To help Dubai achieve its goals of making 25 percent of all journeys in Dubai autonomous by 2030, Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) made a pact in the start of this year with EHANG, a Chinese company that creates autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs). We also reported on this partnership and informed that the driverless flying taxi will be launched by Summer 2017.
RTA and EHANG kept the promise and has started test flights around Burj Khalifa and Skydive Dubia’s desert campus. The engineers are filing data of all the test flights to cater to number of adaptive aviation flight test subjects.
Dubbed as EHANG184, the flying taxi is 3.9-meter long, 4.02-meter wide and 1.60 meter tall, weighing 360 kilograms. It can fly for up to 30 minutes at a maximum speed of 160 kilometers per hour. The aircraft is equipped with necessary safety systems for passenger’s safety. In case of malfunction, the systems allow the drone to land at the nearest possible area.