Ep 148: JoeBen Bevirt, Founder & CEO of Joby Aviation — Flying Cars Have Arrived

0:00We are now in the next age of aviation, the electric age of aviation. You now have your first FAA-confirming aircraft in flight. It's a game changer. We've agreed with the FAA on every detail of the design, not just testing. We can buy a ride. Exactly. What's the timing on this? As soon as the end of this year. What do you need for it to land? Texas is one of the places that's super flexible. All you need is the permission of the landowner. How fast are you letting them fly right now? Up to 200 miles an hour. I love it. I think it's really important to talk about what a game changer AI is. You take one of the greatest aerodynamic minds on the planet and you enable him with something that makes him 10x as productive.

0:35The benefits compound in a crazy way. This is the most profound technology, I think, in the history of humanity.

0:51Joe Ben from Joby Aviation is building the next great American aviation company. Last time he was on the show a year ago, we were talking about the vision. Now we're talking about the execution. We just saw it fly past the Golden Gate Bridge. A government program put forward by the current administration means that we're going to see his planes flying across the country. These are electric vertical takeoff and landing machines. They're 100 times quieter than a helicopter. They're much cheaper and much safer. Eventually, we're going to have probably millions of things like this all around the country, getting people around everywhere from rural to the city to skip your commute, to get to the airport.

1:23He has new technologies. he's working on. He can make aviation 10 times cheaper. He's already proving out new hydrogen technologies that mean you can fly much farther with these at much lower costs. It sounds like I'm going to be flying one in Texas within the next year. When are you going to be on one? Let's hear from Joe Ben. Welcome to the American Optimist. Really excited to have Joe Ben back with us, the founder and CEO of Joby Aviation. Thanks for joining. Thank you so much for inviting me and wonderful to be with you. You know, it's great to have you back on the show. Last summer, we talked about your vision and the conviction behind Joby.

1:53Now we're talking about execution. I'm impatient. I want a flying car to take me places around, especially around Texas. I think they'll be there first. Texas is going to be amazing. I think Texas will be first. I think California will eventually catch up. You did just fly it around the Golden Gate Bridge, I think, just recently. Catch us up to speed. What's happened over the past year? It's been an incredible year across so many different dimensions of the business. As you hit on, the name of the game is really ramping manufacturing. We've made capital investments to ramp from one to two aircraft a month and now two to four aircraft a month.

2:21And we're so excited about what this new technology is going to bring. As you mentioned, we flew in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. We acquired Blade's passenger business. So it's the helicopter service that operates in New York and really does a great job of previewing the future that we're bringing. We're so excited to be celebrating the nation's 250th anniversary and to be doing an electric skies tour where we extend what we did here in San Francisco to communities across the country. Can't wait to come to Texas. So remind us for the audience here, like you bought the helicopter company, you're going to replace it eventually with all jobies.

2:56Like why, why do that? Why are these better? How do they compare it to helicopters? Who can use them? At the core, this is an electric aircraft that can take off and land like a helicopter, but it has a wing. And so it can transition and fly on that wing that makes it more efficient. And it makes it quieter. The acoustics are critical to what we're trying to build. We want a vertical takeoff landing aircraft that you can land as close to the communities that you're looking to serve. And so that's one of the reasons why states like Texas are such a game changer and we can't wait to bring the service there.

3:30And we say it's like about 100 times quieter. Is that approximately how you measure it? That's right. And how much cheaper is it than a helicopter? Like at scale, what should these cost? So with electric propulsion, you remove the cost of the fuel, and then you dramatically reduce the maintenance. You've seen this play out in electric cars where the maintenance profile of an electric car is dramatically different than a combustion car. And so you couple those two pieces together, and you layer redundancy across every single system on the aircraft. Instead of a helicopter with hundreds of single points of failure on the rotor and the tail rotor.

4:06Yes, terrifying on those things. You see a family near the Statue of Liberty, the thing comes off and there's no backup. And we have six propulsion stations and each of those propulsion stations is driven by two separate motors, two separate battery packs. So it's layer on layer of redundancy across all the systems in the aircraft. So one of the rotors could fail, two of the rotors could fail, a battery could fail, like God forbid, and it'd still be okay. Exactly. So safer, cheaper. We're going to need more than four a month. I mean, I assume we're going to need like a thousand a month at some point.

