With players like Uber and Lyft in the ride-sharing realm, most people know what it’s like to use a ride-sharing company. But what about if that Uber was an aircraft? Adam Goldstein, founder and CEO of Archer Aviation, sat down with TheStreet’s J.D. Durkin to explain what it will be like to rideshare in the sky.
Full Video Transcript Below:
J.D. DURKIN: Talk to me about the experience of actually getting inside of one as a potential passenger or as someone who's going to use it for maybe cargo or you and I were talking off air before about some other purposes. What does this actually look like for a person who might see one for the first time?
ADAM GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, so the original go to market use case is going to be around moving people and specifically from urban areas in and around those urban areas. And so we like to really start with a use case that people understand, which are city centers to airports. So think about being here in Manhattan and having to drive out to Newark. It's at 4:00 in the traffic is just absolutely killer. It's going to take you 90 minutes. Maybe you bake in 120 minutes because you don't know how long you're anxious. Now, instead of taking that trip on the ground, you go to a vertiport there's already one down here on Wall Street. There's one already built on the West Side on 34th Street. You go into one of those vertiports, you take the vehicle and you land, not only just at the airport, but behind security. So you not only can skip the trip to the airport, you can actually skip the entire airport itself. And that's what we're hoping to bring here to market in 2025.
J.D. DURKIN: Every time there's a new, very cool technology that gets introduced, oftentimes, as you know, the price point a little bit out of range for a lot of people. Right as you try and scale it, you try and adopt it, make it more of a competitive price point. What do you see that evolution looking like to really ensure that as many people as possible who want to take advantage of this technology are able to do so in time?
ADAM GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, it's a great question. When you think about rideshare going from a city center to an airport, they have to sit-in that 90 minute traffic too and so it limits the total amount of trips that a car on the ground can take. But when you fly, there's no traffic. And it's very, very short because you're flying as the crow flies and you can fly very, very fast. And so you can do a lot of trips per day. And so because you can do a lot of trips per day and because these vehicles are electric and they don't need to be maintenanced as much as piston or combustion vehicles like helicopters, you can actually generate a lot more business with these vehicles, ultimately relaying the benefits back to the consumers in the form of a lower prices.
