An IIT-Madras startup has created a flying taxi prototype that can travel for up to 200 kilometers on a single charge. It can carry 50 kg of payload per trip.
Indian engineers are often coming up with ingenious designs. Now, an impressive prototype has come out of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M). A start-up that was incubated at IIT-Madras is catching a lot of attention. The new startup has created a flying taxi called e200. It can travel for up to 200 kilometers on a single charge. It can carry 50 kilograms of payload per trip. The company claims that the flying taxi could make travel 10 times faster. Let’s take a closer look.
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200 km Range
The e200 flying taxi has been created by a company called ePlane. They unveiled the new prototype at Aero India in Bengaluru. The electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicle comes with a 5×5 meter footprint. It can seat two people, including a human pilot. ePlane claims that the flying taxi can complete a 60-minute trip on a car in less than 14 minutes. The fully electric vehicle uses four ducted fans to act as propellers. It will be available in two variants – cargo and daily intra-city commute.
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“Just about the size of an SUV, we present to you India’s 1st autonomous eVTOL, the e50, capable of transporting up to 50kg payload per trip over a 200km travel range. Weaved with the same technology as our flying electric taxi, we’ve recently conducted a successful tether test – an important milestone on our journey to make flying the norm of the day,” read a statement from ePlane. The company added that the flying taxi could be used for “cargo and industrial use cases for transport of goods for last mile and mid-mile deliveries.” It is aimed at “replacing luxury cars and for helicopter taxi companies [that can replace their] current helicopter fleet.”
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Price Not Out Yet
The impressive design is going viral now. The new startup hopes to replace road taxis with air taxis in near future. It claims that the flying taxi could make travel 10 times faster. ePlane hopes to launch the e200 flying taxi next year. However, it still has to go through the aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA). There is no information about its price tag as yet.
