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17-11-2024
PARIS: One of the innovations at this year’s Paris Olympics was supposed to be an electric flying taxi service.
Germany’s Volocopter promised its electric-powered, two-seater aircraft, the VoloCity, would be ferrying passengers around the city.
It never happened. Instead the company ran demonstration flights.
While missing that deadline was embarrassing, behind the scenes a more serious issue was playing out Volocopter was urgently trying to raise fresh investment to keep the firm going.
Talks to borrow €100m (£83m; $106m) from the government failed in April.
Now hopes are pinned on China’s Geely, which is in talks to take an 85% stake in Volocopter in return for $95m of funding, according to a Bloomberg report. The deal could mean that any future manufacturing would be moved to China.
Volocopter is one of dozens of companies around the world developing an electric vertical take-off and landing (EVTOL) aircraft.
Their machines promise the flexibility of a helicopter but without the cost, noise and emissions.
However, faced with the massive cost of getting such novel aircraft approved by regulators and then building up manufacturing capabilities, some investors are bailing out.
One of the most high-profile casualties is Lilium.
The German company had developed a radical take on the EVTOL theme.
Lilium’s aircraft uses 30 electric jets that can be tilted in unison to swing between vertical lift and forward flight.
The concept proved attractive, with the company claiming to have orders and memoranda of understanding for 780 jets from around the world.
It was able to demonstrate the technology using a remote controlled scale model. Construction had begun on the first full-sized jets, and testing had been due to begin in early 2025.
As recently as the Farnborough Airshow in July, Lilium’s COO Sebastian Borel was sounding confident.
“We are definitely burning through cash,” he told media but “this is a good sign, because it means we are producing the aircraft. We’re going to have three aircraft in production by the end of the year, and we have also raised €1.5bn” but then the money ran out.
Lilium had been attempting to arrange a loan worth €100m from the German development bank, KfW. However, that required guarantees from national and state governments, which never materialized.
In early November, the company put its main operating businesses into insolvency proceedings, and its shares were removed from the NASDAQ stock exchange.
For the moment, work on the new aircraft is continuing, as the company works with restructuring experts to sell the business or bring in new investment. However, getting the new e-jet into production is looking more challenging than ever.
The high-profile British player in the eVTOL market is Vertical Aerospace. The Bristol-based company was founded in 2016 by businessman Stephen Fitzpatrick, who also set up OVO Energy.
Its striking VX4 design uses eight large propellers mounted on slim, aircraft style wings to generate lift. Fitzpatrick has made ambitious claims about the aircraft, suggesting it would be “100 times” safer and quieter than a helicopter, for 20% of the cost. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