4:35I guess that would require a lot of people actually ask me if I don't know what's supposed to ask. It's about like the capital needed. Like, how do we think about this? It's just once it starts working, it's just going to be worth a lot more and you raise more capital. How do you think about that? So we've been very fortunate to have incredible manufacturing partners and we're really excited. Toyota's a really big partner on this. Yeah. Toyota's one of our most significant investors. And we chose Toyota early on. One, because the Toyota family has dreamt about building aircraft for daily transportation dating all the way back to the 1930s.

5:08Wow. Two, Toyota is known around the world for the quality and the reliability with which they build. I guess the way manufacturing works is that once you can do four a month, then it's like much, much cheaper to do eight a month and 16 a month. Like these things tend to scale and get a lot cheaper as you go. Yeah, we want to double and double and double and double. And pretty soon you get to some big numbers. How many do you need? Like, let's just say like in Austin, Texas, we're going to roll it out. And I'm, you know, a lot of people I know would probably want to fly over the traffic. And it's probably useful for the hospital and to have more.

5:39It's probably useful. There's rivers you can instead of having to drive all the way, the bridge, you just hop it over the river. like how many does an area like that eventually use it'd be hundreds i'd imagine and thousands and so i think this is one of the areas where the autonomy systems we're building we have we have a software stack called superpilot and as you want to scale from hundreds in a community to thousands and then tens of thousands you really want to do that with with autonomy i think this is another area where the administration and the FAA, the DOT are really leaning in to look at how do we make our airspace safer and how do we increase the capacity of it?

6:20The Secretary of Transportation has just been an absolutely incredible proponent on this and is making the right investments to scale to this next stage of transportation. So let's talk about that. You now have your first faa confirming aircraft in flight which means you actually have something flying that's confirming with them you're making one that the pods are actually going to fly on i think that's the way this works right you have to get their pilots to fly your thing hopefully in the next year exactly so it's a game changer this is a moment we've been working uh for more than a decade to get to the point where we have designs where we've agreed with the fa on every detail of the design the fa A designated engineering representatives have signed off on each of those drawings before we start making them.

7:07And then a designated airworthiness representative, DAR, signs off as those parts are getting manufactured. Then the full aircraft comes together and we now begin flying it. First step is Joby pilots fly that aircraft. In parallel, we have our testing teams. We built a very vertically integrated company and we have incredible testing teams. We're testing all the components and systems on the ground. When that testing is complete, and the Joby pilots have completed their testing, then the FAA pilots get on board and begin doing for credit flight testing, which is the last step before type certification.

7:41Amazing. And so you're very happy with a lot of the way the regulation in the industry is being pushed forward by this administration. I guess the White House is pushing forward something called the eVTOL integration pilot program is the EIPP. Tell us about that. It massively accelerates this new industry. And so we have a whole bunch of companies here in the US who are leading the world from a technology standpoint. And it is crucial that we're accelerating on a regulatory standpoint as well. And so we're very, very grateful for the lean in from the administration, from the DOT and from the FAA.

8:17They put this through in record time. And recently, they announced the winners. So basically what happened was that dozens of states and collections of states applied for this program and said, we want to be some of the first communities in the country to begin using this next generation of technology. The winners of that were announced. There were seven consortiums that were selected as winners. Joby was part of five of those. And so there's going to be 12 states across the country where we're going to be able to test these next generation technologies, both on our air taxi, on super pilot and on our advanced propulsion systems.

9:04And does that mean you'll literally be flying these new Joby things along with the FAA pilots on them? You'll be flying them with your pilots in these states, testing them? Not just testing, but also. We can buy a ride. Exactly. What's the timing on this? As soon as the end of this year. Amazing. So in 2027, you're telling me, I'm going to look at, there's a list of states I have here. I don't have all dozen of them, but Texas is one of the ones on this. Arizona, Florida, Idaho, New Jersey, New York, surprisingly. I wouldn't think of them as a forward-thinking state. North, you know, Oklahoma, Utah.

