SkyDrive and Suzuki Motor Corporation to work on commercialising ‘flying cars’

Sky­Drive and Suzu­ki Motor Cor­po­ra­tion are to col­lab­o­rate togeth­er on the busi­ness and tech­nol­o­gy of fly­ing cars, with both com­pa­nies also con­sid­er­ing mar­ket devel­op­ment in India.

Japan­ese firm Sky­Drive is cur­rent­ly engaged in the devel­op­ment of a com­pact, two-seat­ing elec­tric-pow­ered fly­ing car with plans for full-scale pro­duc­tion. While Suzu­ki is one of the coun­try’s lead­ing auto­mo­tive com­pa­nies, with exper­tise in man­u­fac­tur­ing and sell­ing across inter­na­tion­al mar­kets.

Areas that Sky­Drive and Suzu­ki will col­lab­o­rate on include tech­nol­o­gy R&D, plan­ning of man­u­fac­tur­ing and mass-pro­duc­tion sys­tems, devel­op­ment of over­seas mar­kets with an ini­tial focus on India, and pro­mo­tion of efforts to attain car­bon neu­tral­i­ty.

Sky­Drive aims to begin air taxi ser­vice dur­ing the 2025 World Expo­si­tion in Osa­ka, Japan, and to ini­ti­ate ser­vices in oth­er regions of Japan.

Suzu­ki cur­rent­ly offers prod­ucts in three vehi­cle cat­e­gories — auto­mo­biles, motor­cy­cles and out­board motors. The part­ner­ship with Sky­Drive will pro­vide Suzu­ki with oppor­tu­ni­ties to explore and poten­tial­ly add fly­ing cars as a fourth mobil­i­ty busi­ness.

In Jan­u­ary, Sky­Drive unveiled its SD-03 com­pact fly­ing vehi­cle at CES 2022, which is the first time the com­pa­ny has dis­played the full-scale mod­el out­side of Japan. The Tokyo-based startup’s fly­ing car was first dis­played to the pub­lic at The Fly­ing Car Tech­nol­o­gy and Exhi­bi­tion Con­fer­ence in Novem­ber 2021. 

The SD-03 has been designed to ver­ti­cal­ly take off and land to allow fast and safe door-to-door trans­porta­tion any­where, includ­ing uses for emer­gency res­cue, mea­sur­ing 2m high, 4m wide and 4m long, requir­ing only as much space as two parked cars.

The com­pa­ny con­duct­ed the first pub­lic flight demo of its new sin­gle-seater SD-03 fly­ing car in Japan in August 2021, with a four-minute flight at the 2.5‑acre Toy­ota test Field. 

In Japan, the Pub­lic-Pri­vate Coun­cil for the Air Mobil­i­ty Rev­o­lu­tion was estab­lished in 2018, and is expect­ed to lead to taxi ser­vices in urban areas, new means of trans­porta­tion for remote islands and moun­tain­ous areas, and emer­gency trans­porta­tion in times of dis­as­ter. 

A roadmap has been for­mu­lat­ed by the Min­istry of Econ­o­my, Trade, and Indus­try (METI) and the Min­istry of Land, Infra­struc­ture, Trans­port, and Tourism (MLIT) for the start of busi­ness in 2023 and full-scale deploy­ment in 2030.