One man’s incremental improvement is another man’s revolution

You may be saying “multi-what? this article is getting too technical” but I promise it’s not. I’m pointing at different technologies from different fields because that’s how revolutions are born. The AI revolution was fueled by gaming graphics cards. Dedicated graphics processors had evolved for years inside the PC gaming niche until one day researchers figured out, they could do so much more with them. The relentless march of smartphone generations, each one slightly better than last years model, sparked the VR renaissance. Even the self-driving car revolution is not based on improving cruise control but the result of crosspollination with autonomous robotics research. A self-driving car is the hyper-advanced son of your robotic vacuum.

Somebody makes a ton of little improvements in one field and that unwittingly solves the big problems in another field. I wrote a tiny article about that too if you want to know more. The point is that it’s happening again and if you pay attention you’ll see it live.

Toys, electric cars and film makers

You’ve seen a toy drone before. Regardless if you love them or hate them in the last 15 years we’ve been witness to their rise from curiosity to mainstream adoption. This coincides with the rise of the smartphone and it isn’t by chance. The concept of a multi-propeller helicopter has been around since the start of the 20th century but it was always too hard to implement. Precisely controlling 4 independent spinning blades is hard but if you do it right it allows for amazing maneuverability permitting the aircraft to execute impressive maneuvers. To do that builders needed fast tiny computers and sensors powered by light batteries. Kind of like the ones that allow you to rotate your phone and watch an HD video anywhere you want. The huge smartphone market directly fueled the drone evolution and soon other people noticed the potential of these new high tech toys.

Film makers loved the idea of having a nimble floating camera so the drone market evolved to cater to that desire. Mini cameras like the gopro had already sprung up. So drones focused on becoming smarter to be more stable, long lasting and even self-flying. This brings us to today when you can see drones whizzing around the sky doing any job that requires an outdoor camera. The market is big but it’s hard to call it huge.

Turn your imaginary gaze back down for a second. You can see electric cars and scooters whizzing around the ground. Motors and batteries are getting better. The natural question arises: what can a drone do with better motors and batteries?

The proposal

Take out your phone, enter your destination and proceed to the pickup spot. A drone, slightly larger than a car, lands there and waits for you. There’s no pilot. There are no controls. The software handles everything and is ready to take you anywhere within 100km (~60 miles). It has to do everything autonomously because there’s very little margin for error. It knows when to go charge itself. It knows what to avoid in the sky and where it can land. It can easily land in any parking lot. In fact the software is simpler than what runs in your average self-driving car. There’s fewer obstacles to avoid in the sky. Roads? It doesn’t need roads. It flies above them but under the altitude of planes. It syncs with the air traffic control AI to keep everyone safe. Just like that it leaves the urban sprawl behind, crosses the river with no bridges and lands in the meadow you wanted to go to. After it drops you off it shoots up into the sky and it’s all quiet again. The drone reflects all the sound it makes up into the sky.

When will this happen? If everything goes smoothly: in the next 10 years. But does it ever go smoothly?

Why now?

Half the readers will think this is outrageous, while the other half will wonder why this hasn’t happened already. The main reason is the technological confluence. All those separate technologies needed to build an autonomous airtaxi are just now ripening. Secondly society is barely warming up to these ideas and it will take a long time for them to be accepted in some places. On demand air travel is still in its infancy as is electric flight. Highly regulated markets are resistant to new ideas not only because of the laws they enforce but also because society is content with the status quo. For example ridesharing companies are forced to fight hard battles with politicians in the big cities of America and Europe with no end to the conflict in sight. Everybody talks about disruption but it needs to be highlighted that acceptance is a process, not a switch. Sometimes it takes many years and multiple waves of change.

Blue sky race

A number of companies are already trying to get into this space, each for very different reasons. Amazon wants to deliver some of their packages by drone. It’s not that outrageous since in Africa DHL is already delivering critical supplies in rough terrain by drone. On the same continent startups like Zipline are using innovative drone delivery setups to solve blood shortage problems.

