This is a flying car. I’m at a facility in Spain where this
electric passenger drone is set to take off on a test flight in a couple of minutes.
We’re getting a sneak peek at the technology.
From electric cars to scooters,
the world is looking for cleaner and more efficient modes of transportation.
Most of these efforts are focused on how we move
around on the ground. But what about the future of flying cars
Technically known as vertical take-off and landing aircraft or VTOL,
companies around the world are racing to develop flying passenger drones.
The reason? These aircraft could be big business.
The urban air mobility market could be worth $9 trillion in 2050,
skyrocketing from its tiny beginnings right now.
While that is some way off, one of the companies hoping
for a big slice of that growing pie is German contender Lilium.
This is the fifth generation of Lilium’s fully electric aircraft.
The company has been carrying out test flights at the ATLAS flight test center
here in the south of Spain as it looks to hone the technology and prove the safety of the vehicle.
The current test vehicle is not what Lilium hopes to finally brings into production in 2023.
The company says the final jet will have a cruise speed of 175 miles per hour and a
range of about 155 miles. That’s roughly the distance from London to Manchester.
Matthias Meiner, a co-founder of Lilium, took me through the technology behind the
jet and the company’s vision of a premium user experience.
You step inside the cabin, it feels very, like high quality, you don't have that feeling that you
might have today in a helicopter shuttle service where everything's loud and rattling and noisy.
So it's really from that kind of business jet experience.
But bringing that eventually to the to the wider audience
While the technology appears to be progressing quickly,
what exactly is the business potential for companies like Lilium?
I caught up with Alexander Asseily, vice chairman of Lilium.
The potential for EVTOL is really to rethink how regions connect internally and with other regions.
So today, if you want to move over regional distances, what do you do?
Taking a long car journey, taking a train,
were you taking a short flight from New York to Boston, London to Paris or something.
And the way to tell is that essentially takes some of those long car journeys.
And it says, "Wait, why spend
two - three hours in a car you when you can do it in less than 45 minutes in an eVTOL?"
And from a business perspective,
now, what's the potential? How are you thinking about business models
So we have to think about it in two ways. One is we've got certain kinds of customers like NetJets,
for example, or Lux aviation, who want to buy aircraft from us,
and then operate those aircraft within whatever model they use,
like either fractional ownership or shuttle routes, right.
There's also a ton of opportunity we're seeing which we've announced
in Europe, also in the US and Florida, which is to run our own routes with partners.
Passenger-carrying drones still face a number of challenges, from the development of
infrastructure such as landing pads and charging stations to safety concerns from regulators.
If the industry is to truly take off, then there are some big issues still to address.
The real challenge is really understanding what
the technology is and how it's going to function in the field.
We think the aerospace industry is awfully mature and has very strict standards for good reasons.
But this is going to be a technology that starts to test the edges of those regulations.
It’s not just Lilium vying to make flying cars a reality.
A handful of companies across the world from EHang in China
to Joby Aviation in the U.S. are hoping to fly ahead.
We're in a great spot to kind of move forward towards this, what we call a
conforming aircraft, a preproduction prototype. So that's going to happen,
we're going to start assembling that in 2023.
And then it's going to be about a year and a half of final test
campaign where essentially we take a bunch of boxes, and then in 2025
the plan is we will get all types certificate and we will launch our commercial operation.
So, don’t expect to see flying cars around your city just yet. But with every successful take-off
and landing made by prototype aircraft like this, the future gets just that little bit closer.
This is going to be a decade long process of development and growing the market.
And so really, we're looking at the middle of the decade when this becomes
reality for people in a way that they can see it and feel it and participate in it.
In terms of mass adoption, we're really looking out past 2030, for the broad adoption.