Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Give money, give people, give equipment.

Author | Chumen Cao Tingting

The first air taxi in the United States, delivered ahead of time!

Recently, Joby Aviation, a US manufacturer of eVTOL, officially delivered its first electric air taxi to the US Air Force.

This is a full six months ahead of schedule, and Joby Aviation has become the first company in the United States to deliver all-electric aerial taxis. The air taxi will be used to carry out a series of logistical tasks, including freight and passenger transport, and will not only be used by the air force, but also enter the mass market in the future.

Before that, Joby Aviation said it would start commercial use in 2025, popularizing air taxis in Dayton, Ohio, for delivery and operation.

Source: Joby Aviation right now, the eVTOL industry is on the eve of the explosion, and around the world, the track has flooded many players, attracting not only aviation leaders such as Boeing, Airbus and Embraer, but also auto giants such as Volkswagen, Geely and Xiaopeng.

However, the challenges faced by eVTOL enterprises are not small, such as eVTOL aircraft has a very high technical threshold, long research and development cycle, the biggest challenge is to solve the contradiction between intelligence, cost and safety.

"Taxi" is getting closer and closer to us as Joby Aviation begins to deliver its first air taxi.

In April this year, Joby Aviation signed a $131 million contract with the US Department of Defense (DOD). Joby Aviation delivered at least nine aircraft to the Pentagon, two of which will be used as air taxis at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

Source: Joby Aviation is scheduled to deliver its first air taxi in early 2024, but it is now about six months ahead of schedule. Joby Aviation said that the air taxi, which has been delivered, will soon be driven by a US military pilot and will serve as a demonstration eVTOL for carrying out logistical missions on the base.

At the same time, Joby Aviation pilots will also participate in the demonstration flight, and as part of cooperation with the US Air Force, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will also use the aerial taxi to conduct research on national airspace.

Source: Joby Aviation according to Joby Aviation, the U.S. Air Force and Marines have visited their flight tests in California several times over the past year.

In April this year, four pilots completed a fully remote-controlled transition flight of the aircraft, and two groups of Marines conducted a mission analysis of the potential logistical and medical applications of eVTOL in May.

As for why it was first delivered to the US Air Force rather than to individual and corporate customers, it was mainly Joby Aviation that the US Defense Innovation Department provided funds for it at the early stage of the project, and then there was a lot of cooperation between the two sides. It can be said that Joby can develop so rapidly that it cannot do without the support of the US defense department.

In addition to the support of the US military, Joby Aviation has also received a lot of financial support from Intel, Delta Airlines, Toyota and other companies, and Toyota has done a lot of credit.

Source: Joby Aviation Toyota is currently the largest outside shareholder in Joby Aviation, with about $400 million invested in it. Tetsuo Ogawa, chief executive of Toyota North America, joined Joby Aviation's board in June.

At the same time, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved the flight test of Joby's electric aerial taxi.

In addition to giving money to others, Toyota even provided goods for the Joby Aviation. In April, the two companies announced that Toyota had agreed to supply key components for Joby's eVTOL aircraft. Toyota will make parts of aircraft powertrains and brakes and send them to Joby's powertrain manufacturing plant in San Carlos, Calif.

Source: Joby Aviation Toyota means more than that to Joby Aviation. In addition to providing aircraft parts, Toyota also helped Joby set up a production pilot in Marina.

"they have also cooperated with us in design, manufacturing process, quality management, development and so on." "they [Toyota] have been an integral part of our business from beginning to end, and we are very grateful for this partnership," said Didier Papadopoulos, head of Joby aircraft OEM.

02. The obsession of continuous entrepreneurs. Joby Aviation, founded in 2009, has been operating for more than a decade. It is an airline company located in California. Its founder, JoeBen Bevirt, is a continuous entrepreneur who has had a lot of entrepreneurial experience before he founded Joby Aviation.

Source: Joby AviationJoeBen Bevirt founded the first company to make robots-Velocity11, mainly to build robots for transporting liquids and testing drugs.

Velocity11 was later sold to Agilent in 2011, when Agilent was a subsidiary of HP.

After his first success, in 2006, Bevirt started another business, named after his own child, and founded a company called Joby, which makes a multi-purpose tripod that looks like octopus for cameras and mobile phones.

In the following year he sold Joby, which was eventually acquired in 2017 by Vitec, the world's leading provider of high-end branded hardware and software solutions.

