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Aug 23, 2016

Look Up! 2017 is Going to be the Year of the Autonomous Flying Taxi

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

Aircraft manufacturing company Airbus is looking to the skies for a solution to the growing traffic problem. They intend to send out a prototype for their self-flying taxi by next year.

For those of us who live in crowded cities, rush hour traffic is a daily struggle we aren’t likely to get used to. The past few years have seen an ever-lengthening travel time in different cities all over the world.

Nobody is immune, not even the most innovative minds of the world. Aircraft manufacturing company Airbus notes the irony that techies in Silicon Valley come up with all sorts of innovation every day, yet none of them has solved one of their own biggest problems: traffic congestion. “Silicon Valley may pride itself on speed, but during rush hour, everything around the IT Mecca grinds to a halt,” they wrote on their website. “The situation is even worse in cities such as Mumbai, Manila, or Tokyo,” they added. In the Philippines, an estimate says PHP 2.5 billion ($57 million) of potential income is lost to traffic every day, and will rise to P6 billion daily by 2030. In the US, this loss is estimated at $160 billion a year.

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