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Volocopter and Grab Team Up to Test Air Taxi in Southeast Asia

Volocopter and Grab Team Up to Test Air Taxi in Southeast Asia

German aviation startup Volocopter is teaming up with Grab, the predominant ride-hailing app in Southeast Asia, to launch an air taxi experiment. The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding to “look into the most suitable cities and routes to deploy air taxis in Southeast Asian cities; evaluate the best use cases for air taxis; and explore the possibility of joint flight tests, among other things.”

Volocopter recently demonstrated its electric aircraft at a tech conference in Singapore, complete with a temporary “VoloPort” landing pad that was meant to illustrate a future in which we use electric VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) vehicles to hop from rooftop to rooftop in dense urban settings.

Volocopter. Image: Dharma Sadasivan for The Verge
Volocopter. Image: Dharma Sadasivan for The Verge

 

Volocopter’s 2X aircraft is a small, egg-like multicopter fitted with a wide halo of 18 rotors. It is essentially an air taxi, built to ferry only one passenger at a time over the congestion, overcrowding, and road closures below.

But instead of facilitating high-volume air travel between cities like an airport, Volocopter wants to focus on local point-to-point travel. When the company begins commercial flights in 2022, it says passengers will be flown from one VoloPort to another.

By 2035, the company aims to have dozens of VoloPorts across Singapore, each with the capacity to handle 10,000 passengers a day. The end goal is to not need any special infrastructure so that a 2X can land in a parking lot and take you to the movies.

Air mobility startup Volocopter in Singapore. Image: TechCrunch
Air mobility startup Volocopter in Singapore. Image: TechCrunch

 

The partnership with Grab is another sign that Volocopter sees Southeast Asia as a likely launchpad for its aerial ambitions. Headquartered in Singapore, Grab also operates Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Japan.

“This collaboration also offers the potential for a much larger cooperation which could eventually extend intermodal mobility to the skies,” Florian Reuter, the CEO of Volocopter, said in a statement.

 


Source : The Verge

Indah Gilang Pusparani

Indah is a researcher at Badan Perencanaan Pembangunan Penelitian dan Pengembangan Daerah Kota Cirebon (Regional Development Planning and Research Agency of Cirebon Municipality). She covers More international relations, tourism, and startups in Southeast Asia region and beyond. Indah graduated from MSc Development Administration and Planning from University College London, United Kingdom in 2015. She finished bachelor degree from International Relations from University of Indonesia in 2014, with two exchange programs in Political Science at National University of Singapore and New Media in Journalism at Ball State University, USA. She was awarded Diplomacy Award at Harvard World Model United Nations and named as Indonesian Gifted Researcher by Australian National University. She is Researcher at Regional Planning Board in Cirebon, West Java. She previously worked as Editor in Bening Communication, the Commonwealth Parliament Association UK, and diplomacy consulting firm Best Delegate LLC in USA. Less
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