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Joby Looks to Toyota for Investment and Manufacturing

Building an eVTOL with Toyota know-how

Joby Aviation eVTOl aircraft. (Roberto Baldwin)

In Marina, California, just north of the Monterey Bay, sits a small airport. In a previous life, it was a helicopter-focused military base. Currently, Joby Aviation is one of a handful of businesses occupying the space. The eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) aircraft company is one of a few such companies that people have actually heard of and is still around.

Established in 2009, Joby has been developing, building, and testing its eVTOL aircraft in Marina. During SAE Media’s recent visit to the location, Joby showed off its latest aircraft but, more importantly, talked about how it's been able to leverage a nearly $900-million investment and partnership with automaker Toyota to build its eVTOLs.

Set to take flight first in Dubai with partner Uber later this year, then eventually in the United States, the all-electric Joby eVTOL airtaxis could replace traditional helicopters as the go-to for those seeking to skip over traffic to get from point A to point B. The company says its aircraft are quieter and safer than helicopters. An eVTOL could lose power to multiple propellers before becoming unflyable, while most helicopters have only one main rotor.

“We’re trying to bring this entirely new class of aircraft to market,” Eric Allison, chief product officer at Joby Aviation, said during a presentation. These aircraft would take off and land at Joby-helmed facilities where passengers would hop aboard flights booked through an app. While landed, the eVTOLs would be recharged via a proprietary port that would handle data and electricity, with the cables housed under the landed area and accessible by a ground crew.

To achieve this goal, Joby has the financial backing of Toyota that comes with perks.

The Toyota Way

Joby's carbon-fiber parts are placed in a large oven to cure the epoxy. (Roberto Baldwin)

Toyota is known for its manufacturing prowess. At one point in the ‘80s, Toyota took GM's worst-performing plant, NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc.), and through a partnership between the two automakers created a facility that was a leader in manufacturing. The plant, located in Fremont, California, is now operated by Tesla.

The automaker took notice of Joby in 2017, with the automaker's investment arm becoming part of Joby’s series B and C funding. That's where most companies stop. Toyota, on the other hand, decided to help Joby tackle the one thing that typically wipes out a new company: building the actual product.

Toyota’s group vice president of flying mobility, Sandy Lobenstein, was on hand at the Marina facility to help guide Joby as it moves closer and closer to creating an aircraft to be deployed to the public, with "the collaboration really started picking up in 2019,” Lobenstein said.

Toyota's manufacturing expertise has been integrated into how Joby builds its current pre-production aircraft. While not building at the scale of Toyota, the aircraft company sees the benefits of learning from one of the largest automakers in the world.

"To have someone with the background, the knowledge, the history of quality, the foundation of any sort of product, that Toyota has to infuse that into our DNA right at the beginning, that's kind of the magic in a lot of ways," Allison said.

Toyota Japan is manufacturing some critical parts and components for Joby’s powertrains at its Monomachi and Teiho, Japan, locations. The automaker is shipping those to Joby's manufacturing center in Marina and a new manufacturing center in Dayton, Ohio. The two locations are joined by a component plant in San Carlos, California, and the Joby headquarters, which are located in Santa Cruz, California.

Challenges

Toyota manufactures powertrain parts for Joby, including the electric motor stator. (Roberto Baldwin)

Even with Toyota's help, Joby has a relatively slow road ahead when it comes to building its aircraft, compared to automobile manufacturing. The company currently builds one aircraft per month, but hopes to increase that number to four aircraft a month by 2027. Each aircraft is built by hand one at a time with an epoxy-infused carbon-fiber shell that needs to be baked in giant ovens. Quality standards are extremely strict in order to make sure the aircraft adheres to standards and regulations.

During a recent tour of the Marina facility, I saw the stages where the aircraft are assembled. Teams of employees work in specialized areas, manufacturing and inspecting items. Near the end of the tour, a nearly completed aircraft was being assembled, but we were not allowed to photograph the craft. Still, we could see the inner workings.

The company needs to bring a new type of aircraft to market while meeting the expectations of investors like Toyota. The plan is to launch the airtaxi service in Dubai by the end of the year. Inclement weather during the visit kept Joby from conducting a demonstration flight. Recently, the company conducted a flight from Marina up past Santa Cruz to Bonny Dunn, California, where Joby got its start.

