This is great. Good afternoon, and thank you for coming to the panel on global mobility. One of the things that is incredibly well understood is the idea that as changes in mobility occur, the global economy grows, and no more so than this region. In fact, I just left the Riyadh presentation, and the exciting thought that really captivated the audience was the idea that nobody wants to do the old thing again. And we are sitting at the cusp of a transformation in mobility. And today, I'm exceptionally pleased to have some incredible thought leaders here who are going to share a really, really wonderful, bold, transformative vision for what the future could be. And perhaps the most exciting aspect is that this vision and this transformation and the world that you will experience is here today.
I'm going to start on the far end and ask my dear friend Adam Woodworth a question. So most of you would imagine that drones are small hobbyist devices or used to be launched to take a photograph of something. And Adam is working with Google, at Google Wing, as the CEO, to build a system that will deliver objects to your home in a matter of minutes. And the question really is, when is it going to happen, and can you scale to a number of deliveries that will actually matter for people's lives?
Yeah, I think that out of maybe all of the sort of future of mobility topics, other than yours, Joe Ben, there's been the largest gap between sort of the idea of what it might look like and the actuality of what it is. We've been doing that for a bit over 10 years, and even just within the last 18 months, we've seen a sort of tidal shift in the ability to go from, you know, pilot programs and demonstrations and sort of science experiments to sort of meaningful business growth. And so, you know, right now today, like there are tens of thousands, if not millions, of people around the globe that are in the service areas of drone delivery. And there are a handful of companies, ourselves included, who every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, are using small automated electric aircraft to go and do parcel delivery. So it's one of those things where we think of it as this far-off future technology, but people are experiencing it today. And we're starting to see that sort of knee in the growth curve where sort of the year-over-year progress is no longer linear. You're in the sort of superlinear range.
Give me an example of how it's used in the most sort of prosaic way.
Yeah, I think one of my sort of favorite anecdotes about drone delivery is when we started operating in Australia first, because that was a place where sort of the regulatory environment aligned with what we wanted to do as a business. And before we started operating, we did all of these user surveys of what do you want drones to deliver, and we had, you know, hundreds of different options. And the overwhelming use case that everyone selected was like, drones should only be used for prescription delivery and sort of emergency medicine, and every other use case is frivolous and like we're uninterested. We offered the service, and 80-plus percent of all orders were prepared coffee. And this is literally like tens of thousands of cups of coffee delivered by drone. And it sort of proved out, one, like people rapidly normalize an emerging technology, and two, like sort of these are day-to-day use cases. This isn't some sort of extravagant thing. If you offer a compelling service, people will use it every day.
So I'm sure all of you have either experienced the flood of Lucids, and obviously PIF has taken a great leadership role in bringing that to market. However, there are still people who have some concerns about EVs. A lot of it is driven by range, a lot of it is driven by how will the batteries perform. Jean-Philippe, to my left, is working on a new technology to make batteries much more effective, much lighter, much safer. And I know that you recently announced something really bold and transformative with your company. I'd love you to tell them a little bit about what Sila does, why it's important, and how you're going to bring it to the market, and hopefully to the Kingdom.
Yeah, so you know, you stated in your opening that when mobility innovations come about, economies thrive, economies grow. And I think there's a truth to that. And there's a truth to that in order for new mobility innovations to come to be, you need better energy systems. Without the combustion engine, you wouldn't have had vehicles. And so what we do at Sila is we are bringing in the next revolutionary set of technologies for battery materials that enable much higher performance batteries: higher energy density, longer range, faster recharge, and ultimately lower cost. And so, you know, what Adam, for example, was describing being done today with existing battery technology, the revolution that we're bringing about is pushing that performance limit even further to enable even more applications in mobility, whether it's further transitioning the vehicle ecosystem from combustion to electric or enabling air transport. So we are building an automotive-scale plant today in Washington state, about a $300 million investment, to produce this technology that seamlessly drops into existing supply chains, making every battery that comes out of a gigafactory anywhere in the world today substantially better, substantially higher performing. So we're driving the science to enable that, and starting with partnerships with Mercedes. So we will be powering their new electric G-Class as our first vehicle, which is a pretty great car to start with.
A few of those running around here.
A few of those, along with the Lucid here, yeah. And then we also recently announced a partnership with Panasonic, and obviously they have one very large customer and some others as well, and we'll be powering those vehicles in the next few years as well.
That's absolutely fantastic. Jean, you have had a long and illustrious career, from Ferrari to running the FIA to bringing Formula 1 to the masses, and now you are serving the United Nations to bring awareness and safety and a new vision for equality in transportation around the world. Tell us a little bit about your work and how you're thinking about it, and what your biggest concerns are with some of these new technologies.
