Hyundai S-A1 Air Taxi first look at CES 2020
Hyundai S-A1 Air Taxi first look at CES 2020
Video Transcript
ROBERTO BALDWIN: Automakers throw the word mobility around like crazy, especially at CES. But this year, Hyundai decided, you know what? We're going to go one step further and create our own air taxi.
The S-A1 is Hyundai's air taxi that'll transport four passengers. Now initially it'll have a pilot, but the plan is to make it autonomous because, of course, in the future, everything will be autonomous.
Uber and Hyundai have partnered together for this vehicle. This is actually the first partner that Uber's had that has the manufacturing prowess of Hyundai. And in the future, we'll be able to get in this air taxi and get away from all the traffic and apparently all the regular people who are trapped on the earth.
The S-A1 will have a cruising speed of about 180 miles an hour, and it will fly within elevations about 1,000 to 2,000 feet, and it'll have a range of 60 miles. You're not going to fly this from, say, LA to San Francisco, but you might use it to go from maybe San Francisco to Palo Alto or to Oakland or LA to Malibu. And, of course, that partnership with Uber means you'll be able to book one of these things through the app.
Now when you have a lot of these in the sky, which is what Uber and Hyundai and a bunch of other companies want, they're going to come up with some safety issues. Hyundai says that because of all the propellers, if one fails, the other ones will pick it up. There's a lot of redundancies built into this air taxi. Plus it'll have a parachute. So if everything fails on this EV-- it's electric-- then it'll just float to the ground, hopefully not on your house.
Now the way this thing works is it's not like your typical drone where all the propellers are always pointing down. "Rrr." It's a bit like a Harrier. Those back two propellers, when you take off, they are pointed down, but once you get going, they turn. And when those turn, it propels the S-A1 forward.
Now Hyundai and Uber have thought beyond just a flying machine. They are talking about a hub. There's the S Hub where these things will take off and land. And to get to those, they have these little autonomous pods. Hyundai during its press conference said that they would like these little pods to be as iconic as San Francisco's cable cars. I don't know about that. I don't know how much regional flair you can add to, well, a tiny metal-- it looks like a pill. But it will create this sort of hub-and-spoke situation where people from this part of town can go to a hub via an autonomous vehicle and then get in a flying machine that may or may not be autonomous.
Of course, all of this is in the, well, far future. It's going to be awhile before these things take off, literally.
During its press conference, Hyundai said that they want to democratize air travel. It's tough to see how that will work though because these things will only hold four passengers. We've seen air taxi concepts before. What's interesting is this is from a major automaker. Hyundai has the manufacturing prowess to pull it off. They build a ton of cars. They might as well throw in a few air taxis.
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