GM Air Taxi at CES 2021

A new player in the new air taxi industry

Gen­er­al Motors said it also plans to join the grow­ing eVTOL air taxi busi­ness — and they want to do it in a spe­cial style. As part of the CES 2021 vir­tu­al show, automak­er GM Exhib­it Zero on Tues­day unveiled ren­der­ings and ani­ma­tions of a bat­tery-pow­ered per­son­al air­craft that will be GM’s first for­ay into air mobil­i­ty.

About Cadillac eVTOL

The review of the upcom­ing nov­el­ty turned out to be as nar­row as pos­si­ble, the devel­op­er almost com­plete­ly exclud­ed the details of the tech­ni­cal side of the ves­sel, not to men­tion at what stage the devel­op­ment of the mod­el is, plans for the start of pro­duc­tion or the time frame in which we can expect the Cadil­lac eVTOL to appear in the air. It’s also not entire­ly clear if GM has a work­ing eVTOL pro­to­type at the moment, or what the next step in devel­op­ing this new busi­ness will be.

Either way, the images show the ves­sel look­ing like a sin­gle-seat drone, pre­sum­ably for short urban flights that are per­formed autonomous­ly. The devel­op­er said that their Cadil­lac eVTOL is dri­ven by four elec­tric motors with a capac­i­ty of 90 kWh each, which will allow hor­i­zon­tal flight speeds of up to 90 km / h.

Let’s summarize

Based on the pre­sen­ta­tion of CES 2021 in the Drones cat­e­go­ry, we can say that GM is the last automak­er today to look to the sky and think about devel­op­ing an air taxi busi­ness. Ahead of them, local rivals FCA have fol­lowed the same path, announc­ing last Tues­day a part­ner­ship with Archer to cre­ate an eVTOL air taxi, as well as com­pa­nies such as Hyundai and Aston Mar­tin, who have also announced their seri­ous inten­tions to devel­op in this new space. mobil­i­ty. To a large extent, we owe this strong progress in the field of per­son­al elec­tric courts to the rapid devel­op­ment of bat­tery tech­nolo­gies, elec­tric motors and cloud ser­vices for elec­tric vehi­cles and trucks. From which it fol­lows that such a large invest­ment by GM in the Ultium EV pro­gram will allow the com­pa­ny to bring large div­i­dends in the near future.

Video

Pre­sen­ta­tion from GM at CES 2021 in 10 min­utes.