Speaker 1: Hi, it's Action. This week. As an extra, we're bringing
Speaker 1: you a fun episode from The Big Take about flying taxis.
Speaker 1: Yes they're real. There might even be a commercial one
Speaker 1: flying as soon as this year. If you're a new
Speaker 1: listener to Zero, I would also urge you to go
Speaker 1: back into the archives and listen to a show about
Speaker 1: flying taxis we did on Zero where I was super
Speaker 1: skeptical that it can be a climate solution. You can
Speaker 1: find the link in the show notes. Enjoy The Big Take.
Speaker 2: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 3: I'm about to step into a flying taxi.
Speaker 2: And if that's not.
Speaker 3: Radical enough for you, this one has no pilot.
Speaker 4: That's Bloomberg reporter Colin Murphy. He's based in Beijing, and
Speaker 4: he volunteered to go on a test flight in a
Speaker 4: test model of a flying taxi in the southern Chinese
Speaker 4: city of Guangzhou.
Speaker 3: First, the fasten your okay, But I'm just gonna fasten
Speaker 3: the seat pots.
Speaker 2: And in the air, please do not touch the door. Okay,
Speaker 2: I got it, thank you.
Speaker 3: So I'm buckled in and we're just about to take off.
Speaker 3: I can't believe I'm doing this and that there's nobody
Speaker 3: flying this.
Speaker 4: Column did not touch the door as instructed and tried
Speaker 4: to stay calm as the machine shot one hundred feet
Speaker 4: up into the.
Speaker 3: Air out in the window.
Speaker 4: The prototype vehicle column rode In was designed by China
Speaker 4: based e Hang Holdings, and it could become the world's
Speaker 4: first commercially operating flying taxi as soon as this year.
Speaker 5: It's here, and it's now, and it's probably a lot
Speaker 5: earlier than people have any idea about it.
Speaker 4: That's Angus Whitley, a Bloomberg Global business reporter based in Sydney.
Speaker 4: He says that right now, all over the world, transportation
Speaker 4: companies are racing to put driverless cars into the sky.
Speaker 4: Billions of dollars in investments and venture capital have fueled
Speaker 4: the technology up to this point, and companies like EHang
Speaker 4: have started to prove the concept. But now comes the
Speaker 4: hard part tackling the regulatory and logistical hurdles standing in
Speaker 4: the way of making flying taxi fleets commercially viable. And
Speaker 4: it turns out where in the world these businesses are
Speaker 4: operating could play a critical role in who takes off first.
Speaker 4: Here's Colum again.
Speaker 3: It's a mode of transport that has yet to take off,
Speaker 3: but by some estimates could be worth as much as
Speaker 3: one trillion dollars by twenty forty.
Speaker 4: This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah
Speaker 4: holder Day on the show the Flying Taxi Companies that
Speaker 4: are determined to turn what was once a fantasy into
Speaker 4: our transportation reality, our own column. Murphy is officially one
Speaker 4: of the first people on Earth to try out a
Speaker 4: flying taxi. He agreed to get on a call with
Speaker 4: me and share what the experience was like.
Speaker 3: It's got like this oval shaped cabin and with a
Speaker 3: lot of glass, which I imagine is to enhance or
Speaker 3: maximize the views that you can get once you're flying.
Speaker 3: So it's a bit like a chopper helicopter, but the
Speaker 3: scale is much much smaller. What's particularly unusual about it
Speaker 3: is that it has eight arms, and each arm has
Speaker 3: two sets of rotators. So when you look at it
Speaker 3: from the ground and it's up in the air flying,
Speaker 3: it really filled me with a sense of an eerie feeling,
Speaker 3: if you will, because it just looks like an insect
Speaker 3: chopping its way through the sky. A fighter, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: But the benefacturers rely or stress that it's these eight
Speaker 3: arms and the sixteen rotators that are at the core
Speaker 3: of its safety, and it's sort of fail proof ability
Speaker 3: to fly and deal with any circumstance that comes its way.
Speaker 4: I'd understand if this isn't what you pictured when we
Speaker 4: first said flying taxi. Angus Whitley, Bloomberg's global business reporter,
Speaker 4: had his own frames of reference.
Speaker 5: My favorite flying cars are actually in the James Bond franchises,
Speaker 5: just because they.
