alt Hacker NewsThe venture money behind some of the larger and more prominent electric VTOL air taxi/helicopter-plane things seems to be betting that by the time they get the hardware design, software, user interface and general safety systems to 100%, battery technology will also have become a lot better.
I'm referring to Joby, Archer, Wisk and similar.
The range is not really good right now with batteries at 255Wh/kg and much worse energy density than Jet-A fed into turbine(s). None of the evtol companies are big enough or vertically integrated enough to come up with some miracle 500Wh/kg battery on their own, so they're relying on market pressure generally to cause their battery subsystem vendors to make some significant breakthroughs.
More directly related to the PR, I saw the video of the JFK to Manhattan test flights and they're being done with only the pilot on board.
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you don't need crazy range to fly between jfk and city .
it's doable to do it today, economically, and solve tons of problems .
in a similar to ev rollout:
solve problem for wealthy people, get the premium, scale cheaper options. Nothing new. Technology of today is ready.
I'm not sure I agree that they're making that bet (there's lots of market at current ranges IMHO), but even if they were it would be a great bet to make. We're talking about jumping to 375 [1] or even 400 Wh/kg in production cars this year [2] (with prototypes long since shown off). And there's every reason to believe that there's a lot more headroom in this space to improve, and that we will improve rapidly since we're making so many more batteries now.
[1] https://electrek.co/2025/04/28/jeep-dodge-maker-validates-so...
[2] https://www.evlithium.com/lifepo4-battery-news/calb-solid-li...
I think Beta's CTOL has better economic prospects, if less useful as an air taxi.
Isn’t the comparison against helicopters for regional and urban transit where EVTOLs hold an edge because of the drastic energy reduction that fixed wing has over helicopters?
I mean sure long term the goal may be to wait for battery density to increase to keep moving upmarket and eat longer and longer flights from traditional aviation, but I don’t think better batteries are a requirement for the initial batch of vehicles.
The upcoming solid-state batteries are around 500 Wh/kg.
But batteries have an advantage over turbines, especially small turbines: specific _power_ density.
Joby actually claims their business is viable without significant advances in battery energy density. We'll see. I think this will be closer to an Eclipse Aviation business case than SpaceX.
The venture money is betting that the e-VTOL technology can be weaponized. Small, disposable drones have been getting all the attention lately due to the war between Russia and Ukraine. But longer term there are a lot of potential missions for larger VTOL combat aircraft — both drones and crewed.