TAKING FLIGHT

Hyundai has pivoted into the world of urban mobility by showcasing an air taxi. Thankfully, it’s still making some excellent cars as well

- Pablo Chaterji

Hyundai, as you know, is one of the world’s premier automotive companies, so at the recently concluded CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas, naturally they unveiled... an aircraft. Developed in collaboration with Uber Elevate — the ride-sharing company’s budding air-taxi initiative — the Hyundai S-A1 is essentially a giant drone, but one that is capable of seating five people (including the pilot). It is battery powered and has four vertical propellers, giving it VTOL capabilities and a quieter operational noise level than a regular chopper, which is noisy as all hell; this becomes important for the urban areas in which Hyundai and Uber foresee the S-A1 will operate.

Once the S-A1 takes off and gets to around 2000 feet, the propellers tilt forwards, transmogrifying it into a fixed-wing aircraft. From this point onwards, the world’s biggest Uber can apparently hit a top speed of 320 kph, which would be very handy indeed in getting from, say, Panvel to Nariman Point. With a full charge, the aircraft has a claimed range of around 100 km, and Hyundai claims that with fast chargers, the S-A1 can be fully juiced up in less than ten minutes, between journeys. Once it reaches its destination, it goes back to VTOL mode so that it can land on a helipad.

Hyundai isn’t stopping at this, however. It imagines that the future is in what it calls a ‘mobility space’ called the Hub, which is essentially a mini-airport designed to fit in space-challenged cities. What does this building do? Well, it connects the air transport aspect of urban mobility with ground transport, for last-mile connectivity; for this, Hyundai also showed the PBV, or Purpose Built Vehicle (it must have been rather difficult to come up with that name).