Oh please don't go, don't go. I'm going to lock down our boards here. Come on in, come on. This will be good. Air mobility revolution, I promise you. You know, I know you all took time coming here in a car. You're probably just pulling your hair out stuck in traffic. Maybe the next time you come, we can have you as part and parcel of our air mobility revolution. You'd never know. Let's get started. One of our colleagues is, he's multitasking today so we have him finishing up another panel. But we will get started here. Sébastien Burell joins me, he's the Chief Commercial Officer with Lilium, and Nikhil Goel, the Chief Commercial Officer with Archer Aviation. So let me get to task with these two and see what's going on here, and then we'll come back and we'll get Joe. So talk to me, Sebastian. We're talking about, you know, air mobility, and clearly we've had great conversations today about new planes coming and new airlines coming to Saudi Arabia and everything. But we may have a different form of aviation transportation coming. Talk to me about the craft, the smaller craft that's going to revolutionize how we move around. And again, maybe talk a little bit about the public acceptance of that. We don't see them at the moment, but soon.
Absolutely. So yes, air mobility exists. Obviously we have airlines, private jets, helicopters, but we are talking about advanced air mobility. By that what we mean is usually electrified, sometimes hybrid, but sustainable, safe, and vertical takeoff and landing to get closer to the destinations that will change the way we travel. That will get the distances to be shorter. Every time you have congestion, terrain, or water, our type of aircraft will be able to help bridging the gap and make the journey much faster. We're just selling time savings, really, in a very safe and sustainable manner. As far as public acceptance, I think there is the wrong concept that suddenly we're going to flip a switch and we're going to find hundreds of those kind of aircraft flying over the cities. That will come in steps. It will be a step approach to the adoption, starting usually with higher-net-worth individuals buying the aircraft, eventually replacing helicopters, private jets, and eventually then going after a mass market of scheduled operations between cities or within the cities to attract people. And I think when people are going to see our aircraft flying and people flying on a daily basis to really great destinations, the acceptance will come quite rapidly.
Yeah, I mean the concept without a doubt, I think it's very exciting for everybody. And you know, it's getting there. I mean, we've had this conversation here, I think at FII particularly, and if anybody supports this, it definitely is FII. We'll talk a little bit about what you're doing later in the region, Nikhil. When we look at congestion in cities, without a doubt it's growing. You know, entire populations are moving to cities, but they're not necessarily getting on public transport as much as everybody would love them to. There's still a lot of the one-car journeys. So there's huge challenges. Talk to us a little bit about that growth that we're seeing, and are we actually moving fast enough to make this a reality? Because I think in Riyadh and even in Dubai right now, we could be doing with maybe a new aviation solution.
Absolutely. Look, I was at Uber for the first chunk of my career, and one of the early realizations we came to was: today, half of the world's population lives in cities. By 2050, it'll be about two-thirds of the world's population. So cities are growing exponentially, the populations are, but transportation solutions are getting worse. They're getting slower, more congested, dirtier, more expensive. And public transit, to your point, will always be the most affordable, most efficient way to get from A to B at scale at rush hour, but not at off times of the day, and certainly not when you need to build new routes. Because you say public transport, public transport, so if you need to go build a new rail line, take the HS2 that they're building in the UK, it's going to cost you billions of dollars and that'll get you one route. If you need to add another route, then all of a sudden you've got to double that cost. With air transportation, if you've got two nodes and you add a third node and then you add a fourth, you're suddenly able to connect to all the other nodes in the network. And that's what makes air transportation within urban environments extremely scalable and extremely low capex. That's why I got excited about it at Uber, and that's one of the things that Archer and everyone here on stage is sort of pursuing.
And again, when you put it like that, it does sound exciting. And right now on public transport, sorry, no amount of money is getting me on public transport. You know, it's like I'll plan my life around another way. But come back to this idea of congestion in the sky, basically. Should we worry about that if this takes on at such a pace? You know, there's not really stoplights and various things in the sky. How do we manage the transportation that's going to be all happening up there?
