Ehang 184 Passenger Drone

Uber is looking for a VTOL aircraft, but they might instead settle on an autonomous people-carrying helicopter, like the Ehang 184 picture.

Uber, the hungry Silicon Valley company that turned people with cars and smartphones into a transportation fleet to rival taxis (while skirting things like labor regulations in the process), has set its sights on something much larger. Uber is already working on driverless cars, which happily for the company exist outside of labor law, but not even unmanned driving machines are enough to satisfy Uber's ambitions. The company wants a flying car.

Specifically, Uber products head Jeff Holden is looking at VTOL -- "vertical takeoff and landing" -- technologies. Holden expressed this interest during an interview with Recode executive editor Kara Swisher at the Nantucket Conference last Sunday. As Swisher reports:

Holden said that he has been researching the area, "so we can someday offer our customers as many options as possible to move around." He added that "doing it in a three-dimensional way is an obvious thing to look at."

Holden said in the interview that such technology could be in use within a decade, which is an aggressive prediction, given the issues around the complexity of movement in the air above densely populated areas. (Also, you know, the possibility of these VTOL vehicles crashing into each other.)