I don't think it's strictly true that nobody has the problem of wanting to travel medium distances quickly. In fact, everyone has that problem - that's why the roads are congested and the trains are busy.
It might be more accurate to say that the kinds of flying taxis these companies are proposing - noisy, highly constrained location, unsolved airspace congestion issues at scale, probably quite unsafe - are not really a solution. But even so, there's clearly demand for helicopter transfers to airports - if an electric flying taxi can deliver that at half the per-hour cost and equivalent safety, then it's a win.
> But even so, there's clearly demand for helicopter transfers to airports
I mean, maybe some? How much? For instance, to take Paris, the example from the article. You can apparently get a helicopter from Paris to CDG for 4000 euro, taking 17 minutes (from a not-particularly-central point). Last time I was in Paris, the RER took 30 minutes from the airport to the center, and cost a couple of euro.
I'm sceptical that helicopters to airports could ever be a huge business, even if you cut the price by ten times.
Manhattan is a better example - there is no fast alternative route between the city and airport, and that's why you see a lot of helicopter transfers. I can see this working in a lot of US cities where public transport is poor and the airport is far away - Seattle, LA, Bay Area etc.
My sister lives 500km away from Perth, but needs to be there every couple of weeks. When family visits, it's a huge pain to have to drive 6 hours after the long flight to Perth from pretty much anywhere (the closest city in Australia, Adelaide, is a nearly 4 hours flight away - plus airport commute time, security etc.). We would pay a lot of money for a flying taxi that could go to Perth in an hour or so, or even more if it could fly all the way to Adelaide, 2,130 km away. I suspect many regions around the world have people in similar conditions (some very rich people in the area own helicopters, but the price to fly and maintain them is extremely prohibitive for everyone else).
Electric air travel has the potential to be pretty revolutionary.
For regional carriers, there's a big potential maintenance cost savings that comes with electric power. See the orders for the Eviation Alice (https://www.eviation.com).
Our opposition as a country to investing in public rail infrastructure could lead to rail being leapfrogged by regional air travel using new technology. There are real topographical challenges that lead to choosing between a 7.5hr train trip vs a 45min flight.
From a logistics perspective, there are potential efficiencies to be gained from running more routes to smaller airports. Organ transplants sometimes fly on private jets to avoid risking organ viability due to a commercial flight being delayed. Those are some of the reasons for the investments in Beta (https://www.beta.team).
Also, air transport of people and cargo will continue to evolve and grow, so we may as well utilize a clean power source.
Vehicles that could be used as a taxi are also big enough to be used as an ambulance or police vehicle, so they're also a solution to various problems we do have.
My previous apartment was here, and before we moved out there were 20-26 sirens per day, lasting 10-90 seconds each, coming from and going in all 5 main exits from that junction, often getting stuck in traffic regardless of path or which emergency response service they were*:
* at least four different services; the extra one was something I had difficulty translating as the prominent word on the side was literally "network" — I think that was the gas mains?
Lilium spend 1.4 Billion since 2015... and looking them up they seem to have gone the not uncommon path of hiring a multitude of big shot executives and of spending on swanky offices in several countries. No product shipped yet.
Now, there is a market for flying taxis. Currently it is quite niche and helicopters are used. It will probably remain niche so it's not clear how these companies might fit in.
It is not but perhaps it is about a decade too early.
The price of drone technology is dropping fast; and will open for an abundance of use cases that right now seem silly and unnecessary - like package delivery, fun rides, and taxiing.
Unfortunately this development will be mostly in China - sadly the best an European drone company could hope for would be to turn this into some sort of military project.
As an aside human piloted flying taxis have been a thing for ages. They can even be quite reasonable if you get the regulators out of the way - I used one in Belize which cost about US$60 consisting of one pilot in a 4 seater Cessna (a while ago - maybe 2x now). In most countries though the safety regulations make it very expensive.
I'm not sure if your "ground braking tech" means that you are concerned with the aircraft literally landing slowly and safely on the ground when power is lost, or if you mean radically better, metaphorically "ground-breaking" tech.
Most of these flying taxi designs seem to be multi-rotor, and I'm not sure they are more reliable. Even a single-engine helicopter can autorotate, these multi-rotor ones generally can't (maybe they could) and depending on the rotor configuration, can't fly with one rotor out of action. For example a typical quadrucopter with one motor out just falls to the ground.
Everyone who currently takes a ground-based taxi, I would guess.
>For what purpose?
Getting from A to B in the shortest amount of time.
>How much are they willing to pay for it?
Now there's the real question. Apparently the price is too high right now for there to be a sustainable market. We'll see what happens as prices come down as the tech advances.
Yeah, "flying taxis" could be cool tech, but for now, companies like Electra seem to have a bit more realistic vision and product.
Their aircraft is a traditional airplane, but uses eight electric motors, batteries, and a turbine powered electric generator.
The specs are pretty nice. Seats 9, 75 dBA at 300ft, with 40% less fuel use than a standard turbo prop. The range is in the hundreds of km, it doesn't require charging infra at every site, and it's "blown lift," so it operates as a STOL aircraft needing only a soccer field's length to operate.
