Morning. Welcome to our Third in a Row Session Discussing the Urban Air Mobility Space and eVTOL Market. We're pleased to have Joby Aviation attend our Autos Conference for the first time. They've attended our Industrials Conference. I hosted Eric at that back in March, so happy to carry on the conversation again. Eric, maybe good to first introduce yourself. I think you have a short video as well, but your role at the company and maybe just provide a short overview for the business for those who may be less familiar with the company.
Yeah, and thanks, Bill, for having us here today. I have to say, save the best for last. Right? It's great to be here, and it's great to be in this industry for 15 years now. I've been actually working in this space for quite a while. I came to Joby in 2021 as part of the Uber Elevate acquisition, a deal that I led at Uber after running that team for a while. I came over to Joby, and I'm Chief Product Officer now. I oversee a bunch of the different aspects of going to market, building out the software and systems and services that will allow us to actually offer urban air mobility on an on-demand basis to people whenever they want to. That's really the vision of Joby. Joby's been around for about 15 years.
It was founded in late 2009, really at the forefront of the development of this technology of electric motors, electric propulsion systems, all of the key technologies to allow aircraft to transition from kind of the traditional technologies to embrace the same technology in EVs that is changing transportation all over the world. We've been at the forefront of that. We've actually developed a lot of the technology ourselves because this technology just didn't exist. Still, actually, in a lot of places, doesn't really exist to allow you to kind of integrate it in an off-the-shelf way. We have built a vertically integrated company to attack this problem. We've built the component layer. We've built the vehicle platform layer. We're building the services and operation layer that allows us to deliver that service into partners like Uber and Delta, some of our key go-to-market partners.
We just got wrapped up some flight testing that we've been doing. We were over in Dubai earlier this year. We did a multi-week campaign of flight testing with pilots in the heat, up to 110 °F , flying there. I have a quick video to show some of that if we want to play that. Gives a sense of what we do.
Let's go around the room, giving you a quick checklist for complete. Ready for aircraft handover to pilot for load starting land control. Controls go. GPU go. Flaps go. Batteries go. Test DC aircraft is yours for power up. We'll be picking up for the hover out of ground effect. We'll send the speed. Here we go.
This really encapsulates what we do. We have been designing and building this aircraft now, and now we're getting ready for operational readiness. We are testing this aircraft in different environments, whether it's Dubai, whether it's at our test flight facilities in California. We've got five of that aircraft flying in our fleet, doing testing every day, working toward our certification, but also working towards learning all of the unknown unknowns that we have. We really believe in learning by doing, which is what we lean into every day.
Great. I've got a set of questions, but if anybody has any questions in the audience, we'll stop, and please let me know. We've been talking about the regulatory landscape for all of these discussions thus far. Maybe at a high level, can you frame the U.S. regulatory landscape as it relates to advanced air mobility, especially given the recent news flow around government support for drones, autonomous, and hybrid?
Yeah, absolutely. We really have been—I mean, we've been working with the FAA since 2019, I think, is when we first started formally engaging with the FAA in the type certification program for the S4 aircraft, which is the one that you saw flying there. It is a process, and we've been working through that process. We actually publish on a quarterly basis the kind of scorecard that we score ourselves, and we score the FAA in some sense in terms of all of the documentation, really, what the basis of that is that we have to generate and have approved in order to finish our type certificate. That is the foundation of that certification work. We've been really impressed with the lean-in that the FAA has had overall in terms of this process, and it's actually accelerated.
The overall engagement from the government, whether it's DOT or the FAA in this administration, has been actually really good. We've seen an acceleration of response times, of turnaround times, all of the things that really feed into building momentum toward getting the certification done overall. That's just the formal regular process. There's also then the executive order, the eIPP, that has been put forward now. We're still waiting for all of the details to be ironed out on that. It's really, I think, quite promising in terms of ability to accelerate learnings, accelerate introduction of these types of aircraft into the space, and really start to essentially plant that flag in terms of leadership at a global level in this industry and continue to drive the industry in that direction.
