Joby Aviation Might Buy Uber’s Air Taxi Unit

Uber has engaged in “advanced talks” about selling its air taxi business Uber Elevate to Joby Aviation, a report from Axios says.

The report cites multiple unnamed sources, and says a deal could be announced “later this month.”

Joby Aviation is based in Santa Cruz, California and has partnered with Uber Elevate in the past. The company has raised $700 million from companies like Toyota, Intel and JetBlue, Axios writes.

The possible sale comes as Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi works to attain profitability. And, it comes after he already partially sold the company’s freight and self-driving units, which had been losing money.

Uber Elevate was formed to bolster a fleet of self-driving air taxis for the company, but until now has mostly served as a way to hold an annual conference highlighting the industry as a whole, according to Axios. Elevate did have a helicopter service running for a time in New York City, with around 80 employees, though the company nixed that during the pandemic.

Uber Elevate was also involved early this year in a partnership with South Korea’s Hyundai Motor to create electric air taxis. They were planned to be piloted at first but eventually become autonomous. The project was Hyundai’s effort to catch up with their competitors in emerging technologies and to keep up with a field where consumers were gaining a higher preference for access than ownership. That has led to a fall in car ownership globally — though, since then, the pandemic occurred and people began to prefer driving in cars again for safety-related reasons.

For Uber, the service was a means to get consumers out of the private cars, though, and into a shared vehicle network. PYMNTS quotes Uber Elevate head Eric Allison, who says Hyundai “has the potential” to build the air taxis “at rates unseen in the current aerospace industry, producing high-quality, reliable aircraft at high volumes to drive down passenger costs per trip.”