Meet Uber's Partners Creating Flying Taxis for 2020

A conceptual illustration of the view from a flying car taxi service. Credit: Bell Helicopter Uber sees no need for startups to bet on a risky "if you build it, they will come" strategy for flying taxis. Instead, the tech giant believes the demand for a faster aerial commuting option already exists among its 60 million monthly users--especially if the flying taxi service can cost about the same as hailing an UberX car. As a result, Uber has partnered with several companies to help build a "flying car" service that could begin public trials in the city of Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates by 2020. The announcement for the ambitious 2020 goal kicked off the start of the Uber Elevate Summit being held in Dallas from April 25-27. Besides naming partner cities, Jeff Holden, Chief Product Officer at Uber, introduced the companies partnering with Uber to make those early demonstrations of the "Uber Elevate Network" happen within three years. Such partners include one of the U.S. makers of the military's tiltrotor V-22 Osprey, the Brazilian aerospace company Embraer that produces both military aircraft and commercial jetliners, and a small Slovenian aircraft manufacturer that is already making and selling electric aircraft. "Urban Aviation is a natural next step for Uber in this pursuit, which is why we are working to make push a button, get a flight a reality," Holden said in a statement. "This is Uber Elevate, and we are excited to announce the first group of Elevate partners - a group of visionary industry and government leaders - with whom we will work closely to take that idea off of paper and into reality." But first, Uber seems eager to ditch the term "flying car" altogether in favor of more technical terminology. The company's motivation is understandable given that its flying taxi vision is definitely not about a science fiction vehicle that can go from driving on roads to flying in the air. In any case, having road capability would be redundant and unnecessarily complex from the perspective of developing air taxis that could hop over traffic snarls below.