After having a certain amount of money, Bevirt founded Joby Energy, which mainly developed large-scale high-altitude kite power generation equipment to generate green electricity.

Then, like the first two companies, Bevirt sold Joby Energy, which was eventually acquired by Google.

In 2009, Bevirt set its sights on the eVTOL aircraft again. Soon after the establishment of Joby Aviation, the first aircraft called Monarch Personal Air Vehicle (PAV) was designed.

The Monarch, equipped with eight motors mounted on a rotatable wing connected to a high-performance glider body, is designed to cruise at 161km / h with a range of 100mph, but the aircraft has never been flight tested.

Source: Joby Aviation did not fly a scaled-down prototype for the first time until six years after the company was founded, and then a full-size prototype two years later, which was put into production and tested in 2019.

Flying cars are more expensive than building cars. In the more than 10 years since the establishment of Joby Aviation, it has been favored by many investors. In 2016, Joby Aviation completed round A financing, led by Capricorn, and received another $100 million in round B financing two years later, led by Intel, followed by Singapore-based EDBI, JetBlue Technology Venture Capital and Toyota.

In 2020, Joby Aviation announced that it had raised $620 million in round C financing, of which Toyota invested $394 million.

It is reported that Toyota invested in Joby Aviation because Akio Toyoda wanted to realize the flying dream of his grandfather Toyota founder Kiichiro Toyoda through Joby Aviation.

Then Joby Aviation launched the listing plan, and in 2021, Joby Aviation successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange through a reverse merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), and became the first electric aviation company to list successfully in the United States in the form of SPAC.

Joby's shares soared about 20 per cent after opening at $10.62 on the first day of trading. But its market capitalization has shrunk to $4.496 billion from $6.8 billion that year.

Source: in a press statement before the listing of Joby, Yahoo Finance was described as "Tesla met Uber in the air".

Joby Aviation estimates that 500 electric flying taxis will be delivered each year from 2025, and plans to start carrying passengers as early as 2025. It is reported that consumers only need to place an order in the relevant application, and booking "Flying" is as easy as using other ride-hailing apps.

03. Flying cars rolled up from the ground are not a new concept. This track has been flooded with a large number of players.

According to a research report by Roland Berger, a consultancy, 3000 flying cars will be used as air taxis, airport buses and intercity flights worldwide by 2025, and the number will reach 98000 by 2050.

Morgan Stanley predicts that the flying car industry will form a global market of $300 billion in 2030 and $1.5 trillion by 2040.

While the market is growing rapidly, the competition is also fierce. Earlier, Space X, a rocket company owned by Musk, invested in an electric flying car, the Alef, which once exploded after it obtained a legal flight permit in the United States. Although it will not be officially mass-produced until 2025, orders have now reached 2500.

Source: Alef and once these orders are delivered, Alef will receive $750 million in revenue. In addition, the Doroni Aerospace of another American eVTOL company has also successfully tested flights in the United States.

Back in China, Xiaopeng Huitian Voyager X2, which is owned by Xiaopeng, made the world's first public flight in Dubai and was the first successful test flight of an electric vertical take-off and landing flying car.

The flying car project of traditional car company GAC GROUP was also officially unveiled this year, with a flying car called "GOVE" making its first flight in the world. The GOVE uses a two-layer assemble structure, with rotors and cockpits on the upper layer, which can take off directly, and the base is a mobile vehicle.

China's first eVTOL commercial route has also been announced to open in October this year, from Shenzhen to Zhuhai to take a "flying car" only 15 minutes.

Therefore, both investors and consumers have great expectations for flying cars. We believe that the future will enter the era of flying cars, but now it is much more difficult to combine the functions of flying and cars than to build cars or airplanes alone.

Source: Xiaopeng Huitian, such as the planning of flight routes, the construction of supporting facilities, as well as the corresponding laws and policies are inevitable problems.

Then there is the question of price. Flying cars may be able to solve the problem of land traffic congestion, but now it is too expensive. The Model A, a flying car that Alef can both fly and run, sells for $300000, or 2.14 million yuan.

This also means that the initial flying cars may only be toys for the rich, and how to sell flying cars is also a problem, it is difficult to form a scale in the early stage, it is impossible to reduce costs, and popularity is a long way off.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Superelectricity Lab (ID:SuperEV-Lab), author: Chumen Cao Tingting

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