Aussies Could Be Ubering Through The Sky Within A Few Years
One Aussie city could be the first to get UberAir.
Aussies could very well be some of the first in the world to fly through the air in Uber aircraft, with executives from the company currently talking to the government about launching their flying ride share system, UberAir, in Melbourne.
Whilst UberAir (ostensibly just Uber but in little drone-like flying pods instead of boring ass cars) still sounds and looks like a far-fetched sci-fi concept, the brains at Uber reckon they’ll be doing test flights in LA, Dallas and a third city that might be Melbourne by 2020 with the full service running by 2023.
Why Melbourne? Well Uber reckons it has just the right amount of population growth, and also our Federal and State government’s are apparently huge pushovers:
“Australia is pretty impressive to us, Australia has been pretty progressive and forward looking on the ride sharing front,” Uber’s Head of Aviation Eric Allison told 7News. “We see that there is a clear need for this type of service.”
The general gist of how UberAir would work is with the tap of a button on the app, you’d firstly be whisked away in a car to a high-rise building, pop up on the roof and then hoon off to your destination from there in a small manned electric aircraft that takes off and lands vertically.
A little bit like this but with more teeny bottles of water and mints:
How much will UberAir cost?
Exact pricing hasn’t been announced but Uber reckons that for the SAME PRICE as an UberX, you could get from the Melbourne CBD to the airport in 5 minutes by air instead of an hour by car. Which like… what? Surely that can’t be right?
It all sounds extremely pie-in-the-literal-sky at this point, and a quick scroll of the official website for Uber Elevate or whatever the shit they’re calling it, proves there is heaps and heaps of red tape to get through before any kind of take-off. They still need to invent the god damn whirly pod plane things, for example, get a whole mess of aviation safety approvals and not to mention devise and implement elaborate infrastructure required to enable such a system of “vertiports” and “vertistops”.
Is UberAir safe?
Um, we bloody well hope so!
But yeah, congrats to Melbourne on being considered as a possible trial city for a transportation mode yet to be invented by a company known for flagrant disregard of its workers. What a time to be alive!