New Futuristic Drone/Car Hybrid Unveiled At Geneva Motor Show

doitvoluntarily (77)in #technology • 7 years ago

Italdesign is a design and engineering company that's based in Italy and they just recently unveiled their limited production car known as Pop.Up. The vehicle is an autonomous electric car and it also acts as a drone, in allowing the driver to lift-off and fly to wherever they wish to go.

The car was unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show which is an international annual auto show that is held every year in March, in Geneva. It features a variety of vehicles and this Pop.Up vehicle was one of the most futuristic designs that was shown this year.

Other desings that were shown include: Alpine A110, Artega Scalo Superelletra, Aston Martin Valkyrie, Audi Q8 Sport Concept, Audi RS5, and many others.

The Pop.Up airbus car/drone, has an autonomous electric car module and it also has an added module that allows it to fly. When it goes into drone mode, it detaches and leaves the electric drive module behind. The company behind the design, Italdesign, partnered with Airbus in order to bring this creation to the market and develop Pop.Up fully.

Airbus already has experience with vertical flight and drones and they are currently testing drones that have vertical flying capabilities. The prototype for Pop.Up is expected to be tested within a year or so and they say that we might see these cars in their completion, come to market in about 7-10 years.

There are plenty of regulatory hurdles that they will first need to overcome however, before we can experience the sort of freedom of conveniently flying out of a traffic jam.

While Italdesign and Airbus continue to explore this avenue of the market, there are many others who are also out there competing with them. Many companies, including big ones like Uber and Tesla, are already pushing hard to get into the flying car business too.

In 10-15 years, things will look a lot different in that we will likely see many more autonomous vehicles on the road and perhaps many flying ones as well. There are already a number of companies that have successfully branched out into testing and introducing their autonomous vehicles on the roads in many places. There are a number of amazing options that are already available for flying cars and autonomous vehicles on the market today, so it will be interesting to see how the technology changes, how the trend grows, and hopefully see that the vehicles become more affordable for consumers.