Speaker 2: Are so simple and so ludicrous.
Speaker 5: Or first one probably in The Man with the Golden
Speaker 5: Gun in the seventies, and they just put wings on
Speaker 5: a normal car and it takes off.
Speaker 2: It's as easy as that. It's as easy as that.
Speaker 5: Yes, And I suppose the point when you look at
Speaker 5: these films is there be in a fiction of our imagination.
Speaker 2: For decades and decades, they've been.
Speaker 5: Held up as this sort of goal and fantasy, and
Speaker 5: if you think about it now, this reality has arrived,
Speaker 5: and in many senses it's totally different from all the
Speaker 5: sort of variance we've seen on the screen in the
Speaker 5: last few decades.
Speaker 4: E Hang Holding's white hovering insect like contraption is one
Speaker 4: example of this new kind of aircraft. It's meant for
Speaker 4: short trips.
Speaker 2: It's essentially a drone.
Speaker 5: It's electric, it's battery powered, It recharges in a couple
Speaker 5: of hours, and it buzzes around. It's a short distance
Speaker 5: electric drone. Its range is pretty small. It's twenty miles.
Speaker 5: It can fly at less than one hundred miles an hour.
Speaker 5: But it's a short distance little thing. And it looks
Speaker 5: like a little car cockpit if you like. There's no
Speaker 5: seat for a pilot, but there's a flat screen in
Speaker 5: the front tells you all the critical information about the flight.
Speaker 4: China's e Hang Holdings is just one of the companies
Speaker 4: piloting what they hope could become the uber of the future.
Speaker 4: There's something of a space strace underway among flying taxi makers,
Speaker 4: and each model has its own design and fuel.
Speaker 5: This is just a burgeoning, emerging industry that has more
Speaker 5: than two dozen really serious EV tour makers. And we
Speaker 5: say ev TOLL that's it stands for electric vertical takeoff
Speaker 5: and landing.
Speaker 4: Are we seeing traditional airplane makers and car makers try
Speaker 4: to invest in autonomous flying vehicles as well?
Speaker 5: Of course, you have the old aviation of like the
Speaker 5: old Guard, and that's Boeing and Airbus. Boeing's fully owned
Speaker 5: business called whisk is making an electric aircraft that can
Speaker 5: carry four passengers with no pilot, and they're planning to
Speaker 5: launch that before the decade is out, before twenty thirty.
Speaker 5: Airbos also has its own variant, Embra, the Brazilian aircraft manufacturer.
Speaker 5: So you have this old guard and then you have
Speaker 5: this legion of upstarts like Jobie and Archer and e Haang.
Speaker 5: They're really just charged as these special manufacturers. And then
Speaker 5: you have this huge range of established names from the
Speaker 5: car industry. So you have Hyundai, there's Stilantis, there's Toyota,
Speaker 5: there's even Tencent, China's Tencent like technology makers, so that
Speaker 5: they're drawing all this manufacturing know how, this technology know
Speaker 5: how car industry expertise along with this huge big stock
Speaker 5: of aviation expertise and likes of Boeing and Airbus, and
Speaker 5: it's not clear who the winners are going to be.
Speaker 4: Winning in this context means getting this very new technology right,
Speaker 4: but it also means getting it to market and turning
Speaker 4: flying taxis into a viable business.
Speaker 5: We've had one hundred years of air travel evolve, We've
Speaker 5: had the jet era, and now we're into this revere
Speaker 5: of urban air mobility or advanced air mobility. If you
Speaker 5: think about what's happened in the jet era, we boiled
Speaker 5: down to essentially Giopoli, didn't we We had Boeing and
Speaker 5: Airbus and now almost I think we'll get filtering out
Speaker 5: in the same way. We have dozens and dozens of
Speaker 5: players vying to enter this space, and it's not clear
Speaker 5: that many of them will survive. And the prize if
Speaker 5: we can break through this frontier is by some estimates
Speaker 5: just enormous. And if you look at estimates by Morgan Stanley,
Speaker 5: for instance, this broad market for urban air mobility, which
Speaker 5: includes electric passenger aircraft flying taxis, some of them without
Speaker 5: a pilot with it's going to be worth one trillion
Speaker 5: dollars by twenty forty, So that's the estimated prize.
Speaker 4: The prize is so huge in part because these pilotless
Speaker 4: aircrafts promise to solve a major urban problem.