Yeah. I know Elon CEO put a lot of excitement in the space and has definitely helped some of the equities involved, including yours. I guess there's been discussion of potentially accelerating the pace of adoption, which you kind of just alluded to. Are there opportunities to bring forward a certification timeline, given what's clearly been pushed out relative to prior expectations?
Yeah. We are continuing to work with the FAA on basically a daily basis on this. We see, like I said, we are seeing acceleration in terms of the response times, turnaround times, in terms of the work that we have to do to finalize all these plans, get the plans done, get all of our testing done and accepted. We actually think that there's a lot of momentum building, and the FAA is really leaning into this.
Maybe just setting more of the stage on this from an FAA certification process. Where are we in the process? What is the significance, I guess, being on the path to begin TIA? You can maybe define what that is, flight testing within the next several months.
Fundamentally, the type certification process is the big thing that we talk about all the time. It's essentially a design certification. In the process of being able to offer a commercial aviation product, you have to have the design certified. You have to have your production system certified, and you have to have your operations certified. All of those things have to be in place in order to launch essentially a product that the public can pay for and use on a regular basis. We actually already have our operational certification. We got that a few years ago. We're using that in the context of an employee shuttle, and we've built out what I call ElevateOS . All of that, we can come back to in a little bit, I think.
All of that knowledge and learnings that we had at Uber Elevate, we kind of condensed into software now, and we've built out that as the foundational platform for this future service. We're actually working on a production certificate. The target there is to have that simultaneous with our type certificate, which is kind of an industry standard thing to do. Really the bulk of the effort, though, is on this design certification, the type certificate. We have broken this down into five stages. The way that the FAA has technical orders that govern this process, but it's kind of like a couple of small stages, one giant one, and then you're done. That is less helpful. We actually have just kind of discretized it a little bit differently, and that's how we report out on this.
We are in what we've deemed stage 4 of a five-stage process. Stage 4 is where you take all of your certification plans, which is stage 3, that you've agreed to with the FAA across every different aspect of the entire airplane. Then you write detailed test plans for every single test that you're going to do. All of those test plans have to be reviewed and accepted by the FAA. We are in the process of doing that. We've submitted 70% of the entire set of test plans that we anticipate having to write to the FAA, and they've accepted 53% of them, which is really great progress if you look at our overall progress over the last few quarters. That is kind of accelerating. We're super excited by that.
Of course, this represents many, many, many, many things that are actually happening all simultaneously. As these test plans are getting written and submitted and accepted, we're doing all of the testing work. We're testing components, we're testing assemblies and subsystems and systems, all of this. We submit that final data to the FAA when the results of those tests, some of them the FAA is witnessing, some of them they've delegated witnessing to our internal employees. That's stage 5. The FAA formally accepts all of that data as passing the test and mapping to the certification basis.
Question?
[audio distortion] Safety data is publicized and for our people to knowledge and working with the FAA. This is what we think is the public safety basis for a system that. Fly, that's working with.
The FAA, stage 1 is what's called the certification basis. That's where it's the high-level safety intent. That's actually the first thing we negotiate with the FAA. For a normal airplane, a normal airplane, right, that's actually literally published in federal laws. It's like part 23, part 25, part 27. Those are kind of the standard safety standards, essentially. For this novel aircraft, we actually ended up negotiating that, essentially. Some of it was taken from part 23, some of it from part 27, some of it from other places. Some of it had to be special and kind of negotiated and written with the FAA. That was all done kind of upfront in that. That cascades down.
Those test plans all have to trace back up to those safety intent, safety standards in that certification basis that we negotiated with the FAA early on in the process.
Great. Thanks for that. I guess when we think about coming back to the TIA, what are the key milestones the team's looking to achieve before the testing can begin? The team has spoken about using a fleet of five test aircraft for the TIA testing next year. Would Joby think about building additional to speed the process, or is that really not feasible?
Yeah. Kind of going in order on that. We've talked a lot about in the last few quarters about this thing called TIA. TIA is Type Inspection Authorization. This is a really big milestone when it comes to working with the FAA. This means that the FAA has authorized their test pilots to get into our aircraft and start executing flight test plans. Flight test plans are one of these test plans. There are many different flight test plans. Flight test plans are part of what we call stage four, these test plans that we're submitting to the FAA that they're then reviewing and accepting formally.
