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| A drone's view of engineers working on the Lilium jet. |
A PRESENTATION by Lilium CEO Daniel Wiegand and Tencent Holdings’ chief exploration officer (CXO) David Wallerstein at the Web Summit 2019 explained how the way people commute will change radically in the next five years.
The Web Summit is billed as “the best technology conference on the planet”, bringing Fortune 500 companies and groundbreaking startups together and was held in Portugal.
Wallerstein introduced the Lilium Jet, in which the Chinese internet giant Tencent is an investor alongside Atomico, founded by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström.
Wallerstein explained his job as Tencent’s CXO is to look “at the things that humanity has to get right” as the world’s population heads to 10 billion people by 2050. He said cities will continue growing, with congestion caused by 100 million cars sold a year, pollution from burning 700 billion barrels of fuel a year, and roads that costs $1,5 trillion a year — money that could go to building green infrastructure for energy or water.
Wallerstein said congestion and pollution will only get worse “unless we do something different” — like using the electric, vertical take off planes Lilium has designed to add a third dimension of personal travel.
Wallerstein said the Lilium jet will increase people’s scope of travel exponentially while addressing some of the planet’s biggest challenges. He was most excited that going green does not mean going slower or backward, but faster, further and cheaper.
Wiegand said in designing the Lilium the goals were to create a new personal transport system that doesn’t need roads, won’t emit gas or make noise, but will expand one’s “radius of life” by going much faster than today’s traffic.
The company was founded in 2015 and now has a team of almost 400 people who this year delivered the prototype Lilium jet. It has seats for five people, takes off vertically like a helicopter, flies like a plane for 300 km at 300 km/hr, “all completely emission free and extremely silent”.
SAFE
Wiegand stressed the Lilium jet meets the same safety standards as a commercial aircraft, which is statistically a lot safer than travelling in a car, but adds the Lilium has a whole aircraft parachute in case of emergencies, as well as a lot of redundancy, with 36 engines, three batteries, 12 independent data buses and four flight control computers, all using the same electricity as a Tesla car. Ducted fans capture and dissipate noise to make the Lilium 100 times quieter than a helicopter.
Wallerstein compared the Lilium’s noise to 36 hairdryers, with none of the paraffin smell that all aircraft have. He said the Lilium can fly at 3000 metres, removing “visual pollution” while saving states billions in road infrastructure and changing states into large metropolitan areas.
Wallerstein pointed out the plane uses relatively cheap, off grid landing pads, which developing nations could be a completely new paradigm for the developing world to connect people by air instead of building roads for private cars.
CHEAPER THAN A TAXI
Wallerstein said what got Tencents interested in Lilium was this accessible price point of flying.
Wiegand said the Lilium air taxi flies 25 times further than people can travel in a car in one hour, and does so 2,8 euros cheaper than an electric ground-based taxi.
He said this was because the Lilium’s business model is based on that of a ground-based shuttle service, but because it travelled at 250 km/h and takes a straight line to the destination, it can carry 20 more passenger per kilometre than a car, despite having the same number of seats.
“This means even if the Lilium costs 20 times more to build than a car, and the pilot has two or three times the salary (of a driver), the cost of the pilot per passenger is lower than for the driver on the ground,” Wiegand said.
Ilium plans to shuttle people across three large cities in 2025, but in 20 years, Wiegand expects all trips over 100 km to be in a similar, small autonomous planes, “because it is so much faster and cost effective”. He predicted the adding this third dimension to personal travel will have the same revolutionary impacts on property prices in small scenic towns and rural lifestyles as did the car when it replaced horses.
