What Do We Know About the World’s First Real Flying Car

Time is one of the most valuable resources on earth. One year of life you're going to spend in traffic, standing there. That's a huge amount of time. We're not making the cars for the reach, otherwise it doesn't solve the initial problem. This is why it is important for us to get it to the affordable price. Everyone can remember when they did not have time to reach somewhere because of the traffic. And if they did, that would actually change their lives. Our great area innovator today is Jim Ducampne, founder of Aleph Aeronautics and the driving force behind what's called the world's first true flying car. Based in San Mateo, Aleph has just begun flight testing at the Half Moon Bay Airport and soon to be the Hollister Airport, making the first time a vehicle that looks and acts like a normal car takes off vertically from real streets in California. But not everyone is convinced. Critics flood social media with skepticism, calling it fake, unsafe or just a fantasy. In this episode, Jim takes on those doubts, clears up misconceptions and explains why he believes the future of flying cars is closer than we think. This is Area Innovators and I'm your host, Steve Viswas. Jim, welcome to our program. Thank you, Steve. Well, great to have you here. Flying cars, it's something that's been talked about for many years, mostly science fiction. I think probably Back to the Future was the movie I remember, probably most people remember that flying cars became the thing. But I think it's been a dream for many for a long time. And it seems like you're bringing it together. First thing I want to ask you is tell us, how did you get this started? What was the inspiration? What was the idea that gave you this idea? How did you get started? Sure, so it's me and my three co-founders, Constantine, Oleg and Paul. And for all of us, there was actually two big parts of exploration. One is our fathers. Most, well, actually all of our fathers were engineers and scientists. For example, my father, Joseph Duchovny, his patents were used on spaceships. So he was an engineer. On the other hand, all of our fathers, again, and specifically us, loved science fiction, which you alluded to. It was actually book science fiction. Even Jules Verne's, if I'm not mistaken, 1905 started mentioning flying cars and so on. So that has been well over a century, when people mention flying cars. Obviously, with the Hollywood and Back to the Future, Blade Runner, Fifth Element, and many others, there is a notion of flying cars. So we have actually a very interesting product that people already know how it's supposed to look like, how it's supposed to function like. So the inspiration is actually taking a science fiction, taking something which is fictional and made up. And marrying it with the hard science, with the hard engineering, right? If you take any of the parts away, it's not going to work, right? Because as you know, people try to make flying cars for centuries, as you correctly pointed out, with little success. There are many reasons for that. And also, obviously, it was portrayed in science fiction, right? So if you take away any of the two parts, it's not going to work. So our main inspiration was book science fiction. And our fathers who worked on a real science, and if you want to, were like dreamers as far as the science, as far as the better future. Have they been involved, your fathers, in any way with the company? Or just more like inspiration? Not really. Unfortunately, my father passed away before he learned what we do. So obviously, to my co-founders, their fathers probably know what they do. But I think it's mostly up to us right now. But I think it is in DNA. So it is important to us what we do here. Tell us more about your thoughts of science fiction versus reality. How do you differentiate and how do you know when you want to combine the two? So the, at least American definition of science fiction, is something which is scientifically possible, right? It's not just completely made up. So it is scientifically possible, which means we kind of have a blueprint, right? Now, we talked about AI, we talked about many different things. It's a question of maturing of technology. So around 2015, when we started the company, about the marrying, by the way, science fiction and reality, by complete coincidence, as you know, the car from the Back to the Future, the flying car, traveled exactly to the year 2015 is when we started the company. Yes, yes. It's a complete coincidence. But yes, so the science fiction becomes, as you pointed out, a reality when technology matures. In our cases, around 2015, multiple technology matured without any of them that would not be possible. First and foremost, it's a battery technology, electric battery technology, right, rapid prototyping, composite materials, especially software. It's a software design, it's a software control, it's a drone software which we use, right? A lot of drone technologies, microprocessing. So many technologies came together. For example, before you need a very expensive wind tunnel. Right now we can simulate it in software. And then once we're actually building the results are pretty accurate of simulation of the wind tunnel, rather than physically testing in a very expensive wind tunnel as before. So a lot of technology matured and this is how science fiction becomes reality. You take multiple, actually, usually multiple technologies, not just one technology, and you take some dream or some idea, and you see if you can put technology versus that fiction. And often enough, you actually can come up with