SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — In the 1980s, Joeben Bebert was a young boy making long, tedious trips between his school and his home in the forested mountains. I started daydreaming about flying cars. .
As CEO of Joby Aviation, Bebert seeks to bring his childhood fantasies of flight closer to reality. He and a modern-day version of the Wright Brothers are launching a new class of electric planes that aim to become the taxis of the sky.
Known as an electric vertical take-off and landing vehicle (eVTOL), the aircraft takes off from the ground like a helicopter, flies at speeds of up to 200 miles per hour (322 kilometers per hour) and has a range of about 100 miles (161 kilometers). It is. kilometers). And these aircraft do it without filling the air with excessive noise caused by fuel-powered helicopters and small planes.
“We're so close to the finish line, and we want to turn the one- or two-hour trips that currently take us into five-minute trips,” said Bebert, 51, who was flying a Joby Air Taxi in Marina, California, about 60 miles south. He spoke to The Associated Press before starting test flights. From the mountains where he grew up.
Archer Aviation, a Silicon Valley company backed by automaker Stellantis and United Airlines, is testing its eTVOL on farmland in Salinas, Calif., and a prototype called Midnight rolled into a field last November. It was seen gliding over a plowing tractor.
The test will help Joby Aviation, which has jointly raised billions of dollars, and other ambitious companies to develop flying cars from a mere picturesque concept popularized by the 1960s cartoon series “The Jetsons.” It's part of a journey we're on to make it more than just that. ” and the 1982 science fiction film “Blade Runner.”
Archer Aviation and its neighbor Whisk Aero, with ties to aerospace giant Boeing and Google co-founder Larry Page, are at the forefront of the race to bring air taxis to market in the United States. Joby already has a partnership connecting its air taxis with Delta flights, while Archer Aviation has a similar partnership with United Airlines.
Flying taxis are well regulated by the US Federal Aviation Administration, which recently created a new category of aircraft called “power drift,” which has been the first since helicopters were introduced for civilian use in the 1940s. This is a measure that had not been taken by the government.
But there are more regulatory hurdles to clear before air taxis are allowed to transport passengers in the U.S., so Dubai is the most likely place for eVTOLs to start flying commercially, probably by the end of this year. This is the place.
“Developing an entirely new class of vehicle is a difficult business,” said Adam Lim, director of Alton Aviation Consultants, a firm that tracks industry evolution. “It's going to be a crawling, walking, running situation. I think we're still crawling right now. Within the next two to three years, we're going to have the Jetsons flying everywhere. Such a reality will never come.”
China is also racing to make flying cars a reality, with President-elect Donald Trump increasingly interested in making flying cars a priority for his next administration over the next four years.
If the ambitions of eVTOL pioneers are realized in the United States, people could be riding air taxis to and from airports in New York and Los Angeles within the next few years.
Because the company's electric taxis can fly unhindered and at high speeds, Joby envisions transporting up to four Delta passengers at a time from New York-area airports to Manhattan in about 10 minutes. First, while the cost of an air taxi will almost certainly be significantly higher than the cost of taking a taxi or Uber from JFK to Manhattan, eVTOLs should be able to carry more passengers than ground vehicles, so it will save time. The difference may narrow over time. I got stuck in a one-way traffic jam.
“You're going to see freeways in the sky,” Adam Goldstein, CEO of Archer Aviation, predicted in an interview at the company's headquarters in San Jose, California. “We'll have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these aircraft flying over individual cities, which will truly change the way cities are built.”
Investors are betting Mr. Goldstein is right, with Mr. Archer helping the company raise another $430 million late last year from a group that includes Stellantis and United Airlines. The injection comes on the heels of the Japanese automaker pumping an additional $500 million into Joby, bringing its total investment in the company to nearly $900 million.
These investments are part of the $13 billion eTVOL companies have raised over the past five years, Alton Aviation said.
Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation both went public through reverse mergers in 2021, opening new avenues for financing and making it easier to recruit engineers with the attractiveness of stock options. Both companies have been successful in attracting workers from electric car maker Tesla and rocket maker SpaceX, and in Archer's case, they are joining Whisk Aero.
Wisk's defection sparked a lawsuit accusing Archer of intellectual property theft in the dispute, which was resolved in a 2023 settlement that included an agreement for both sides to cooperate on several aspects of eTVOL technology. .
Before going public, Joby also acquired eTVOL technology developed by ride-hailing service Uber in an $83 million deal that brought the two companies together as partners.
But no amount of agreements or technological advances could stop losses from piling up for the companies that make flying cars. Joby, whose roots go back to 2009 when Bebert founded the company, has lost $1.6 billion since its founding, while Archer has racked up losses of nearly $1.5 billion since its founding in 2018.
While moving toward commercial air taxi service, Joby and Archer are also looking to make money by negotiating contracts for the U.S. military to use their eTVOLs for deliveries and other short-range missions. Archer partnered with Anduril Industries, a military and defense technology specialist founded by Oculus headset inventor Palmer Lucky, to help land the deal.
Because of the uncertain outlook, the market value of both companies is relatively low by tech industry standards, with Joby hovering around $7 billion and Archer around $6 billion.
But Bebert sees blue skies ahead. “eVTOL will change the way we move,” he said. “It's a dramatically better way to get around. It's better to see the world from the air than to be stuck in interstate traffic.”
