"At Paris Air Show, eVTOL Industry Preps for Takeoff"

From the Daily Upside, June 17:

It’s a bird … it’s a plane … it’s an … electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle, or eVTOL (neither of which exactly rolls off the tongue, if you ask us).

As Airbus lands major sales and Boeing tries to regain its credibility at this year’s Paris Air Show, the upstart not-quite-a-plane, not-quite-a-helicopter, not-quite-cleared-for-liftoff eVTOL industry is climbing closer and closer to achieving its sky-high ambitions. For key US players Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation, the show comes at a critical moment.

Icarus Moment

Both Archer and Joby went public in 2020 during the SPAC craze. Like a lot of SPAC companies, their appeal to investors was largely speculative — and, five years later, remains somewhat speculative (neither has completed a commercial flight yet). But promises of a Jetsons-esque future of battery-powered flying taxis are starting to look a little more real, especially after a slew of developments in just the past couple of weeks.

At the end of May, Joby announced it received $250 million from Toyota, the second tranche of a $500 million investment from the major automaker announced in October (which itself followed a previous $394 million investment from Toyota). Then, last week, came the big news: As part of a broader initiative to promote domestic drone production, the White House issued an executive order to launch a pilot program for the nascent industry. 

The announcement brought renewed interest to the pair of eVTOL firms, which showed both companies may have climbed a little too close to the sun:

• Shares of Joby had spiked more than 30% in the days immediately following the announcement of the Toyota cash infusion. That led analysts at Cantor Fitzgerald to quell some of the excitement, downgrading the stock from overweight to neutral while highlighting the company’s high cash-burn rate and lack of near-term upside....

....MORE 

We said in the introduction to October 2016's "Uber to Challenge Airbus in the Autonomous Electric Flying Taxi Business":
As the only analysts covering the nascent as-yet-theoretical autonomous electric flying taxi market we intend to be the the go-to source for all things autonomous electric flying taxi and/or theoretical... 

Well, nine years later, it looks like the industry is approaching takeoff.

And it appears we may have some upstart analyst competition. Arrivistes!
Or, as Churchill's detective/bodyguard was reputed to have commented on meeting a certain American "He has the whiff of the parvenu about him".