something tangible. When people hear about flying cars, the first question that comes to mind is how does it actually work? For decades, we've seen flying cars in science fiction movies, but they have never really become real. Today, Jim's company is claiming a true breakthrough. In this part, I'd like to talk to him about the principles, the challenges, and how he managed to go beyond others who tried and failed. Please tell us as much as you can, how does it actually work? How does your car actually work? As far as are there propellers, how does it turn? How does it go up and down? Just give us a sense of the technology or the breakthroughs that you came up with. So first of all, it's not only me, it's my three co-founders too, Konstantin, Oleg, and Paul. So it's that case where a picture worth a thousand words, but I'll try to describe it with my hands. Let's say you have a car, you take away engine or everything which is in front of you, and you take the trunk away. In the empty space, you put what is called DEP, distributed electric propulsion. Distributed electric propulsion, in our case, is eight independent propeller, motor, speed controller, battery systems, independent, four in the front, four in the back, which give you a differential thrust, which means one propeller can spin at one speed, another at another. All eight are independently controlled by microprocessors. And each have their own battery and everything? Right, so that provides you a redundancy, and that also provides you a differential thrust for stability, for turning, and for everything. Now, you need an air circulation. So top of the car, instead of being solid as you used to, we created what is called a mesh. So on one hand, it provides a structure, it's also a safety device. On the other hand, it allows the air through for the lift, right? Now, you still need to drive, right? So the engine, which used to be in front, got replaced by four motors inside four wheels. This is not new. Everything I'm just saying is not new. It's putting together, all of it is new, right? In addition, we have other things which make it possible, for example, transition to the biplane, which means the sides of the car. They do not stick out, they actually work as wings of the airplane. So there are multiple parts which are reused, as you can see, because it's at the same time car and an airplane. And a common misconception is you're either gonna have a crappy car or crappy airplane. That's not true if you use design tools correctly, and if you use the latest software, as we talked about, including AI, by the way, for design, right? And that can optimize parts that not only you do not compromise either car or an airplane, you're actually winning in both cases. There seem to be many companies that call their products flying cars, yet you're saying that yours is the first real flying car. Tell us why. So words matters, definition matters. So people try to redefine what flying car is. The traditional definition of flying car, again, you refer to science fiction, right? Yes. Everybody understood what a flying car is. It's a car with a vertical takeoff. Every movie you just mentioned, Back to the Future, Blade Runner, Fifth Element, all the book science fiction like Asimov, Bradbury, Jules Verne, right? All of them depict flying cars the same way, right? It's a car with a vertical takeoff. Surprisingly enough, electric helicopters, eVTOLs, are called right now flying cars. They have nothing to do with a car, like absolutely nothing. They don't look like a car, they don't drive like a car, they have nothing to do with a car. Personal flying vehicles like Jetson One, for example, or Blackfly, also being called flying cars. There are also another type of vehicles which are actually cars with expendable wings which need an airport and runway to take off. I've seen those, yes. Which kind of defies the whole purpose of the flying car, and it's again not what traditionally everybody thought the flying car is. So yes, you can redefine what a flying car is, you can redefine what the car is, you can redefine what the chair is, what the human is. Now, I'm not saying anything bad about those categories, by the way. They are making absolute breakthrough in aviation. They're completely disrupting the market. They're doing absolutely genius, great work from engineering business and customer point of view. But this is different, this is not flying car. So flying car is actually A, disrupting the automotive market. It's automotive, uses automotive infrastructure, uses automotive business model. So it is a car which can also fly. It's not an airplane with wheels which can drive. This is completely different, right? Again, the image, that's another thing where the picture was a thousand words here, looking at how eVTOLs look, how flying taxis look. Taxi is how you use something. You can use a bicycle as a taxi, you can use a horse as a taxi. Taxi is the business model, taxi is not defining of what it is. So eVTOLs, personal flying vehicles, again, cars with expendable wings, like airport cars. Those are different categories, right? And they have nothing to do with a flying car. This is why, where the first actual car was a vertical takeoff. And I think this is important because there was a reason everybody depicted the flying car the same way. There's a reason people want exactly the flying car and not an electric helicopter. There are many, many advantages in the commute, in usage, in accessibility, in availability. All of it is a completely different category. We just talked about the principles and the technological breakthroughs of the flying car. In this