When there are other tests that have to be done in order for the FAA, many other tests that have to be done in order for the FAA to allow their pilots to get into our aircraft and start to fly the aircraft against these flight test plans that we have agreed on. This is a really big deal. Kind of to the best of our knowledge, every company that has entered that phase of TIA flight testing where the FAA pilots are actually flying the aircraft eventually comes out of it. It is kind of like the last lap in some ways, the way we see it, where all of the pieces have come into place to allow that big step of the FAA pilots getting in the aircraft and formally executing those test plans.
We're targeting early next year to be able to start doing that.
Okay. Great. Given the focus of this conference, obviously an auto's conference, I want to discuss a bit on the partnership you have with Toyota. Maybe you can kind of briefly just outline what this partnership's all about, what's the significance of automakers getting involved with the space, and maybe how Toyota can potentially help Joby scale its manufacturing footprint, maybe first in California, later in Ohio.
Yeah. Toyota was an early investor. They came in in our Series B, I believe it was, a while back before I was at Joby, actually, through one of their ventures, what's now Toyota Ventures and Toyota AI Ventures, I think it was at the time. They led our Series C in 2019, 2020, which was a pretty big round that we raised, kind of the last big private round that we raised before we did the public listing in 2021. They remain our largest outside investor and actually announced kind of a further investment about a little less than a year ago of an additional $500 million that they're putting in two tranches. We received that first tranche earlier this year and we're working toward kind of a milestone that will trigger the second tranche of $250 million subsequently.
Really taking a step back, though, Toyota has had an interest in flying mobility for a long time. The Toyota family has been very, very interested in this space, and they've made several different efforts along the way in the flying mobility space. Really, this is kind of just on path in some sense for the vision that they have of doing more than just ground mobility, but rather kind of a more all-encompassing type of mobility. It's really exciting to be able to work hand in hand with a group that has that long-term vision that is seeing kind of where things are going and working with us. That's kind of the strategic piece of it and why they're so invested and leaned in with us.
On a tactical front, they're working with us from a manufacturing standpoint on a daily basis. We have Toyota team members in our factories working with our leaders and our floor workers to look at things like optimizing process. They're the best in the world at Kaizen. It's how do you make everything better and carve time out, even at this stage when we're still building early copies of everything that we're building. Because we're building a lot of things, there's a lot of opportunities to do that.
That is the type of work that they do with us, where they are really kind of both directly kind of analyzing and helping and giving advice, but they are also coaching our leaders on how to think about this, how to think in the Toyota production system way, which is really the gold standard around the world as to how do you do this type of complex manufacturing that has to all come together and then continuously drive quality up and cost down.
You spoke to it a bit. One of the milestones unlocked the second tranche of the investment is including a strategic manufacturing alliance. I guess maybe taking one step further, what is the vision for a manufacturing alliance on top of the existing Kaizen and other work you've been doing thus far?
Yeah. The strategic alliance that we're working toward is really about taking the next step. We recently announced that we had increased our footprint in California, in Marina, to be able to capacitize up to 24 aircraft a year. That's a big step for us. We're making this steady progress toward increasing our capabilities and our capacity. Taking a step past that, taking a step to the type of scale that we believe is going to be necessary to feed this market as we're able to launch and start to provide services both in places here like New York City and other places around the world like Dubai and Japan, the places that we're working with partners to be able to launch this. We know we're going to need more capacity.
Working with Toyota on what kind of how can we work together in this kind of concept of a strategic alliance to take that next step and start to build at a higher scale, at higher rates. That is what that is all about. It is really exciting work that we are doing, and excited to be able to share more about it soon.
Joby recently announced plans to acquire Blade's passenger business for $125 million to help bolster its go-to-market strategy on the commercial side. Blade's company, we're familiar with. We call it, I think our term was exactly net positive for both companies. Something we thought was pretty interesting. Can you help understand why now, why Blade, and how having access to this know-how, infrastructure can help position Joby relative to peers in terms of entry to service or any other positive factors you may want to speak to?
