Soaring private vehicle ownership and declining use of public and nonmotorized transport have created mounting traffic congestion in India, the world’s most populous country, which also struggles with relatively narrower roads and inadequate parking facilities in cities. New Delhi recognizes these challenges and has been exploring new ways to address them quickly.
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, at an event in September, said that air taxis will soon be a “reality in India,” indicating the government’s interest in supporting the new transportation mode. The country’s aviation regulator, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, also recently framed rules for vertiports to set the ground for air taxis.
The ePlane Company is riding this wave.
The startup, founded by IIT Madras aerospace engineering professor Satya Chakravarthy in 2019, is building its electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicle, the e200x, several months after developing unmanned drones for cargo and camera applications. Chakravarthy has a strong pedigree: He is also a co-founder and adviser at Indian space tech startups, including Agnikul and GalaxEye, and at an Indian hyperloop-focused startup, TuTr Hyperloop.
Chakravarthy told TechCrunch that ePlane secured IPs in developing the intra-city commute and cargo-focused aircraft with reasonably slow fly speed and a compact wingspan of 8 meters, unlike typical air taxis with 12- to 16-meter wingspans. That will enable it to land in tighter spaces and make multiple short trips — up to 60 trips a day — on a single charge, he says. Commuters would reduce travel time by as much as 85%, at a cost of less than two times the fare they usually pay on an Uber ride, he claims.
Image Credits:ePlane Company
Most eVTOL vehicles currently are multicopters similar to commercial drones, including air taxis carrying spokes and vertical rotors. Chakravarthy said that while this configuration is easier to develop and implement in the market, it does not cover longer distances with a single battery charge. ePlane chose a lift-plus-cruise configuration where the vehicle carries a winged architecture just like a typical plane but with vertical rotors similar to a drone.
“This configuration has been proven to actually be very reliable because we have redundancies in terms of the vertical rotors carrying the weight of the aircraft, while wings taken with thei …