Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Volocopter’s flying taxi takes off at CES”.
Hey everybody: this is Sean from the virgin. We are backstage at the rehearsal for Intel’s big CES 2018 keynote and, as you can see, I’m standing in front of a gigantic flying car. This is the valla copter. It’S an 18 rotor electric helicopter that will hopefully someday become an autonomous vehicle, something that you could just hop in and take to wherever you need to go right now. It’S still in the testing phase, and the reason it’s here at CES this year is that Intel Singh working with Bala copter to integrate all the technology that it has from its drone division into this.
To basically get this in the air a lot faster. I’Ve never actually been in a helicopter before, and this seems like it would be more terrifying than a helicopter. Although when we watched it fly on stage, it was very calm, it was very quiet and the video that they showed of an Intel CEO, Brian krzanich, flying it in Bala copters headquarters. He seemed to enjoy it and it seems to be a relatively controlled flight. To begin with, so I don’t know, maybe it would actually be pretty fun. Let’S back up a second we’ve actually seen a lot of volatile assed few years, the company hasn’t been shy about sharing videos of its radical vehicle.
While they were testing it. It recently got a huge funding round from Daimler and the company even struck a deal to bring the air taxis to Dubai, but the vallah copter has never flown stateside. This is our first good look at the company and its air taxi in North America, and they didn’t just bring the prototype that flew on the stage at the Intel keynote. They also brought the production version, which is what could actually shuttle passengers someday soon. Okay, so now we’re here with CEO of ala, copter Florian Reuter, and what are we standing in front of this is different from what you’re throwing off on stage of Intel right. Yes, so this is the volocopter 2x. It’S our latest model. The doors is the most obvious. You know change to the overall structure that we’ve made. We’Ve set the entire rotor level a bit higher. That’S you know to have more passive safety.
We now have more room inside the fuselage and which we have much more room for the battery compartment and where you have her performance and endurance right now. So with the 2x, we will reach 30 minutes of flight, which still isn’t where people want it to be. Eventually, but it is what we can live with, you know, based on their current limitations of battery technology. What is the target for out? There just start those kinds of programs, so the volocopter really is designed to be used as an air taxi inside urban centers.
So we’re not targeting that say, you know large longer distances. We want to cover an urban center as good as possible as efficient as possible. So I believe that, with an endurance of about an hour, we should be safe to do every relevant route in most of the other mega cities that we want to apply this technology.
I’Ve been told by some of the people at Intel that one of the benefits of working with electric motors and building this around electric technology, as opposed to a helicopter which has many more moving parts and is far more complex, is that something like this should be. Actually very easy to fly, even if somebody doesn’t have experience in a helicopter or something that requires a pilot’s license. Does that mean I could really hop in this thing and actually fly it without any experience like that, absolutely it is so intuitive to fly. You can put a five-year-old in there without any explanation.
It’Ll know how to maneuver this vehicle. It is so simple, so why don’t you show me? What you’ve got here is the attraction version so welcome inside what you see now is you have a lot of space? Very comfortable to sit in this is the autonomous version, so you don’t have a joystick here and there in the regular piloted version. You would have the joystick here that you can then command the directions in this is where you would usually find the emergency handle for the full of aircraft parachute right. So again, from a psychological perspective, they explain how a parachute works on a thing with 18 rotors. So actually it is that’s the neat thing about the design of the volocopter. We don’t have a rotor covering the the center piece, so if the the parachute shoots out it, of course, is wired. You know you know in a way throughout the entire fuselage, so it will hold the entire fuselage, the cabins near with the passenger inside and actually it’s the it’s a ballistic rocket, that’s being shot out in order to inflate the parachute as fast as possible, and then It will, you know, descend the entire vehicle in a safe manner, vallah copters, far from the only company working on air taxis or flying cars or whatever you want to call them. This might seem like a crazy technology, but there are huge companies like uber and Airbus and plenty of startups that are soaking up money to try and make all this happen.
The whole idea with this partnership that Intel announced this week is that first off, it’s already been going they’ve been doing all this work from fire copter to integrate their flight control software as their motor controllers, stuff, that they’ve gotten real their expertise, they’ve cut their teeth On with all the drone stuff that we’ve seen here this week and they’ve integrated all that into this and helped viola, copter really just sort of move the schedule up on this fantastic idea. It doesn’t mean that we’re gon na have flying cars and flying taxis tomorrow or next week or in the next five years, but vallah copters gon na get there a lot faster with help from a company like Intel and on Intel side they get to work with A company that’s doing flying cars. I mean, like that’s a cool thing, to have in your roster of companies that you work with when you’re a company like Intel and you’re constantly competing with other companies that are also doing cool stuff like autonomous cars and graphics chips and all this stuff. So I think this is the perfect example of what Intel’s trying to show off at CES this year, which is a our stuff, is really powerful.
But look at the cool stuff that it can power. Tell you what it’s tight, but this is kind of cool .