Abacus | On yer bike: personal air mobility is becoming a race between Japan, China and the US
- Consumer drones once looked like a fad that would come and go, but now, if you have the means, you can buy one and sit on it
- Imaginative engineers from the University of Tokyo, foreseeing a revolution in passenger vehicles, are unleashing a ducted fan flying motorcycle on well-heeled consumers
Han Solo stepped on a twig in the forest of Endor, alerting an Imperial scout trooper who promptly jumped on a Speeder bike, kicking off one of the most exciting chase sequences in 1983’s Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Newly created special effects from Industrial Light and Magic showed Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia Organa chasing down the scout troopers at 100mph through the trees on fictional hover bikes.
Glued to the silver screen by the chase, a group of engineering students studying drones, a subset in aeronautics, decided to design and build their own. And now they have turned the project into a business.
While a “repulsor drive”, the device that enables the bike to float in the air, might be a little tricky to source in downtown Akihabara, advances in domestic drone technology made it possible to create an alternative lifting engine using electrically driven ducted fans made from carbon fibre – a materials market segment in which the Japanese dominate globally.
In collaboration with Toray Carbon Magic, they built the airframe, a few high performance electric motors, and lithium batteries. Then, to generate power with a drive-chain, they added a Kawasaki motorbike engine built by Toda Racing. Finally, the hoverbike became a reality. Differentiated as a new form of personal mobility rather than a “flying drone you sit on”, it will hit the market this year as the XTURISMO and can be yours for a ticket price of US$770,000.
“Our first major challenge was financing,” CEO Daisuke Katano of Aerial Lab Technologies (A.L.I.) said, one of the former students turned businessman. “With only a few poor engineers, we needed money.”
To provide initial funding they found a number of firms including two technology heavyweights, Kyocera and Mitsubishi Electric, as well as the “Drone Fund”. In the second round, private equity funds came in, and the firm is looking to start production of the first 200 units this year.
The next major challenge was how to ride the device and make it “float safely”, according to Katano. This was largely trial and error – not unlike SpaceX testing its new rockets, though perhaps a little less dramatic when it went wrong.
The machine in its current incarnation is loud and boisterous, presenting another challenge: how to operate it in relatively peaceful Japan where neighbours will readily call the police on you if you have the BBC World Service turned up too loud. Noise reduction is a priority, something the design team will need to improve before the ready acceptance of such a vehicle.
