Soon you’ll be able to go to work in a flying taxi

Late for work? Imagine skipping the subway and instead heading to your local “vertiport,” where you can hop into an aircraft the size of an SUV that runs on electricity and works pretty much like an elevator.

Advertisement

Get in, punch in your destination, and off you go. Alone.

It may sound like an episode of “The Jetsons,” but electric air taxis are a form of transportation that is coming to Dubai in just a few months. And investors hope American cities aren’t much far behind.

Insiders call the new breed of flying machine “e-VTOLs,” (pronounced “EE-VEE- talls”), an acronym for “electric vertical take off and landing.”

We want it to be on-demand. You push a button and a car will pick you up and take you to a vertiport and the next aircraft will leave in minutes.

Exotic prototypes are being designed, built and flight-tested by companies ranging from Airbus to startups bankrolled by tech billionaires such as Google co-founder Larry Page.

“Dozens of companies . . . are investing in e-VTOL aircraft,” observes advocate Mike Hirschberg, executive director of the American Helicopter Society International. “They are proving that not only is e-VTOL technology feasible, but it can make a compelling business.”

The business case is being made most eagerly by Uber. The San Francisco-based rent-a-ride provider wants to live up to its name — German for “over” — by making it possible for customers to use their Uber cellphone app to order up a lift by car or air taxi or a combination of the two, whatever is most convenient and economical. Uber sees e-VTOLs as the answer.

“Flight is a natural extension of what we’re doing,” said Jeff Holden, Uber’s chief product officer, who created Uber’s self-driving-car laboratory in Pittsburgh.

Uber will host an invitation-only “Elevate Summit” in Dallas from April 25-27. There, Holden and others from Uber, along with leaders of companies developing and investing in e-VTOLs and related technologies, will discuss the many issues raised by the concept of urban air transport.

“All these benefits may seem great in theory, [and] far-off in practice, but we believe VTOLs could be flying on Uber within a decade,” Nikhil Goel, Product Manager, Advanced Programs & Uber Elevate, told The Post. “We’ll be talking about timeline in more depth at the summit.”

Modal Trigger

A rendering of a “vertiport” where flying cabs take off and land.