Speaker 5: There are some use cases if you like, that are
Speaker 5: often cited. The first one is that flying taxis are
Speaker 5: a sort of solution to chronic congestion that we're seeing
Speaker 5: around the world in huge, big metropolis is from Tokyo
Speaker 5: to New York to London to Southeastate.
Speaker 4: Need to get to your board meeting downtown, but traffic
Speaker 4: is at a standstill. Flying taxi want to go to
Speaker 4: the football playoffs, but parking is a nightmare. Flying taxi
Speaker 4: need to catch your flight, but the highways shut down
Speaker 4: flying taxi.
Speaker 5: Then there's the kind of intercity shuttle use case. And
Speaker 5: then there's that sort of tourism case which we're seeing
Speaker 5: emerging that we see e Haang try and capitalize on
Speaker 5: in China as a way of taking tourist rides, perhaps
Speaker 5: supplanting the sort of helicopter trips, making them more affordable,
Speaker 5: making them shorter, making them autonomous, And there are thousands
Speaker 5: of locations and Ehang's eyes that could support that user case.
Speaker 5: These flying taxis are going to at some point going
Speaker 5: to have to integrate in the way that airlines travel
Speaker 5: around the world as well. So the idea is that
Speaker 5: perhaps these flying taxis could connect to larger airports and
Speaker 5: you might take a flying taxi from downtown Manhattan up
Speaker 5: to JFK or LaGuardia and jump on a plane, a
Speaker 5: conventional aircraft somewhere else.
Speaker 2: So that's why a lot.
Speaker 5: Of the orders for these electric taxis come from actual
Speaker 5: airlines themselves.
Speaker 4: So flying taxis could be lean, green traffic avoiding machines.
Speaker 4: At least that's what these transportation companies hope. But there
Speaker 4: are a few big things standing in the way of liftoff,
Speaker 4: including economics, timing, and red tape. All that in a moment,
Speaker 4: flying taxis they're the hot new frontier in air transportation,
Speaker 4: and they're supposedly just around the corner. Bloomberg reporter Angus
Speaker 4: Whitley again.
Speaker 5: We're really approaching the reality here. We're seeing EHang launching
Speaker 5: this year. We're going to see Jobian Archer launching next year.
Speaker 4: For investors in the industry, this means payoff may finally
Speaker 4: be near after years of waiting, Flying taxi companies started
Speaker 4: to gain traction during a heady moment for the global economy.
Speaker 4: At the time. There were a lot of investors with
Speaker 4: a lot of money to throw around, and they were
Speaker 4: willing to invest it with companies that required a lot
Speaker 4: of upfront cash, even if they didn't have the most
Speaker 4: airtight business plan. Interest rates were near zero, unborrowing was
Speaker 4: very cheap. These were the perfect conditions to build a
Speaker 4: business that was highly expensive and highly speculative, like flying taxis.
Speaker 5: But the days of cheap money are over. We're seeing
Speaker 5: funding not drying up, but decreasing at.
Speaker 4: Least with interest rates back up. Investors are getting more
Speaker 4: risk averse, and that poses a challenge for flying taxi
Speaker 4: companies who might have the technology down but will still
Speaker 4: need to navigate logistical hurdles like aviation regulation, certification, liability, and.
Speaker 5: They're going to have to step up in terms of
Speaker 5: producing these things. So they're going to have to find
Speaker 5: a way of not just getting these things certified, but
Speaker 5: being produced at enough scale to make money.
Speaker 2: So that this is a scale game.
Speaker 5: You need to have these things produced at a level
Speaker 5: that we haven't really seen since the Second World War.
Speaker 2: Archer, for instance, wants to.
Speaker 5: Produce ultimately more aircraft a year than Boeing produced last year.
Speaker 4: A scale game. Basically, flying taxi companies need to find
Speaker 4: a way to make enough of them to launch a
Speaker 4: viable business. The more taxis they make, the cheaper the
Speaker 4: cost for each new taxi. The cheaper the cost of
Speaker 4: each taxi, the less they need to charge customers per ride,
Speaker 4: and the less they charge per ride, the more people
Speaker 4: who are likely to actually try this out.