So in my previous life I worked for Airbus, and we predicted several times that the air traffic would double every 15 years. And that's what people were probably saying years ago: airplanes, oh, congestion in the sky, it won't work. I mean, you have 10 times more aircraft than you had 50 years ago, and we actually manage. So it's always people trying to bring fear into new technologies, but it's going to happen. On top of it, our aircraft has the latest avionics from Honeywell or other suppliers. We have all of the systems on board to integrate in the air traffic management system. Of course, you have airspace constraints, you have prohibited airspace. We have to work with the regulators to make sure that our economy can grow. And I love the way the Chinese actually call this — they don't call it advanced mobility, they call it the low-altitude economy. Because of course, aircraft that we know, the airlines, they fly much higher. Everything below 10,000 feet, there is space here to create value, money, and economy.
I like that. It's a different way of looking at it too. It's a pragmatic and sensible way of looking at it. Clearly, Nikhil, we're going to be looking at battery technology, which, you know, we need to establish a lot better in terms of the electric aviation. A lot at the moment, payload limitations, various things, we need to work on that, and we need to work faster on that, don't we?
Well, the good news is the batteries that we need to do the type of routes we're talking about are already here. So when I was at Uber, we spent a lot of time taking a look at how people move in and around cities. And what we discovered is the most painful routes weren't necessarily these long 100-mile or 150-mile routes. Typically, those well-traveled routes have beautiful highways built, whether it's Delhi to Agra or Dubai to Abu Dhabi, etc. The painful ones are the 20- to 50-mile routes inside of cities that are extremely congested and there's no more space to build roads. And so if you look at those 20- to 50-mile trips, the only answer is to go up. And so the batteries to do that already exist today, and a lot of that is thanks to the EV industry. In fact, all of it, I would say, is thanks to the electric vehicle industry, whether it's companies like Tesla or really all of the automotives around the world that have pushed the limits on lithium-ion technology in cylindrical cells. We are using those same cells. So our team is alumni of SpaceX, Apple, Tesla, you name it, and we're using those cells that are off the shelf. We're building the battery packs ourselves for safety and reliability, and that's what we're using today. So we don't need any silver bullets or magic. We're going to use those batteries to be able to move in and around, and it's getting us there.
Joeben joins us here, the Founder and CEO of Joby Aviation. Joeben Bevirt, thank you so much. Lovely to see you. I know you're the busiest man in town. You've already been on the other panel convincing them what's going on. These two gentlemen are kindly trying to convince me that life up in the skies, the low-altitude transportation route, is the place to go. I've been worried about congestion in the cities and really looking for the answer. Will the likes of Joby and this new aviation concept, will this help relieve that congestion that we're all getting a little bit frustrated with now?
Absolutely. I think Nikhil just did an incredible job talking about some of the fundamental technologies that make vertical takeoff and landing aircraft possible. This is something I've been dreaming about since I was a boy. I began working on it in the early 1990s. At that point in time, the batteries weren't ready, but thanks to the incredible innovations that have happened in the electric vehicle industry, we now have batteries that can deliver really important and useful trips. And the impact of that is really on our daily lives and how we move around cities on a daily basis — the amount both in the time that it takes but also the quality of the experience. And as an engineer, I'm all about efficiency and saving time, but when you get to fly and you get to see the city from the beautiful vantage of the air, that's really transformative. I was just on another panel and we were talking about the challenges around ground safety. In the US, we lose 40,000 people die every year on our roads. Globally, it's 1.2 million, with 50 million people across the planet who get severely harmed every year by car accidents. And aviation is a really incredible industry in that over the last hundred years it moved from being something that was quite dangerous to being our safest mode of transportation. So not only is it our lowest-cost mode of transportation and our fastest mode of transportation — 10 times, 10-plus times faster than driving — but also substantially less expensive per passenger-kilometer than driving. We want to take those incredible attributes of aviation and bring them to daily transportation. And I think that's one of the things that's so incredibly exciting about this time and the technology convergence that we're currently living in.
