• 02 Jan 2019 10:14 AM
• 0

Fantastic eVTOL Forecasts

In November, Roland Berger, a strategy consulting firm headquartered in Munich, Germany, released a study dubbed, “Urban air mobility — The rise of a new mode of transportation.” In it, the company noted that “pilot projects are already scheduled to go live in cities like Dubai, Singapore, Los Angeles and Dallas in the early 2020s,” and predicted about 3,000 passenger drones would be in use by 2025, followed by exponential growth; Roland Berger forecast that, by 2050, “close to 100,000 passenger drones could be on the move worldwide and serve as air taxis, airport shuttles and intercity flight services.” (In contrast, Uber hopes to achieve as many as 100,000 flights per city per day by the mid-2030s.)

Meanwhile, financial company Morgan Stanley published an 85-page report in early December stating that the market for autonomous UAM aircraft could be as much as $1.5 trillion by 2040. “We see the development of the UAM ecosystem as extremely long-dated and requiring up-front capital allocation, testing and development in the short term, with increasing visibility,” the report stated. In response, Bloomberg News reported that “According to the analysts’ most bullish calculations, it could become a $2.9 trillion global market by 2040, while the most pessimistic estimates peg the value to about $615 billion.”