Is it a flying automotive, or simply a very large drone? The road is getting blurrier, especially now that Japan’s NEC Corp. just unveiled a prototype with 4 propellers that was in a position to easily hover for a couple of minute.
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Tested just outside Tokyo in a large cage used as a security precaution, the unmanned vehicle reached as high as 10 feet into the air.
NEC’s push for a flying automotive comes from the Japanese government, which announced a national initiative last 12 months for corporations to construct an electrical (or hybrid electric) vehicle with driverless capabilities that may take off and land vertically, a feature commonly referred to as VTOL and previously reserved for military jets.
“That is such a completely latest sector [that] Japan has a very good likelihood of not falling behind,” said Fumiaki Ebihara, the federal government official in control of the project, back in September 2018.
“Japan is a densely populated country and which means flying cars could greatly alleviate the burden on road traffic,” Kouji Okada, certainly one of the project leads at NEC, told Bloomberg. “We’re positioning ourselves as an enabler for air mobility, providing location data and constructing communications infrastructure for flying cars.”
NEC is not the primary company, and Japan is not the primary country, to try its hand on the technology, which Popular Mechanics has been writing about since 1906. The Dubai Police hope so as to add hoverbikes to their repertoire. And here within the U.S., Uber has been dreaming of VTOL taxis since 2016.
Source: Engadget