The Alef Model A and the future of flying cars with Alef CEO Jim Dukhovny | E1929

0:00If you tell me today to put in our car, which we have today physically, a human and fly the human autonomously somewhere, we can already do it. The technology is completely there. We have all the software, we have all the hardware, we have all the hardware, we have all the hardware, we have all the hardware, we have all the hardware, we have all the hardware. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock to report fast. Twist listeners can get$1 ,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. LinkedIn ads To redeem a$100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to linkedin.com slash thisweekinstartups.

0:58And Zendesk. The best customer experiences are built with Zendesk. Qualifying startups can join their startup program and get Zendesk products free for six months. Visit Zendesk.com slash startups today to get started. All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. We've been tracking VTOLs, vertical takeoff and landing vehicles for some time on this program. You probably are well aware of Joby and seen some of these vehicles that are currently in testing and that people believe we might actually be able to take a ride in sometime in the next couple of years. But it's been a couple of years for a couple of decades.

1:43Now, another category is flying cars. You may have seen in popular science, you can look them up, all kinds of fantastical moments in time where people dreamed that you could drive a car down a road. And then when you get stuck in traffic, magically, just float above the traffic. Most of these vehicles had retractable wings. So in practicality, you weren't going to actually be able to drive down the freeway, get in traffic, and then just vertically take off. You would drive the car to maybe an airstrip and then pull out the wings. So they weren't truly flying cars. When I saw today's startup, I said, huh, we're getting closer.

2:25and i started double clicking on the technology and i was uh pretty impressed so jim ducovny is with us today he's from aleph aleph is the first letter of many alphabets like version arabic hebrew syrian many many alphabets that's actually first letter of the alphabet aleph got it um spelled a a l e f so you heard my little intro there are v tolls in the world like Joby. Those are super impressive. And Larry Page invested in a bunch of companies like Kitty Hawk, etc. And people have really been pursuing this concept of, you know, vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. And they're taking a little while, but they're pretty stable.

3:10And they're getting close from my understanding. I know some of the investors actually, and Joby and some of the other ones. So you have a slightly different profile, and a slightly different technology, maybe you could explain to us how what you're doing is so radically different than say, Joby. I would say it's a little bit the other way around. So we had a concept of flying cars, as you correctly mentioned, for 100 years, right? Henry Ford attempted it. Many people attempted throughout the history. Then Evitols came out, Evitols electrical vertical took off and landing electric helicopters, they came out because people could not do the flying cars.

3:51So there's a reason we didn't have flying cars. The laws of physics actually tells you you cannot have it. You need big wings. You need the correct shape for the flying. The car is actually the opposite shape of a good stable aeronautic shape. So from the laws of physics, actually flying cars are pretty crazy and almost impossible. So people created eVTOLs. eVTOLs were called flying taxis, right? We did have flying taxis in 70s and 80s, actually, here in Silicon Valley. So this is not something new. They were helicopters. They were not electric. They didn't have that new technology which eVTOLs have, but it's not a new concept.

4:37again all of this happened because we could not come up with something which was on everybody's mind which is a flying car right which is a physical car with a vertical takeoff now here is the kind of fundamental i wouldn't say problem i don't want to use the word problem because i'm incredibly impressed by what tivitol is um incredibly impressed with joe b archer and everybody else uh what they're paving for the electric aviation or the short range aviation which did not exist before. So all of it is absolutely incredibly impressive. There are several kind of like fundamental issues with this.

5:13So number one is infrastructure. In order for that to scale, you need a huge number of heliports or whatever you want to call them. You need that infrastructure. Otherwise, your typical commute from point A, which is your house or your apartment, to point B, which is your work, actually will be longer using eVTOL than today's traditional cars, which are stuck in traffic. And the reason for it is because, A, you need to get from point A to the helipot, from helipot to helipot, from helipot to the point B. So that actually doesn't solve your commute problem. It solves short-range aviation problem or for some mileage, it actually makes sense, right?

5:56Not for the general commute. So that's problem number one. Again, like I said, scaling that, if you want to get anywhere close to the number of cars in any kind of city, we'll need to wait for about 100 years to make all these helipods to be built. Another problem is fundamentally expensive. Why it's a fundamental problem is because, think about the helipod, right? They have to be built in a city. That helipod has to pay the property tax. That helipad has to have some kind of a maintenance on it. Some people looking after it. It consumes energy, some kind of energy and so on. All of this cost will be passed to the consumer.