9:36It's pretty cool. So people in those states are going to be able to actually pay to use Joby, maybe to go to the airport? We're going to be rolling it out both for passenger transport, but also we'll be testing the connectivity between rural and urban and using this for emergency purposes, for things like wildfire detection, for a whole breadth of different use. So rural, you'd maybe go to your ranch with this thing? Wouldn't that be awesome? What do you need for it to land? Like how much space do you need to clear? Just like a helicopter pad type equivalent? You need to have a pad going to be a big clear dirt thing.

10:14Like what's going to be the rule? Yeah, it's super flexible. And one of the incredible things like as I talked about with Texas, Texas is one of the places that's super flexible. All you need is the permission of the landowner. Really? I mean, I assume some HOAs are going to ban it, but as long as you're not in an HOA that bans it, you could theoretically land in your backyard. But this is where the acoustics are so vitally important. Yeah, a lot of them will maybe change their mind when they hear how quiet it is. Exactly. You know, what we're seeing is lots of developers are seeing this as an asset, where if they have a VertiPort in their neighborhood, the houses that they're building or the commercial property they're building is going to be more valuable because it connects into this new network.

10:59My friends, actually, we have developments I've introduced to you guys. I want to push you on this. We're going to do it on the air. Like, like if you wanted to like, as a developer or even as a homeowner, set up a place where these things can land, I guess there's not much you need to do. You just, you just need to have a big enough, safe enough landing pad. And then eventually you guys will be allowed. You think you're going to put out some guidelines or something for people? Again, it's, it's quite straightforward. We have a whole infrastructure team. We would love to engage with all the developers out there.

11:27We want to, the faster we can propagate the takeoff landing locations, the faster we can ramp manufacturing. And tell me about the charging, because you're going to want to, you don't need a charger at every location. Obviously, this thing has enough charge to go a bunch around the city and then go charge with plenty left over. But then you are going to want to have some places with chargers spread around the city. If someone wants to build a charger on Atlanta, can they do that? Or are you going to want to do them all yourself? How are you thinking about this? Absolutely. So we open sourced our charging standard and so anybody can build a charger in addition um uh we're we're deploying our chargers uh to uh all the locations where people want to build them and imagine you know just want like a random person doing a charger you don't know because maybe they can charge one of your things wrong or something and cause a problem i i they're the chargers are really well designed and uh so it's they're quite yours are yours are safe but like what what if like some random guy does it wrong.

12:20You probably have to have certified or something. We'll figure it out. We will cross that bridge. We got to figure this out. I want to put these in. No, I know. It's great. I know. We could put chargers in for you. I love it. I love it. We got to get a little click on the website to click so we could do it. So this Vertiport, it's a Vertiport network, basically, is going to start going everywhere. And this is a natural network effect, sort of, right? Because once you get enough of these places, then it's just more and more people are going to want to use it. Exactly. And that's what's so powerful about aviation is the N plus one.

12:49Every time you build an additional node on the network, it increases the value of the network exponentially. In Austin, we have all these places like east towards Bastrop where Elon's built all this stuff. And we have campus there for you ATX. And for me, that's quite a long drive from the west. I'm very excited to get these things going. Let's do it. All right. All right. Maybe we do one of the early Austin flights. We got it. We have to agree on this. Let's talk a little bit about AI and autonomy. So you're saying like at scale, if you have thousands or tens of thousands of these, at some point, enough pilots would become a blocker and you're going to want to like legalize autonomy.

13:20That's probably not a focus, I assume the next couple of years, but, but how are you thinking about AI in general in your operations? And, and, you know, how, how does, how does it scale? Yeah. So let's, let's take the autonomous aircraft and the autonomy systems. That is a absolute game changer. Whether that's on the safety side, whether that's on the productivity and efficiency side. Really, really excited. And again, the work that's happening on airspace from the administration, from the DOT, and from the FAA is absolutely phenomenal. That's laying the foundation for a really, really exciting new feature.

13:59With the EIPP, you're going to see a lot of that start getting tested. So they're going to start testing autonomy in addition to the pilots for certain of these use cases. That's why having all those 12 states is absolutely fantastic. So we're going to see this is fast forwarding this really fantastic future all across the country. So that's on autonomy. And in fact, over the last two days, I was at NVIDIA's GTC conference. NVIDIA is an incredible partner. They've put, invested vast sums of both people hours into building this really safe autonomy stack. They're using that for autonomous driving, using that for robotics.