The plan now is to demo the aircraft at different locations around the United States and other countries.

The pilots

At the end of the tour, Joby placed me in a simulator. I was virtually able to fly from Brooklyn, New York to JFK airport. With some coaching, I was able to take off, fly, and land. I don't have a pilot's license, but this felt far less complex than flying a helicopter. That said, Joby is working with the FAA to create a license for these types of crafts. The pilot would have to have an established license before taking the Joby course.

Talk of robo-airtaxis is out there, but for the time being, it's going to be humans flying humans around for Joby. For this aviation company, the magic sauce isn't a big pile of money and gumption. It's a big pile of money, gumption, and the manufacturing know-how of Toyota.

Topics:
Aircraft Automotive Aviation Electrification

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    Transcript

    00:00:07 Today's a super special day. We've just finished preparing the aircraft. We're going to fly from Marina, which is our home base airport. We're going to fly up the coastline past Santa Cruz to Bonnie Dune. And there's a Quarry Bowl there, which is really significant to Joby. This is where Joby all started. A lot of the engineering, the testing, even the manufacturing came

    00:00:28 from Bonny Dune. Super excited to see the aircraft come back to where it all started. [music]
    >> Now we're coming full circle. I think it's just a nice homecoming.
    >> Today's flight is just another example of what our aircraft can do. Another mission set that demonstrates our reliability, our safety. This aircraft is the future.

    00:00:44
    >> All right, RPM shift coming along right for the course. All right, down. We're coming up.
    >> A lot of testing, a lot of troubleshooting, a lot of experimenting to get to this stage. There's been a lot of hard work put into this. A lot of long nights, a lot of early mornings, and it's just amazing where we started to where we are now.

    00:01:08 Today was really testing that all the systems we put in place in terms of communicating with a ground control station beyond visual line of sight, beyond radio line of sight, how we do over the horizon comms back with our GCS where the engineers are watching all the parameters on the airplane. This was a test to really expand the

    00:01:29 distances that we've flown to date. The quarry is a magical place. Freeze your mind. Everything's possible here. I've been at Joby since 2019, early 2019, so coming up on 7 years. This is the birthplace of the S4. There's a lot of early morning and late nights developing and building each piece. Everybody used to be here or in the Cory

    00:02:05 Bowl. So if you design something or you work on something, you literally just walk it to the plane. There was a single focus and everyone just worked on a problem together. I've worked at Toby since 2013. I came here straight out of college. We did most of the composits work for the old airplane that we'll see down there in in Bonnie up here at

    00:02:28 Woodpecker. You know, even the mill that's down there we used to make the MDF tools that we made the carbon parts out of all, you know, here. This was Joby. There wasn't a marina. There wasn't a St. Carlos. It's like sort of unbelievable given where we started. My impressions of Joby when I got here 6 years ago all originated here at the

    00:02:48 Corey. I had such an incredible feeling when I met the entire team that day. It just took me no time to realize that I had to go back to Montana and immediately move my family here. But it was just completely worth it and I have loved that decision ever since.
    >> Jaban has a knack for finding good people and he sees the strength in

    00:03:11 people. It may not exactly be what their degree says or whatever their experience is. He just finds what they do best and he'll put people together where each one will feed off each other's energy. There is no limits or nobody ever stops you. If you come up with an idea or if you think, "Hey, I want to try this thing." Nobody ever stops you. They're like, "Go

    00:03:33 for it."
    >> Just to have everyone's hard work come full circle. and to know how much we've grown and how far we've come and to be here to support our flight test team that works so hard and let them know how grateful and proud we are of them to create this milestone for all of us. We're making history here.

    00:04:01
    >> Welcome home, man.
    >> All right.
    >> Coming up here today was just such a gorgeous day for flying. It was nice just coming up the beach there, Santa Cruz, looking at all the people privileged to be surfing at Pleasure Point and Steamer's Lane. The airplane performed flawlessly. You know, I had an easy job. The airplane was

    00:04:20 taking care of itself on track. I got a chance to just really look around and absorb the day. It's a testament to the entire engineering team. This really unlocks us for this coming year where we are going to go barnstorming around the US demoing the airplane in different sites. This is a bookend story for the company. We go forward from here.

    00:04:46
    >> The whole tenant of redefining possible, it's very true here.

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