Pilotless Air Taxis Are Here. Your Daily Commute? Still Stuck on the Ground.

I've never had a driver's license. I've been waiting for the flying car since I watched "The Jetsons" as a kid. Forty years later, pilotless air taxis are finally showing up, just not quite how the cartoon promised.

A pilotless air taxi route between Shenzhen and Hong Kong has been announced: 20 minutes, about 800 yuan ($110) a seat, nobody in the cockpit, the flight path preprogrammed and monitored from a ground command center.

At a low-altitude economy expo in Guangzhou in December 2025, EHang said its EH216-S autonomous air taxi would begin cross-border service that January. Coverage of the announcement repeated the same numbers: 20 minutes, 800 yuan and a shortcut between two cities about 25 miles apart in the Greater Bay Area, Beijing's name for the Hong Kong-Shenzhen-Guangzhou megaregion.

This is about as close as anyone has come to a real flying-car service, so I went looking for someone who could tell me more. Emails to EHang went unanswered. I blame the summer vacation season. Here's what I found instead:

The aircraft exists and it's certified. The EH216-S seats two, uses 16 propellers, tops out around 130 km/h (80 mph) and has a maximum range of roughly 30 km, or about 19 miles. China's civil aviation regulator has issued a type certificate, a standard airworthiness certificate, a production certificate and, through its operators, the first air operator certificates for civil pilotless, human-carrying eVTOL flights.

So far, those approvals have covered sightseeing loops, tightly controlled test routes and early ticketed services rather than open-ended city-wide transport. In EHang's own descriptions, the initial phase focuses on tours and flight experiences, often taking off and landing at the same vertiport, with broader regular scheduled service presented as a later step.

EHang and the trade press now describe the Shenzhen-Hong Kong route as live and bookable, with multiple daily autonomous flights at around 800 yuan a seat, which EHang bills as the world's first cross-border, fully autonomous passenger eVTOL service.

Nearly everything I can find on how often these flights run, and how reliably, traces back to EHang, its partners or the eVTOL trade press; the big global outlets haven't covered it. That's not enough to call this a daily commuter corridor.

There's a reason announcements come early. Shenzhen pays subsidies for new cross-border routes to Hong Kong, plus bonuses tied to flight activity, and Guangdong province runs its own program for eVTOL operators. You can get paid for announcing a route and paid again for flying it, even while the service itself stays small and expensive.

EHang is working on longer-range aircraft, and Hong Kong has opened a regulatory sandbox for advanced air mobility. Joby, Volocopter and Lilium are running piloted eVTOL demos in the U.S. and Europe under similar programs. Add it all up and you get a handful of tightly controlled test routes and a few ticketed corridors, far from a city-wide network.

Right now, if you actually want to buy a ticket on a pilotless flying taxi, China is the only place anyone claims you can, and EHang is the company running those flights. Everyone else is still in demos, sandboxes or working through certification.

Four decades after "The Jetsons" aired, someone did build the aircraft. It's certified and it flies. I'd just like one that goes somewhere I actually need to be.