SkyDrive's Personal Flying Vehicle Could Hit the Skies in 2025
Science
Speaker 1: Imagine hitching your next ride across town in this personal flying vehicle, we talk about EV tolls or electric, vertical takeoff and landing vehicles all the time on this channel. Well, today the one I want to talk to you about comes to us from Japan. This is a prototype EV toll from Japanese startup. SkyDrive making its first public flight back in 2020 [00:00:30] during the demonstration, the pilot flies the prototype about six feet above the ground and hovered for about four minutes. You may have heard about SkyDrive recently. They just announced a partnership with Suzuki to develop a flying car. They hope will be ready in time to shuttle passengers around at the 2025 Osaka world expo. And I thought this would be a good time to find out a little bit more about SkyDrive and its technology.
Speaker 1: The prototype we've seen dubbed model SD zero three is a one seater, [00:01:00] all electric aircraft powered by a battery and four pairs of propellers. Each rotor has its own motor. So if one malfunctions, the other seven can still operate it's about four meters long, four meters wide, roughly the same size as two part cars while the pilot does have most of the control, a flight computer handles flight stability. According to SkyDrive, it can carry a maximum of 400 kilograms and has a maximum cruise speed of 40 to 50 kilometers per hour. The company [00:01:30] calls it the world's smallest EV toll. Now, if you were at CES this year, you may have even seen the SDO three. This was just a few months after some inaccurate reports on the internet about SkyDrive and its bid for flight certification in Japan, some reported that SkyDrive had received Japan's first certification for a personal flying vehicle or its next flying vehicle. To be clear, this was misreported SkyDrive had merely applied for the certification with what you could consider Japan's [00:02:00] version of the FAA. Since then there has been progress there last month. SkyDrive said it came to an agreement with regulators on a certification process. And again, the SDO three is just a prototype to prove sky drive's technology. Find out what's next. I talked with Yugo Fukuhara he heads up sky drive's air mobility division.
Speaker 2: Our vision is, uh, to transfer the people, uh, from anywhere to anywhere. Many other company is our ETO company is [00:02:30] going, uh, with direction of longer range from city to city and four or five passengers. But our vision is to be focused on personal transport, uh, with just compact, simple and easy to maintenance and the lower operating cost the vehicle, uh, inside the seat, especially, uh, in the area of the very congested traffic jam on the ground.
Speaker 1: That vehicle, the company hopes to be flying passengers [00:03:00] in by 2025 is the SD zero five. We don't know exactly what it will look like, but it could be something like this. These are concept photos from SkyDrive released last fall of what it called the SD X X a two seater EV toll that really does fit the flying car title sits on three wheels suggesting it has a drive mode. In addition to a flight mode, Hugo did confirm with me the SD oh five will carry a pilot and one passenger. [00:03:30] And as for a flight range,
Speaker 2: Our practical operational range, uh, will be around 10 kilometers. So, uh, right time will be around 10 minutes.
Speaker 1: Yuko told me they expect initially the SDO five, the cost between half a million and a million us dollars. So at that cost, they don't expect a lot of interest from consumers. SkyDrive is really setting up sites on the market for air taxi services. Right now the company is just aiming for certification in Japan, but they do have plans to expand [00:04:00] globally, including into the us. Now there's a lot of EV tool companies out there and we've seen a lot of promise launch dates and a lot of delays. So do you think that SkyDrive is gonna hit that date of 2025? Let me know in the comments below now, if you enjoyed this video, don't forget to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to CNET for more with the future videos. Now, if you wanna learn about some other EV tools, check out these videos over here, that's gonna do it for me and I will see you in the future.
