Uber reportedly in talks with Joby Aviation to sell off its Elevate business

Uber is report­ed­ly in talks to sell its Ele­vate divi­sion to eVTOL air­craft devel­op­er Joby Avi­a­tion, and a deal could be announced before the end of the year.

First report­ed by Axios, the news comes as Uber CEO Dara Khos­row­shahi seeks to get the com­pa­ny back towards prof­itabil­i­ty, after it report­ed a loss of $8.6 bil­lion on rev­enues of just $14.1 bil­lion when going pub­lic in May 2019. Axios had pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed that Uber was look­ing for a buy­er for Ele­vate in Octo­ber.

Uber first pub­lished its land­mark white paper on the con­cept of an on-demand trans­porta­tion sys­tem in cities across the world in 2016. It also host­ed sev­er­al ‘Ele­vate’ sum­mits in the years that fol­lowed, to pro­mote the idea of eVTOL air­craft and Urban Air Mobil­i­ty

Uber Ele­vate plans to launch aer­i­al ride-shar­ing net­works in Dal­las, Los Ange­les and Mel­bourne by 2023. Accord­ing to its cal­cu­la­tions, a jour­ney from San Fran­cis­co to San Jose using one of its air taxis — which would be devel­oped by one of its OEM part­ners — would take just 15 min­utes, as opposed to more than two hours when mak­ing the same jour­ney in the car.

Joby Avi­a­tion is regard­ed as one of the fore­run­ners when it comes to com­mer­cial­is­ing pas­sen­ger-car­ry­ing eVTOL air­craft, and also one of Uber Ele­vate’s strate­gic OEM part­ners.

It has spent more than a decade devel­op­ing its own mod­el, raised near­ly $1 bil­lion in fund­ing and has also com­mit­ted to a 2023 time­frame for when its ser­vice is oper­a­tional.

The com­pa­ny’s air­craft will trav­el at speeds of up to 200mph and trans­port four pas­sen­gers more than 150 miles on a sin­gle charge. Joby Avi­a­tion says that its air­craft will take just 15 min­utes to trav­el the 35-mile dis­tance between LAX and New­port Beach.

A spokesper­son from both Joby Avi­a­tion and Uber declined to com­ment when approached by eVTOL Insights.