This is not your grandad’s cable car gondola. Born of an amusement ride and opening to the public in 2026, this remarkably clever kiwi idea offers quick, cheap, on-demand urban transit – that’s much more direct and private than public transport.
It looks a lot like a big urban gondola system, but Whoosh’s as-yet-unnamed autonomous transport pod system is much more interesting. Gondolas are fixed to their cables, which are pulled in long loops; the Whoosh pods have their own motors and autonomous route-switching systems on board, and are free to navigate their way from point to point across a complex, super-modular network that could stretch from one side of town to the other.
Cable cars, in other words, that don’t all have to go the same way, switching freely between cables that can be much shorter and cheaper than several miles of regular gondola line. In a network that’s super cheap and easy to extend, that doesn’t have to be constrained by geography or existing road networks. It’ll look something like this:
Whoosh
It’s an entirely new and very clever way of thinking about urban transport. Like an eVTOL air taxi, these pods can happily float over traffic – not as quickly, but certainly much more efficiently and with far less hullabaloo in terms of noise, safety and downwash. Like monorails, they take up minimal space on the ground and are not stuck on a set route, so there’s no public transport-style connections to switch between. They’ll go from any stop in the network directly to any other, intelligently choosing routes to maximize speed.
And they’ll be much more like a ride-share service than public transport. “Our view is: people don’t want to wait for the bus – they want the bus to wait for them,” says Chris Allington, founder and CEO of Whoosh, on a video call from his office in Christchurch, New Zealand.
“Everyone wants that Uber experience,” he tells me. “You want to go from point to point, without any stops in the middle. So you have an app, you either book a vehicle and have it waiting, or walk to your nearest small-footprint station and grab one if it’s there. The vehicle knows it’s you, the doors open and close, it knows the temperature and lighting and music you prefer, and it takes you on the network without stopping to another small-footprint station, very close to your desired destination.”
Check out an animation:
Whoosh City Scene Animation
Whoosh’s pod vehicles and infrastructure
The smallest “stations,” says Allington, fit within a standard car park space, just big enough for a spiral up to the elevated height of the Whoosh network, about 12 m (40 ft) off the ground. Larger stations could easily be built right down at ground level. Stations will have their own loops of rail off the main network, so that when pods stop, they don’t hold up any other traffic.
The ‘tracks’ will all be completely static, a combination of tensioned cables stretching 150-300 m (500-985 ft), and shorter sections of steel rail for smooth turns and junctions. “The cool thing about cable is that you can span difficult terrain without any cost,” says Allington. “We can cross over a river, a bridge, a highway. We don’t have to fit down existing road corridors. We can have a network that runs along the tops of buildings – one of our clients overseas is looking to connect rooftop to rooftop between about 10 hotels he’s got, so you don’t even need to go down to the ground floor.”
The pods will carry internal underfloor batteries to run their onboard air con, Wi-Fi, comfort, and entertainment systems, as well as sending torque to the drive wheels that pull the cars along on the cables and tracks. The system will optimize the paths of all vehicles in the network, and each pod will switch between different track options at a junction using small switching wheels that can either switch the pod onto a track to the left or right, or allow it to go straight ahead, which is also the failure mode.
Whoosh
Whoosh is predicting an average speed around its network of 40 km/h (25 mph) – but that’s without stopping, so it promises to be much quicker than driving in congested urban areas. The pods will happily switch between cables and rails at the tops of the towers at that pace.
Check out a simulated ride to get a sense of how it’ll work and what the infrastructure will look like:
A simulated ride on the Whoosh transit system
Whoosh’s pod vehicles and infrastructure
The smallest “stations,” says Allington, fit within a standard car park space, just big enough for a spiral up to the elevated height of the Whoosh network, about 12 m (40 ft) off the ground. Larger stations could easily be built right down at ground level. Stations will have their own loops of rail off the main network, so that when pods stop, they don’t hold up any other traffic.
The ‘tracks’ will all be completely static, a combination of tensioned cables stretching 150-300 m (500-985 ft), and shorter sections of steel rail for smooth turns and junctions. “The cool thing about cable is that you can span difficult terrain without any cost,” says Allington. “We can cross over a river, a bridge, a highway. We don’t have to fit down existing road corridors. We can have a network that runs along the tops of buildings – one of our clients overseas is looking to connect rooftop to rooftop between about 10 hotels he’s got, so you don’t even need to go down to the ground floor.”
The pods will carry internal underfloor batteries to run their onboard air con, Wi-Fi, comfort, and entertainment systems, as well as sending torque to the drive wheels that pull the cars along on the cables and tracks. The system will optimize the paths of all vehicles in the network, and each pod will switch between different track options at a junction using small switching wheels that can either switch the pod onto a track to the left or right, or allow it to go straight ahead, which is also the failure mode.
