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C<\/span>hinese<\/strong> company Ehang offered a glimpse this week of what could lie ahead, releasing its first video of passengers climbing aboard its autonomous drones and taking off with the push of a button.<\/p>\n It’s one of a bunch of companies racing to bring their different versions of computer-controlled airborne taxis to market. The contenders include big plane makers like\u00a0Boeing\u00a0\u00a0and lesser-known startups.<\/p>\n Ehang says it first managed to carry passengers in its drones back in 2015 and has since racked up at least 40 successful journeys. It hadn’t shared footage of the flights publicly until this week.<\/p>\n Its video suggests the Chinese startup is ahead of companies in the U.S. and Europe in the push to develop a new generation of aircraft that could potentially ferry people across cites, from one rooftop to another.<\/p>\n This is a different game from helicopters. Smaller, electric-powered aircraft are changing the shape of flying.<\/p>\n Rather than traditional\u00a0<\/strong>gas-driven engines and large propellers or rotors for forward and vertical flight, new designs spread out the work across many small electric motors. They’re giant, people-carrying versions of the small remote-controlled drones that have become hugely popular with consumers around the world.<\/p>\n Ehang created a buzz at the CES tech conference in Las Vegas in 2016 where it\u00a0showed off a prototype<\/a>\u00a0of its passenger drone, the 184. But it says the technology has come a long way since then.<\/p>\n Its video backs that up. Dozens of passengers, including company executives and local government officials are shown taking rides in a 184. They tap a button in the drone to take off over a field in China’s eastern Jiangsu province or an abandoned space-themed amusement park in the southern city of Guangzhou.<\/p>\n The video showed the drone coping with challenging conditions. They included test flights 1,000 feet above the ground, in storm-force winds, in low visibility and even at night.<\/p>\n While other startups may have also carried out manned flight tests, no one is doing it on “this level,” Derrick Xiong, Ehang’s co-founder and chief marketing officer, told CNNMoney in an interview.<\/p>\n Ehang claims the 184 is the world’s first passenger drone capable of reaching speeds of more than 80 miles per hour.<\/p>\n It hasn’t always been smooth sailing. New flying technology requires plenty of trial and error, and Ehang CEO Hu Huazhi says in the video that it took him “a while” to get comfortable with actually putting passengers in the drone.<\/p>\n In the past three years, the team has carried out more than 1,000 test flights, including some that turned “violent,” Hu said. (The company said no one was hurt in those tests, which used a dummy to\u00a0<\/strong>simulate the weight of a passenger.)<\/p>\n “We do tests basically every single day,” Xiong said. “I’m not going to say that there was no crash at all. But we do all the tests in a really, really careful way.”<\/p>\n A global race<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n The race to harness electricity for flight is in high gear.\u00a0Boeing\u00a0and\u00a0Airbus\u00a0are competing with smaller newcomers in the U.S.,\u00a0Germany<\/a>\u00a0and China to bring a new generation of electric flying vehicles to the sky.<\/p>\n Last week, Airbus’ Silicon Valley unit sent Vahana, its\u00a0air taxi prototype,<\/a>\u00a0flying over Oregon for the first time. The flight came just months after its rival Boeing\u00a0bought\u00a0<\/a>autonomous aircraft<\/a>\u00a0maker\u00a0Aurora Flight Sciences<\/a>.<\/p>\n Joby Aviation, a secretive startup based in Santa Cruz, California, also announced last week that it had secured $100 million in new funding, with the help of venture capital funds from\u00a0JetBlue,\u00a0Intel\u00a0and\u00a0Toyota.<\/p>\n The company recently demonstrated its technology to a pair of Bloomberg News reporters with\u00a0a piloted flight of around 15 minutes<\/a>.<\/p>\n Regulators have yet to catch up to the pace of development.<\/p>\n Traditional aircraft have rigidly established and globally recognized standards, from small propeller airplanes to enormous jetliners. But there’s little in the way of national or international guidelines for the electric craft Ehang, Joby and others are developing.<\/p>\n And the technology to safely operate in busy urban airspace — avoiding other small aircraft or obstacles on the ground — has yet to be fully demonstrated.<\/p>\n![\"Flying](\"http:\/\/i2.cdn.turner.com\/money\/dam\/assets\/170905124753-flying-taxis-video-thumbnail-1024x576.jpg\")
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