Dream or Disaster, Flying Cars Face Multibillion Dollar Moment

The bleak, blustery skies above Guangzhou are whipping the cramped two-seater aircraft with rain. One hundred feet above the ground, the plane’s 16 small electric rotors thrash alarmingly against the wind. Waiting below are murky waterways and hard-edged industrial sprawl.

Inside the tiny plane, there’s only one person — a Bloomberg News reporter — and he’s not a pilot.

Far from an imaginary nightmare, this test flight in China last month was an unsettling reality. The bubble-like automated vehicle is made by EHang Holdings Ltd. and is vying to become the world’s first uncrewed commercial flying taxi this year.

The advances by the Chinese company give it early bragging rights in the race to break through air transport’s next frontier. The once-fictional future of electric flying cars, long a Hollywood fantasy, has, in some fashion, already arrived.

In New York, Joby Aviation Inc. and Archer Aviation Inc. aim to buzz people from downtown Manhattan to the city’s airports in a few minutes, about the same time it takes to walk two blocks. Both companies plan commercial flights with a pilot in the Middle East as soon as next year. More radically, Boeing Co.-owned Wisk wants to operate air taxis with four passengers — and no pilot — before the decade is out.

The potential market for these next-generation flights could be $1 trillion by 2040, Morgan Stanley has estimated. If that prediction is even close to accurate, in not much more than a decade, the world will be spending more on flying-car trips carrying people and goods — many of them with no pilot — than it currently does on conventional air travel.