In the sport of technology coverage, victory is measured by one's ability to identify the next big thing, and also to identify flops before they flop. office in San Francisco, the most skeptical of journalists and industry veterans will start writing their small words about the manned drone they saw at CES. When I speak to someone from Ehang's external public-relations company ten days after CES, he says the drone is actually functional, it just needs a battery.Ī couple of weeks from now, as the Ehang 184 is being packed up and shipped to the company's U.S. The physical prototype on the platform doesn't actually turn on-a tube behind the cockpit that runs underneath the stage powers the 184's lights.

The CGI water beneath the rotors doesn't ripple. Behind it, against the false walls of the booth, looped video that looks stylistically rooted in the early 2000s shows a fake Ehang 184 flying over mountains, then across a lake. Chinese men wearing glasses and jeans and Ehang hoodies occasionally open one or both of the vehicle's upward-swinging doors to show a photographer the mounted tablet inside. You push to the front for a better view of it, perched on a raised platform on the hideous convention-center carpet. This is CES, the annual Consumer Electronics Show, the world's largest concentration of prototype gadgets, most of which will prove too ambitious, or too superfluous, to ever see production.

People in the crowd read from the press materials or parrot what they've heard about the machine in front of them, which is a drone, much like a drone you'd pilot by remote control in your backyard, only this one has an eighteen-foot wingspan, is about five feet tall, and has a cockpit with a four-point harness and air conditioning. There are 4,137 companies exhibiting on 2.3 million square feet of floor space. You feel as if you're standing three-deep at a bar, only here, on the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center, there are fluorescent lights a mile overhead, everyone is wearing a lanyard name tag, and some drag around a rolling backpack. If you want to see it up close, you have to wait for the three or four people in front of you to finish taking pictures or lose interest.

The hover car