Speaker 5: It's certainly a moment, and also I think in the
Speaker 5: next few years we're going to see who is emerging
Speaker 5: as winners and losers, and there will be people who
Speaker 5: lose a lot of money along the line.
Speaker 4: For any of these companies to have any chance of success,
Speaker 4: Angus says, they'll need to win over regulators.
Speaker 2: It is a global game.
Speaker 5: For instance, if you're if you're a flying taxi manufacturer
Speaker 5: and you have signed off from the FAA, then you'll
Speaker 5: be able to access other markets around the world as well,
Speaker 5: and jurisdictions like Australia they take them nod from the
Speaker 5: FAA in terms of certification and approving flights. It's an
Speaker 5: important step to being certified and that will open doors
Speaker 5: into other markets and we'll see the likes of Jobie
Speaker 5: an Archer and e Hang enter other markets as well,
Speaker 5: for example the Middle East and Europe. So it's not
Speaker 5: a single country game.
Speaker 4: Getting those rubber stamps is not going to happen overnight,
Speaker 4: and that's part of the reason why years of investment
Speaker 4: haven't paid off just yet. It's worth pointing out though,
Speaker 4: that some regulatory environments will be easier to navigate than others.
Speaker 4: That's in part why Colums E. Hang Holding's test flight
Speaker 4: was possible and why the e Hang taxi business could
Speaker 4: take off in China sooner than competitors based elsewhere.
Speaker 5: EHang already has a pilotless aircraft that can carry two
Speaker 5: passengers certified by the regulator, so they're pushing ahead towards
Speaker 5: commercial launch by the end of this year, and they
Speaker 5: would have bragging rights over potentially emerging as the first
Speaker 5: autonomous commercial flying taxi in the world. But it's interesting
Speaker 5: how these things are being regulated. The China Civily Avisian
Speaker 5: regulator has cleared that it's partly because Chinese policy has
Speaker 5: identified these kind of areas as a policy lever to
Speaker 5: develop what they call a sort of low altitude economy.
Speaker 2: Other regulators are taking a bit more time. I'm not
Speaker 2: suggesting that China's.
Speaker 5: Regulators necessarily less onerous when it comes to certifying aircraft,
Speaker 5: but it's fair to say that power is more centralized
Speaker 5: in China, which allows sort of policy levers to be
Speaker 5: pulled at all levels to achieve a goal.
Speaker 2: So if you look at e Hang's.
Speaker 5: Aircraft, it has a certification from the regulator to fly
Speaker 5: and to go into mass production. And once you get
Speaker 5: those kind of badges. Then orders start coming in and
Speaker 5: right on queue. We've had local tourism entities order e
Speaker 5: hang aircraft in their hundreds.
Speaker 4: So realistically, how soon could I hail a flying taxi?
Speaker 5: I think this is the picture they would like you
Speaker 5: to see in your mind, walking out the door and
Speaker 5: hailing and flying taxi. In reality, that is some way off.
Speaker 5: I think that that is years away, but you could
Speaker 5: next year. You could potentially take a trip to your
Speaker 5: local vertaport as they call it, and take a flight
Speaker 5: to the airport, perhaps not the price of an uber,
Speaker 5: but you know, as a special treat.
Speaker 4: Of course, one person's treat is another person's terror. And
Speaker 4: I wanted to know on which side of the spectrum
Speaker 4: column had landed. After his two minute test ride, it.
Speaker 5: Feels very stable, very secure.
Speaker 3: I think we're going back down now.
Speaker 2: Seems that we're making many sense.
Speaker 3: I actually did have another opportunity to take one, and
Speaker 3: that was they offered us three different slots, and I
Speaker 3: felt that after the first one, I had basically enjoyed
Speaker 3: the experience, had survived the experience, but I wasn't particularly
Speaker 3: keen or anxious to jump in and go up again.
Speaker 4: To be honest, this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News.
Speaker 4: I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by Jessica Beck,
Speaker 4: Naomi and Adrianna Tapia. It was mixed by Rishi Bajako
Speaker 4: and fact checked by Eddie Dwan. It was edited by
Speaker 4: Stacy Vennick Smith and Rebecca Greenfield. Our senior producers are
Speaker 4: Kim Gitttleson and Naomi sha who also edited this episode.
Speaker 4: Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Nicole Beemster Borer is
Speaker 4: our executive producer. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts.
Speaker 4: If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and
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