And for you, it's like the double whammy. You also get to work on your childhood dream and do good and create a whole new industry and everything. So wonderful, well done. Sebastian, talk to me about the regulation, because clearly, it's a new form of transportation. The regulation can't be mature, it can't be in place right now, but is it in the works? So you all talking? Is it beginning to happen? And how are you cooperating with governments, the regulatories, the industry, everybody?
It's actually more than in the works, it's happening. You know, we're lucky to be based in Europe. Lilium is based in Germany, right? The certification basis for aircraft was published in 2020. We also had the operational regulation published a few years ago. And some of us were in Las Vegas last week to witness the signature of the same regulation by the FAA, with the Administrator Whitaker. That was with Joe and myself and a few others. So happening, of course, in Europe and in the US. And a lot of us here are talking to other regulators that usually adopt either EASA or FAA regulation to adopt it on each of the country level. Now, there is a last piece of regulation which I think we need to work harder together: is the infrastructure piece. The permitting is usually done by national authorities, and we want to make sure that industry gets tighter together with the government, with the ASA and FAA, so we can have a standard or pre-standard that can be applied everywhere, so people don't have tons of questions on the ground side.
Nikhil, pick up on this and also maybe add to it in terms of, you know, infrastructure. How much of it is in place? Are you seeing and are you encouraged that countries and cities are planning the infrastructure right now to suit this?
Well, it goes back to what I said earlier, which is there should be no magic bullets to making this happen. That's been our entire strategy since day one, which is: how do you get to market as quickly as possible and how do you have as few barriers as possible? The good news on the infrastructure front is that infrastructure already covers the world. The aircraft that I think all of us have built is designed to fit into any existing helipad on Earth. And so you look at a lot of cities, that helipad infrastructure or the airport infrastructure already exists. So in the United States, you have over 5,000 airports that are already there for public use. We only use something like 28 of them now. But the big challenge is getting from the airport to where you want to go. Exactly, that's the killer one. Exactly. And so often what we see, let's say you're going Manhattan to the airport, you'll spend more time in the car before you get to one of the Archer trips. But that infrastructure already exists. In Manhattan, you've got one on West 30th, you've got East 34th, you've got downtown. In San Francisco, you've got two dozen helipads that are already there, but you can't use them given the noise. The only one that you're actually able to use is the one on top of the University of San Francisco's Hospital because that is used to save lives. LA's got dozens and you can't use those either. But our technology unlocks it.
So I would love to just tag on to that and talk about the incredible opportunity that new takeoff and landing locations present. So as Nikhil talked about, there's amazing infrastructure in places around the world. You've got Tokyo with hundreds of helipads already on buildings. Those are helipads that currently can't be accessed; they're for emergency use only because of the exhaust fumes that come from turbine engines on helicopters and the air conditioning intakes that are on the rooftops. So they don't want that turbine exhaust going into the building air conditioning system. So with electric propulsion, with zero emissions, you can now take all those existing resources and open them up. And that makes the buildings that those helipads are on more valuable. So we were in Grand Central — we had our aircraft in Grand Central in New York City a few weeks ago — and I was doing some research about the history of Grand Central. When Grand Central opened, in the decade that followed, real estate prices in that neighborhood tripled. So the value of not just the real estate next door, but the whole neighborhood got elevated by this new mode of transportation. And you see this again and again: when a new train track goes in, when a new highway goes in, when a new mode of transportation arrives, the real estate values appreciate. And I think that's one of the most exciting things about this new sector: it gives the ability to take an inconvenient piece of real estate and make it really valuable. Real estate is a $230 trillion global asset class, and this is the lever that moves that in a really profound way.
And again, it's happening. Talk to me, Sebastian, about the infrastructure also that's happening — I suppose the ecosystems of, you know, the electric aviation partners that you've got in place. I mean, are they all lined up, so to speak, to support sustainability and to support growth?
