Xpeng's AeroHT flying car unit has rebranded after an embarrassing air show fireball, and the Chinese company has announced a very Joby-esque long-range, high-speed air taxi to go along with some of its more bizarre offerings.
Nobody was hurt, according to AeroHT, when two of its conventional multirotor two-seaters gave each other a mid-air love-tap during a rehearsal flight for the Changchun Air Show about a month ago – but the resulting double crash and lithium-powered conflagration certainly weren't a great look:
长春航展两架飞行汽车在空中相撞坠落起火！9月16日，长春航展预演结束后，广东汇天通航参与双机编队演练期间。两架eVTOL（电动垂直起降飞行器）在空中相撞后坠机，在地面燃起大火... pic.twitter.com/pYWqziAHUD
— 希望之聲 - 中國時局 (@SoundOfHope_SOH) September 17, 2025
With the timing so close, there's no suggestion that automaker and parent company Xpeng rushed to rebrand the company as a result of the crash – instead, it's an unfortunate hiccup, and a twist in the tale of one of the most outrageous eVTOL companies we've ever seen.
You may recall a couple of AeroHT's launches in recent years – because there's really nothing else out there remotely like them. The company debuted with a street-legal, fold-out flying supercar concept that we thought was sheer fantasy, right up until it went and flew a two-ton prototype.
And there's certainly no forgetting the "Land Aircraft Carrier" – a six-wheeled, Cybertruck-styled adventure van with one of the craziest party tricks we've seen. This machine is designed to carry, and launch, a two-seat manned eVTOL aircraft, enabling multi-mode adventure travel that doesn't stop where the road does.
Who's asking for this? Nobody. But that doesn't mean it's not pretty darn neat, and again, AeroHT put its money where its mouth is and actually went and built the bloody thing. Oh, and flew it, with people inside. Deliveries are scheduled to begin next year, at a rumored price around US$280,000.
It's clear enough to me at this point that this company is extremely technically ambitious, well-funded and disinclined to make wild promises it doesn't intend to follow up on. So as it now rebrands to Aridge (air bridge, apparently?) with a design for an extremely fast, extremely long-range tilt-rotor eVTOL air taxi, I'm willing to look past the fact that it's just a render video at this point.
Squint, and the upcoming A868 looks an awful lot like it was built in California. The resemblance to Joby's market-leading S4 eVTOL is surely no coincidence; its six tilting rotors, the two rear ones riding high on a V-tail, make it a dynamically complex airframe, but the same configuration is what gives Joby such a massive speed and range advantage over most of its competitors; there are no redundant lift propellers sitting there causing drag in cruise flight.
Aridge isn't planning to equal Joby's performance figures, though; it plans to beat them. The promise at this point is that range will be over 500 km (311 miles), and the A868's top speed will be over 360 km/h (224 mph) – despite the fact that it'll have six seats, where the Joby seats five. Those impressive speed and range specs sadly don't portend a leap in battery technology; Aridge is making this a hybrid-electric aircraft, so it won't be 100% clean.
It's unclear whether this will be a five- or six-passenger aircraft; China is not only the first country in the world to fully certify the commercial use of eVTOL air taxis, it's also already certified eHang's eVTOLs to fly without pilots on board. I'm not even sure that's on the roadmap with EASA and the FAA as they take a much more conservative path towards certification. Either way, the option's there if Aridge wants to throw out the controls altogether and make this an autonomous air minibus.
Clearly, a six-seat tilt-rotor beast like the A868 is going to take some time to develop, and with commercial service in the plan, it'll need to be built and tested a lot more rigorously than the flying supercar or the Land Aircraft Carrier.
But the trail's already been blazed, other companies have cleared the path forward and proven what's possible, and the Aridge team has proven itself capable of getting things built, if not preventing them from banging together. It'll be fascinating to see how quickly this "Choby" project progresses.
Source: Aridge