Yeah, absolutely. Super excited about this announcement that we made last week that we're bringing in the Blade Passenger Business along with Rob Wiesenthal, who will remain kind of the CEO of that segment when it comes over to Joby when the deal closes. What Blade's done is they've built a great brand. They've built a great customer experience, and they've showed how to make this type of service work using existing machinery, existing equipment that's available right now. Because it's more than just about the technology. It's about the technology put into service and actually understanding all of those key learnings about how do you actually do customer service, how do you actually operate this type of a business, what are the gotchas.
That's what's incredibly exciting, to be able to essentially just jump-start that aspect of our business, have a running start at it when we're ready to launch. It really fits into this overall arc of commercial readiness that we're working toward, that we're getting all of these pieces put into place so that as we get to the finish line and certification and are ramping up our production kind of in parallel with that, we're going to be able to hit the ground running and start offering the services quickly and as kind of effectively as possible.
Maybe something near and dear to you. I mean, how would this Blade existing bookings and operational platforms and some of the backend and front of the nave developed, how's that expected or how would you think that would be integrated with Elevate OS, which is Joby's homegrown platform or maybe even your prior jobs?
Yeah, yeah. Certainly all kind of a continuum in some sense. Really what Blade's focused on as essentially the front end to this type of service, like the customer interaction piece of it, they've built out this layer of software that solves a lot of contingencies, contingency management, all of these types of things that kind of the real-world operation has to solve. We've really focused on the backend about kind of the operator side of this. What are the things that really make the Part 135, that operating certificate operate incredibly efficiently? We've done some work on that customer-facing side, but we're much earlier on that piece than Blade is, obviously having a real-life product in the market for multiple years now. I think it's really complementary in a lot of ways that we can bring these pieces together.
We've got tech teams already engaging and super excited about that and more to come there. I think that it's going to be a really nice pieces of the puzzle fitting together to accelerate our rollout.
Yeah. Just want to pause again and see if there's any questions before moving on. All right. After Blade, I just want to kind of maybe spend a little bit more time on your activities in Dubai. You talked about expected to fly passengers next year. First of all, how should we think about that timing? I think it's more like end of next year. Can you give us a sense of what this operation could look like and maybe subsequently what this can maybe make the U.S. operations look like soon after?
Yeah. We announced last year that we'll be the air taxi provider for Dubai when we launch. We are partnering with the Road Transport Authority there, which is the transportation regulator in the Emirate of Dubai. Dubai is, just for those that aren't familiar, I guess Dubai is part of the UAE, so the United Arab Emirates, which is kind of a confederation in some sense of these Emirates, a little bit different than a state in the U.S., but not quite a country. It is an interestingly different kind of polity in terms of how it works. A very strong regulator, though, the RTA, that has kind of authority over this space in the whole Emirate of Dubai. Dubai's become this incredible tourist destination, and they actually are investing a lot of money to drive that even harder.
The numbers, I don't remember the numbers, but in terms of the percent increases of folks that are coming into Dubai since like 2019 is quite amazing, actually. We see that there's both an incredible opportunity just from the standpoint of if you went to Dubai five, six years ago, the traffic wasn't that bad. If you go to Dubai now, traffic's terrible. You could see and feel it when you're there, the growth, the excitement, the opportunity in some sense for this type of mobility in that space. If you combine that with a government that wants to lean into new technology, that wants to be at the leading edge of this type of mobility across the board, honestly, not just with air taxis, but with a number of different technologies kind of running the gamut, that's really exciting.
What we did is kind of crafted this relationship with them where we'll provide air taxis and we're working with the national level regulators. This is a GCAA, kind of the FAA equivalent in the UAE, which has a purview over the Dubai portion as well, to take the work that we're doing with the FAA and accelerate the final stage, essentially, with extra resources that they're devoting to review test results, review the documentation, and get us to kind of think of it as like an early authorization to start flying with passengers there. They're really excited and really leaning in hard on that. That's kind of the opportunity space.
I guess where's the team in that process, the GCAA certification process? How many more flight campaigns or flight testing? What other verification needs to be done before passenger flights take place?
Yeah. We have a number of essentially a project plan laid out with them. We are working through these stages in terms of doing both all of the documentation and paperwork and the different meetings and interactions like that, as well as then these flight testing campaigns. More of that coming up, but everything is kind of proceeding apace, I would say, in terms of the plans that we have laid out.
