The market for urban air mobility is expected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2040. Commuters are increasingly frustrated by wasting hours in traffic and companies such as Boeing, Airbus, Toyota and Uber are realizing the need for more efficient travel and investing millions into developing VTOLs, or vertical takeoff and landing vehicles.
“There have been a number of innovations through hardware, software, telecommunications and infrastructure that have led to this acceleration of of both capital and early commerciality and proto-commerciality of urban air mobility,” says Adam Jonas, Head of global auto and shared mobility research at Morgan Stanley.
“A few of these things are weight reduction, carbon fiber composites, more dense and higher energy density batteries which improve the power to weight. Smaller, lighter electric motors, more powerful micro motors for what they call DEPI or distributed electronic propulsion.”
Watch the video to find out why designing a hybrid road-and-air car is such a tough undertaking and what urban air mobility is likely to look like in the future.