6:40So there are issues. Also, there is safety issues. So think about open propeller airplane slash helicopter flying inside the cities. And if anything, let's say that helipad is busy. let's say like calipot can handle like three or six um vehicles at the same time let's say it's busy and it has an um electric charge it has to land someone at that point is going to kill people on the ground so there are issues with this solution there is there's a good reason people wanted a flying car and again it's not saying we're better than anybody or definitely of course It's not. It's well known that these are larger than a normal car.

7:25They have huge batteries. They're designed to go 45 minutes, typically. And they need to have a range of typically 50 % further because of FAA regulations than their intended trip. So if it's a 20-minute trip, they really need to tell the FAA, hey, we've got like 40 minutes. I think it's maybe double as the rule. So there's a lot of rules that are emerging. And you're correct. They need to land somewhere. They need to take off from somewhere. And you're right. A to B is A to B, not A to B to C to D, which is what you would do. I mean, they seem incredibly convenient for going from JFK Airport into Manhattan because that's an hour-long drive or an hour and a half if it's like a crazy traffic day in Manhattan.

8:08And yeah, you can reasonably get from either the heliports to somewhere, but you do have to go find it. Now with your technology, you would park it in your driveway. And at some point, you would lift off and fly somewhere and then land in a parking lot, etc. So listen, a strong sales team can make all the difference for a B2B startup. But if you're going to hire sharks, you need to let them hunt and you can't slow them down with compliance hurdles like SOC 2. What is SOC 2? Well, any company that stores customer data in the cloud needs to be SOC 2 compliant. If you don't have your SOC 2 tight, your sales team can't close major deals.

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9:20And then I've got questions about physics. Because you did bring up, you know, hey, do these things actually, can this actually work, I guess is the question. So let's take a look at this. All right. So now we're watching this. It's showing what looks like a really slick car with webbing, I guess, on the top or a grid that allows air to flow through. This is all carbon fiber. So tell us, how does this work? Where are the propellers? Right. So number one, and the biggest questions probably is, you're looking at CGI. You're not looking at the real thing. There are real things in our press kit so you may show it like a little bit later mostly we are preparing so the shape which you're seeing right now was like redesigned um about a year and a half ago we've been in business for about eight years um it didn't look like a sports car it looked like a prototype like a normal prototype full-size prototype which were flying and everything um sometimes ago we asked one of the famous uh car designers hirash rozagi from sweden to actually design it to look like a car right to look like a sports car to look better um the exterior just designing exterior um and as you were describing in jason you actually correctly tried to describe it yes it actually looks like a sports car because hirash was the person who designed bugatti he designed lotus he worked on some famous cars um this is why he did the shape now what you're looking at um so first of all as you correctly point out there's no wings and we'll get to that in a second there are different modes of uh driving and flying so let's let's let's talk about this number one you have a car shape right now take the engine which used to be in the front take everything which is used to be a trunk and take it completely out yep no engine no trunk correct so you still need to drive and you still need some luggage case so where you would put it you put we put four smaller motors in each wheel.

11:22Again, it's nothing new. There are a number of cars today which actually uses the same technology, which makes it lighter and which makes it has like also differential drive. But now you have the space up front in the back. You need the space in order to put their propulsion. It's called the DEP, distributed electric propulsion, eight independent motor speed controller, propeller, battery systems. And the reason I'm saying they're independent, it's actually important because that gives you a differential thrust b it gives you a huge redundancy the second thing we did is we opened the top what we created what is called mesh important thing about mesh on one hand it provides the structure on the other hand it allows the airflow through i mean you need airflow for the lift that's what gives you the airflow right so this is the mesh now you're still faced with the most important question is like when you're looking at this, you're seeing the car shape.