You talked about the ability or the capacity to support 24 aircraft annually. How many incremental aircraft do you expect to be built and delivered for early Dubai operations next year?
I guess we're not revealing numbers at this point in terms of the number of aircraft that we'll be deploying there. You can imagine that it's at least one. We are going to provide enough aircraft to kind of provide a meaningful, a useful service. That's part of our discussions, and it'll kind of depend on some of these timelines and how everything comes together, but that's part of our capacity planning overall. Actually, coming back to your question, a couple of questions back that I didn't answer, actually, the number of aircraft toward the TIA flight testing that we're doing. We certainly are always evaluating what the possibilities are to accelerate builds. If we can add another aircraft into that flight testing campaign, it's going to meaningfully accelerate what we're able to do. That's something we take really seriously.
This is kind of a constant evaluation that we're doing. Because of the vertical integration, actually, we have in some sense more control to be able to do this and to react to realization like, oh, if we could add this or reorder these things and add this other capability in, we could actually overall speed up the schedule. We have teams that are constantly looking at that and trying to figure out how do we carve days, weeks, months out of our timelines to be able to move things along even faster.
That last point reminded me of something. Clearly, Joby is the most vertically integrated amongst especially the companies we've hosted here thus far, which I think maybe do spend more time on the batteries and modules and packs, but less so on the airframes and things like that, maybe a little bit more on propellers as well. You are clearly the most vertically integrated of these. Why is that an advantage other than speed to market? What other advantages would you think would be the case with your strategy?
Yeah. I see it as we're building kind of a full-stack aviation company. Maybe to use too much of a software analogy, but we have kind of this bottom layer of the stack, which is these component-level technologies that we are developing, both the capabilities on how do you rapidly design a composite structure, but then how do you certify it too. Building up both the design, build, test, and certify capabilities for all of the constituent pieces. Then we're building up the platform layer, so the vehicle platform itself, where we're taking all of those technologies, putting them together into this first product that we're certifying to bring to market. We're building the service kind of tech stack layer on top of that. That's the overall approach that we're taking to this problem.
Any of those layers, you can both add another technology in and then essentially combine them in different ways for different kind of variations of the product in the future. I think that the announcement that we made in terms of the work that we're doing with L3Harris Technologies is a good example of this.
I'll get to that.
Yeah. Fundamentally, because we control these pieces and we control the manufacturing and kind of the variations of things like even the composite structure, we can take one of the aircraft that we're building and adapt it pretty rapidly to add different capabilities initially as prototypes, but then as potentially kind of derivative product lines down the road. The vertical integration lets us do that, I think, a lot more easily than can be done in other contexts.
Let's spend more time on that. This was something exciting opportunity, frankly. This partnership with L3Harris to commercialize platforms for applications, I guess, can you speak more broadly on Joby's efforts to develop different variants of the aircraft? How does this fit in with the overall strategy? Maybe even on what are you going to be doing? What are they going to be doing, at least maybe starting off with?
Yeah. The announcement was that we're essentially exploring how do we take variants of the S4 platform and then work with L3 to integrate essentially their different products and payloads onto that as an offering essentially to DOD. We've been working with the DOD for quite a while. I think we were the first company really working in this space pretty closely with initially DIUx and the DIU and AFWERX and Agility Prime through these different programs of innovation that the Air Force and DOD have put forward. One of the things we learned, one of the points of these programs was for the DOD to learn about this technology, learn about what capabilities are, what the opportunities are in the space, and where they want to then further invest, forward invest into the future.
That's the reason we built the hydrogen version or the hydrogen variant, I guess, of the aircraft last year that we flew and did a 560-some-mile flight with it just to kind of show the capabilities of that. That was in partnership essentially with Agility Prime for doing that. That was basically a hybridized version. It was like a hybrid on hard mode, I call it, because we used cryogenically—it was a cryogenically fueled liquid hydrogen fuel cell variant that we'd actually put together in about six weeks, actually. We'd been doing powertrain work, but that was the aircraft that we flew here in New York City in the end of 2023. We flew it here. We brought it back to California.
