Eve Air Mobility and Embraer announce first eVTOL production location in Brazil

Eve Air Mobil­i­ty Embraer announced today that the first eVTOL pro­duc­tion facil­i­ty will be locat­ed in the city of Taubaté, in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, sub­ject to the final author­i­ties’ approval.

The man­u­fac­tur­ing plant will be sit­u­at­ed on a des­ig­nat­ed por­tion of land with­in Embraer’s exist­ing unit in the city that will be expand­ed. The site ben­e­fits from a strate­gic logis­ti­cal loca­tion, offer­ing easy access from two high­ways and close prox­im­i­ty to a rail­road.

Anoth­er sig­nif­i­cant advan­tage is the region’s prox­im­i­ty to Embraer’s head­quar­ters in São José dos Cam­pos and Eve’s engi­neer­ing and human resources team, which will facil­i­tate the devel­op­ment and sus­tain­abil­i­ty of new pro­duc­tion process­es, enhanc­ing Eve’s agili­ty and com­pet­i­tive­ness.

“When we began our search for a man­u­fac­tur­ing loca­tion to build our eVTOL, we want­ed to reimag­ine how the air­craft could be built using the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy and man­u­fac­tur­ing process­es, cou­pled with oth­er aspects such as sup­ply chain and logis­tics,” said Andre Stein, co-CEO of Eve.

“Our objec­tive is to offer safe and reli­able prod­ucts and ser­vices to the mar­ket and be high­ly com­pet­i­tive in man­u­fac­tur­ing effi­cien­cy. The team was tasked with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to design an opti­mised assem­bly line that pri­ori­tis­es safe­ty, qual­i­ty, effi­cien­cy, pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and sus­tain­abil­i­ty.”

Embraer pres­i­dent and CEO Fran­cis­co Gomes Neto added: “This deci­sion is aligned with our growth strat­e­gy plan, which is dri­ven by inno­va­tion and sus­tain­abil­i­ty. We believe in the enor­mous poten­tial of the glob­al Urban Air Mobil­i­ty mar­ket, and we rein­force our com­mit­ment to Eve as one of the major play­ers in this indus­try.”

In May 2022, Eve announced a part­ner­ship with Porsche Con­sult­ing to define Eve’s eVTOL glob­al man­u­fac­tur­ing, sup­ply chain and logis­tics macro strat­e­gy, and have since worked togeth­er to research advanced man­u­fac­tur­ing and inno­va­tion con­cepts, using their com­bined aero­nau­ti­cal and auto­mo­tive exper­tise to design a con­cept of indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion for eVTOL air­craft based on high safe­ty, qual­i­ty, effi­cien­cy and cus­tomer focus.

Alice Altissi­mo, Vice Pres­i­dent of Pro­gram Man­age­ment and Oper­a­tion at Eve con­tin­ued: “We are focused on achiev­ing the high­est qual­i­ty stan­dards in eVTOL man­u­fac­tur­ing through increased knowl­edge and con­sid­er­a­tion of an inno­v­a­tive approach.

“Fol­low­ing exten­sive research on advanced man­u­fac­tur­ing and inno­va­tion con­cepts for over a year, we are now pre­pared to estab­lish our ini­tial fac­to­ry for eVTOL pro­duc­tion. With con­fi­dence in our capa­bil­i­ties, we are equipped to effi­cient­ly scale the pro­duc­tion vol­ume sus­tain­ably to meet the demands of a grow­ing mar­ket.”

In May 2022, Embraer con­clud­ed a series of exper­i­men­tal flights in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro, focussed on eval­u­at­ing new autonomous sys­tem tech­nolo­gies in real flight con­di­tions.

Embraer and Eve eval­u­ate autonomous flight in real flights over Rio de Janeiro