This Florida Startup Says It Can Make Electric Air Taxis Happen

RIO DE JANEIRO—A sales pitch for electric air taxis at Web Summit(Opens in a new window) had the benefit of a persuasive backdrop: congested to congealed traffic that for three mornings in a row turned a roughly 6-mile ride from my hotel to the Riocentro conference venue into a 40-50-minute slog. 

“I spend one hour a day coming here,” said André Stein, CEO of Eve Air Mobility(Opens in a new window), in a panel Thursday morning(Opens in a new window) after attendees raised their hands to indicate they’d spent more than 25 minutes on their own commutes.

“Every time you’re stuck in a traffic jam, you’re probably thinking there’s some better way to do that,” he said. “That’s what urban air mobility is about.”

(Rio de Janeiro has a fairly extensive bus rapid transit network(Opens in a new window) with its own lanes, although that service only covered part of my Web Summit route.)

Eve, a Melbourne, Florida, startup spun out of and backed by Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer, aims to make this happen with its four-passenger, human-piloted eVTOL(Opens in a new window) (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft. It will ascend and descend vertically using eight rotors and fly in between powered by two larger ducted propellers for faster speeds and lower noise. Stein said it will begin flying in 2026. 

“You can say that it’s the kid of a drone and a commercial aircraft,” he told his onstage interviewer, Diogo Teixeira, co-owner and publisher of the Lisbon-based automotive-news site  Razão Automóvel.

Eve cites a range of 60 miles but doesn’t advertise a particular speed. A trip calculator on its site assumes a 125mph cruising speed, while an April 2022 concept-of-operations paper (PDF(Opens in a new window)) says a flight from Rio’s Barra da Tijuca neighborhood to its international airport, about 15 miles in a straight line, would take 12 minutes by eVTOL for an average speed of at least 75mph.

That paper doesn’t offer a figure on how long recharging might take—a possible constraint on the frequent operations Eve plans—but also describes battery swaps as an option.

Stein didn’t offer more specifics about range, speed, or charging in the talk. He also left a little room for interpretation about an eVTOL ride’s cost. 

“It is quite comparable to ground transportation, and up to six times lower than helicopter,” he said. Later on in the talk, he suggested this might present itself more as a premium option for time-stressed passengers who want to get home from an airport faster. 

Stein said the eVTOL design will be cheaper to operate because its battery-electric power zeroes out fuel costs and because its electrical motors will need less maintenance than the machinery on a helicopter.

“Electrical motors, on top of being very light and very small, are very simple,” he said. 

Meanwhile, screens on both sides of the stage looped a video reel showing eVTOLs carrying shiny, happy people above such metropolises as Rio, Dubai, New York, and London.

The air-taxi business has featured a non-trivial amount of puffery. Web Summit 2017 in Lisbon featured a keynote from Uber confidently predicting electric air-taxi service by 2020(Opens in a new window), but Eve and other “advanced air mobility” projects have received notable votes of confidence in recent years.

In September, for example, United Airlines invested $15 million in Eve(Opens in a new window), a deal that included “a conditional purchase agreement” for 200 eVTOLs. United announced in March that a venture with another air-taxi startup, Archer Aviation, would lead to flights by 2025 from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport to a vertiport about 2 miles from the Loop at a cost competitive with Uber Black ($104 to $114 as estimated by Uber’s site Thursday afternoon).

And in April, the US Air Force said it would start flying Joby Aviation’s electric VTOL aircraft out of Edwards Air Force Base in California next year. 

Stein did not understate the difficulty of bringing Eve’s eVTOL from design to flight by 2026. “For startups, that’s probably an eternity,” he said. “For aviation, it’s much sooner than you think.” 

(Disclosure(Opens in a new window): Web Summit provided airfare and lodging in return for my moderating two panels at this event.)