VoloCity takes passengers around the city, first in Paris and then around the world. Volocopter’s eVTOL for passenger transport, VoloCity, is one of the company’s aircraft being developed to reform air transport, alongside the VoloDrone for parcel transport, the VoloConnect for longer distances and the VoloIQ, the infrastructure underpinning the VoloCity, which will serve as the system’s brain.
Germany’s Volocopter and Saudi Arabia’s NEOM have also set up a joint venture for the project. For some time now, Saudi Arabia has been at the forefront of the world’s megaprojects: the Middle East country has built the world’s tallest clock tower – the world’s third tallest – the Abraj al-Bayt in Mecca, and is also building the monumental Jeddah Tower, which will be the world’s tallest building when completed, at over a kilometre tall.
The VoloDrone is the name of a German-developed logistics machine, powered purely by electricity, that is expected to change the way people around the world think about parcel delivery in big cities and expand the use of drones. The unmanned automated giant helicopter has successfully completed another test.
South Korea is ramping up preparations for drone passenger transport, with plans to launch an air taxi service by 2026 and autonomous urban air mobility (UAM) operations by the next decade.
The electric Volodrone will serve in places where traditional forms of transport are limited, according to the company. In May, Volocopter unveiled its second drone for passenger transport, the Voloconnect, which, unlike the previous Volocity, is not only capable of intra-city trips but also of much longer distances of up to hundreds of kilometres, and the company is also offering air taxi services and freight/cargo transport with the Volodrone eVTOL.
It is not a toy, a surveillance or information-gathering device, nor is it a military-industrial development: it is a serious working machine. At this year’s World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS World Congress) in Hamburg, the German-developed Volodrone was unveiled to the public at the Port of Hamburg.