Kitty Hawk CEO says flying cars will be in the air within five years
The CEO of a Larry Page-backed firm said that flying cars will be in the air within five years
Sebastian Thrun who is the CEO of Kitty Hawk, a company backed Alphabet Chief Executive Larry Page, told media sources.
At the moment, flying cars are in the "science phase." of development but could still take off in the next five years.
Kitty Hawk is backed by Alphabet CEO and Google Co-Founder, Larry Page. Its CEO, Sebastian Thrun who is also one of the founders of Google X said that an announcement is due in March about the next stages of the project.
The company is pioneering in the driverless car arena and its research and development is being conducted at Google’s moonshot lab. As well as being the CEO of the flying car firm Kitty Hawk, Thrun is also the chairman of an online education company called Udacity.
Kitty Hawk unveiled a demonstration video of its flying car in 2017 and the company will be making another announcement next month.
When asked when the next version of the flying car will be ready, he said Kitty Hawk is "very very close."
At the World Government Summit in Dubai, Thrun said
"We are going to have a big announcement coming forward in March,"
"The reality is if you look at transportation as a whole, most of it stays on the ground. And the ground is very capacity limited… when you go in the air, the air is mostly free. And you are now at a point where we can make air-based transportation, like daily transpiration, safer, faster and also more cheaper actually, environmentally friendly, than on the ground."
In the future, people will be able to able to hail flying cars with a smartphone app. He went on to say that it is unlikely that people will own a vehicle in the future as ownership will be seen as "antiquated,".
People will share flying cars, much the same as they do today with Uber and Lyft when it comes to ground vehicles.
Although the project is in the early stages at the moment, with the rapid pace of technological development, it wouldn't be unreasonable to think that flying cars could be in the air in five years. Thrun went on to say:
"We are at the science phase. However, given that society moves really fast, I wouldn't see why within five years' time we wouldn't be able to take a city like Dubai and really give them a massive system for people to use flying cars every day."
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