14:44And we're able to layer on top of that for all the work we're doing for autonomous aircraft. So this is really fantastic, incredible partner, very grateful for all the work. And I mean, and then they've been working on this for, for more than a decade. So, and you think they're actually in a therefore being Nvidia chips potentially in the, in the Joby aviation. Oh, absolutely. We've been, we've been partnered with them for many years and we're using the, the latest generation of, of their autonomous chip sets. Very cool. So each, each of these things will have these chip sets. And I guess you want that for safety anyway, if your pilot somehow has a problem, you're going to want the autonomy backup either, even if you didn't have a pilot, I assume.

15:26The perfect initial use case. Yeah. And then eventually it's like, maybe you don't actually need the pilot right now by law, you do, we got to go figure that out. I guess you're going to have to train a bunch of pilots to start though. And I guess maybe there's some things you're going to want to hopefully have a bunch of pilots for. So, so, so how does that work? And is this awkward? Like we're going to have autonomy, but also please come learn to be a pilot for us for thousands of pilots. How are you thinking about that? There, there is an insatiable demand for pilots across the aviation ecosystem today.

15:54Just everywhere. And so we have built something called the Joby Academy, where we are training pilots. We've taken delivery of our first simulator, which we developed in partnership with CAE. CAE is the leader in flight simulators. This is an incredible experience where you get in and it feels like you're flying. You're in a cockpit that has exactly the same avionics. Oh, wow. So you actually feel like you're sitting in Adobe. Absolutely. And you've got the displays. And it looks just like a flight simulator that you'd learn to fly a Boeing or Airbus aircraft in. So these are the same pedigree of simulators.

16:42Did you practice crashing it and see what happens? Not allowed. Not allowed. Not allowed. Flight controls. This is what I always did as a kid on these simulators. Is that weird? No. One of the really cool things about our aircraft is because of Flybar, you can take your hands off the controls and the aircraft maintains the attitude. You can get into the simulator and you can fly the aircraft flawlessly the first flight. Hundreds of people or thousands of people have done it now. So it's pretty easy to do. It's super easy to fly. So if people are interested in learning to fly, they should go to jobeyacademy.com.

17:21We would love to have them. This is going to be a fantastic opportunity to get to be part of this next stage of aviation. And these things can go like, how fast are you letting them fly right now? Up to 200 miles an hour. Really, it's got to be up to 200 miles an hour. I love it. That's pretty fast. It is. And it's point to point, right? No, of course. You're not going over the road system. You're going directly as a crow flies, as they say. It's, you know, being able to take a trip that, you know, takes you half an hour, an hour on the ground and turn into a five or 10 minute trip. You know, sometimes you're replacing a two hour trip because you've got traffic.

17:59Of course. So you can fly over, you see the traffic jam, you get a little shot and Freud, right? And just go right by it. It's pretty awesome. So, I mean, if you were to train yourself, like, could you actually then just like fly yourself, I guess, places or how would that work? I mean, you know, because that's what I'm getting excited about. I, you know, I came over from, from Santa Cruz and if I, if I could have been here in 10 minutes. What is it? The 237? Is it there? So what is it? 60, 80? What's that road there? I forget. 17. 17. That's right. It's been a while. So I'm in Texas. I'm in Texas now.

18:27So, so yeah, the 17 is probably a lot faster just to hop over the hill. It's a pretty hill. 10, 10, 10 minute trip. There's probably plenty of room by my pool. Exactly. Next time we have to do one of these episodes where we get you landing somehow. I don't know. the Woodside might not allow it. They're like, it's like, it's like always like the last places to allow things. It's like these little communist, like strongholds of California. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. Well, we can hope. My bias was always that even though it's really quiet, you could still sort of hear it if you're a neighbor.

18:55So if you'd have like a tall building, you couldn't hear it on top of a tall building. Shouldn't we just build one tall building per nice neighborhood and just landed there? Wouldn't that make sense? Landing on rooftops is a fantastic opportunity. Especially if it's high, you can have like one building where you have like housing for all the staff in the neighborhood for a nice neighborhood and then they can land on the top of the top buildings got nice views exactly some people pay premium prices for exactly houses that's true in woodside you have a woodside penthouse that's you never know you know there's a few other exciting developments i want to ask about i think like it leaked there's like hybrid aircraft for defense purposes you guys announced the fact that it's hybrid aircraft something about hydrogen is leaking out in public that it's like what can you tell us so uh the work that we've we've been doing on both the hybrid aircraft.