section, I would like to talk about specs and performance. And looking into the future, if the flying car market continues to grow, will there be different models, like a luxury car, sedans, pickup trucks, or even sports cars? Let's talk about specs first. Some of this information is on your website, but just give us a sense. How fast can it go? How high? What's the range? Things like that, for our audience to know. Sure, so first, let's differentiate, again, this is something which is a misconception online, between different models. The specs which are published are specs for the Model A. Okay. Model A is the first consumer model to be delivered, fully functioning model. There is Model 0, there's Model 0 Ultralight. There are several, actually, Model 0 Ultralight versions. There is Model A, the first commercial model. There is what we call Model Z, a future model, which is going to be somewhere in the future, right? So specs, let's talk about the Model A, because those are more relevant, right? So the maximum range, the maximum flying range, is 110 miles. Or maximum driving range is 200 miles. That's an or, that's not an and. Or any kind of combination of the two. Now, the favorite question is, how high does it go? Because when we were in Detroit at the show, 99.9% of the people asked the same question, how high does it go? So it can go 10,000 feet, it can go very high, but it's not efficient. When you drive, it uses battery very efficiently, it uses energy efficiently. When you fly forward in a biplane mode, it uses energy very efficiently. When you do what we call a rotorcraft mode, right, because it's what is called a rotorcraft. That's what people mistakenly call drones sometimes. Rotorcraft mode, when you go up, you drain your battery. Propellers have to spin really fast to gain the weight, and it's very not optimal. So the higher you go, the less forward you're gonna go, right? So this is optimization between when you wanna drive, how high do you wanna go, and how far do you wanna go forward, and in which scenario you wanna go forward, right? Now, other specs are people saying, like, how many people it can fit? My usual answer is one and a half, because you can't, it is a, so it's a kind of an old school, old cars, like you could fit multiple people in there, unlike modern cars. That being said, for better luck of the words, our car designer, like famous car designer, Hiroshi Rozagi, he's from Sweden, says the whole car is designed, the starting point of design of the car is the size of somebody's behind. So this is kind of the width of the seat, which you have, and around that, kind of you design how the car looks like. So yes, we can fit, it's actually not the weight. The weight is not the limitation. It's the width of the cabin, because we have propellers, and because there's a maximum width, so there is a maximum width of the cabin. It's not the maximum weight on that. So you said one and a half of people, that means, I guess, two? Again, for the lack of better words on TV, it depends on the size of the behind. So we can literally fit two people with, like you can fit two of me, or one football player. Okay. We've just gone through the specs, the performance, and what lies ahead. Now I'd like to shift gears to another important topic, safety, that is, and also some of the criticism that's out there. Flying cars are such a bold idea that people naturally ask, is it dangerous? Can you really be trusted? Additionally, on YouTube and social media, there are many negative comments related to flying cars, such as being unsafe, fake, not realistic, noisy, or even asking why companies build flying cars instead of solving other social problems. Let's take some time to address these concerns. Now, let's talk about safety first, and how you address the issue of the safety, and most people would worry if they get something that flies in the sky, you know, they're going to worry, right? So let's address that misconception of safety in the car. Right, so usually I start my presentations on safety about asking the audience, would you put your child in a flying car, like a kid? Most people obviously say no. After that, I said, would you put your kid in Toyota, in a regular car? Most people say yes, that's how they drive their kid. Would you put your kid on a plane? I don't know, like regular plane, commercial plane? Yeah, most people flies with kids. It is mathematically safer than any commercial aircraft, and it's mathematically safer than most of the cars. And this is, as you mentioned, there's actually two separate things, there is a safety and there's a perception of safety. Yes. So to answer, I'll try to briefly answer both of them because it's actually a long technical answer about why it's safety. So safety in aviation is actually a number. It's defined by FAA as one in a billion critical fatal accidents. Now, so it's a probability, right? So safety is a number, which is a probability in aviation. Now, first of all, as I already mentioned, there is more redundancy. There's at least four to 16 times more redundancy in a flying car than any commercial aircraft which you fly. Right, because there are more engines, there's more, they're independent. This is very important, right? That's how you count probability. Moreover, there are other systems which can step in, right? So there are other systems, like if the probability of all eight going out is like miserable compared to like any traditional aircraft, even if all eight, there are other systems can step in. There's like a second system, third system, and the last system, you actually have like a full body ballistic parachute because it's