Ehang's autonomous helicopter promises to fly you anywhere, no pilot required

CES has already given us plenty of news about drones and cars, it’s even given us drones that launch from the back of trucks! Both industries are working toward the same end goal — completely autonomous vehicles that can carry passengers or packages. And they are relying on a similar set of fundamental technologies — from computer vision and artificial intelligence to a suite of sensors for positioning and navigation. But we rarely think of them as overlapping.

That will certainly change after this morning. Ehang, a Chinese drone company, announced a new product at CES it's calling the Ehang 184, an all electric quadcopter scaled up from a drone so that it's large enough to carry a passenger. Ehang calls it an autonomous aerial vehicle, I prefer personal pilotless helicopter, but if you need to explain what it is to anyone, just say it's a driverless car for the sky.

Ehang says the 184, which is all electric, can carry a single passenger up to 10 miles or roughly 23 minutes of flight. The person in the cockpit doesn’t do any piloting, they just input their destination and enjoy the ride. The aircraft claims to be able to autonomously take off, fly a route, sense obstacles, and land. And if anything goes wrong, a human pilot is supposed to step in and take over the controls from a remote command station.

If this sounds crazy and illegal, well that's because currently it is. Right now Ehang has no plans to fly it in the US, where it hasn’t been tested or approved as airworthy by the FAA, so unfortunately a live demo at CES isn't happening. It says it has completed successful flight in China, but the video the company provided never showed the aircraft in flight with a human inside. The photos it supplied were mostly renders or images of the craft that lacked any other objects for scale.