This Florida Startup Says It Can Make Electric Air Taxis Happen
RIO DE JANEIRO—A sales pitch for electric air taxis at Web Summit(Opens in a new window) had the benefit of a persuasive backdrop: congested to congealed traffic that for three mornings in a row turned a roughly 6-mile ride from my hotel to the Riocentro conference venue into a 40-50-minute slog.
“I spend one hour a day coming here,” said André Stein, CEO of Eve Air Mobility(Opens in a new window), in a panel Thursday morning(Opens in a new window) after attendees raised their hands to indicate they’d spent more than 25 minutes on their own commutes.
“Every time you're stuck in a traffic jam, you're probably thinking there's some better way to do that,” he said. “That's what urban air mobility is about.”
(Rio de Janeiro has a fairly extensive bus rapid transit network(Opens in a new window) with its own lanes, although that service only covered part of my Web Summit route.)
Eve, a Melbourne, Florida, startup spun out of and backed by Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer, aims to make this happen with its four-passenger, human-piloted eVTOL(Opens in a new window) (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft. It will ascend and descend vertically using eight rotors and fly in between powered by two larger ducted propellers for faster speeds and lower noise. Stein said it will begin flying in 2026.
“You can say that it's the kid of a drone and a commercial aircraft,” he told his onstage interviewer, Diogo Teixeira, co-owner and publisher of the Lisbon-based automotive-news site Razão Automóvel.
Eve cites a range of 60 miles but doesn’t advertise a particular speed. A trip calculator on its site assumes a 125mph cruising speed, while an April 2022 concept-of-operations paper (PDF(Opens in a new window)) says a
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