Uber Elevate has published a white paper updating its perspective on urban air mobility, advanced air mobility, or whatever term it is we’re supposed to use to describe how new aircraft can transform the way people and things get moved from one place to another. “Uber Air: Designing for the Community” is a long-awaited update on the ride-hailing group’s plans. It arrives a little more than four years after the company’s October 2016 white paper (“Fast-Forwarding to a Future of On-Demand Urban Air Transportation”), which has been widely regarded as a seminal statement of intent for this exciting sector.
Of course, much has changed since October 2016. Most notably, for instance, how could the original white paper’s authors possibly have foreseen a global pandemic and how this might reshape attitudes toward travel?
Fundamentally, Uber’s business model of the Uber Air service it still aims to launch before the end of 2023 appears to be unchanged: “We seek to build and scale Uber Air, a multimodal transportation product that seamlessly integrates first- and last-mile ground transportation with a time-saving intra-city flight, in a way that is holistically sustainable for the cities and citizens that we will serve.”
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