Hyundai’s Supernal eVTOL division is laying off 80% of its staff but the company insists it’s in the advanced air mobility business for the long haul. “This decision is a strategic pivot to ensure our staffing and cost structures are optimized for the long-term delivery of our market-aligned aircraft design,” a company spokesman told the Orange County Register. “Hyundai Motor Group remains committed to the Advanced Air Mobility business as part of its future mobility vision, and Supernal will continue to serve as the group’s dedicated AAM execution arm for aircraft development.”
Hyundai has sunk $1.7 billion into the design that included tilting electric motors for the vertical part that swing to the horizontal to push and pull the vehicle. According to autoblog.com it’s been struggling to make the aircraft work properly during testing at facility in Mojave. Work on the vehicle has been stalled since last September. That didn’t stop the company from announcing a joint venture with Uber in January.
While admiring their efforts, I still don’t see how these new ideas are going to compete with the already many fine high performance helicopters already available. I don’t see how that machine can operate in and out of areas making it Uber usable. I’ll continue to enjoy watching development, but not investing in these ideas for now…for sure.
Bingo, Roger. Anyone who has spent any time doing reliability engineering knows that as the parts count goes up, the reliability goes down. The more complex the design, the more likely catastrophic failure modes can develop. The military may need a contraption like the V-22 Osprey to enable a dash in/dash out heavy lift capability but most civilian missions don’t need that time advantage. MY guess is that — just like NASA found out with the X-57 Maxwell — Hyundai found out an idea like this is little more than ‘pie in the sky’ fantasy that isn’t cost effective.
The eVTOL visionaries must really *hate* the LLM/AI visionaries, as they’ve sucked all of the Oxygen (i.e. VC money and private equity) out of the room.
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EVTOL is a bad idea unless it is hybrid with a IC or turbine for wing borne flight. The distributed electric motors then need smaller batteries for the VTOL part. Distributed electric propulsion solves the safety and redundancy that in the past has caused most VTOL projects to fail.
For a few intoxicating years now, the future of urban mobility sounds like a mosquito choir.
Investors, consultants, and a small army of PowerPoint experts promise that fleets of electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft would soon rise above the traffic-clogged misery of our cities. Commuting? Pah! Congestion? Pah. The sky, we are told, will be the new freeway.
Reality (just like Physics) has this nasty habit of happening, regardless of how much money one burns on the way to learn this lesson.
I am beginning to think that this whole farce is nothing but another well thugged out cash grab/ tax evasion scheme.
Since the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles is planning to have a major presence of eVTOL to shuttle athletes, spectators and news media to the various venues, that should serve as a make-or-break test to see if the whole concept is viable. Considering that LA is the nexus of bad traffic and crowded skies, if it can make it there, it can make it anywhere (apologies to Frank Sinatra and New York New York). So, by the fall of ’28, we should have an answer. Maybe we should start a pool….
John, I agree. LA28 is where the sales talk meets the real world. SoCal airspace is already crowded, and the Olympics will pile on to existing traffic, If eVTOL can operate in that mess and still make sense, then it earns credibility. But if it only works as a staged VIP demo, then it will just be a tap dance.