Uber Air’s aerial ride-sharing is expected to go commercial in India by 2023

At an event in New Delhi on 6 September, during the ongoing Global Mobility Summit, **Uber** gave a little sneak peek into their “future of mobility” project — Uber Elevate. The Uber Elevate project At the **Uber Elevate** Asia Pacific Expo in Tokyo, Uber, earlier this month, had already **announced** its plans for the aerial ride-sharing service and shortlisted five countries for the project, namely, Japan, India, Australia, Brazil and France. Building these flying cabs are five companies that Uber has partnered with, which are, Pipistrel, Bell, Karen Aircrafts, Embraer and Aurora. [caption id=“attachment_5138691” align=“alignnone” width=“1024”]  Uber Elevate[/caption] When will Uber Elevate go commercial? At the event here, Uber dove a little deeper into its plans and announced that Uber Elevate will begin a demo for the project as soon as 2020. In India, the testing will start with Mumbai. Further, after the demonstrations are complete, the ride-hailing service will begin commercial operation for Elevate by 2023.

.@Uber says it will start commercial flights of these vehicles by 2023, with a limited amount of vehicles, which is also subject to permits and regulations. https://t.co/tyKvnXxdR3 pic.twitter.com/cjRikSqm2R

— Tech2 (@tech2eets) September 6, 2018

How will this work? To make this work, Uber plans to mark its operation areas as Uber Air-cities, where, after due permissions, it plans to set up landing pads on top of buildings. The flying cabs will be all electronic and will have vertical take-off and landing. However, if that even works out, can you imagine noisy vehicles flying over your head, day in and out? Wouldn’t that make bother you? Well, Uber thought of that too and it says that it is working on making the flying cabs’ noise 50 db lower than a helicopter’s. Uber says that they are going to install sound meters in cities to measure the noise of the cityscapes in order to blend the noise of these flying cabs with the city’s noise. They want to keep them “essentially silent”. How will the Uber Elevate rides be priced? It’s too soon to comment on right now. I mean, we are talking about the service “probably” being made available in another five years. However, I still had to ask, and from what the Uber Elevate CEO tells us, these flying cabs will have fares similar to how UberX rides are priced. Now, Uber X is not a service available in India, but in the US, that’s about a $1.80 for a mile, which means upwards of Rs 200 for some 1.6 km.

Do you think landing pads on top of buildings really practical for India? Also, where will the #UberAir drop me if I have to go to Keventers in Connaught Place? This sounds like a lot of walking. @Uber @Uber_India #UberElevate pic.twitter.com/iYSqGOtTQy

— Tech2 (@tech2eets) September 6, 2018

Quite naturally, the economics would change according to markets. So what do you think? How likely is it that this mobility project would work in India? Do you see flying cars in India in the next five years?