A documentary by Bloomberg explores the high-flying potential of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOLs), but also some of its technical obstacles and its unproven market
No one likes to be stuck in traffic. Those hectic weekday mornings sitting behind a line of cars moving at snail-like pace as you try to get to work on time or reach the airport before your flight takes off without you. Another irritating scenario: holiday weekend getaways where it takes an inordinate amount of time just to get out of the city.
We spend an absurd amount of our lives sitting in vehicles—and as one common saying goes, time is something you can’t get back.
But if the dreams of eVTOL CEOs and free-thinking engineers come true, it might not be long before you find yourself flying over the congested freeways of a metropolitan area, arriving at your destination not only much faster than in the past but with much less stress. eVTOLs are no magical elixir to every problem of modern transportation, but they could provide radical new ways of getting from point A to point B.
With all the frenetic energy surrounding AI and closely related technologies, events in the eVTOL industry sometimes fly under the radar. But the industry is alive and well: it’s heavily funded—to the tune of billions of dollars—and ripe for a variety of use cases.
Along with personal transportation, eVTOLs could be used in certain military operations, like surveillance and reconnaissance. In the shipping industry they could transform last-mile delivery. In the area of search and rescue they could serve as a crucial option for the speedy deployment of personnel.
Given the range of use cases for eVTOLs it’s no surprise that hundreds of companies throughout the world—from the U.S. and China, to Brazil, France, and South Korea—have entered the air mobility sector over the past two decades. One reporter notes that a Morgan Stanleey estimate has shown that eVTOL’s “addressable market could be $1 trillion by 2040.”
Archer Aviation, based in San Jose, is one prominent company that has seen investor money pour in. Since its founding in 2009, Archer has received $2.5 billion in funding, around a third of which has come from the pockets of automotive giant Toyota. (In addition to aerospace companies, automotive manufacturers have also been getting involved in the eVTOL industry.)
Listening to some of the founders of eVTOL companies featured in the documentary, it’s hard not to get excited about their visions for the future of travel. The urge to innovate is an attractive quality, and if technological innovations can bring about new and improved ways of transportation—which reduces the amount of time we spent sitting in idling vehicles—that’s something to cheer for.
But eVTOLs face some significant challenges. There are engineering obstacles, for one. Batteries are key to eEVTOLS; and while battery technology has gotten better over the years, it remains a significant and finicky problem. As one reporter aptly puts it, batteries “govern” so much about the design and function of eVTOLs: “the batteries dictate the range. They dictate the power, they dictate the payload, how many people or how much cargo these things can carry. They dictate how fast they can recharge.” Batteries can also be very heavy. “It’s a fun fact,” says one founder of an eVTOL company, “our battery alone weighs more than the rest of the vehicle.”
In addition to engineering challenges, a host of regulatory issues will have to be sorted out before eVTOLS start hitting the skies in large numbers. Safety of course is part of this; so, too, is public perception. “Safety concerns around the eVTOL industry are similar to every kind of air travel industry,” notes one reporter. In order for certain areas of the eVTOL industry to lift off, there’s going to need to be a high degree of confidence among the public about the safety of the aircraft—something that eVTOL company CEOs are very much aware of.
While there are clearly major issues that will need to be worked out—technical, regulatory, certification—none of them appear to be insurmountable. It takes time for any emerging technology to get off the ground, in this case, literally. One German researcher posits an optimistic but modest path forward for the very near future: “Within the next few years it’s very likely that we will see commercial eVTOL operations, but they will start with very few numbers and a few example cities.”
How the eVTOL industry will evolve in the coming years seems hard to predict. It could help “rewrite urban transit maps around the world,” says a Bloomberg reporter. “At the same time,” he goes on to say, “it could just fizzle into a niche market only within the reach of the very richest travelers and in the process burn up billions of dollars of investor capital.”
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