Nikhil Goel
As co-founder of Uber Elevate, Nikhil Goel helped establish the vision of urban air mobility (UAM) that has since captured the imaginations of entrepreneurs and investors around the world.
Now, as new chief commercial officer of Archer Aviation, he is working to establish the startup’s go-to-market strategy ahead of a planned commercial launch in 2025. In one of his first interviews in his new role, Goel sat down with the AAM Report to discuss his expectations for the AAM industry in the coming years. An abridged transcript follows:
AAM Report: Is there anything about the development of the AAM ecosystem so far that has really surprised you?
A couple of things. One is that capital has come into the industry far more aggressively than I expected. I think the IPOs we saw in 2020 and 2021 were really phenomenal catalysts, and something like $10 billion has been raised toward eVTOLs [electric-vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles] since we published the white paper in 2016, which is really amazing. The second thing that’s happened is the players that were in the lead three to five years ago are no longer leading. Back then, established incumbents like Bell and Airbus and Boeing were considered major contenders, whereas now the upstarts like Joby and Archer have really taken over. In some ways, it was expected because the classic Innovator’s Dilemma basically played itself out. In other ways, it’s a bit of a shocker because these are really phenomenal, massive aerospace companies that really had every advantage in the book, but just never made it happen.
What do you think the competitive landscape will look like in the coming years?
Look, I think that, ultimately, there’s going to be a lot of players in this space, but I do believe that Archer and Joby are going to be the only two to certify in the near term. That’s because you need a lot of capital to do it—that’s just the harsh reality. You also need to be able to take off and land vertically, of course, which is also technically challenging. But I think the real important thing to focus on is that this is a very iterative approach. The aircraft that both Joby and Archer are going to certify and deploy in 2025 is effectively our Tesla Roadster. It’s a phenomenal feat of engineering. It’s also, in some ways, the worst aircraft we’ll ever make because we’re going to iterate on that quickly. So, by the time other players get to market, we’ll already be on the V2, V3 of our aircraft. Archer’s approach has really been to get to market as safely and quickly as possible. Because once we’re out there, that’s what enables us to really go learn from passengers, airports and cities and build upon that experience quickly.
How should we think about the capabilities of the next generation of eVTOLs?
The most important piece of what we’re building is the battery, and that’s something that billions of dollars are being poured into every year. Battery efficiency improves 5-7% per year compounded, and so by the time we get to market there will be a new generation of battery cells available, and the batteries that will be certified will already be obsolete. So as battery technology improves, you can do one of three things: you can improve the range, you can improve the speed and you can improve the payload. That’s going to open many new route possibilities. So take a route like Manhattan to the Hamptons. That’s probably going to be a bit too far to be possible with V1 of the aircraft, but by V2 it will probably be within range.
The second thing you’ll see over the coming years is just the ability to operate these vehicles more safely and autonomously. So you’ll start to see it become easier and easier to be an operator of the aircraft until eventually you take the pilot out of the cockpit and actually fly it fully autonomously.
How critical will the airport shuttle market be? And when can you move beyond those services?
Airport transfers are only a beginning. They’re important for two reasons. One is, if you look at Uber where I spent a lot of time, roughly 20% of our revenue came from trips to and from the airport. So it’s a really important place where people don’t want to take their own cars, mainly because airports are moving farther and farther away from cities and parking is expensive. Number two is that one half of the equation is already solved for us because the airport obviously exists, and so it’s already a safe place to take off and land with air traffic control, etc. So that makes airports really attractive.
The way I see it is, we’ll have airport routes going from airport to city center and other destinations. You’ll have intracity routes for commuters who are going to and from work twice a day. You’ll have leisure routes, so if you can go to the beach in 10 minutes by eVTOL, maybe you’ll do it every day instead of once a month. You’ll have more tourist-related routes; maybe you can go out to a remote area that was previously inaccessible by car. One example could be LA to Santa Monica–most people have never done that trip but you can do it in as little as 10 minutes by air taxi. So airport routes are just the beginning.
Are you concerned that UAM services may not be affordable for the majority of the population?
The way we’ll ensure against that is by getting to market as quickly as possible. Let’s go back to the Tesla Roadster example. That was not an accessible vehicle for most people. Today, you can get a Model 3 for under $30,000, including tax credits. And so the beautiful thing about this technology is that every part of it is set up with a really aggressive cost curve that will decrease precipitously with scale. Helicopters don’t do that because they have effectively asymptoted. The price of gasoline is not really going to go down, the price of the parts of the helicopter are not going to go down. But with eVTOLs, on the other hand, the load factors are only going to go up. The vehicle itself will only get more affordable with scaled manufacturing. The cost to operate it will only go down as autonomous tech gets better. And so every piece of the operating cost puzzle is set up to decrease with scale.
Archer recently announced a contract with the U.S. Air Force. What is the opportunity to sell eVTOLs for military applications?
The Department of Defense has been a great partner for us. And from a commercialization perspective, it’s great for a few reasons. One is that it just highlights how the U.S. is going to be at the forefront of bringing this technology to market to the world. It’s sort of becoming a national imperative that this technology comes to the U.S. first and gets built here first. Then number two is that the DOD sees myriad use cases, not just across the Air Force, but also with the Navy and Army. There are use cases from the transport of military personnel or delivery of cargo, for movement between bases, etc. If you just think about how the military uses helicopters today, we have the potential to replace a really large percentage of them with eVTOLs that are quieter, safer and more affordable. So we really want to not just start the partnership we announced, but think about how it expands into the future as well.
The FAA recently published its implementation plan for scaled UAM operations by 2028. How do you view that timeline?
We’re really supportive of what the FAA put out there, which is very much aligned with our plans. In fact, most of that is work product from our Chief Safety Officer, Billy Nolen, who was the acting administrator at the FAA. He had the great idea to essentially put out a forcing function that ensures by the time the Olympics are here in Los Angeles in 2028, we’re going to see real scale with vibrant ecosystems of multiple commercial operators that are flying hundreds and thousands of people around cities. That’s our vision as well. And the FAA is still planning for operations to start in 2025, in line with our planning. And so you can expect to see a few dozen vehicles from Archer and Joby spread across two or three cities in 2025, but both of these operations are going to scale up into the hundreds and potentially thousands of vehicles per year by the end of the decade.
How aligned is Archer with the original vision set forth by Uber Elevate?
Goel: The reason I came to Archer is because, out of everyone in the playing field, I thought they were extremely aligned with how we envisioned the world at Uber Elevate. At Uber, we talked about building an efficient tiltrotor aircraft that effectively stood on the shoulders of giants and leveraged the supply chain that already existed–the pieces from Honeywell, from Garmin, etc. And Adam Goldstein and the Archer team have done a phenomenal job at that. They’ve also done a really great job of presenting to the world that this vision is real and it’s coming soon. Also, by bringing in major partners like United Airlines, that has done so much to promote the fact that this is credible, and it’s going to be safe. Those are really the things that drew me to the Archer mission.
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