In the flying car factory: are air taxis finally ready for take-off?

Inside the hangar of a decommissioned military airstrip on the California coast, white-coated workers cut and press layers of carbon fibre before putting them into a giant oven that bakes them into ultra-hard, super-lightweight wings and propellers. In the corner, a giant yellow robot arm meticulously examines a finished component, shooting a small jet of water to aid its ultrasound detection system, which looks for the tiniest of imperfections.
When you are trying to build the future, you can leave nothing to chance.
Flying cars have been the stuff of science fiction for decades. A perusal of recent news might lead you to believe that the vehicles, also called air taxis or eVTOLs (electric vertical take-off and landing), will forever remain tomorrow’s technology. Start-ups from Europe to America have begun dropping like flies this year, burning through once-immense cash piles with little to show beyond a handful of prototypes and some YouTube flight demos.
But in this facility in Marina, a sleepy, windswept beach town two hours south of Silicon Valley, the mood is buoyant. Eric Allison is chief product officer of Joby Aviation, a $5.2 billion, (£4.2 billion) New York-listed company that has been developing the technology for 15 years. “I’ve never been more confident that this is actually going to happen,” he said. “The innovation in transportation is kind of constrained by the ground. What we’re solving is a better way to get from A to B.”
With a fair wind, he added, Joby could start commercial operations by the end of next year in Dubai, where the local regulator has agreed to fast-track certification.
The allure is clear. Imagine swapping snarled roads or crowded trains for a quiet trip through the skies, covering in minutes what might otherwise drag on for soul-crushing hours.
Joby’s eVTOL is a strange-looking craft. It has a helicopter-style cabin topped by a wing fixed with four large propellers, and a V-shaped tail topped with another two. The propellers start parallel to the ground to take off vertically. Once at the desired height, they shift 90 degrees to enable airplane-style flight. The vehicle has a top speed of 200mph, can carry four passengers and one pilot, and will have a range of up to 100 miles. It has completed “thousands” of test flights.
Days before The Sunday Times’ visit, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the US regulator, published its final guidance on how eVTOL start-ups can get this new generation of aircraft certified — a critical step that the industry has been working toward for more than a decade. “The regulatory path is now set across all of the key things,” Allison said. “Now we know what we need to do.”
This is not a small thing. Joby and its many competitors are 100 per cent electric. In other words, the propulsion is a total departure from the fossil-fuel-powered systems that have dominated since the era of flight began. This shift means the regulatory path that start-ups must follow is tortuous. Many have simply run out of time.
The most surprising perhaps was Lilium. The German company listed on the tech-heavy Nasdaq stock exchange in 2021 and raised more than $1.1 billion to build what looked like an aeroplane with dozens of hairdryers affixed to its two wings. It filed for insolvency last month and has been put up for auction.
In Britain, Rolls-Royce has shut down its electric propulsion arm, which was developing next-generation air taxi systems. Vertical Aerospace, the Bristol-based, New York-listed start-up, is rapidly running out of cash. The loss-making company expects to be down to its last £25 million by the end of next month but is caught in a bitter fight for control between its founder Stephen Fitzpatrick, the tycoon behind Ovo Energy, and shareholder Mudrick Capital.
Sergio Cecutta of aviation specialist SMG Consulting said that the industry, after years of hype, is going through a brutal separation between the winners and losers. “Air taxis are definitely going to be a market that is going to come, and it’s going to be big. The issue is, what is the timing for that market? Is it going to work according to the timeline that these companies have in their minds?” he said. “I think the answer probably is going to be no.”
That is one reason why Joby and Archer Aviation, a California rival that has partnered with United Airlines, are seeking to launch services in the Middle East in 2025 — potentially a year or more before they receive the final approval from their domestic regulator, the FAA. The General Civil Aviation Authority, regulator for the United Arab Emirates, has agreed to accelerate final approvals for both companies. Joby has signed a deal to launch in Dubai as soon as next year; Archer is aiming to launch around the same time in the region.
Cecutta said: “The Dubai thing is a recognition that they want to get revenue as soon as possible, and that might not align with the FAA. So it’s very interesting. An airplane has never been certified for the first time outside their own jurisdiction. This has never happened before.”
Despite the long odds, the potential, especially for aeronautics nerds, is intoxicating. Imagine booking a trip from London to Bristol via, say, Uber. Joby bought Uber’s air taxi arm, Elevate, and plans to integrate its offering into the app.
The vision is that, in the not too distant future, passenger could open the Uber app to book an end-to-end journey, starting with a car ride to a Joby skyport that is strangely quiet because eVTOLs needn’t be kept “warm” and so the engines will be off during boarding. The plane then takes off, covers the bulk of the 100-mile distance in 30 minutes and touches down next to an Uber car that handles the last few miles.
“We can add a degree of freedom to transportation,” Allison explained. His company said that the Civil Aviation Authority, the British regulator, recently visited the Marina facility to see the progress for itself, though getting approval in America and Dubai takes precedence.
If the air taxi industry has its way, there will be many thousands of its craft plying the skies, often over cities — and that notion is a non-starter if they make a helicopter-type racket. Which is why Joby, Archer and the rest talk so much about noise — or the lack of it.
At its loudest — during take-off — Joby’s craft create 65 decibels of noise, similar to a hoover. At 1,000ft of elevation, the plane is, in effect, silent to those standing directly below it. “Noise is the critical unlock when it comes to scalability,” Allison said. “With the design, we took noise into account from the very beginning.”
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Joby has raised more money than any western competitor — about $2.4 billion — after Toyota, the auto giant, announced a fresh $500 million cash injection last month. Other big investors include Baillie Gifford, the investment management firm, based in Edinburgh, Intel, the microprocessor manufacturer, and Delta, the US airline. But its core challenge is the same that has downed so many of its rivals.
Just how long can it continue to burn through cash while it waits for the regulator to approve its aircraft, for cities to build infrastructure, and for the public to feel comfortable enough to hop on board? Cecutta said: “A lot of these numbers I see out there — ‘There are going to be hundreds of vehicles, thousands of vehicles’ — I’m going to buy into that in 2035. I’m not going to buy into that in 2028.”