Hyundai, Supernal S-A2 Electric Air Taxi Preps for Launch

Speaker 1: The Hyundai motor route is preparing to take to the skies as early as 2028 with the vehicle that you see right over my shoulder. Here, it's just the Peral A two, and it's an electric vertical takeoff and landing air taxi. Now, we saw a vehicle similar to this way back at CES 2020. The Hyundai Air Mobility SA one. That vehicle was designed in partnership with Uber, but as the years have passed, they've restructured, and now it's under their advanced air mobility superal brand. Now, what is this vehicle? [00:00:30] It's a battery, electric, vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. It's got eight rotors, four of which tip upwards and four tip downwards for the takeoff phase takes off vertically. And then once you're in the air, all of the rotors flip forward and you have a fixed wing for more efficient traveling. For distances, they're expecting average trips For a vehicle like this to be around 25 to 40 miles of range. Speaker 1: Top speeds around 120 miles per hour, and its cruise is around 15,000 feet. Now, that range doesn't sound super impressive, [00:01:00] but you got to think about the purpose of an air taxi. This vehicle is designed to move people around the city over traffic. So the use case is you live in, for example, San Francisco, a very crowded city where you can take up to an hour to get to an airport. With this, you can take off from downtown, go straight up and over traffic, and be at the airport in around five minutes. Not a long trip, but you're saving a whole lot of time. Now, this designed to be a modular vehicle, which means that as battery technology improves over the years, [00:01:30] they'll be able to swap in more energy dense batteries, speed up charging, so the time between those trips can be even quicker. Speaker 1: Now, they're expecting to start building this thing in just a few years, and for the first commercial flights to take off as early as I said in 2028. Now, some of you will remember that when the SA one was announced, they were expecting trips to start as early as 2023, and here we are in 2024. So take that expectation with a bit of a grain of salt. To learn more about the Superal SA two, the road that Hyundai Motor Group took to get here [00:02:00] and how they plan on building this thing in a highly automated factory. You can head over to cnet.com for even more details.