8 Years After Uber Elevate’s White Paper: Gains and Losses of the UAM market
“Every day, millions of hours are wasted on the road worldwide,” embraces the company that made road travel inexpensive, efficient, and independent of costly personal assets. In 2016, Uber published a white paper entitled “Fast-Forwarding to a Future of On-Demand Urban Air Transportation.”
Back then, Uber started Elevate, a branch focused on VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) vehicles, or urban air mobility (UAM) aircraft. The subsidiary was later sold to Joby Aviation (2021) with all its developments.
Looking back after nearly eight years, many of the assertions in the pioneering UAM (Urban Air Mobility) essay clashed with the realm of the complexity of air transport. On the other hand, some steps (if not leaps) are obvious when we notice how thin the line between the imagined future and our present is.
What did the Uber Elevate white paper predict right, and what went in another direction? Let’s snatch a glance at it.
Fighting traffic jams
“Just as skyscrapers allowed cities to use limited land more efficiently, urban air transportation will use three-dimensional airspace to alleviate transportation congestion on the ground.”
Status: Yet not achieved.
The last eight years have shown that VTOL technology and UAM face many more obstacles than multi-story architecture back in the 1880s.
It was only on July 26, 2023, that the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) released the update to the air carrier definition that adds power-lift to the document, allowing commercial use of eVTOL aircraft. As of that date, none of the potential eVTOL aircraft models had reached a complete eVTOL certification.
As of today, Joby Aviation JAS4–1, Archer Aviation M001, and AgustaWestland 609 are the three competitors battling for the first certification of airworthiness.
The landscape is similar to Europe. In November 2023, EASA (the European Union Aviation Safety Agency) granted Design Organization Approval to Lilium N.V., the manufacturer of the eVTOL business aircraft.
Meanwhile, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) issued the type certificate to the EHang EH216, an uncrewed aerial vehicle and a competitive spin-off of the eVTOL.
Nevertheless, granting airworthiness to an aircraft does not guarantee it’ll be airborne. Infrastructure awaits a ballast of investments, while eVTOL uses existing heliports and helipads for test flights. Also in October 2023, the FAA approved the first public-use vertiport in the US, located in Blackstone, Virginia, on a dual-use military and civil airport field.
The other topic of major concern is the ATM (air traffic management) applied to UAM, which is still discussed as a concept rather than a ruleset. Urban airspace classification, standardization of clearance procedures, resource management for a raised load on air traffic controllers, and the switch from manned to unmanned flight are just a few layers to that discussion.
All this makes VTOL technology too advanced to rapidly become an in-demand reality.
According to the Center for Sustainable Systems of the University of Michigan’s “Personal Transportation Factsheet,” traffic congestion caused Americans to spend an extra 8.7 billion hours on roads and burn an additional 3.5 billion gallons of gas in 2019 alone. At the same time, micromobility (bikes, scooters) and shared transportation services have seen rapid growth, allowing 136 million trips by shared micromobility users in 2019, more than 6 times the number in 2015.
Just like robotics, the eVTOL industry is still in the phase where the benefits of alleviating private transport congestion are doubted by what can go wrong.
No pollution and less noise
“VTOL aircraft will make use of electric propulsion so they have zero operational emissions and will likely be quiet enough to operate in cities without disturbing the neighbors. At flying altitude, noise from advanced electric vehicles will be barely audible.”
Status: Achieved.
eVTOL has proven its efficiency, environmental sustainability, and noise reduction qualities that Uber has stated.
According to EASA, the noise limits for eVTOL aircraft are 106 EPNdb for takeoff, 104 EPNdb for overflight, and 109 EPNdb for approach. These figures are comparable to the ones issued for helicopters.
Nevertheless, according to Archer Aviation, their eVTOL flying at 2,000 ft produces 45 dBA, which is 33 dBA less than a helicopter, and 17 dBA less than a single car driving at 30 mph 50 feet away. In other words, eVTOL promises to be one of the quietest means of private transportation in a city landscape.
The microphone tests that NASA held on the S4 prototype for Joby Aviation confirmed these numbers. An S4 model produced about 45.2 dBA when listened to from the ground while traveling at an airspeed of 100 knots (115 mph / 185 kmh) and at an altitude of 1,640 ft (500 m).
Needless to say, 100% electric propulsion makes eVTOLs emission-less. And the concern of battery usage, capacity, recharge times, and cycles, seem to be solved. However, this does not mean that the electric propulsion system will not have to show itself in regular-load operations.
According to the University of California research (“eVTOL Fleet Selection Method for Vertiport Networks” by a group of authors led by Jasenka Rakas), most of the existing eVTOL models by 2021 achieve a range between 100 and 400 miles (160–643 km), which will allow either continuous flight in urban areas with overnight recharging, or potentially cross-country flying with multiple stops for “ground handling.” The range between recharges is comparable to the Tesla model line.
EVTOL transportation is cheaper for end-users than owning a car
“We also believe that in the long-term, VTOLs will be an affordable form of daily transportation for the masses, even less expensive than owning a car. Normally, people think of flying as an expensive and infrequent form of travel, but that is largely due to the low production volume manufacturing of today’s aircraft. Even though small aircraft and helicopters are of similar size, weight, and complexity to a car, they cost about 20 times more.”
Status: We are not there, though sources confirm the math.
If ignoring the psychological factor alone (up to 40% of the general population has shared a “self-identified fear of flying”, according to research), costs and economic models are still an arguable field for many OEMs. This doesn’t stop public announcements from being aligned with the formula Uber stated in 2016.
Boeing’s subsidiary for autonomous eVTOL Wisk is aiming at $3.00 per passenger mile with their 6th Generation model. Some operators, ex. Vertical Aerospace, try to push to $1 per passenger-mile cost.
Given that one of the benefits of UAM would be a straight-line route — in this, Uber was right — the landing fees at vertiports would still be affected by the land rent rates and available infrastructure. The landing fees are projected to reach 11 to 40 cents per passenger mile. Insurance is also not calculated in these projections.
Owning an eVTOL aircraft is another story. Germany’s Lilium Jet is projected to cost between $7–10 million, depending on the specifications. The Chinese two-passenger EH216-S is priced at $410,000, facetiously compared to the cost of a brand new Cessna 172 Skyhawk, a 4-seater.
Shared flight will reduce costs, but when?
According to Uber in 2016, the initial pricing of the VTOL market will go down because “the ridesharing model amortizes the vehicle cost efficiency over paid trips <…> [while] a positive feedback loop should ensure that ultimately reduces costs and thus prices for all users, i.e. as the total number of user increases, the utilization of the aircraft increases.”
While the economic logic is reasonable, the diversity of the current eVTOL top 10 market players proves that there is a chance for the technology to remain in the exclusive niche, becoming a form of business and private travel.
There is a strong reasoning behind being reliable on technology innovators in the business aviation segment.
Even if flying a straight line between vertiport A and vertiport B on a peak hour in downtown Manhattan will take you 10 minutes and only $40 for a trip, what are the odds you will not jump on a bicycle, until eVTOLs have proven to be a reliable, comfortable, and zero accident technology?
