Typically, when you think about ridesharing, Uber and Lyft come to mind. However, one company is looking to take ridesharing to new heights, literally. Archer Aviation is working toward commercializing air ride sharing, and a recent partnership with NASA brings them one step closer to achieving that goal. CEO Adam Goldstein sat down with The street to discuss how your company plans to achieve this.
Full video transcript below:
ADAM GOLDSTEIN: That is why we are building electric aircraft, with vertical takeoff and landing, to be used in urban air mobility. So think about land trips that will take you 90 minutes, 120 minutes by car. We can recover in the air with a 5 to 10 minute trip. And that is the product we are launching on the market. The goal is to bring it to market in 2025. We are in the final stages of the certification process with the FAA and we are excited to be here to talk about it.
JD DURKIN: How does this compare to, let's say, maybe the closest comparison that people could visualize with helicopters? They see them buzzing around the city. Tell me about what your product is, how it's similar, maybe how it's different.
ADAM GOLDSTEIN: When vehicles are electrified, there are substantial benefits that make them far superior to helicopters. So the first one is really about security. He can create a vehicle that has no single points of failure, while helicopters will have between 200 and 300 single points of failure. So they are certifying these vehicles to a safety standard as high as the large commercial airliners we know today. The second thing has to do with noise. So you can make these vehicles where they are very, very quiet. And when they fly over, they basically make no noise, they just blend into the background, allowing you between those two elements to really scale these vehicles, reduce the cost, and hopefully create a mass-market transportation solution.
JD DURKIN: Tell me about the partnership with NASA. Great headlines lately. Really exciting. What does it mean for you and the company?
ADAM GOLDSTEIN: It's actually a really special partnership because a lot of the core underlying technology of eVTOLs started at NASA. And so NASA was really involved from the beginning of building what they call distributed electric propulsion, using multiple electric motors to fly an airplane. So once they put that concept out there, it really gave rise to the industry, which we call eVTOL or electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft. Today's announcement really focuses on safety and working with NASA to validate the safety of these aircraft. And we are starting with battery cells to demonstrate that these battery cells are very, very safe and can be used in mass market production. And who knows, maybe one day it will be used in space too.
JD DURKIN: So I was going to ask you, do we have any idea what NASA is looking for in this technology in terms of where they see its potential use?
ADAM GOLDSTEIN: Yes, really helping to create a new transportation solution for the mass market was the original thesis behind this. But there are actually many additional use cases to be had from some of the technologies. That's why we have created and are working with very, very safe lithium-ion batteries that can be used for transportation solutions. And so it's not just limited to aerospace on the ground, you know, here on Earth, it can actually be used in space as well.
