Mercedes takes first step towards flying cars

Following rapidly in the footsteps of autonomous and electric vehicles – and employing technologies from both fields – the flying car is shaping up as the next major battle ground in personal mobility.

At least a dozen VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) vehicles, better known as passenger drones, are currently in development by companies as diverse as Toyota, Airbus, Uber, Google, Terrafugia and Neva Aerospace.

It may seem like a Jetsons-style, pie-in-the-sky dream but personal aircraft make sense, given they only require their own footprint to launch and land, and could one day free our roads from cars completely, freeing up valuable inner-city real estate.

After all, once we have the technology to make full Level 5 (hands and eyes off) autonomous driving completely safe on our roads, which most car-makers agree will happen within about a decade, why not transfer that directly to the sky, where there are no trees, power poles or pedestrians to bump into?

In fact, Toyota says it aims to have aerial taxis operational at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, and BMW previously told us its i division is not working on flying cars yet, but has not ruled it out.

Now its arch-rival Mercedes-Benz – the world’s oldest car-maker -- has entered the flying car race too. Last month it announced a $38 million investment as part of a consortium investment in German-based VTOL maker Volocopter, which was established in 2011.

Volocopter’s multi-propeller Flying Air Taxi was displayed prominently in front of the Mercedes-Benz exhibit at this week’s Frankfurt motor show, and it wore the same ‘EQ’ badging the German car-maker will apply to its first volume-selling battery-electric models due in Australia from 2019.

Similar to its competitors, Volocopter’s personal aircraft -- which is at an advanced stage of development and has already been granted a provisional license to fly from the German aviation authority -- is a pure-electric, fully autonomous two-seat VTOL passenger drone that delivers a flying range of more than 27km.

In fact, the small German start-up has already entered into an agreement with the city of Dubai, where the first licensed Volocopter will go on the market as soon as next year. Pricing is yet to be announced but – like the world’s first road cars – it won’t be cheap.

Daimler’s cash injection will help employ additional engineers to speed up the development of flight systems, software and electric propulsion technology, in which Mercedes-Benz is now well advanced. Manned tests have already been completed of a prototype version of the aircraft, including a real-world simulation of its ballistic parachute deployment.

Mercedes-Benz research and development chief Ola Kallenius acknowledged the competition in the field of aerial taxi services to the public.

“Now that you have more and more performing batteries you can reach flight times of 25-30 minutes,” he said.

“It doesn’t sound much, but if you think of certain situations — going from the airport to the centre of the city... you can start thinking of use cases where a 20- to 30-minute flight could be a significant improvement of convenience for many customers.

“There are many companies that are looking at this now,” he said.

Kallenius said he is under no illusion that passenger drones will replace cars in the immediate future, be he is nonetheless keen to “see how it goes”.

“It is an interesting, potentially quite big market in the future,” he said.

“Will it replace the one billion plus cars that we have in the world? Not very soon.”

But Mercedes-Benz’s R&D chief also said that despite his company’s well-established road vehicle roots, the company’s three-pointed star emblem has always symbolised two other modes of transport too.

“The original meaning of the star was at sea, land and air,” he said. “We have focused very much on land in past years.”