so light. It's actually ultra light. It's a very lightweight because of the carbon fiber materials. You literally have the full vehicle ballistic parachute. Now, again, this is a super short answer because like technically it's much deeper than that. Safety, like a return to home, like hover in a place, we can literally land anywhere. All the propellers are not exposed. There are many, many safety features which are not existent in today's aviation. So there's innovation not only in a flying car, but it's actually in safety, in aircraft safety. Usually, as I say to us, safety is not number one. To us, safety is number zero. With like the only reason we're gonna be successful or not successful is safety. There's no working around it because that's why most time we spend actually on safety. Now, the more interesting question is why is it safer than a regular car? First of all, what happens when there's a collision? First of all, that means two or more cars try to occupy the same space, which is again geometrically less possibility in the air. Moreover, most of your damage usually happens actually from the secondary hit to the tree or a curb. Again, something is not happening in there. And the most important, you have more recovery time in the air. So first of all, probability just mathematically of something bad happening is much less. But even if it does, you have more time to recover. And again, keep in mind of ballistic parachute, right? It can always go up. So all those systems which I mentioned and the fact that like unlike on the ground, you have like so much time to recover makes it mathematically safer. Geometrically, the lack of collision, mathematically the time of recover and the ways to recover from something bad. This is why it's one of the reason it is actually mathematically safer. I'm assuming it has a self-driving function if you wanna choose that or no? Yes and no. There's actually three questions in here. So first question is, is it technically, do we technically have that capability? Yes. Regulation-wise, you cannot fly, you can have self-flying cars with a human. Autopilot is a separate question. So technically, yes. Regulation-wise, no. Third question which you might have did not ask but wanted to ask is like we're using AI for self-flying. No, because AI is fundamentally probabilistic. And why? AI is fundamentally fallible. AI cannot get you the accuracy of one in a billion on a model which is built on a real life scenario. It doesn't matter how much you train it with today's state of AI. We may get it at some point, but with today's state of AI. The autopilots which like the regular airplanes use for over 100 years right now is using a rule-based deterministic system approved by FAA. And that is actually possible to do the autopilot in this case. Not using AI which is pretty much untestable which will not give you the right probability and has other things which are not okay to use for safety in FAA. Thanks for bringing that up. I think AI is definitely something people would worry because you kind of give your destiny to some machine that may or may not function the way you expect it to. The issue is again, science and mathematics. AI is not at the state right now to give you enough safety according to FAA regulations. Let's move on to the next topic which is the misconceptions that exist. I recently looked on YouTube and some other social media accounts about flying cars and there's a lot of comments saying that it's impossible. It's fake. Why do we need such a thing? It's not useful. Why don't we use the money spent for something else? Or simply people don't believe that it's actually gonna work or that it's useful. Tell us your, I wanna give you the chance to address some of those misconceptions. Yes, as you mentioned, when regular customers read it, there's a lot of misconceptions. On safety, for example, we just talked about it, right? And it is simply because of the lack of education, right? It's on us to use media, right? To talk about those misconceptions, right? So it's not, people are saying it not because they're malicious, but because there's actually a lack of information on that, right? So let's try that. So first of all, that those videos are AI-generated, the videos of us actually flying. There was, again, people can look up NBC Nightly News, can people look up Associated Press, where actually where they came in and they actually shot the videos, right? So it's not us. Yes, you may not trust them either, but there's no other way for me to prove that other than actually literally for people saying it. So yes, there were independent media who also came in and who shot us flying over the cars. Yes, we saw that as well. Right, so that's as AI. Another thing is like, there are bad drivers on the road. What's gonna happen if there's bad drivers in the air, right? Again, as we mentioned, because of the geometry and how things work in the air, and we haven't talked about yet highway in the sky and how the paths are managed and so on. And there is an autonomy, right? We talked about autonomous flying. However, most of the aircraft today, there is an autonomy when you turn left, a lot of things happening behind the scenes, right? So even though we don't use AI for navigation, for sure, this is absolutely cannot be done. AI can be used as a suggestive system, right? It can use for object detection, other aircraft detection and so on. It will not let you like hit the tree or hit like the building or something like that, right? You can actually do more damage with the car as a bad driver than you can do with an aircraft. A, because of the technologies, the new