If you haven't noticed lately,
we're living in the future.
Technology that was only imaginable
in science fiction is now so mundane
that we practically take it for granted.
But there's still one thing
that's conspicuously absent from our futuristic present.
Where are the flying cars?
I was promised flying cars.
I don't see any flying cars.
Why, why, why?
The one thing that both utopian
and dystopian visions of our future
have seemed to agree on is that by now
we'd be flying around our cities.
But for the vast majority of us
who don't happen to own private helicopters,
we still mostly move around at or below ground level,
often stuck in congestion.
But over the last decade,
a growing cadre of bootstrapping startups
and industry stalwarts
have been raising and spending oodles of money
on a new mode of transportation known as urban air mobility.
Could these autonomous, human-ferrying super drones
finally be the flying cars that we've been waiting for?
I think there are two things
that are driving the investment
and the attention to the sector.
The fact that people are moving to cities,
and cities are getting more congested,
and urban dwellers do not want to own cars.
So anything that can move an urban dweller
from A to B is interesting to investors.
We saw it with micro mobility solutions.
We saw it with shared mobility solutions.
The next natural step is shared aviation solutions.
The concept of urban air mobility
isn't totally new.
For decades, helicopters have been a means
for those with means to hover and glide over traffic
in major urban centers like New York, San Francisco,
and Sao Paolo.
Past attempts at turning helicopters
into a form of mass transit, however,
have been grounded, mostly by the inevitable problems
of helicopter technology,
noise, inefficiency, and danger.
Thanks to these issues,
many cities have either limited
or banned helicopter transit outright,
except for limited use, such as in emergencies.
But imagine a future which instead of driving your own car
or hopping on a city bus or subway or taxi,
you could cut your transit time significantly
by booking a flight on a sleek, safe,
and relatively quiet electric powered drone, or EVTOL,
short for Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing.
If we look at just 0.1% of the Americans
that are driving in their cars from work to home,
and we assume that's going to be our addressable market,
we're talking about a 100,000 passengers a year,
more or less, that need to be moved.
If we assume that these aircraft can carry
about four to five people,
and they're doing four to five trips a day,
we would need roughly 5,000 of these aircraft.
So that gives you a sense
of the massive opportunity we have here.
Given this potential market,
the field is unsurprisingly very crowded.
There are over 180 companies
developing some type of EVTOL.
A lot of them are drone developers.
So it's all about scale.
If I can build a small version,
I should be able to scale it to a larger version.
One of these drone turned megacompanies
is EHang, a Chinese firm founded in 2014
that has already earned a spot on NASDAQ.
From the very beginning,
we designed big drones to carry passengers, right?
And second, you can see that for normal drones,
the technology is one-on-one.
That means we need one person to control each drone,
but for us, we designed the system
to control many, multiple AAVs simultaneously
by using one single platform.
EHang recently secured approval
from the Korean government to perform test flights
over Seoul, showing off the company's prototype
during a recent three-hour tour.
Although EHang is designing its remote controlled prototype
to fit applications ranging from medical evacuations
to sightseeing, it's the so-called last 10 mile problem
that seems to be the most ripe for disruption.
For example, if you take a train to arrive in Beijing,
the train takes about one or two hours, right?
And after the train, if you take a taxi,
it takes another one hour or even two hours
to go to the destination, which doesn't make any sense.
But if you can transfer our AAV,
it takes maybe 15 minutes to arrive at at your destination.
That's very cool.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe,
a German company called Volocopter
has spent the last decade or so designing a fleet
of prototypes that have recently been flying
in demonstrations over cities both at home and abroad.
We are extremely pragmatic.
We set out to build a vehicle that can meet
the high safety standards,
that can be certified,
based on existing technologies that are available today.
What came out is the Volocopter.
We explicitly designed it as a multicopter concept,
so we have 18 independent rotors
that give us a very high degree of redundancy.
So any two, any three rotors can fail
and we can still safely compete our mission,
which gives us huge safety advantage over any other concept.
And particularly on the urban mission,
where it's about safely transporting people
from A to B in an urban context, as quiet as possible,
we believe the multicopter concept is the winning design
for that particular mission.
There may be other missions that require
different design concepts.
Volocopter's ambitious plans
have attracted interest from a number of large companies
hailing from other sectors of the transportation world,
such as Chinese auto giant Geely, Germany's Daimler,
and most recently Japan Airlines,
all of whom have participated in funding rounds
for Volocopter that have raised
well over a hundred million euros so far.
Of all the companies currently working on EVTOLs,
Volocopter seems to be the furthest along
in committing to a launch date,
already taking reservations for flights
beginning as soon as 2023
at an introductory price of around 300 euros.
But the main hurdle that could disrupt that timeline
isn't merely a technical one.
This is a very safety critical transportation mode,
and you need to make sure
that you have all relevant stakeholders involved.
