air taxis – Impact Lab

By Futurist Thomas Frey

The Transformation Nobody’s Fully Grasping Yet

Walk through any major airport today and you’re witnessing an institution in the early stages of existential transformation. The massive parking structures generating 40-50% of non-aeronautical revenue? They’ll be largely empty by 2035. The carefully designed terminal flows optimized for passengers arriving by personal vehicle? Obsolete. The clear separation between ground transportation and air operations? Dissolved.

Future airports won’t just look different—they’ll operate on fundamentally different economic models, serve radically different transportation modes, and integrate technologies that blur the distinction between ground and air travel in ways that make today’s airports seem as quaint as train stations from the 1950s.

I’ve written about future airports several times over the past few years, covering everything from air taxis to pilotless travel to robot food delivery. But I’ve never quite grasped the full scope of the transition we’re living through right now—the uncomfortable period where old revenue models collapse before new ones fully materialize, where infrastructure designed for one transportation paradigm must adapt to serve another, and where the very definition of “airport” expands to include facilities that look nothing like what we recognize today.

Let me walk you through what airports actually become by 2035, why the transition is more disruptive than anyone’s admitting, and what replaces the business models that have sustained airports for decades.

The EmbraerX Pulse features a stylish glassed-over cabin that slots into both electric car and eVTOL bodies for seamless multi-mode end-to-end transport

Here’s one we missed from several months ago: Brazilian eVTOL innovator EmbraerX put forth a fun video showing how a multi-mode 3D transport system might work, with an eVTOL air taxi carrying a detachable glassed-over cabin that it delivers straight onto a self-driving car chassis.

The coming new breed of eVTOL air taxis are nearly all, at this stage, designed to work as part of a multi-mode transport scheme. The flying taxis themselves will travel from skyport to skyport, meaning you’ll need other means to get yourself to the takeoff point and something else again at the other end for the last mile. It’s simply not practical to expect eVTOLs to drop you off right at your destination.

Companies like Uber are salivating at the thought of being able to offer the whole service as a single sale, co-ordinating a car at each end to minimize travel time, but that starts looking like a bit of an annoyance when you consider the hope is that people will use these things for the daily commute. Four taxis and two eVTOLs every day is a pain.

And so we get this concept from Embraer’s flying taxi division EmbraerX. The Pulse system has a single, shared, glassed-over luxury cabin that can click into an eVTOL airframe or clip onto a skateboard electric car chassis, something like what REE makes.

Continue reading… “Pulse eVTOL concept drops its cabin onto an autonomous car chassis”

Tag: air taxis

The Coming Airport Revolution: When AI, Drone Ports, Air Taxis, and Autonomous Vehicles Converge

The Transformation Nobody’s Fully Grasping Yet

Pulse eVTOL concept drops its cabin onto an autonomous car chassis