Uber Hires Veteran NASA Engineer to Develop Flying Cars – Bloomberg (Feb 6, 2017)
Amazon is fond of making announcements around cool but generally far-off concepts around the end-of-year holidays as a way of giving its brand a boost just when people are thinking about buying lots of stuff online. The timing here may be a coincidence, but it certainly won’t hurt Uber to have some flying car stories out there at a time when its brand has taken something of a knock in the US from the immigration brouhaha. Flying cars are probably the only thing Uber is working on that’s even further out than its autonomous cars in terms of timelines – hiring a NASA engineer to head the project is a great PR move, but there’s no chance we’re seeing anything like this in any American cities anytime soon. Take all the regulatory hurdles associated with autonomous cars and then put them in the sky and you have some idea of what these VTOL (vertical take off and landing) vehicles would have to overcome to go into production, even with human drivers/pilots. And as with autonomous driving, Uber’s cavalier attitude towards regulation doesn’t give me lots of confidence that they’re the ones I want pioneering this technology.
via Bloomberg
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