Uber is selling its flying car project, Elevate, to Joby Aviation and is investing $75M into the company as part of the deal; terms were not disclosed
- The move will allow Joby to use Uber's app to offer air taxi rides when the company's aircraft eventually enters service, which could be as soon as 2023.
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes the loop on a five-year build-out: Uber partnered with NASA for Elevate in 2017, unveiled a four-rotor vertical-takeoff prototype in May 2018, and opened a €20 million Advanced Technologies Center in Paris that same month. Selling the project to Joby marks the retreat from in-house aircraft manufacturing — but the $75M check and the app-distribution deal show Uber keeping the demand side it always cared about.
The structure anticipates where this market actually went: by 2025, Uber is planning Blade helicopter rides on its app through Joby, which had itself acquired Blade for $125M. The 2020 handoff is the moment Uber stopped trying to be an aircraft company and locked in its role as the booking layer.
First-order effects
- Joby inherits the Elevate program — engineering work, the NASA relationship's momentum, and the 2023 service target — plus $75M of Uber capital, consolidating it as the lead independent eVTOL developer.
- Uber exits aircraft development immediately, cutting the burn from the Paris center and prototype program while securing exclusive-ish placement of future Joby flights inside its app.
Second-order effects
- Rival eVTOL developers now face a distribution problem: if Uber's app is spoken for, they need their own partnerships with airlines, heliport operators, or other booking platforms to reach riders.
- The deal pressures Uber's earlier aviation partners — Airbus ran an on-demand helicopter trial with Uber back in 2016 — to decide whether they are suppliers to platforms or competitors to them.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, urban air mobility structurally splits the way ride-hailing did: capital-intensive vehicle makers on one side, demand-aggregating apps on the other, with the app layer controlling customer access and pricing leverage.
- Regulators and city planners end up negotiating with platform-plus-manufacturer pairings rather than either alone, since the operating model — who books, who flies, who owns the vertiport — arrives as a bundle.
The trend: Urban air mobility is consolidating around paired structures — one aircraft manufacturer, one demand aggregator — as hardware developers concede that rider access, not airframes, is the scarce asset.