[ngoel36]

@mdorazio - agreed that helicopters today are largely reserved for the commutes of the wealthy, and they are also too loud for most cities (outside of NYC and Sao Paulo) to tolerate at any meaningful scale.

My team and I published a whitepaper in 2016 that goes into detail on the cost projections for electric VTOL: uber.com/elevate.pdf.

You don't quite need a 10x reduction -- helis are ~$10/passenger-mile today and an Uber X is about $1.50, so you need a 6-7x reduction to be on par. You get ~30% from the new vehicle (electric, more efficient) and you get the remainder from higher utilization and low factors enabled by the lower cost and noise. Scaled manufacturing and autonomy get you to ~$0.50/passenger-mile which is on par with the variable price of car ownership.

The FAA is extremely supportive of certifying these aircraft -- here is the Administrator Dickson speaking to that directly yesterday: https://evtol.com/news/dickson-faa-15-evtol-aircraft/

Add -- the utilization and load factor efficiencies apply to helicopters today, we are proving that with Uber Copter in NYC: https://www.uber.com/blog/new-york-city/uber-copter/ -- ~$200 from Manhattan to JFK