It took about six weeks to take some stuff out on the inside, put a big hydrogen tank in it, and then went back up and flew it in this hybrid configuration for a really long flight. That, I think, helped to kind of shape some of the thinking, though, about what the capabilities are on kind of hybridized versions of these aircraft.
That's kind of the foundation of the thinking of this work with L3 , that we think that a hybridized version, so think of it as like a heavy fuel kind of turbohybrid as opposed to the more advanced but further out in, I think, technology readiness of the liquid hydrogen fuel version of our aircraft, is something that's pretty interesting, has capabilities that are pretty interesting to DOD, and has opportunities to integrate the kind of things that L3 builds and is really good at, and then leverage their connectivity to the customers to explore what the opportunities are there.
How should we think about the long-term opportunity for hybrid? If you want to say hydrogen too, that's probably even more long-term. You're doing the hybrid work, which is particularly useful for defense, but frankly, it's probably pretty useful for commercial as well. How should we think about the long-term opportunities as well as the fungibility between these programs?
Yeah. I think that that's another advantage of our vertical integration that we see an opportunity to take to initially demonstrate. I mean, we plan to fly a demonstrator of this shortly, I would say. I think we said in the fall that to kind of show what this type of kind of heavy fuel hybrid can do and what it looks like. We see an incredible opportunity there. Maybe the initial application is kind of more in a kind of UAS non-certified context, say, which I think is an opportunity to flex on, again, some of our component manufacturing and ability to kind of assemble something that can be applicable in a different space.
I think long-term, though, we always see this as kind of a dual use in a lot of ways where we're going to learn a whole bunch of things if we find the right opportunity and launch a product line along those lines with a partner like L3Harris . The learnings from that can then come back into the civil side. Certainly, that's part of our thinking about this, that because we control both kind of the component layer of the tech stack as well as the vehicle platform layer, we can plan and think about how these things interact back and forth to accelerate our future product development.
Yeah. Any questions before we're getting close to the end here? Just want to make sure if there's any questions we can get them addressed. Maybe real quickly, where does autonomous fit in in the overall strategy?
We think autonomy is incredibly important in the near-term in certain contexts and the long-term in other contexts. We bought a company called Xwing last year that's been working on autonomy for kind of conventional aircraft. One of the applications of this technology that they've developed we call Superpilot is in a Cessna Caravan. A lot of the work there was with DOD. There's a lot of interest in essentially being able to take autonomy, retrofit it into existing platforms like that, and then leverage them in other contexts, shall we say. There's a lot of ongoing work on some of the contracts that have come out of that context. That same core technology, that Superpilot technology, can be applied to kind of our S4.
If you think about this turbohybrid UAS version of it that we've talked about now or have kind of considered in this partnership with L3 , think of that Superpilot technology, kind of adding the turbohybrid and bringing that together. That is that potential platform for the DOD applications.
Great. As we wrap up, any sort of closing remarks, anything maybe we didn't discuss or things that are misunderstood or just sort of final thoughts for the audience?
I think that one of the really key things that I always like to emphasize is that the opportunity here is, we believe, is really quite large. It's really unlocked by a couple of different things. One of them is the overall kind of technology of electric vertical takeoff and landing that allows the overall operating cost to come down. We think that's really important, particularly in the longer arc of all this. I think an even more important piece of this technology is the noise, the acoustics.
I think that many people in New York understand this pretty clearly, that the opportunity to take this new technology and use it to build vehicles that are kind of dramatically different in sound profile is what really unlocks the addressable market, we believe, that essentially may have kind of a structural cap in some sense with traditional technology. That technology of altering that acoustic profile, of making these things so quiet that you can't hear them at all when they're flying over, that really unlocks things. That is why we made that a priority from the very beginning of the technology we've been developing. Our motors, our batteries, the powertrain, the whole aircraft is optimized around acoustics and being able to drive that acoustic signature as low as we can.
We think that's going to be really, really important as this market launches and then starts to grow.
Really appreciate you sharing your insights again and all the progress you guys have made. We look forward to seeing further progress in the future. Thanks for supporting the conference and good luck with your meetings today.
Awesome. Thanks so much, Bill.