A、It flies at about 80 miles per hour. B、It’s fully electric and semi-automatic. C、It has a maximum 2-passenger capacity. D、It f

Good afternoon, everyone. Today, I’ll talk about how autonomous flying taxis could change the way you travel. Cities are getting more populated. The roads are full, and it’s really difficult to expand them. And so in a lot of places, there really aren’t a lot of good solutions for getting around traffic. But what if you could fly over it? The sky is underutilized, and I would argue it will never be as congested as the roads are. In many cases, flying can be a long-term, compelling alternative to traveling on the ground.
    One of the first things we need is an aircraft that can take off and land in small spaces and quickly take you where you want to go. And helicopters can do that today, but traditionally, helicopters have been just a little bit too expensive, just a little too hard to pilot and just a little too noisy to be used for daily transportation in cities. Well, electric flight and autonomy are changing that.
    Electric flight, in particular, unlocks new possibilities for vehicle configurations that we just could not explore in the past. If you use electric motors, you can have many of them around the aircraft, and it doesn’t add a lot of extra weight. And that gives you redundancy and safety. And also, they are cleaner, cheaper and quieter than internal combustion engines. Autonomy allows the transportation network to scale, and I actually think it makes the aircraft safer. Commercial flights are already automated for most of their duration, and I believe there will come a day when we won’t even trust an airplane that required a human to fly.
    So, one of our teams at A3 wanted to see just how close this future really was. So they built and flew a prototype of one such vehicle. And they made a point of only using mature, commercially available technologies today. We call it Vahana. It’s fully electric. It takes off and lands vertically, but flies forward like a regular airplane. It’s fully self-piloted. You push a button, and it takes off, flies and lands, all by itself. The prototype that you see here is designed to carry a single passenger and luggage. And it can go about 20 miles in 15 minutes. And our estimate for a trip like that is it would cost around 40 dollars, which you can really build a business around.
    Question 16. Why does the speaker say traditional helicopters are not fit for daily transportation?
    Question 17. What do we learn about electric flight and autonomy?
    Question 18. What do we learn about Vahana?