[Courtesy of Hyundai Motor Group]
SEOUL -- The urban air mobility team of South Korea's Hyundai auto group will help build an advanced air mobility ecosystem in Nusantara, the future capital of Indonesia. Urban air mobility (UAM) is an ecosystem involving flying passenger vehicles in urban areas. Advanced air mobility (AAM) builds upon the UAM concept by incorporating use cases not specific to operations in urban environments.
Under a memorandum of understanding signed during the B20 summit in Bali on November 14, Hyundai would work with a cabinet level-agency tasked with managing and governing Nusantara to introduce AAM as part of a smart mobility ecosystem in the new capital city, located on the east coast of the island of Borneo.
Hyundai said it would develop a roadmap and review the concept of consolidated mobility for ground and air while carrying out an AAM demonstration project and test flights. In Indonesia, which consists of more than 17,000 islands, the auto group will help improve the mobility of islanders by efficiently building an AAM ecosystem.
Based on its achievements in Indonesia, the auto group aims to build a global AAM ecosystem. In July 2022, Supernal, a mobility service provider set up by the auto group in the United States, revealed its five-seat electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL) cabin concept at a trade exhibition in England. The cabin concept incorporates materials such as recyclable carbon fiber reinforced thermoplastic, durable plant-based leather, recycled plastic fabric and responsibly sourced wood.
Supernal’s battery-powered eVTOL vehicle is designed for intra-city passenger journeys starting in 2028, while engineers based in South Korea are developing a hydrogen-powered mid-sized vehicle for city-to-city cargo and passenger journeys.
Hyundai is a member of UAM Team Korea, a public-private consultative body that would commercialize drone taxis in 2025. Foreign companies which have joined a Hyundai consortium include Altitude Angel, a British provider of airspace management data and services, Skyroads, a German-based aviation embedded system developer, and OneSky, a U.S.-based provider of unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM).
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