safety technologies. B, including AI, separate technologies and AI safety technologies. Because of the geometry and how things work in the air and for many other things, right? So in the air, bad drivers are actually can be mitigated, right? Moreover, as of today, not in the future, but as of today, if you do something bad, if you're a bad driver, you may get a ticket or people may yell at you or you may have some road range. In the air, if you're gonna do something bad, nobody's gonna allow you to take off the second time. So it's very harsh rules. The rules in the air are much harsher than on the land. So that's about the bad drivers. What else? Let me throw a couple more. A lot of noise, a takeoff, and I'll give you a couple noise of takeoff and also wind, a lot of wind in order to take off. It's less noise than most of the motorcycles, right? So we compare usually as we automotive, we compare it to automotive. It's not as quiet as Tesla. It's not as quiet as Lucid for sure. It's electric, but it still generates noise. But it is comparable to some cars and motorcycles which are right now. But keep in mind that takeoff is literally 10 seconds. After 10 seconds, the noise is very small. And when we actually reach the flight height, the noise is actually zero. It's indistinguishable because it's electric. It is 100% electric because it's enclosed and because of how acoustics works, right? So that's the noise. On the wind, yes, obviously, you have to have like down generated wind. This is how the takeoff works. That being said, it's not as bad as people think. If you're gonna show us taking off in the city, there's this video, take a look. First of all, I wanted to cut that part out because it looked horrible because there's like a dog at the very right part of the video. And then I left it because it's very good indication. Anybody who had a pet as a dog, for example, would know how much dog will react to the wind and to the noise. There's a dog standing right next to the takeoff with zero reaction. That will tell you how about the wind and noise. We've talked about technology, performance and safety, but there's another big question when it comes to flying cars, legal restrictions. Legally speaking, where can these cars actually take off and land? What are the current FAA or government regulations? And looking ahead, what kind of changes in regulations will be needed for flying cars to become part of everyday life? In other words, to have a highway in the sky. Give us a sense of what would it look if this technology, if this product takes off big time, what would the highway in the sky look like? Just give us a sense. So there's another misconception that if we're going to take the traffic from the ground up to the air, we're going to have traffic in the air. And what is like, you need like many new regulations and you need to build something. So let's start with this. First of all, let's start with the geometry. First of all, the whole point, the whole reason you have traffic on the ground is the width of the road. This is the only reason you have traffic on the ground. Agreed. Every year, you try to put more and more cars through the same width. And it's really not trivial to make the road wider. Oh, you built a new highway and that's obviously expensive. It's expensive, long, and it's going to fail pretty soon too, right? In the air, the geometry works like this. So first of all, your highway can vary. Not only in X direction, but also in Y direction, right? So this is, that means you can literally put a hundred times more cars in the air than on the ground. Second of all, you never have a stop sign or the stoplight. You understand why, right? Because you never cross in the same Y direction. We have this, right? Now, as you know, right now, even as of right now, FAA has an issue with not enough traffic controllers. And those traffic controllers have to manage more aircraft than they can do today, right? So that's a very known problem. How about we just put a billion, actually 1.4 billion more cars in the air? Now, NASA and FAA, actually NASA Ames here in Mountain View, worked on this. They built something which used to be called Highway in the Sky. I really like that name because it gave people a visual. It's not, it doesn't work as a highway. It's actually paths. It's many paths. It's more complicated than that. It's API calls and so on. It's a connectivity. But unfortunately, right now, it has a new bureaucratic name, which I cannot remember. But Highway in the Sky gives you a nice visual, right? It's not the same as freeways on the ground. It's literally the path. But they vary, they're API based. And that system can literally scale, right? We talked about like a human traffic controllers, not easy to scale. It's an important skill, right? You need to have this. By the way, when I talk about the system, it's not 100% electronic. There's still humans in the loop somewhere, right? So it's a good system. So those systems are important. Now, another misconception that those systems have to be somewhere in the future. They're already built, right? So they're already built. They're being tested. I give a huge props to NASA Ames. Again, there are other people who worked on it, but I just know people in NASA Ames who worked on it. And this is absolutely really, really important for air traffic, not just flying cars or EVTOLs or drones. That's called AAM altogether, advanced air mobility. It is actually important for the existing safety of existing traffic, making sure it's very safely. Everybody knows their paths and everybody's forced to stay in exact paths which they're flying. And I would