Aaah!!
Seems like the days of the robber barons, Silicon Valley-style, are back.

Two words: Anthony Levandowski

"flying AUTONOMOUS air-taxis"? Are there people who would adventure using these?

The safety of autonomous air taxis has been questioned. While no mode of transportation is completely safe, here are a few ways in which an autonomous air vehicle has a much easier task than a ground vehicle:
1) No pedestrians, objects in the roadway, construction barricades, etc to detect and avoid.
2) No constantly shifting lane markings to detect and follow.
3) No constant stop signs/stop lights to detect and obey, with severe bad results for failure.
4) Only other air traffic needs detecting and that could be managed by new protocols built in from the beginning of autonomous air taxi operations.
5) Air traffic is not stop-and-go.

Not having to concentrate moment-by-moment on staying separated from, and not colliding with, other vehicles mere feet away makes air navigation much easier and safer to automate than its road counterpart. Not having to deal with legacy users (e.g. pedestrians, who must still remain free to cross the street without coordinating with a computerized traffic system) plus stop lights, lane shifts and drivers who brake suddenly means that most of the really hard part of what autonomous ground vehicles have to do is not required in the air.

TL;DR - Autonomous air vehicles have a much easier job to do, thus they are inherently safer than autonomous ground vehicles.