Hi, it's Action. This week. As an extra, we're bringing you a fun episode from The Big Take about flying taxis. Yes they're real. There might even be a commercial one flying as soon as this year. If you're a new listener to Zero, I would also urge you to go back into the archives and listen to a show about flying taxis we did on Zero where I was super skeptical that it can be a climate solution. You can find the link in the show notes. Enjoy The Big Take.
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I'm about to step into a flying taxi.
And if that's not.
Radical enough for you, this one has no pilot.
That's Bloomberg reporter Colin Murphy. He's based in Beijing, and he volunteered to go on a test flight in a test model of a flying taxi in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
First, the fasten your okay, But I'm just gonna fasten the seat pots.
And in the air, please do not touch the door. Okay, I got it, thank you.
So I'm buckled in and we're just about to take off. I can't believe I'm doing this and that there's nobody flying this.
Column did not touch the door as instructed and tried to stay calm as the machine shot one hundred feet up into the.
Air out in the window.
The prototype vehicle column rode In was designed by China based e Hang Holdings, and it could become the world's first commercially operating flying taxi as soon as this year.
It's here, and it's now, and it's probably a lot earlier than people have any idea about it.
That's Angus Whitley, a Bloomberg Global business reporter based in Sydney. He says that right now, all over the world, transportation companies are racing to put driverless cars into the sky. Billions of dollars in investments and venture capital have fueled the technology up to this point, and companies like EHang have started to prove the concept. But now comes the hard part tackling the regulatory and logistical hurdles standing in
the way of making flying taxi fleets commercially viable. And it turns out where in the world these businesses are operating could play a critical role in who takes off first. Here's Colum again.
It's a mode of transport that has yet to take off, but by some estimates could be worth as much as one trillion dollars by twenty forty.
This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah holder Day on the show the Flying Taxi Companies that are determined to turn what was once a fantasy into our transportation reality, our own column. Murphy is officially one of the first people on Earth to try out a flying taxi. He agreed to get on a call with me and share what the experience was like.
It's got like this oval shaped cabin and with a lot of glass, which I imagine is to enhance or maximize the views that you can get once you're flying. So it's a bit like a chopper helicopter, but the scale is much much smaller. What's particularly unusual about it is that it has eight arms, and each arm has
two sets of rotators. So when you look at it from the ground and it's up in the air flying, it really filled me with a sense of an eerie feeling, if you will, because it just looks like an insect chopping its way through the sky. A fighter, yeah, exactly. But the benefacturers rely or stress that it's these eight arms and the sixteen rotators that are at the core of its safety, and it's sort of fail proof ability to fly and deal with any circumstance that comes its way.
I'd understand if this isn't what you pictured when we first said flying taxi. Angus Whitley, Bloomberg's global business reporter, had his own frames of reference.
My favorite flying cars are actually in the James Bond franchises, just because they.
Are so simple and so ludicrous.
Or first one probably in The Man with the Golden Gun in the seventies, and they just put wings on a normal car and it takes off.
It's as easy as that. It's as easy as that.
Yes, And I suppose the point when you look at these films is there be in a fiction of our imagination.
For decades and decades, they've been.
Held up as this sort of goal and fantasy, and if you think about it now, this reality has arrived, and in many senses it's totally different from all the sort of variance we've seen on the screen in the last few decades.
E Hang Holding's white hovering insect like contraption is one example of this new kind of aircraft. It's meant for short trips.
It's essentially a drone.
It's electric, it's battery powered, It recharges in a couple of hours, and it buzzes around. It's a short distance electric drone. Its range is pretty small. It's twenty miles. It can fly at less than one hundred miles an hour. But it's a short distance little thing. And it looks like a little car cockpit if you like. There's no seat for a pilot, but there's a flat screen in the front tells you all the critical information about the flight.
China's e Hang Holdings is just one of the companies piloting what they hope could become the uber of the future. There's something of a space strace underway among flying taxi makers, and each model has its own design and fuel.
This is just a burgeoning, emerging industry that has more than two dozen really serious EV tour makers. And we say ev TOLL that's it stands for electric vertical takeoff and landing.
Are we seeing traditional airplane makers and car makers try to invest in autonomous flying vehicles as well?
Of course, you have the old aviation of like the old Guard, and that's Boeing and Airbus. Boeing's fully owned business called whisk is making an electric aircraft that can carry four passengers with no pilot, and they're planning to launch that before the decade is out, before twenty thirty. Airbos also has its own variant, Embra, the Brazilian aircraft manufacturer. So you have this old guard and then you have this legion of upstarts like Jobie and Archer and e Haang.
They're really just charged as these special manufacturers. And then you have this huge range of established names from the car industry. So you have Hyundai, there's Stilantis, there's Toyota, there's even Tencent, China's Tencent like technology makers, so that they're drawing all this manufacturing know how, this technology know how car industry expertise along with this huge big stock of aviation expertise and likes of Boeing and Airbus, and it's not clear who the winners are going to be.
Winning in this context means getting this very new technology right, but it also means getting it to market and turning flying taxis into a viable business.
We've had one hundred years of air travel evolve, We've had the jet era, and now we're into this revere of urban air mobility or advanced air mobility. If you think about what's happened in the jet era, we boiled down to essentially Giopoli, didn't we We had Boeing and Airbus and now almost I think we'll get filtering out in the same way. We have dozens and dozens of players vying to enter this space, and it's not clear
that many of them will survive. And the prize if we can break through this frontier is by some estimates just enormous. And if you look at estimates by Morgan Stanley, for instance, this broad market for urban air mobility, which includes electric passenger aircraft flying taxis, some of them without a pilot with it's going to be worth one trillion dollars by twenty forty, So that's the estimated prize.