guess that the same way you get on a lane, on a highway here, that's how you'd get on a height or a specific location in the sky, if you were to fly a car. So think about this. Think about existing Cessna airplanes. Think about existing helicopters. Think about existing ultralight aircraft, which we are right now. This is very similar, right? Again, the common misconception is because there's not enough information. There is nothing new. The system is already existing, right? We're not even modifying the existing system that much. It's still the same existing system which worked for a hundred years. We are making it safer and more scalable without modifying the system. I would say that the average person is very familiar with how a car operates, but not how a Cessna operates or how it integrates into the sky. So that's why I think more education is needed. This is correct. And another question which you didn't ask but implied is, do you need a pilot license, for example, right? So, and how related question is, how long or how hard is it to train, right? So there's two parts. For example, there's ultralight, there's LSA. So we have many different models, as I mentioned, right? So for ultralight, you actually do not need a pilot license. So we can teach it. We have a training program, right? We have training program. But that still does not mean you don't have responsibility to learn how the air traffic works. Because if you're going to break the law of air traffic, you're going to break it only once. Lack of the pilot license does not mean you can't break any laws. Moreover, like to the question of how high does FAA rules start regulating? A millimeter from the ground. It doesn't matter. You jump, you already have the FAA rules, right? So those rules do apply. They're not hard. For example, I have what is called part 107, which is a commercial drone operator license. It teaches you about how, another misconception, let me address it later, about that we are a drone. We're not a drone. But the drone pilot license, it's a drone operator license, is actually very good because it teaches you about air traffic, right? And how to operate drones, but it also can apply to us even though we're very far from a drone, right? So this is actually important to learn. Other than that, I can teach you within a day how to actually operate a flying car. But that's not going to teach you the rules and regulations of the air traffic. How is it different than a drone? Right, so a lot of people call it a big drone, right? Or drone or something. So first of all, again, let's come back to definitions because words matter, right? Drone, by definition, is actually unmanned. There's no such thing as a drone. There is UAM, unmanned aerial machine, right? First of all, it's not unmanned. Second of all, if you're going to talk about the size aeronautics and everything, it's actually closer to the helicopter than to small. By the way, the word drone can mean also different things. There's those drones which you buy on Amazon, small ones. There are military drones, so drones are many things. Again, drone means unmanned. We are unmanned. So there is a car mode. There is a rotorcraft mode, which is people call it a drone. And there is a biplane mode, right? So it's a transitioning in different mode. Again, the rotorcraft mode, again, which some people call a drone mode, which is not correct, is about 10 to 20 seconds, and most of the time it operates in other modes. But yes, a lot of people call it drone because this is what media calls everything, right? So again, this is- It's what people can relate to. This is what people can relate to, right. This is another misconception. There's another interesting, if you want to call it problem or something, or opportunity, actually. There are a lot of parts which were made for small drones and for helicopters. There's nothing in between. There's almost nothing in between. So this is a new industry, which is starting right now to being filled, right? Which has a different, little bit different battery requirements, speed controller requirements, electronic requirements, and so on. So this is another very interesting thing. But yeah, it's basically many things. Drone, technically, is not one of them. How much work is to be done there from your side for you to be allowed to start flying, not commercial, but private cars in the sky? What needs to happen? So for the go-to-market, nothing needs to happen because we managed to build what is called Model Zero Ultralight, as an ultralight aircraft. Ultralight has restrictions. Ultralight cannot fly over densely populated areas, so not over Santa Clara, and cannot fly at night. So there are restrictions. There are more restrictions, right? So there are restrictions on ultralight. That being said, you can already start operating for some commute, which makes more sense for some people, right, rural to rural, rural to urban, for example. And when I say rural, it doesn't mean a farm, like Huffman Bay, for example. It's a good city, so there are parts of Huffman Bay, but you can definitely operate that. This is ultralight, right? Nothing needs to happen today. The next version is just recently, FAA passed what is called Mosaic Rule, which is really reclassification of light sport aircraft. Again, according to how Mosaic Rule rules today, we actually qualify as a classification for light sport aircraft, but even in the long term, we still have like different types of classification there, right? So one important distinction between us and many other companies is that we are designing this car to operate today under existing rules, existing