12:17Car shape is probably one of the worst shapes for flying because it's actually shaped to push you down the airflow, not to push you up. Moreover, you need wings. And as you correctly pointed out, there were Terra Fuji, Air Mobile, there were many companies with expendable wings. The problem with expendable wings is you're adding weight. Not only it's funky looking, this is fine because you can hide it. For example, X-Pen is hiding it right now. But you now don't have enough power to lift vertically i mean you can actually lift vertical let me rephrase it but your um range of flying maybe 30 seconds to two minutes because you spend because you're too heavy now you have like all this expendable wings you spend all your power for the vertical takeoff so you don't have enough power to fly forward so we needed to solve the problem and that's why i'm saying we were facing the laws of physics of wings which weigh zero pounds zero extra pounds which is as you understand is impossible from the laws of physics so uh my co-founders actually i'm not a technical co-founder my co-founders constantine olig and pavel did something so simple that uh actually all the great minds 400 years did not think about it because it is super simple they just took the car as it is and they just turned it 90 degrees that's all it was so it's like the car is you know flying as if it was flipped on its side correct when you do that the size of the car become way so if you look at it from the top as you look in here again this is cgi that's not the real thing it's actually the airfoil is a correct airfoil so when you fly like this it becomes a regular biplane it's just a regular biplane there's nothing new about it so if you think about the whole thing together at any given point of time there's nothing new which we invented we just put whole bunch whole many things which existed in the world together you drive the takeoff the transition the biplane all of it is existing technologies put together now when you fly a biplane and i'm no expert here uh we understand has two wings the engines but it also has a tail and a rudder and it has the point of the engine and the point so how much of that is necessary also to have stability in flight because this when it flips on its side it looks like science fiction and it doesn't seem to me like that would be super stable but you tell me i know you've lifted these cars straight up have you been able to tilt them sideways and fly them in that direction yeah for For many years.

14:57Yes. Full size for many years we have been flying it. Again, there's a reason we're not showing. The reason we're not showing is because the previous one doesn't look like a sports car. And apparently right now, you know, like we are all over the news. For people in 2024, it's important how things look like, not only how they function. So even though we can show the functionality, it's actually important to look. So we're changing the look. We actually have this right now. It has like drive and vertical takeoff. The previous version did everything for several years. Now, when we do that... So you have a version of this that you've actually flown that just looks different than this really slick-looking one.

15:37And have you flown it with a person in it? Or is it like a smaller-scale model? It's not smaller-scale model. It's a full-scale model. It's actually the same scale. It's the same airfoil. So it's exactly the same. It's just it doesn't have all those slick lines and all of the things which Hirachi redesigned. So now let me address the stability because it's an important question which you said. So it is actually pretty stable. It is pretty stable. So first of all, because there's a differential thrust, there are elements there. There are many control surfaces. Obviously, what makes it possible, and that's actually the difference between us and, for example, Henry Ford, is software.

16:18What makes it possible is not hardware, it's software. It's that software. It's millisecond reactions. It's controlling all the surfaces. All this transition. All this transition is incredibly complicated functionality, right? When you do the transition, it's incredibly functional. A lot of things have to work in unison. A lot of things have to work perfectly together to make that transition work. And that's software which does it. No human will ever be able to do that perfectly. Yeah, we know this because quadcopters and the ones that people go by and, you know, DGIs, etc. They will, if they're hit, and you'll see videos online of people hitting with broomsticks, they automatically adjust.

17:02Or if you were to lose one or two of them, they adjust. Or if there's wind, or they hit an obstacle, they self-correct. Yes? Correct. Through software. Yes, yes. It's actually similar. It's incredibly similar, like almost to the point the same. we don't reinvent where we don't need to it's the same technology as drones use it's kind of incorrect so as far as the software it's actually a good analogy but it's incorrect to look at it as a drone in different modes so on the ground it's a car when it takes off it's a rotorcraft when it does transition and flies forward it's a biplane it also uses a lot from the drone technology too so it's all these technologies put together Like I mentioned, it's not that we invented anything big.

17:49We took existing technologies and we put them together. What will the weight be of this vehicle? And then how many passengers? It looks like it's a coupe. It looks like it fits one person, maybe two at the start, which is reasonable given it can fly. So when do you think this is going to come out? You started taking deposits for it. And what's the version one that's available to the public? How many people will fly in it? Okay. There were like three different questions. Let me answer one of them and then we'll come back to others. How many people? Usual answer to how many people is one and a half.

