The world has dreamed of the day flying cars will
become a part of daily life. And despite many
attempts, that day hasn't come.
But we might not have to wait much longer.
Advances in battery and electric propulsion tech
have enabled entirely new types of aircraft to take
to the skies.
Things we once only saw in cartoons, thought of as
science fiction, are actually coming to life
right before our eyes.
Electric propulsion has enabled us to think
differently about aircraft design and to
develop a new class of aircraft.
Startups Joby, Archer, Vertical, Lilium and more
are developing eVTOLs, electric vertical takeoff
and landing aircraft, with the vision of making
air taxis a reality.
This new mode of transportation allows us
to move into the third dimension and rethink the
way our cities operate.
The vehicle of the future.
The Tesla meets Uber of the air, where we can
redefine human mobility.
Major airlines have been securing deals and
preorders in the hopes that these take off.
The eVTOL space is going to fundamentally change
how people get to an airport.
CNBC got an inside look at Joby Aviation, one of the
eVTOL players that has grand ambitions of not
only building the aircraft but operating an
uber-like air taxi business.
The problem in cities is often overcrowded or
bottleneck infrastructure. We have an
opportunity to help solve that problem by getting
people over and above traffic to where they want
to go as much as 5 to 10 times faster than driving
on the ground.
Investment in eVTOL startups has taken off.
Last year, $5.8 billion was invested and it is
estimated the U.S.
Passenger eVTOL market could reach $17.7 billion
by 2040. But enormous challenges lie ahead.
The future of urban air mobility is still being
mapped out by regulators, and Joby must prove its
aircraft will be safe for commercial transit.
That is one of the biggest hurdles for the eVTOL
industry, particularly as it gets into the
development and entry into service spaces.
The FAA will want to make sure there's a great
safety record behind these.
We are working with the same level of energy as
the industry itself.
Innovation can never come at the expense of safety.
It has to work hand in hand.
Our designs are locked in and we're now in the
stages of going through the testing analysis and
then moving into the certification. We are very
close to making this reality.
When I was a child, I dreamt about building an
airplane that could take off and land vertically.
That was quiet and that was sustainable.
The solution to that, in my mind, was electric
propulsion. When I was in college in 1993, I worked
on it. The challenge was that batteries weren't
ready.
JoeBen Bevirt went off to study robotics at
Stanford. He later founded a robotics company
and after that, invented a popular flexible camera
tripod called the GorillaPod.
Those two successes gave me both the confidence and
the financial resources to go back to my childhood
dream.
In 2009, he founded Joby Aviation in Santa Cruz,
California.
We started the company in this redwood barn, and it
was a really tight-knit group of engineers
dedicated to building a new class of aviation
company with vertical integration in its DNA.
Early on, the focus was on the proof of concept.
That went on for the first few years, leading
to 2017 when we started flying effectively the
aircraft that resembles what we have today.
The aircraft you're seeing today began flying in
2019. Our first production intent aircraft
will be rolling off our pilot manufacturing line
shortly.
The company has secured sizable investments from
some big names.
In 2020, Toyota invested nearly $400 million and is
helping the company with manufacturing.
They've been able to give us a lot of assistance,
even in this stage, in terms of how do we design
the right manufacturing facility.
It also received a Department of Defense
contract for more than $75 million.
Since 2016, they provided us access to flight test
facilities, restricted airspace, that has
significantly accelerated the development of this
really exciting new technology.
In 2021, the company went public via a SPAC with
Reinvent Technology Partners, which is run by
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Zynga founder
Mark Pincus. Bringing Joby $1.6 billion.
The company manufactures and performs flight tests
at a pilot production facility just outside
Monterey, in Marina, California.
Our pilot manufacturing facility is where we are
going to optimize our build rate.
And we're also going to build tens of airplanes
per year.
Unlike an electric car, weight considerations are
far more important in an aircraft to maximize
range. As a result, the entire airframe is made of
composites.
Composites are really a combination of composite
material and honeycomb pieces.
You'll also see at a smaller scale use of
metallics, such as 3D printed titanium, as well
as some other materials, such as aluminum.
Some of the material we're using here and the
way we process it, cut it and cure it is really
state of the art of what you would see in aviation.
Once the parts are manufactured, they go
through rigorous inspections.