infrastructure, which means as soon as it's built and delivered, you can start using it today. We've talked a lot about the technology and the product itself. For this last part, I'd love to shift to the business side. How will Aleph actually produce these cars? Have they partnered with any car companies yet? Or is it something to be revealed later? And they have received over 3,000 pre-orders. What does that actually mean? What's the most important priority for the company right now? Investors, fulfilling pre-orders, or clarifying misconceptions? Give us a sense of where you are right now with moving from prototype to market production. You have over 3,000 pre-orders. Where are you? What's happening? We call this a pre-production model. It's actually past the prototype stage at this point. So another common misconception is this is the big, we're like, I don't know, some big company or anything. We're a very small startup. We actually have 30 people. This is it. We're a very small startup. As a small startup, we have limited resources. So the time we can deliver the actual first car to the customer depends on funding. We actually do not require, we're much more efficient than Evitals, but we still require funding. Typically, the estimate, and again, this is estimate, and every word in that phrase matters. If everything goes right, we plan to start production of the first car to be delivered by the end of 25 or Q1 of 26. Every word in what you just said matters, not only 25 and 26. Every word in this sentence. So realistically, yeah, it's a hardware startup, so it can be the first margin. It can be delayed. Right now, as of today, as our talk, we are on track. Do you need to partner with a car company, or as much as you can reveal, of course, or are you gonna plan to do this on your own or together with a car company? One of the ideas is to become a car company. Like, I mean, we are a car company, right? So it's called OEM. We're more than happy to partner with somebody, but not for the sake of taking over or something like that. We want to be our own car brand. We want to actually develop into the car brand. That being said, there are a number of areas where we can collaborate, some car manufacturers, especially electric car manufacturers. So definitely possibilities for a lot of good collaboration, but the idea is, again, to develop it into the new car brand because there's a lot of advantages, right? Not only it's an electric car. Most people, you know, like right now in United States, more than 90% of people do not drive electric cars for many reasons. If you want to summarize all those reasons, those reasons, it's called value proposition. Most people choose something else over electric cars, value proposition. We're electric car. We have a vertical takeoff. So the value, the only reason why you have a car, the only reason you have a car, is to get you faster from point A to point B than a horse. That's the only reason you have a car. We can do it faster and more reliable. So when we were in Detroit at a show and we were like next to Lamborghini and Tesla and everything else, I pointed out that we're the fastest car in the building because we can literally reliably get you from point A to point B, right? Any arbitrary point A to point B on average, faster than any existing car. And this is important. This is why we want to actually take a piece of the car market or expand the car market if you want to. So that's kind of like for partner with somebody, but only for collaboration purposes. Where do you plan to manufacture it? We have a lot of offers. We have offers from United States, Spain, China, Saudi Arabia, Sweden. We have offers, right? That's great. It's a more complex question than most people think. It's not what we want. It's not because of the political, because of the how we feel philosophical or anything like that. It's a much deeper question which involves business, like the mathematics of business, which does involve little bit of geopolitics, which involves, there are many, many factors in making the decision. But one thing I can tell you, I highly doubt like almost zero chance of everything being manufactured in one place. This is not how modern manufacturing works. Different parts getting different, manufactured in different places. We would love for convenience to manufacture in Silicon Valley. As you know, not many companies do that for a reason. So there are many factors. There are many factors in the manufacturing. We are researching in it. We're looking at it. And again, for our audience, what does it take for them to pre-order? They can go to a website. How much do they have to pay down payment to pre-order the car? Right now, there's three different lines. There is, so we actually took Tesla model, right? Like it actually worked for Tesla, original Tesla, right? It was Martin and Mark, pretty well. So $150 is the regular line, just $150. This is it. That's all it takes you to get in the line. 1,500 is a priority line, right? So obviously priority will get their cars before the 150 line. And $100,000, this is what is called investor line, right? So depending on the line. Now, it's not as straightforward as this line is going to get first, this is going to get second, this is going to get third. It's also going to depend on location where we're going to deploy first. So you might be lucky enough to be in the $150 line, but living in the right location where we're going to deploy first. I see, I see. But in general, if there are more people in the location, which are in the priority line, they will get their car first. And of course, the car price tag right now is $300,000, which is, I guess, reasonable in some ways. $300,000 is because that's about what it takes us to make one right now. This is because we're making it by hand. Now, several things need to happen. A, we need to move to the, as you said, manufacturing. At that point, the price should drop almost in half. That's number one. Two, in the long, long term, we talked about different models, right? The Model A is the first model we're delivering. Model Z is some future model. Now, another misconception. Model Z does not exist. Model Z is not going to exist in a year, in a two or in five. This is a future, future model. The Model Z will actually cost less than $30,000. And the reason for it is because the car is simpler than Toyota Corolla or Ford Focus. It takes less people, less hours, less materials to make that car than some of the cheap cars like you have on the road right now, right? So it should cost under $30,000. But in order for that to happen, we need to have volume. We need to make many, many of them. This is why I'm saying not in two, not in five years, right? We need to have optimized manufacturing, which means it's not somebody in San Mateo doing everything by hand, like doing like a hundred hours, right? It's optimized manufacturing. And jumping on the price again, we're not making the cars for the rich, otherwise it doesn't solve the initial problem. The problem of traffic on the ground, it's not gonna be solved only if people who can afford $300,000 cars would be in there. It's not gonna do much for the traffic on the ground, right? This is why it is important for us to get it to the affordable price. That being said, those who can afford $300,000 right now, I'm not one of them, would be actually getting access to the technology first. They would have that advantage. But this is how technology works, right? This is huge and for cars and for aircraft, right? People who can afford get their hands early. They pay premium for this usage, right? But then they help those people who pay $300,000 help getting the price down. The more they buy, the more we can get the price down, right? This is how the unit economic works. Another misconception I think you wanted to mention was about Elon Musk investing in your car company. Yes. The common misconception is that SpaceX, Tesla, or Elon Musk invested a dollar, which is completely 100% not true. You probably wish it was true. I would guess. It's a separate question, but this is completely have nothing to do with us. And everywhere I try to post it, I can tell you how this started, right? So originally Bloomberg, I think if I'm not mistaken, published an article that SpaceX and Tesla investor invested is a lead investor in other flying cars. That's Tim Draper. That's not Elon Musk. Then others picked it up. And then we had like major news media actually publishing it and because the media works by using sources, by citing sources of other major media, I cannot stop that anymore. Nobody believes me. I'm like, no, nobody invested. So I cannot fix the Wikipedia page. I cannot fix anywhere online, which actually says that Elon invested in us. And because they're citing media and the word of people who are actually doing it have nothing to do with it. That's how media works. We're actually very familiar with that. So Jim, I really appreciate your time. You have a revolutionary product, something that can actually change lives in so many ways. And it's very interesting, very amazing. Thank you again for explaining how it works as much as you did and really appreciate it. Any final thoughts to potential users of your product or just in general? So you met, well, I'll give you one and a half final thoughts. One is we are looking for investment always because we're a startup. But the main final thought is what you just mentioned. It is actually changing people's lives. So first of all, the economy overall, literally global economy, losing trillions of dollars of people wasting time in traffic. I don't know how much you and I or anybody in this room is going to live, I don't know, 80 years, 100 years or so. One year of that life, you're gonna spend in traffic, standing there. That's a huge amount of time. You can do many good things. You can do more interviews. You can go on a vacation. You can spend time with people you love, right? One year of your life is a huge amount of time. That time also matters. For example, let's say there is a mother with three children and with multiple jobs. To her, time is unbelievably important. Unbelievably important. If we can cut her commute by half and give her that year, and actually it's about a week per year, it's a work week per year that you're wasting. If we can give it back to people, that's gonna impact people's lives. And I'm sure everyone, everyone, and I have my story, but I don't wanna tell it because it's very sad. It's about my father. Everyone can remember when they did not have time to reach somewhere because of the traffic. And if they did, that would actually change their lives. And this is important. So yes, that, we talk about resources as an environment, right, like everybody's saying environment. Time is one of the most valuable resources on Earth. And saving people a year worth of their life is actually very important. So I do think that technology is the one which is gonna affect people and change their lives. Thank you. Thanks, Steve. Thank you for watching another episode of Bay Area Innovators. If you enjoyed this episode and you know someone who should be on our show, please send us an email at sfbay at epochtimes.com. We would love to hear from you. Thank you and see you next week.