Toyota Is Upping Its Investment in Air Taxi Company Joby Aviation

Robotaxis aren’t the only place where the basic concept of “pay someone with a vehicle to take me a short distance” is undergoing some high-tech permutations. There’s also the matter of air taxis: small vehicles that can take you somewhere local — and where, as a beloved fictional scientist said, “we don’t need roads.”

This week, Toyota pledged to invest an additional $500 million in Joby Aviation, bringing their overall investment in the electric air taxi company to $894 million. The two companies have been working together for almost seven years, and Joby Aviation’s founder and CEO, JoeBen Bevirt, had good things to say about the partnership when announcing this new functing.

“The knowledge and support shared by Toyota has been instrumental in Joby’s success and we look forward to deepening our relationship as we deliver on our shared vision for the future of air travel,” Bevirt said in a statement.

This latest funding follows an agreement between the two companies in which Toyota agreed to develop powertrain technology to be used in Joby’s air taxis. As Autoweek‘s Jay Ramey noted, this also follows Joby Aviation’s first successful test in a metropolitan area, which took place in New York City in November 2023. One of Joby’s air taxis is now on display in Grand Central Station.

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As Jeff Wise observed in New York, electric VTOL technology has gone from theoretical to tangible in recent years — but there’s still something of a legal question surrounding its wider adoption. Wise, who’s been covering this part of the industry for years, pointed out that regulations of ultralight flying vehicles include relatively strict fuel requirements, which some manufacturers have worked around.

The focus of the New York article is on personal craft rather than air taxis — but it does open the door to questions about the extent to which flying cars will be widespread as opposed to a speciality market.