So we are really relying on the buy-in
of the regulators and gaining their trust.
So we always talk to them and be like,
okay, do we have an alignment of vision?
Do we have the civil aviation authority on board?
Do we have the airspace manager on board?
You need to make sure that you have alignment,
because any one of those stakeholders can block you
from ultimately achieving your goal.
Part of the added challenge
in gaining regulatory approval
for civilian carrying EVTOLs is that the standards issued
by regulatory agencies are evolving
in tandem with the technology itself.
They have to be airworthy, these aircraft.
They're gonna be running on batteries,
and batteries need to be also approved
as safe enough to be in an aircraft
for this particular application.
Volocopter, EHang,
and other well-heeled EVTOLers,
such as Lilium and Joby,
are each taking a slightly different approach
to engineering an all-electric passenger drone.
Some of the designs are more of a hybrid
between an EVTOL and a small plane,
capable of both navigating a dense urban environment
and flying long distances
at up to almost 200 miles per hour.
And while some of the engineering solutions
for challenges like battery capacity are pretty innovative,
such as Volocopter's hot swapping charging stations,
any EVTOL's viability
ultimately comes down to proving its safety
in a variety of conditions and scenarios.
So assuming that EVTOL technology
eventually passes those regulatory hurdles,
that still leaves a very important question
about this untested market.
Who exactly are these for?
If we look at Elon Musk's master plan,
the first iteration in 2006, he was very clear.
He said he was going to build an expensive car
to help pay for a less expensive car
to help pay for a mass market car.
So I think we're gonna see something quite similar
in this specific segment,
where companies will be offering the service
to high-end consumers, but in the end
that will subsidize the technology
so that everybody can access it in the long term.
Mass adoption of urban air mobility, though,
might pose its own potential issues.
Once the product trickles down
and more people start using it,
we fear it might actually cannibalize users
from public transit in cities,
which will have negative consequences in our view,
mainly because it will just shift congestion
from the road up into the sky.
Before we get to that point, though,
these companies face yet another technical challenge,
integrating urban air mobility
into the existing transportation landscape.
On this front, Uber is taking advantage
of their own learned experience
building a revolutionary ride sharing platform
to bring their technology into a third dimension,
and they're not even waiting for EVTOLs to get started.
Back in the quaint pre-pandemic days of late 2019,
I gave their Uber Copter service a whirl.
There is no smoking allowed.
All right, we're en route to JFK.
I can take this to work every day.
We're really thinking of this as kind of a version 0.1
of our vision of this future Uber air product.
The key thing what we think
is the important learning that we are developing right now
is this foundational feature,
kind of this core experience of multimodality.
So true multimodality.
So with a single button press for the product,
we dispatch the first mile car, the helicopter,
and the last mile car bi-directionally
from downtown to to JFK, and we're using our technology
to do that all behind the scenes.
Admittedly, it's extremely satisfying
to fly above New York City's snarling rush hour traffic
and plop down on the landing pad at JFK Airport
within 10 minutes,
where a car is waiting to shuttle you
directly to your terminal.
But even Uber understands that once the novelty wears off,
it needs to make economic sense
in order for customers to adopt it.
The economics of these vehicles will allow us
to push and bring it to be a much more accessible product
that a broad base of users can use on a daily basis.
We actually think the long-term vision,
we can actually get to the point where flying
in these types of aerial networks can be competitive
with driving your car, with owning a car,
in terms of like the marginal cost of ownership.
It's not gonna happen right away.
It's not gonna happen in the medium-term,
but we think in the long run
that we can actually make flying in this type of a fashion
kind of a economically rational thing
for most people to do everyday.
Despite the sleek renderings
of swanky rooftop heliports and city skylines
buzzing with EVTOLs, the commercial case
for urban air mobility is still up in the air,
putting pressure on the companies vying for viability.
Given the complexities of the solution,
the complexities of the regulation,
we do not expect to see a very diverse ecosystem
in the long term.
We rather expect to see a few, a handful of developers,
of manufacturers, working with a handful
of service providers.
And that consolidation
seems to already be underway.
In late 2020, Uber handed off its ambitious Elevate project
to Joby, the current EVTOL valuation king,
with nearly $1 billion to its name so far.
Boeing and Airbus seem to be stepping back
from their experiments as well.
Some of the smaller startups have vanished entirely,
leaving behind expired domain names
and silent Crunchbase profiles.
So as the field narrows,
the technology matures,
and the regulations are ironed out,
you may someday find that this perennial sci-fi fantasy
could become another mundane option for getting around.
The way that we envision this to play out
is ultimately the customer, whether it's a citizen
in the city or a visitor to the city,
has their mobile phone, has a mobility need,
and he just gets a choice of different transportation modes.
Each comes with a price point, with a comfort point to it
and a predictability point to it,
and then he chooses whatever is the best format for him.
And obviously, we're working very hard
to make your choice as often as possible.