In the hopes of reducing city traffic and shortening everyday commutes, many companies have developed extreme concepts they hope could one day provide solutions. Airbus, however, has revealed something that could take things to a completely different, ridiculous level.
At the Geneva International Motor Show on Tuesday, Airbus revealed Pop.Up, a multi-faceted mobility concept developed through a partnership with Italian engineering company Italdesign. Basically, users would be able to summon a taxi from their homes, be driven by a fully electric vehicle to their destinations or, if Pop.Up detects heavy traffic, the vehicle will be picked up by a massive drone and carried to a nearby station. The actual vehicle functions more as a pod, which detaches from its wheel base upon being picked up by a drone.
Through an app, passengers plan their trips and let Pop.Up determine if ground transportation, air travel or a combination of both are the most useful methods in reaching their destinations.
“If you want to design the urban vehicle of the future, the traditional car cannot alone be the solution for megacities,” Italdesign CEO Jorg Astalosch said in an Airbus press release. “In the next years ground transportation will move to the next level and from being shared, connected and autonomous it will also go multi-modal and moving into the third dimension.”
It might sound like Airbus is jumping the shark a bit with this idea. The company at the very least, however, has proven it’s serious about changing the ways people travel in the future.
Thumbnail photo via Airbus
