This electric air taxi is one step closer to making your commute suck a whole lot less
Imagine doing your daily commute in five — instead of 50 — minutes.
That's the promise of Lilium Jet, an all-electric air taxi that can quietly lift off vertically, hover, and then cruise at up to 186 miles per hour before expertly pulling off a vertical landing.
Last spring, we saw proof of this concept in a test flight (check out the clip above) over Bavaria, Germany. That was apparently enough to interest investors like Twitter co-founder Ev Williams and his venture group Obvious Ventures.
Lilium announced on Tuesday that it had secured $90 million in Series B funding from William's group, along with LGT, Atomico, and the Chinese investment firm Tencent.
The company plans to use the funds to expand its team (currently 70 employees) and finalize development of a 32-ft-wide, 300 mile-range (per charge), five-seater Lilium all-electric air taxi.
“This investment is a tremendously important step for Lilium as it enables us to make the five-seat jet a reality," said Lilium Co-founder and CEO Daniel Wiegand in a release.
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Lilium enters an increasingly crowded field of alternative transportation and commute options.
There's the autonomous EHang air taxi, essentially a 500-lb. single-passenger drone, that Dubai may start using as early as this year.
In addition, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is busy digging tunnels in California with his Boring Company. They'll be used as a sort of high-speed subterranean ferry system for cars, including his all-electric vehicles.
There's also Musk's vacuum-tube brainchild, Hyperloop, which has two companies competing to complete these sub-supersonic mag-lev transportation system: Hyperloop One and Hyperloop Technologies.
Lilium Jet isn't as fast as some of these technologies and, even with this series B round, as well-funded as those that Musk runs, but it's also one of the few to have completed an end-to-end test of all its capabilities. Plus, as Lilium execs have noted, Lilium Jet requires no significant infrastructure upgrades or development for operation. The same cannot be said for Hyperloop and the company digging tunnels under our major cities.
The upstart transportation company plans manned Lilium Jet flights sometime within the next two years, No word on how much a single flight will cost, but we suspect it will be a lot more expensive than a yellow cab or Uber.
Topics Electric Vehicles Innovations
Lance Ulanoff was Chief Correspondent and Editor-at-Large of Mashable. Lance acted as a senior member of the editing team, with a focus on defining internal and curated opinion content. He also helped develop staff-wide alternative story-telling skills and implementation of social media tools during live events. Prior to joining Mashable in September 2011 Lance Ulanoff served as Editor in Chief of PCMag.com and Senior Vice President of Content for the Ziff Davis, Inc. While there, he guided the brand to a 100% digital existence and oversaw content strategy for all of Ziff Davis’ Web sites. His long-running column on PCMag.com earned him a Bronze award from the ASBPE. Winmag.com, HomePC.com and PCMag.com were all been honored under Lance’s guidance.He makes frequent appearances on national, international, and local news programs including Fox News, the Today Show, Good Morning America, Kelly and Michael, CNBC, CNN and the BBC.He has also offered commentary on National Public Radio and been interviewed by newspapers and radio stations around the country. Lance has been an invited guest speaker at numerous technology conferences including SXSW, Think Mobile, CEA Line Shows, Digital Life, RoboBusiness, RoboNexus, Business Foresight and Digital Media Wire’s Games and Mobile Forum.
