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Comment by willart4food | Hacker News Reader

I can see Uber doing R&D in autonomous cars, I see that an extension - and the next logical steps - for transportation as we know it.

But, when I read:

"The joint work statement focuses on research to create the first usable stacked co-rotating rotors or propellers; this is a concept for having two rotor systems placed on top of each other and rotating in the same direction."

I scratch my head: where is Uber's domain expertise in this?

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It's a $500,000 dollar research grant, I assume the military gives out a lot of these and almost none make press releases. Uber has talked about flying cars before, so that's the experience answer.

I also talked about flying cars before, how is that "experience"?

Do you have people on staff working on building flying cars? If so you too can probably match the government for $500,000 and research the topic.

> Do you have people on staff working on building flying cars?

Does Uber? They sure talk about things a lot and yet, there is very little - if any - proof of them doing actual work on "flying cars".

I'm inclined to agree with other comments that this is mostly a PR stunt for Uber.

UberElevate Summit Videos:

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWvQuk0_xjs

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uELtDHITGo

You can see that they do have people actually working on various important aspects of urban aviation.

If you have money, you have domain expertise. They hired Mark Moore from NASA and Celina Mikolajczak from Tesla. Each of these people can hire an entire team of experts from NASA and Tesla.

Isn't Uber's most recent soft pivot in their pitch to their investors "cars on the road are overrated, the future's all about flying taxis"?

I just hope this isn't DARPA subsidising Uber's questionable at best business model.

I haven't heard that one (from them), got a link?

https://www.uber.com/info/elevate/

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