Audi stopped the project air taxi Pop.Up Next

15 October 2019

Joint with the Airbus flying and driving modular taxi from Ingolstadt did not work

Alexander Klimov, photo Drew Phillips

Automotive news website Automotive News reported that Audi and owned her Studio Italdesign completely ceasing all work on the conceptual project of the air-land electromobility Pop.Up Next.
According to AN Germans unhappy with a joint project with Airbus to such an extent that she chose to abandon it. However, it is not entirely clear: the project is fully collapsed or still frozen. Audi said: "we are currently working on a new direction in the field of urban mobility and air has not yet made a decision regarding potential future products".

In turn, the consortium Airbus declined to comment on the folding project, but in the Audi gave further explanation: "We worked on a solution to maximum complexity and came to the conclusion – before serial air taxi will no longer require passengers of any change of vehicle, will take a very long time."

However, the competitors don't agree with it, so Geely is promoting in China the project Terrafugia,
and the brand Porsche (owned by the same Volkswagen Group – ed.) interacts with Bœng to the project of creating a vehicle with vertical takeoff and landing.
Project Pop.Up Next twice presented at the Geneva motor show in 2017 and 2018, and the exhibition Drone Week in Amsterdam at the end of last year.

And although tests of scale models were successful, but before you start real flying taxi in Ingolstadt, it never came.

The Project Pop.Up Next is an attempt to carry passengers by air and land "without seam" in a double capsule, moving from a drone on an Autonomous platform is a skateboard. Chetyrehsotletney and, respectively, four-engine drone with a total capacity of 160 kW (217 HP) carries on the lower suspension capsule with a speed up to 120 km/h and transports its platform with two electric motors with a power of 60 kW (82 HP) and a battery capacity of 15 kWh, giving a range of 130 km.

PS Why are Audi's so cool disappointed in air taxi not entirely clear, perhaps due to a dismissive attitude on the part of Airbus, but it is possible that the lack of rapid progress in the technologies of batteries and Autonomous driving. In short, the idea was ahead of its time. Let's see what happens in other...