Concept Cars

The Honda eVTOL is a futuristic air taxi concept

Flying cars have long been considered the future of transportation, and the recent popularization of self-driving electric vehicles has led some automakers to resume research in this area. Meet the Honda eVTOL, an airborne urban taxi running on batteries.

In case you didn’t know, ‘VTOL’ stands for ‘Vertical Take-Off and Landing’. In this respect, this prototype comes closer to a helicopter than an actual car. Nevertheless, it could play a major role in land mobility if given enough attention from major manufacturers.

Honda has conducted some research into the topic and concluded that airborne taxis of the future would be severely limited in range, but still viable for intra-city transportation. The eVTOL concept, however, has the potential to solve this issue by gliding like a plane, rather than relying on power-hungry propellers to stay airborne. Calculations have shown that around 400 kilometers (248 miles) should be attainable.

This is not all. Honda intends to integrate the eVTOL into the existing ‘ecosystem of mobility’, which includes land vehicles, so that passengers arriving to a landing area would be able to transfer to a car and thus travel door-to-door. Commuters in particular would benefit from this kind of innovation, the company believes.

Editor: Andrew Raspopov

October 3, 2021