The prize is so huge in part because these pilotless aircrafts promise to solve a major urban problem.
There are some use cases if you like, that are often cited. The first one is that flying taxis are a sort of solution to chronic congestion that we're seeing around the world in huge, big metropolis is from Tokyo to New York to London to Southeastate.
Need to get to your board meeting downtown, but traffic is at a standstill. Flying taxi want to go to the football playoffs, but parking is a nightmare. Flying taxi need to catch your flight, but the highways shut down flying taxi.
Then there's the kind of intercity shuttle use case. And then there's that sort of tourism case which we're seeing emerging that we see e Haang try and capitalize on in China as a way of taking tourist rides, perhaps supplanting the sort of helicopter trips, making them more affordable, making them shorter, making them autonomous, And there are thousands of locations and Ehang's eyes that could support that user case.
These flying taxis are going to at some point going to have to integrate in the way that airlines travel around the world as well. So the idea is that perhaps these flying taxis could connect to larger airports and you might take a flying taxi from downtown Manhattan up to JFK or LaGuardia and jump on a plane, a conventional aircraft somewhere else.
So that's why a lot.
Of the orders for these electric taxis come from actual airlines themselves.
So flying taxis could be lean, green traffic avoiding machines. At least that's what these transportation companies hope. But there are a few big things standing in the way of liftoff, including economics, timing, and red tape. All that in a moment, flying taxis they're the hot new frontier in air transportation, and they're supposedly just around the corner. Bloomberg reporter Angus Whitley again.
We're really approaching the reality here. We're seeing EHang launching this year. We're going to see Jobian Archer launching next year.
For investors in the industry, this means payoff may finally be near after years of waiting, Flying taxi companies started to gain traction during a heady moment for the global economy. At the time. There were a lot of investors with a lot of money to throw around, and they were willing to invest it with companies that required a lot of upfront cash, even if they didn't have the most airtight business plan. Interest rates were near zero, unborrowing was
very cheap. These were the perfect conditions to build a business that was highly expensive and highly speculative, like flying taxis.
But the days of cheap money are over. We're seeing funding not drying up, but decreasing at.
Least with interest rates back up. Investors are getting more risk averse, and that poses a challenge for flying taxi companies who might have the technology down but will still need to navigate logistical hurdles like aviation regulation, certification, liability, and.
They're going to have to step up in terms of producing these things. So they're going to have to find a way of not just getting these things certified, but being produced at enough scale to make money.
So that this is a scale game.
You need to have these things produced at a level that we haven't really seen since the Second World War.
Archer, for instance, wants to.
Produce ultimately more aircraft a year than Boeing produced last year.
A scale game. Basically, flying taxi companies need to find a way to make enough of them to launch a viable business. The more taxis they make, the cheaper the cost for each new taxi. The cheaper the cost of each taxi, the less they need to charge customers per ride, and the less they charge per ride, the more people who are likely to actually try this out.
It's certainly a moment, and also I think in the next few years we're going to see who is emerging as winners and losers, and there will be people who lose a lot of money along the line.
For any of these companies to have any chance of success, Angus says, they'll need to win over regulators.
It is a global game.
For instance, if you're if you're a flying taxi manufacturer and you have signed off from the FAA, then you'll be able to access other markets around the world as well, and jurisdictions like Australia they take them nod from the FAA in terms of certification and approving flights. It's an important step to being certified and that will open doors into other markets and we'll see the likes of Jobie an Archer and e Hang enter other markets as well,
for example the Middle East and Europe. So it's not a single country game.
Getting those rubber stamps is not going to happen overnight, and that's part of the reason why years of investment haven't paid off just yet. It's worth pointing out though, that some regulatory environments will be easier to navigate than others. That's in part why Colums E. Hang Holding's test flight was possible and why the e Hang taxi business could take off in China sooner than competitors based elsewhere.
EHang already has a pilotless aircraft that can carry two passengers certified by the regulator, so they're pushing ahead towards commercial launch by the end of this year, and they would have bragging rights over potentially emerging as the first autonomous commercial flying taxi in the world. But it's interesting
how these things are being regulated. The China Civily Avisian regulator has cleared that it's partly because Chinese policy has identified these kind of areas as a policy lever to develop what they call a sort of low altitude economy.
Other regulators are taking a bit more time. I'm not suggesting that China's.
Regulators necessarily less onerous when it comes to certifying aircraft, but it's fair to say that power is more centralized in China, which allows sort of policy levers to be pulled at all levels to achieve a goal.
So if you look at e Hang's.
Aircraft, it has a certification from the regulator to fly and to go into mass production. And once you get those kind of badges. Then orders start coming in and right on queue. We've had local tourism entities order e hang aircraft in their hundreds.
So realistically, how soon could I hail a flying taxi?
I think this is the picture they would like you to see in your mind, walking out the door and hailing and flying taxi. In reality, that is some way off. I think that that is years away, but you could next year. You could potentially take a trip to your local vertaport as they call it, and take a flight to the airport, perhaps not the price of an uber, but you know, as a special treat.
Of course, one person's treat is another person's terror. And I wanted to know on which side of the spectrum column had landed. After his two minute test ride, it.
Feels very stable, very secure.
I think we're going back down now.
Seems that we're making many sense.
I actually did have another opportunity to take one, and that was they offered us three different slots, and I felt that after the first one, I had basically enjoyed the experience, had survived the experience, but I wasn't particularly keen or anxious to jump in and go up again.
To be honest, this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by Jessica Beck, Naomi and Adrianna Tapia. It was mixed by Rishi Bajako and fact checked by Eddie Dwan. It was edited by Stacy Vennick Smith and Rebecca Greenfield. Our senior producers are Kim Gitttleson and Naomi sha who also edited this episode. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Nicole Beemster Borer is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts.
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