19:40We flew a hydrogen electric version of our VTOL aircraft, more than 500 miles. And, and then, you know, we have some really excited, exciting advanced research programs that have incredible applications for both commercial and defense applications. And, and we think that that hydrogen is a game changer across the aviation ecosystem. it's three times the specific energy of jet fuel and with fuel cells we can convert that into propulsion twice as efficiently this is fuel cells it's not hindenburg hydrogen correct it's liquid hydrogen it's liquid so it's not not as explosive it's cryogenic it's you keep it really cold yeah so if like you're bringing out of power then it'd be bad well no so it's it's in a it's in a door you can think about this like you know what's what's on starship got it got it and and so it's there there's there haven't really been major accidents with this is a safe, this is a very safe technology.

20:36Yeah. It's been deployed across lots of applications for ground transportation and sea transportation. We have matured that technology and we're using it for aviation. Aviation is the best use because hydrogen is so light. So hydrocarbons are like change of carbon and hydrogen on them. And they're pretty efficient and pretty, pretty light for the power they have. Like how much more efficient per weight is your hydrogen fuel cells than, than, than fuel? three times lighter uh the hydrogen is three times lighter than jet fuel yep and then we can convert it into propulsion twice as efficiently so you get a 6x game 6x and so if you want to build an aircraft that flies long distances that's obvious that seems like a long period of time seems like a much better deal it's why aren't others doing this already uh we've cracked the secret sauce of it we've been leaned into this for a number of years so you're a scientist in the background on the on the hydrogen as well as on jovi itself well i mean this is this is one of the pillars of the incredible future that we're building.

21:34And this is a game changer on both the commercial applications and for the Department of War. And so tell us a little bit more about this. We've been hearing rumors leaking out of the Pentagon. People are very excited. Like, why is the Department of War potentially excited about this? Why would they be engaging with you? If you can build aircraft that are a dramatically lower cost to make and to operate and that have unprecedented performance, that's really, really important. So what would this potentially compete with that they're using right now? How would someone think about that? Is this like instead of a Black Hawk helicopter, like those are very popular?

22:12Is this like what kind of missions? Just I know you can't tell us everything, but like, how do you think about this? Just from a high level? I think that over time, hydrogen propulsion will redefine every class of aircraft that's flown today, both on, uh, you know, on the commercial side and, uh, and for defense applications. First jet aircraft as well, because it makes more sense. Because it's so much higher specific power, specific energy, um, and specific power. When you're talking right now, I think a lot of people are picturing a Joby that has a fuel cell attached to it, but you're actually talking also about other types of aircraft that are potentially even longer distance.

22:48What we built is, is what I believe to be the world's most vertically integrated aviation company. So this is from design to testing, to manufacturing, to operations across the full stack and also the full width. So we're building everything from the autonomy computers to the battery systems, to the motors, to the airframe, the propellers, the propulsion systems, like everything on the aircraft or the vast, you know, more than 90 % of the components on the aircraft are designed and manufactured in house. But this is not just like an EV tall craft necessarily. It could also be some other kind of airplane that they can go really far with hydrogen.

23:33Exactly. But we're not announcing that yet. We're just teasing people. You had also brought up earlier AI and we touched on the autonomy piece of it, but I think it's really important to talk about what a game changer AI is. And, you know, This is the most profound technology, I think, in the history of humanity. Does it make you go faster in everything you do? Absolutely. Tell us, what does that look like internally? Like, is there something that would take you a few weeks that you get back in a day now? Or explain, like, what does it mean faster? Our chief air dynamist was absolutely giddy. I was talking to him just a few hours ago.

24:13And he's like, he can't sleep because of how excited he is about how performant these new models are. Where there have been project after project after project that he, even though he runs a huge team, that he hasn't had resources to go and conquer those projects for years. So he's got this whole stack of ideas and opportunities. he's he's now able to build uh in uh an afternoon what would have previously taken him weeks or months um he's like i'm 10x 10x as productive as i was just a few months ago and so that kind of breakthrough when you take one of the greatest minds aerodynamic minds on the planet and you enable him with something that makes him 10x as productive, the benefits compound in a crazy way.