This is one of those inspections that we call
nondestructive inspections. And the idea
is to leverage this UT robot to actually see
through the material and identify any defects.
Once we've done with that, if we have a clean
check, then we can proceed into the assembly
part of the manufacturing process.
We have the Toyota team here working with us on a
daily basis, helping us with their automotive
expertise so that we can really design the right
footprint, use the right equipment and right
processes that really allow us to scale from
this facility to the much larger one.
This aircraft is one of our prototype airplanes
that we are using throughout the development
process. All electric aircraft designed from the
get go. Intended for five occupants, one being the
pilot, and then for passengers with plenty of
luggage space. Each of these propulsion units is
articulated to allow us to take off vertically
like a helicopter, then go through a transition
phase and then go wing born and fly like an
airplane. We've demonstrated in the past
that we were able to exceed 200 miles per hour,
150 miles on the range.
But in typical use, you'll see it used more
for flights within 50 miles or less.
Each of our six propulsors is powered by two separate
motors with separate inverters powering each
motor and separate battery packs powering
each inverter.
Since the aircraft will be operating in urban
environments, noise was a key concern the team
designed for.
The acoustic signature is core to being able to land
where our customers want to go.
And it's not just the level of the noise, it's
also the quality of the noise, a noise that blends
into the background.
The company said a majority of the aircraft
and its components were developed in-house.
The batteries were also developed by Joby, with a
team of ex-Tesla engineers.
Our battery team, they were responsible for
developing the battery packs for the Tesla Model
S, the Tesla model 3 and the Tesla Model X.
Joby uses a simulator to develop and test the
software that powers the aircraft.
We check that the software actually is doing what
it's supposed to do. So we check that the avionics
do things that they're supposed to do.
We check that the control laws or the way the
airplane flies and handles and maneuvers does
exactly what it's supposed to do.
The simulator is also crucial for training.
So we are going to be bringing hundreds and
thousands of pilots through this type of
simulator in the future.
The important aspect is that the simulator is very
close to the real aircraft and actually
flies exactly like the real aircraft.
Here we go, we're on our way up.
I'm actually making no inputs at all right now.
And what you can see is the aircraft is in a
perfectly steady hover.
This isn't me. I'm not doing anything.
This is the aircraft.
If you sat here in a helicopter, and I am a
helicopter pilot, or a jump jet like a Harrier,
you would be working on the controls, multiple
inputs, like an input every second, in order to
keep it steady and keep it in this location.
But I'm actually doing nothing. And this is one
of the key elements that makes our aircraft easy to
teach.
Joby's vision doesn't stop at just developing the
aircraft.
It's also the operations, it's the customer
experience, the vertiports, we're building
a whole ecosystem.
In 2020, the company acquired Uber Elevate,
Uber's air taxi division, along with a $75 million
investment.
That team is providing all of the technology to
deliver on the multimodal experience, as well as
coordinating the pilots, the maintenance, the
customer service staff.
Just recently, Joby inked an exclusive five-year
partnership with Delta Airlines. The carrier is
investing $60 million with plans to use its air
taxis to transport passengers to and from
airports.
It's been a multi-year journey and our teams have
been talking to different people in the industry.
We are investing $60 Million into Joby.
We have the ability to grow that investment over
time. We will have a board seat.
Delta has invested billions of dollars into
airport infrastructure and we're leveraging that
infrastructure and the relationships that Delta
is built to deliver vertiports at the airport.
Delta tends to be one of the more conservative
airlines, and their investments certainly
stood out to me as very compelling and their sort
of support for this eVTOL industry.
And I think the fact that each airline is
individually partnering with a different OEM tells
you that they don't want to be left out if this
does, no pun intended, take off.
Joby envisions the experience being
all-inclusive for every leg of the trip.
It starts with booking a flight in either Joby's
app or one of its partners, such as Delta or
Uber.
You can use our app or the Uber app to book a
seamless, multimodal journey from door to door.
Our goal is once a customer picks their
flight, they can then add on a Joby connection
itinerary to that and have all of that
transaction happen on the same experience on
Delta.com or the Fly Delta app.
Joby says the cost of these trips will be
comparable to what one might pay for a premium
Uber.
Our goal is to make this equivalent to ridesharing
today, similar cost per mile for every seat that
we're delivering.
