IIT Professor's ePlane Company aims to ferry Indians in flying air taxi in 2023 - Express Computer

As urban mobility giants like Boeing, Hyundai, Airbus, Toyota, Uber and Joby Aviation plan to soon ferry passengers in air taxis, the homegrown ePlane Company is all set to to build India's first flying electric taxi to make passenger commute and cargo transport up to 10 times faster, says its founder and CTO Satya Chakravarthy The startup is in the final stages of building a sub-scale version of the flying aircraft and expects to commence its flight trials in the next couple of months. "We are developing the full-scale prototype, the ePlane e200, and aim to have the e200 cargo variant built towards the end of 2022 and undergo the certification process through the next year for it to be ready for commercial deployment approximately by late 2023," Chakravarthy told IANS. The passenger version of the ePlane e200 would undergo additional development and flight tests for a more rigorous certification process, "which would take us until 2024 for its certification and their commercialisation as air taxis will happen subsequently," he noted. The market for flying cars, now known as electric air taxis, can reach $1.5 trillion globally by 2040, according to a recent study by Morgan Stanley Research. Earlier this year, the ePlane company that aims to develop electric planes for short-range intra-city commutes, raised $5 million in a pre-series A round.