I mean, first, I mean, it's a pleasure to be here with so many skilled, new visionaries about mobility. You know, we should not forget that motoring is quite new; it's just over 100 years. And when you see the evolution, every decade is absolutely fascinating. And what we see now, since a while, I mean, being able to get delivery, which incidentally, something we discussed earlier, saves lives because, you know, it's much safer to get your pizza from a drone than from a motorbike driver, you know, so clearly. And then talking about battery, you know, it's fascinating because we started with a range of 100 kilometers and eight hours of recharging, and now when I hear that soon we will be able to do 800 kilometers with a battery without having to recharge, and then I'm very excited to hear about taxi by air. So coming back to my equation, I have had experience in motor racing, and everybody knows that motor racing is a very dangerous sport, until a lot of effort has been done to make motor racing safer. And if you take Formula 1, between 1994, when Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger died in Imola, 30 years after, it has been one death in Formula 1. One too many. Today it will not occur anymore. It was banned about five years ago in Japan. So having had the responsibility in Formula 1 and in FIA, I thought, what is the situation on the road? Until I realized that every year, 1.2 million people die on the road. You have about 50 million people who are injured with full disability. It's the number one cause of death and injuries for the young generation, those people who are working on mobility. And I thought it was an interesting challenge. And when Ban Ki-moon, the former Secretary-General, invited me to be for the first time Special Envoy for safety, I took the challenge. And it's very presumptuous to think that I make a big difference, but I try to make a very small difference. But small is a life, when injured people is when injured people. So clearly, and we know that, I mean, the world is divided. You have the rich world and the poor world. So 92% of the figures that we're mentioning are occurring in low- and middle-income countries. So that's where, I mean, you know, everywhere we need to concentrate, but the biggest effort has to be concentrated in low- and middle-income countries. And our friend here has a very nice logo, which is, I don't know if people know what it is, it's SDG, Sustainable Development Goals. You have 17. Two of them are around the road: 3.6 to halve the number of victims by 2030, and 11.2 to give access to public transportation to any citizen. And another thing, public transportation is not obvious. You know, you have half of the planet who do not have public transportation. So again, on one side we see the fascinating modernity, but I think it's very important to keep one eye on the world behind and to make sure that the world behind will be able to match the level of the world where we are here today, for example.
Thank you, Jean. You know, when we were children, at least when I was a child, the future was always described by a vehicle that would sit in your front yard and take off vertically and fly away. And until very recently, that was really thought to be the purview of a very expensive military system powered by very large, powerful jet engines that roared, and not accessible to the general public. And JoeBen was so far ahead of his time that he's brought the future to today. And as I'm sure all of you have experienced the traffic in Riyadh, you can imagine transiting the city not in 45 minutes, but in three minutes, in silence. I think it will be because of the work that JoeBen has done with Joby. Tell us a little bit about your journey and how close you are to bringing that to these great people.
So this was my dream when I was a little boy, like Adam. And when I was in college in the early 1990s, I worked on it. And at that point in time, we had batteries that had between 40 and 50 watt-hours per kilogram of specific energy, which means that you can't build an electric aircraft that can go very far. But thanks to the incredible work of Jean-Philippe and so many others in the battery space, we've seen incredible improvements in both the specific energy, which is the amount of energy per unit of mass, the specific power, the amount of power per unit mass, and the life cycle that you can get out of the batteries. And that's enabled us to build aircraft that have incredible new capabilities, like what Adam and the Google Wing team have built, but at a human scale. And this is incredibly exciting because it allows us to think of a world where we avoid the 1.2 million fatalities and the 50 million injuries on the roads every year. One of the incredible things that's happened over the last century of aviation is an incredible effort in the aviation industry to drive safety. And now today, aviation is not only our fastest and lowest-cost mode of transportation, it's also dramatically safer than any other mode of transportation we have. And so if we can bring that safety to people's daily lives and the way we move around on a daily basis, I think that that's incredibly exciting. If we can bring the speed that Adam talked about and let us rise above traffic, that's incredibly exciting. And one of the elements that I'm so passionate about is the acoustics. And this is one of the elements that I've spent the last more than, you know, almost 15 years of my life working on, is how do we build electric propulsion systems for aircraft that can make an aircraft not only take off and land vertically, but also fly incredibly quietly, and so that we can welcome these new types of aircraft, this new mode of transportation, into our communities. And so I'm very, very excited. We've flown our aircraft this last year at a demonstration in New York City, and we're going to be flying it in a number of different countries around the world over the coming months. And we're really looking forward to bringing it here to Saudi Arabia.
