Flying Cars Have Arrived! eVTOL Panel: Archer, Joby, Wisk | All-In Summit 2024

At the time of the panel, executives expected the first real eVTOL passenger services to launch abroad before the United States, with Archer targeting Abu Dhabi and Joby Dubai. Goldstein said U.S. regulation made domestic launch harder; both firms were meeting UAE aviation officials, while Joby planned four Dubai vertiports and 2025 commercial service.

The near-term product is airport transport on a few dense routes, not thousands of flying cars over cities. Airports were described as the easiest initial operating bases, Archer designed around 20–50-mile “hero routes” such as Manhattan-to-airport trips, and Brian Yutko said even bullish deployment would not soon replace existing helicopters.

eVTOL became financeable largely because the 2021 public-market window supplied capital traditional venture investors would not. Goldstein said roughly $1 billion upfront scared off most VCs; Archer said it raised nearly $1.5 billion, Stellantis invested almost $300 million, and United ordered up to $1.5 billion of aircraft.

No battery breakthrough is required for initial service. Archer uses commercial Molicel lithium-ion cells and designed Midnight mainly for repeated 20–50-mile trips, while Joby said its certification cells are about 300 Wh/kg, nearly double the roughly 170 Wh/kg available when it began in 2009.

Joby’s core urban-acceptance claim is that its aircraft can be quieter than ordinary city background noise while adding redundancy unavailable in conventional helicopters. JoeBen Bevirt said Joby achieved below 65 dB around takeoff and landing and 45 dB in overflight, with six propellers driven by separate motors, inverters and battery packs.

Initial service will still have real weather limits: Joby does not plan to certify its first aircraft for known icing. Bevirt said the fleet would simply be grounded in certain icing conditions, meaning service in colder northeastern markets could be unavailable a few percent of the time.

Wisk is taking the slower but more radical path: certifying passenger flight without an onboard pilot. Brian Yutko traced its lineage from Larry Page through Kitty Hawk and a joint venture to Boeing ownership, while acknowledging Joby and Archer would launch first because piloted certification comes sooner.

The hardest regulatory problem is not simply “approval”; autonomous aircraft force aviation rules themselves to be rewritten. Yutko noted existing rules repeatedly specify what “the pilot shall” do, while retired FAA expertise and frontier technologies leave regulators and manufacturers learning the safety case together rather than applying a ready-made standard.