The cost of the actual eVTOL, the average selling
prices, they're anywhere from $3 to $5 million
depending on the manufacturer. Whether
they'll make money on that? That's a question
that remains to be seen. So that'll answer how much
the consumer has to end up paying and how much the
operator is willing to subsidize.
The company is targeting late 2024 for its launch,
but hasn't revealed where it plans to offer the
service first.
We certainly think of this business as one that's
applicable for large, medium and small sized
cities, both here in the US and abroad.
Our approach is going to be to go deeper into a
smaller number of cities as opposed to going wide.
That's the way that we can show the utility of
this service and really drive down cost on the
other side.
It's also looking at eventually servicing rural
communities.
We've got an opportunity to get people to where
they want to go there by basically roads in the sky
that don't exist on the ground.
But before Joby can begin ferrying passengers
through the skies, it has some major hurdles to
overcome. The aerospace industry is heavily
regulated and the Federal Aviation Administration
has strict standards for aircraft used in
commercial operations.
Commercial aerospace, despite proven aircraft
and long certification processes that range
anywhere from 5 to 10 years for each aircraft
model, still have major setbacks.
We have to certify the vehicle or the aircraft
itself. Second, we have to certify the operation.
That is, how will the operators, the pilots,
operate for something that takes off like a
helicopter, translate to forward flight, lands like
helicopter. And then thirdly, how do we ensure
that we safely integrate this new technology into
our national airspace system.
We began certification with the FAA in 2018 in a
formal way and received our Stage 4 G1 issue paper
in May of 2020. We recently announced the
completion of our Part 135 Operating Certificate.
eVTOLs are especially tricky since it's the
introduction of an entirely new aircraft.
Because you have a novel, new aircraft that will
operate in both modes, we want to make sure that we
get that right from a pilot's training.
And then as we gain more and more experience and
we've gained more time in this, we can continue to
evolve our regulatory framework there.
And the general public will need convincing that
these are safe. We talk about safety of ten to the
minus nine. That's something happens one in a
billion time. This is what the public has come
to expect every time they get aboard an aircraft.
We want them to feel as safe on an eVTOL as they
are on a commercial airliner.
And that's what we are building toward and that's
what the industry must adhere to.
Also critical to its plan is gaining buy in within
the urban environments it hopes to operate.
We're interfacing across multiple different areas
of the FAA, along with municipal governments,
incorporating the feedback from communities.
And that is why we're so focused on the acoustic
signature. We want communities to want our
vertiports.
And when it does receive all the necessary
approvals for the aircraft, it still has the
uphill battle of scaling manufacturing.
One report claims Joby cannot hit its ambitious
2024 target.
This facility has the capacity for tens of
aircraft per year. The next step is to select our
site for our phase one production facility that
will allow us to scale to hundreds of aircraft per
year.
Joby also has a lot of competition, with an
estimated 200 companies worldwide developing
vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.
Archer Aviation, another California based startup,
is also in the testing phase.
It went public last year through a SPAC and
received funding from Stellantis and United
Airlines. Earlier this year, it received a $10
million deposit from United for 100 of its
aircraft. American Airlines has also thrown
its hat into the ring, backing UK based Vertical
Aerospace. But given the difficulty and expense of
building a successful aerospace company, some
predict consolidation.
I think the share prices say it all.
The share prices have not been great since launch.
So there definitely will be consolidation as
development timelines could be prolonged and
liquidity might be needed.
And once these aircraft are operating, price will
be the determining factor in whether these
ultimately succeed.
What really has this industry take off is
getting that price cost equation lower.
I would certainly take a $100 ride to JFK and save
an hour of my time.
And of course, higher adoption, as we've seen
with Uber, as we've seen with companies like Wheels
Up, have more demand come in.
I dream of that day where myself and my kids are
going to be getting on a Joby aircraft from an
airport somewhere and traveling downtown.
And we're doing that, not only with ease, but also
by leaving a clean footprint across the
board. I want to be one of the first passengers
out there.
We're still in very early innings when it comes to
the long arc of the business. We need to stay
extremely focused every day and making sure we're
putting one foot in front of the other so that we
can get to the next chapter of the story and
the chapter that comes after that.
If there's any skeptics out there, just watch our
execution, watch our results. We're going to
continue to deliver.
We are so excited about what this next stage of
aviation is going to bring.