explore the implications of this urban air transportation movement.” It’s amazing how a $70 billion valuation can chill out a company’s outlaw instincts.

Uber says its goal is not to design and build its own flying cars, but to “contribute to the nascent but growing VTOL ecosystem and to start to play whatever role is most helpful to accelerate this industry’s development.” Jeff Holden, Uber’s product chief, told Wired that Uber’s intent “is to help the industry get there faster.” In other words, Uber wants to do for flying cars what it did for the taxi industry: swoop in, disrupt it, and bend it to Uber’s vision of what transportation should be.

All of which raises the question: how will Uber Elevate dovetail with the company’s plans to swap its current network of peer-to-peer ride-sharing with one that is powered by self-driving cars? Will they become one in the same? Or will the poor be relegated to the roads while the rich soar above in robot power aircraft?

Flying cars can be very expensive to produce, and so far many of the projects in the works seem geared more toward oil barons than gas station attendants. The Terrafugia Transition is expected to sell for a base price of $275,000, while Aeromobil, another flying car startup, promised that its 3.0 will be a luxury item that costs somewhere between a supercar and an aircraft. But if Uber can find a way to make on-demand aviation affordable — it says it anticipates fares starting out in the $120 range but eventually dropping to $20 — well, then the sky’s the limit.