Ok that’s cargo but what about person sized drones I keep mentioning? Boeing is actually testing an ambitious airtaxi. Chinese drone manufacturing leader Ehang has restructured itself completely to pursue airtaxies and they’ve already tested their prototypes in crowded cities. Japanese giant NEC has also unveiled their prototypes. This is a mobility problem after all so Uber is pursuing airtaxies as a long term project that will enable future growth. They’re not the only mobility company interested in it. Daimler is funding startups like Volocopter with the same goals.

Is it only for the big players? No. Technological confluence brings breakthroughs within reach for everyone. Small startups can explore radical ideas like flying motorcycles but even enthusiasts are getting into the game with dangerous prototypes for personal use or just for fun.

Does all this mean the field saturated? Not even close. Things are just getting off the ground. No company or individual has yet figured out the right approach to surf the wave of this new revolution. There’s great fear tied to the idea of using a heavy duty drone to transport people but it needs to be overcome. To quote an industry insider “there’s great opportunity here with unmanned cargo aircraft to start proving out some of the technologies in a lower-risk environment without people on board, and these same technologies can eventually be introduced to the aircraft that we will use for flying around cities to and from work”.

Just “why?”

Is it really worth it though? Do we actually need to zip around the sky when crawling on the ground seems to have served us well so far? We’ve gotten good at shaping the ground to help us crawl faster. Is there a need for this?

Fly over the city or the forest

There’s a few different perspectives to consider. Everyone has had that moment, sitting in traffic, daydreaming of flying, getting away from the crowds and soaring directly to their destination. It’s this specific daydream that’s being addressed by all the companies proposing airtaxies. The vision is the upper classes of big cities like Dubai or NYC paying a premium to float above the traffic of the commoners. But this is a really fragile business model, relying on very few high-paying customers that might be willing to risk a new flight to save a little bit of time in traffic. These same people can afford to be chauffeured everywhere. With self-driving cars appearing shyly on the market, taking an airtaxi might be an even harder sell if all it does is help you skip traffic.

A better value proposition lies in the places that are currently inaccessible by road. To better understand what I mean think of how a city grows. Everything really grows along the path of least resistance. In the case of cities this resistance comes from the natural geography and this is why we rarely see cities growing equally in all directions. National Geographic did an amazing series of animations showing major cities growing. Bridges, tunnels, highways, trains and other extraordinary infrastructure projects are meant to break through the resistance created by geography. They accomplish that very well but they quickly become chokepoints. After all, there can only be so many bridges and tunnels. They’re expensive and difficult to build.

Cities grow the way geography allows them to

On the other hand if you can fly over the landscape then geography isn’t much of a problem anymore. You can live on the other side of the river and fly to work in the city center. It’s a bit of a far fetched idea so let’s take an example that’s closer to everyday life: suburban sprawl.

It can take forever to drive through here.

Two neighboring houses are separated by 7 miles of driving. From USA Today.

The multitude of tiny streets of residential neighborhoods seem nice at first glance but the reality is that they make transportation a nightmare. It takes forever to go anywhere even if there’s no traffic and the drive is usually extremely stressful. Once out of suburban roads drivers are forced down congested highways all the way to their destination. Wouldn’t it be simpler if everyone just called an airtaxi directly to their home and flew directly to wherever they need to go?

When I started evaluating this I worked with time-distance maps and wrote my own scripts to make comparisons but it’s really easy to see for yourself how big the airtaxi potential of a city roughly is: put a pin in the center and draw a circle with a radius of 20km (that’s the range most airtaxi producers are aiming for with prototypes), now go to google maps to type the name of city in the searchbar, load the current city limits and compare the two shapes. See the difference? It’s just a rough estimate but those areas that are within the circle but outside the city limits are underdeveloped.

If you want to do it more accurately compare an isochrone map of 20 minutes to a 20km circle from the same point. Here I made some fancy visualizations for a few cities using this technique: