Google's Larry Page Is Spending $100 Million To Build Flying Cars
Elon Musk may be building rockets and cars, but Google co-founder Larry Page is taking those passions together: according to a new Bloomberg Businessweek story, Page has spent more than $100 million money two different self-driving car startups.
As per the Bloomberg, the high-flying billionaire is funding rival programs from Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk to develop electric flying machines.The object is a vessel that can take off and land vertically in urban environments, and Page's companies are making real progress on bringing them to our skies.
“Over the past five years, there have been these tremendous advances in the under¬lying technology,” Mark Moore, an aeronautical engineer who’s spent his career designing advanced aircraft at NASA told Bloomberg. “What appears in the next 5 to 10 years will be incredible.”
According to Businessweek, Page has been personally funding startup Zee.Aero since its launch in 2010. He set up the company on the first floor of a building near Google’s Mountain View headquarters, initially taking the second floor for himself as a “man cave” that involved “expensive paintings, a treadmill-like climbing wall, and one of SpaceX’s first rocket engines.” Zee.Aero employees referred to Page as GUS, the guy upstairs.
Indeed, last year NASA released slides from a thought study for autonomous, electric flying taxis, and identified Silicon Valley as an “early adopter” area because of its large incomes, heavy traffic and high rates of embracing new technology. The air taxis could cruise at up to 200 miles per hour, according to NASA.
Page had attempted to keep secret his involvement in the two flying car companies, but Zee-Aero, which is now seeking aerodynamics, controls, and IT engineers, has revealed its work to a limited extent, saying on its website that it’s working on “better ways to get from A to B.”
Kitty Hawk is also contracting engineers, according to postings on Glassdoor, together with one for a mechanical engineer specializing in “recovery systems.”
“We are not attempting to re-develop the same devices that have been developed in the past so are seeking applicants from a range of backgrounds including aerospace decelerators and parachutes, vehicle crash safety engineering, rapid mechanical prototyping, product development, and so on,” the job posting from two weeks ago says.