Uber Elevate Summits and White Paper

This subsection provides a brief information about Uber, the San Francisco based transportation and technology company, which has expanded to 450 cities in 73 countries and serves 60 million monthly users, and their efforts regarding urban mobility and eVTOLs; Uber Elevate White paper published in 2016 and Elevate Summits in 2017 and 2018.

Uber now added a third dimension to its business model in late September 2016. It introduced the overall framework of a future on-demand air transportation system. Uber envisions that a network of small, electric aircraft that take-off and land vertically will enable fast, reliable transportation between suburbs and cities, and within cities.

14 http://www.vtol.org/transformative

Uber’s Elevate team is developing an urban aviation ridesharing product called Uber Air.

A network of small, electric aircraft that take off and land vertically, will enable rapid, reliable transportation between suburbs and cities and, ultimately, within cities. Starting in 2023, Uber customers will be able to push a button and get a flight on-demand with Uber Air. For their vision, Uber published a white paper called “Elevate” for ODM operations, including the major technical, regulatory, and economic challenges.¹⁵ This comprehensive report has also provided significant contribution to this study. Uber has established and funded a group to perform additional ODM studies and analyses.

The Uber Elevate Summit in Dallas, April 2017, became a watershed industry event that brought together 500 stakeholders and significantly raised global profile of the emerging e VTOL industry (Swartz, 2017). The summit was a very public launch pad for an array of transformative eVTOL air vehicle. Uber Elevate leadership has also welcomed 700+ of the world's foremost aviation leaders in industry, government, and academia to discuss the vision for how urban aviation will help cities become smarter, better, and more efficient at the second Uber Elevate Summit, May 2018, in Los Angeles.¹⁶

The summits have showcased major advancements unfolding across the urban aviation industry, exploring themes of urban mobility, technological progress across aircraft and battery systems, airspace management, operations, and product at scale. Uber elevate role is closing vehicle capability gaps through requirement standards, user surveys, tools, and technologies that accelerate partners and developing a highly efficient airspace-operations-network that provides seamless multi-modal to users (Moore, 2018). Five aircraft companies have signed on as partner, and while many other companies have also begun developing eVTOL aircraft for similar or related applications. They are exploring ways to overcome barriers to make the vision a reality. Reviewing Uber’s white paper and summit presentations contributed a lot in the assessment section, chapter five, to learn more about eVTOL PATS for the future.

Over the next few years, Uber will be continuing to work closely with city and country stakeholders to ensure that Uber create an urban aviation rideshare network that is safe, quiet, environmentally conscious and supports multi-modal transportation options.¹⁷ To bring Uber Air to market, Uber have assembled a network of partners that include vehicle manufacturers, real estate developers, technology developers and three ‘launch cities. At the first Uber Elevate Summit in 2017, the team announced that the first trial city would be Dallas, a city with a rich

15 (https://www.uber.com/elevate.pdf).

16 www.uber.com/elevate or www.vtol.org/uber

17 https://www.uber.com/info/elevate/

history of aviation. At the Web Summit later that year, they announced that Los Angeles would become second launch city — one of Uber’s top markets and the most congested city in the world. In response to growing interest from across the globe, Uber announced open criteria for a third launch city outside of the United States. Importantly, Uber is not looking for cities to provide tax breaks or local incentives. Rather, they are looking for cities with aspirational vision who are investing in their transportation systems and wish to bring Uber Air to market for their residents as quickly as possible. These cities will be the first to offer Uber Air flights with the goal to begin demonstrator flights in 2020 and commercial operations in 2023.

On-demand aviation has the potential to radically improve urban mobility, giving people back time lost in their daily commutes. Uber is close to the commute pain that citizens in cities around the world feel. Just as skyscrapers allowed cities to use limited land more efficiently, urban air transportation will use three-dimensional airspace to alleviate transportation congestion on the ground. A network of small, electric aircraft that take off and land vertically will enable rapid, reliable transportation between suburbs and cities and, ultimately, within cities.

The development of infrastructure to support an urban eVTOL network will likely have significant cost advantages over heavy-infrastructure approaches such as roads, rail, bridges, and tunnels. It has been proposed that the repurposed tops of parking garages, existing helipads, and even unused land surrounding highway interchanges could form the basis of an extensive, distributed network of “vertiports” (eVTOL hubs with multiple takeoff and landing pads, as well as charging infrastructure) or single aircraft “vertistops” (a single eVTOL pad with minimal infrastructure). Furthermore, eVTOLs do not need to follow fixed routes. Trains, buses, and cars all funnel people from A to B along a limited number of dedicated routes, exposing travelers to serious delays in the event of a single interruption. eVTOLs, by contrast, can travel toward their destination independently of any specific path, making route-based congestion less prevalent.

Recently, technology advances have made it practical to build this new class of eVTOL air vehicle. Over hundred companies, with as many different design approaches, are passionately working to make eVTOLs a reality. eVTOL aircraft will make use of electric propulsion so they have zero operational emissions and will likely be quiet enough to operate in cities without disturbing the neighbors. These eVTOL designs will also be markedly safer than today’s helicopters because eVTOLs will not need to be dependent on any single part to stay airborne and will ultimately use autonomy technology to significantly reduce operator error.

Uber’s experts expect that daily long-distance commutes in heavily congested urban and suburban areas and routes under-served by existing infrastructure will be the first use cases for urban eVTOL air transportation mode. This is due to two factors. First, the amount of time and money saved increases with the trip length, so eVTOLs will have greatest appeal for those traveling longer distances and durations. Second, even though building a high density of landing site infrastructure in urban cores (e.g., on rooftops and parking structures) will take some time, a small number of vertiports could absorb a large share of demand from long-distance commuters since the “last mile” ground transportation component will be small relative to the much longer commute distance.

They also believe that in the long-term, eVTOL air transportation mode will be an affordable form of daily transportation for the masses, even less expensive than owning a car.

Ultimately, if eVTOL air transportation mode can serve the on-demand urban transit case well — quiet, fast, clean, efficient, and safe — there is a path to high production volume manufacturing (at least thousands of a specific model type built per year) which will enable eVTOLs to achieve a dramatically lower per-vehicle cost. Initially, of course, eVTOL air vehicles are likely to be very expensive, but because the ridesharing model amortizes the vehicle cost efficiently over paid trips, the high cost should not end up being prohibitive to getting started. And once the ridesharing service commences, a positive feedback loop should ensure that ultimately reduces costs and thus prices for all users, i.e., as the total number of users increases, the utilization of the aircraft increases. Logically, this continues with the pooling of trips to achieve higher load factors, and the lower price feeds back to drive more demand. This increases the volume of aircraft required, which in turn drives manufacturing costs down. This is very much the pattern exhibited during Uber’s growth in ground transportation, fueled by the transition from the higher-cost UberBLACK product to the lower-cost and therefore more utilized UberX and UberPOOL products.

Mark Moore, Uber`s engineering director of aviation (and previously at NASA where he worked on Greased Lightning, among other electric aviation projects), believes that the integration of autonomy and robotics into new e VTOL designs will improve piloting and safety, reduce acquisition and operating cost, and ultimately re-invigorate the general aviation industry by inspiring a new generation of aviators and passengers to fly. He expects companies will spend the next two to three years developing prototype two to four seats eVTOL designs with experimental certifications proceeding under 14CFR Part21.195 as the FAA works out electric propulsion certification rules.