18:29The reason is one and a half. It's either two of me or one football player. Let's put it this way. Got it. So it all depends on your size and the weight. There is a certain room inside. It's a pretty big room. it's pretty like for example if i'm flying alone i have more than enough room there yeah if we're gonna put two people it's okay um if you're gonna put like a linebacker or anything that may be a problem here so cozy like you would be in a mazda miata or a corvette any other two-seat roadster type vehicle right it all depends that being said it's a first version um obviously we're still working through the kings um we're planning to have a four for four person um at some point right um so we're still working on it um as of right now one person was definitely safe that um two people who wait like i am also probably okay and how will the what were they retail for when do you think it's going to be available to the public so right now we're open pre-sales actually we didn't expect that many pre-sales when we opened we just wanted to hit like some people.

19:37Right now, actually, just bypassed 3 ,000 pre-orders in one year, which is, as far as I search the internet, is by far the right. Yeah. And yes, it's a crazy number for us. We don't know how to manufacture that many. We're going to start slow and then try to ramp up. That being said, right now, we're focused on delivering the first one, just the first one. And as we deliver the first one, we're going to start thinking about how to make a lot of them. Again, there's nothing we have to invent. I mean, there are existing productions like aircraft productions, automotive productions, which we can plug in and which can work in.

20:19So the sentence of when goes like this. Usually people hear just the last word, but I'm trying to make sure that people have every single word in that sentence. If everything goes wrong, we plan to if all the resources are going to be there, if you're going to have enough funding, enough everything, if the laws, if the regulations at least stay the same and will not get worse, we plan to start production of the first one by the end of 2025. Got it. So this has still got a lot of work left to do, a lot of disclaimers in there, obviously, because there are things outside of your control. The FAA has to approve this.

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22:49We're actually right now put$300K for that. just because the cost is kind of similar to that. That being said, it's because it's handmade, nothing is optimized. As you know, the first ones, it's like for early adopters, this is a premium. Same thing as the Tesla Roadster. It was 165K, I think, for the first 100 that they made. It's something similar. At the end of the day, which is not going to be tomorrow, not in five years, it's very, very end of the road, like long time for it if we can get to honda toyota numbers or even half of half under toyota numbers if we can get an optimized production again close to tesla honda toyota for anything like that the price should be 35 or 30k or less the reason for it is obvious because fundamentally it's actually simpler than Ford Focus Toyota Corolla.

23:54So fundamental is that but together their volume needs to happen. The optimization needs to happen. A lot of work needs to happen to get the price really down and to make it affordable for everybody. That's the goal. We're not making something to lift one or two cars in the air and have like one person bypass. How many batteries do you have to put in this just generally speaking because when you when you look at the car i didn't see the battery packs obviously they're huge in a tesla you would think they would need to be huge here you need a lot of battery power to to get liftoff correct so they are about one third of the weight um of the whole car it's not i mean there's different ways actually putting the batteries um you can put the battery but in any case first of all it's a distributed batteries also it's it's redundancy right you need redundancy everywhere including the batteries making sure that if one battery fails, it's independent of other stuff.

24:53They take up a lot of space. They are pricey. But there are different configurations. It's not... We don't have any kind of proprietary battery technologies. The way we use the battery is different. So just to tell you that if you fly like this, like everybody does, like vertical take off and forward versus if you fly in the biplane mode we get out of the same battery about seven x more ah because you're gliding as opposed to just like a helicopter so because it's a biplane format you don't need a lot of power you just need to get to a certain elevation and then get a certain amount of speed and you're you're gliding so here's the uh here's the you know i should say here's the video of the original og version uh which is you know quite charming looking what was showed here briefly uh but this was i guess your your prototype and yeah there it is flying um this was uh this is this is not cgi correct this is an actual yeah prototype flying one of their list one of their lives it's amazing it's fantastic i mean we know that the quadcopter technology scales up to the size of a car or more uh that's been proven and it's been proven it's stable.

26:11And so I guess the last piece is, what is the FAA's view of this? Do you think? Because I know that they've been working and yeah, like in good faith with a lot of these quadcopter companies like Joby, et cetera. So they really want to see this happen. And then the next piece I think is, well, you're driving on the road and then where can you take off from? If it's your private land and I'm driving from, you know, if I've got a farm or something out in Texas, I can totally fly it around my farm. But what do you think flying from my farm into the city would look like? And how do you see the world evolving over time?

