Eviation Aircraft Ltd chief executive Omer Bar-Yohay pictures a day not too far away when summoning a bargain airplane ride with a smartphone will be as easy as hailing Uber.
The Israel-based start-up working on a self-piloting, electric aircraft was on Tuesday at the Wall Street Journal D.Live conference in Laguna Beach, California, with a vision of “Uber Technologies Inc meeting Tesla Motors Inc in the sky.”
Bar-Yohay spoke of a future in which people could take Uber to a regional airport and use another smartphone application to summon an Eviation electric plane to whisk them inexpensively to destinations hundreds of kilometers away.
Photo: AFP
“What would happen if Uber meets Tesla in the sky?” Bar-Yohay asked rhetorically in an interview. “I think it makes super-commuting not so super anymore; you just go. That is the vision.”
Eviation was at the Paris Air Show earlier this year with a small-scale prototype and is intent on returning in 2019 with a full-scale electric aircraft capable of carrying passengers.
Cofounders were at the Wall Street Journal technology conference to rustle up funding, with a goal of about US$20 million.
The start-up founded about two years ago has been paying its way out of pocket, with some help from the Israeli government, going through about US$10 million to date, Bar-Yohay said.
The new infusion of cash is to be used as fuel in a race to be first to market with an electric airplane, this one designed to carry up to nine passengers and two crew members.
“We have been sprinting full-speed for the past two years,” Bar-Yohay said. “I don’t think it is going to be winner takes all, but it will be winner takes a hell of a lot.”
In his eyes, the appeal was obvious. Instead of spending hours in a car traveling hundreds of kilometers, an electric airplane summoned on-demand to a regional airport would get passengers to far-away destinations quickly and inexpensively.
Eviation is out to take advantage of small, typically underutilized regional airports, making them lift-off spots for on-demand flights.
“It needs to cost like a bus ticket,” Bar-Yohay said of such a service. “If you build the plane electric, like a Tesla, the cost of operating becomes ridiculously low.”
Electric components for airplanes are a fraction of the cost of comparable parts for engines in traditional aircraft, and are more reliable, Bar-Yohay said.
“You need to build machines that will never break; electric components are naturally like this,” he said.
Eviation plane batteries are spread out in more than a dozen places, so “no matter what hits you, some part of the aircraft will have the power to keep you going,” he added.
The expected range of the Eviation plane is to be about 1,050km.
The vision is to have the aircraft be self-piloting, so it could be summoned by an app or be available as desired for people who pool resources to buy one.
“The market can become transportation for the masses,” Bar-Yohay said. “We are already getting used to not owning everything.”
He said that while society might be grappling with trusting self-driving cars, self-piloting aircraft have been around for decades.
“We are not here to steal clients from Cessna [Aircraft Co] or other aircraft makers,” Bar-Yohay said. “We are here to steal clients from Ford [Motor Co], GM [General Motors Co], Tesla ... because we can be cheaper per mile.”
He expects the first-generation Eviation aircraft to cost US$2.5 million to US$3 million.
Bar-Yohay said there is competition forming already, including rideshare leader Uber researching vertical-takeoff vehicles to fly passengers short distances.
“It’s the next blue ocean out there,” Bar-Yohay said of the on-demand flight market. “There is going to be room for everybody.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts