The people’s car may take to the sky in China. Volkswagen
VWAGY,
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is currently studying the Chinese market to test the feasibility of vehicles that don’t need to be grounded.
Don’t look for flying taxis in China any time soon, but the German automaker has said that it is developing a drone that would take to the air to ferry passengers and goods from point to point.
For now, the study is merely a look at the feasibility of “vertical mobility.”
“We are investigating potential concepts and partners in a feasibility study to identify the possibility to industrialize this approach,” VW said in a statement released to the media.
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Volkswagen is a major player in China, which over took the U.S. as the world’s largest car market several years ago and has shown no signs of slowing down. Because of that exponential growth, Chinese roads are routinely clogged with cars, even though much of the infrastructure is less than 25 years old.
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Still, highways and urban streets are a known entity, whereas mass travel in the skies is an untapped frontier. The seemingly boundless air above us creates numerous potential hazards, not the least of which is gravity. And regulatory framework to crowd airspace could take decades to hammer out.
This story originally ran on Autotrader.com.