26:50Because I don't think they're gonna let you take off on the 405 immediately. Okay, so let's do this. This is like two completely separate questions, which you asked us for the second one. Where you will be able to able to take off, like especially, by the way, important thing for both of your questions here is which jurisdictions are you applying to yeah whether it's united states where it's canada where is it europe where it's asia answer to this question would be different i actually again and now this is complete my predictions coming out of nowhere i'm like not um don't know if it's going to happen or not i think united states would be probably one of the most conservative ones and probably will be behind everybody else on timing when it's going to release, which is maybe a good thing.

27:38Which is maybe a good thing. FAA is known for incredible safety record. That's what they do well. The way they do it is they make it a hard, enforceable process. That's how it works. So I would expect, and again, this is a complete guess. it's a complete guess i would expect united states to be later than uh countries outside i would uh all of those quirks need to be worked out moreover um it's also different um difficult branches of government or however you want to call it in the scenarios you were describing there is a city government there is a state government there is a federal government there's a private land there's all kinds of considerations here all of it need to be worked together and um as you know in some cases it's actually there's some great areas and some branches of government don't work well together unfortunately yeah united states is going to be tough i mean i think this is why the middle east is probably the one of the great destinations to do this because they're super pro innovation.

28:57They can make a top-down decision if somebody in the UAE or in Saudi or in Qatar decide, hey, we want to have this. Somebody can say, okay, we're going to just do an accelerated exemption to just do this on this route. And you probably have people who would be willing to pay for it to get from Dubai to Abu Adobe in five, 10 minutes as opposed to, you know, so that's where I think you'll see this actually take off, so to speak. So early research and what we did, I'm not going to kind of give up several semi secrets, even though like everything is almost public, but I actually think that at least for us, the earliest adapters would be Europe and Canada.

29:42Really? Explain why you think that? Yeah, I'm curious that I cannot explain. I mean, I can't explain it publicly. Sorry. okay no problem um yeah i mean there are because i can hint on it there are some laws existing laws nothing new which uh and it's not it's not a big door it's existing laws which already exist we have to make sure that we adapt towards certain existing laws yes and we fit into their infrastructure. They already have something in existence which we have to adapt to and plug into that. In the United States, it's tougher. Yeah. For sure, we've had a lot of bad experiences with aviation and one tiny little aviation era sets back the entire industry decades.

30:35We had a very famous instance where the pan am building used to have these chinooks i'm sure you know this history but from jfk you would go from the pan am building which is above grand central they had these double bladed you know like military style you know those i guess they call them chinooks two blades fit a lot of people fit a lot of bags and you would go to grand central station in the 50s and into the 60s go have a meal at the top go up get in your helicopter zip out to jfk get on your flight to paris it was quite compelling until one of the struts broke uh on that one of those helicopters it tipped over and one of the blades flew off and killed somebody on the street and then that was the end of landing on top of buildings in new york city at least and some other locations i think followed suit you know about this i'm sure yeah this is exactly why all this new technology was evitol and everything like that is good because it is safer it's actually addressing that um it um if you compare whatever the helicopter you see in this picture with anybody like any like jobby archer anybody like including us and so on this is a much much safer technology it has so much the level of safety between that helicopter which you see there and jobby archer us and everybody else it's not even comparable yeah i remember this actually this was 1977 actually it's really hard to have a quadcopter fall or break like this or fall out of the sky because you have eight rotors 16 rotors you have the technology they they are much more graceful under pressure correct yeah right so not only have a level of redundancy which in this case it will actually be saved, right?

32:28So there's a rotor block like it like this. So in this case, you have like many, many more rotors. That's number one, they're independent. That's number two, they are protected. In our case, at least they are all inside. As you can see, there's no any outside rotors at all. So everything is contained inside. Don't you love that warm, fuzzy feeling when a business appreciates you, and then they treat you like you're their most important customer, you know, BVVIP. I love that. And that's why I love Zendesk because they're going to let you do that for your customers. They offer a suite of tools made just for startups.

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34:01Well done. So here's your call to action. It's very simple. Apply for the Zendesk for startups program and get six months free. Yes, six months free of Zendesk and get ready to scale with the best in customer support. Go to Zendesk.com slash startups. Zendesk.com slash startups. There is one another advantage which we have over most of the eVTOLs, actually. We're incredibly aligned. It's very likely. What the advantage it gives us is you can actually deploy ballistic parachutes at pretty low altitude, which makes it like the whole vehicle parachute, even at low altitudes, would actually work okay.