Susono, JAPAN and Santa Cruz, Calif.―November 2, 2024―Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) and Joby Aviation (Joby) came together at Toyota’s Higashi-Fuji Technical Center (Shizuoka, Japan) to assert their collective passion and ambition for air mobility in a gathering that included executives from both companies, Akio Toyoda, the chairman of the Toyota Group, and Joby CEO and founder, JoeBen Bevirt, along with Joby’s air taxi, an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL*).
Since its founding, Toyota has been working to realize a society in which everyone can move freely. About 100 years ago, in 1925, Sakichi Toyoda, founder of the Toyota Group, offered a prize to encourage the development of a storage battery that could provide enough performance “to fly an airplane across the Pacific Ocean.” Since then, Toyota has continued to focus on the challenge of air mobility through the generations. Toyota Motor Corporation founder Kiichiro Toyoda also expressed a strong interest in the aircraft business, making prototypes of helicopters and aircraft components. After World War II, among other developments, Dr. Shoichiro Toyoda was involved in the joint development of the world’s first electronically controlled aero piston engine with an American company at Toyota’s Higashi Fuji Technical Center, which could be described as the birthplace of Toyota’s development of air mobility. Today, Sakichi’s dream carries on, with batteries seen as a viable source of power for eVTOL.
As Toyota transforms into a mobility company, it has been able to work with other great companies like Joby to find new and exciting opportunities. Joby’s CEO, JoeBen Bevirt, is driven by his passion and dreams that “look forward to a world where our environmental footprint is smaller, a world where we’re able to spend more time with the people and places that matter most to us, without having to worry about traffic jams.” Akio Toyoda, chairman of the Toyota Group, has ambitions to bring the freedom of mobility to all people. The two leaders met and began a journey together. The culmination of the efforts of both companies over the last seven years, in which Joby’s dream and passion for air mobility as a startup met Toyota’s expertise in production processes and technology development, led to Joby’s first air taxi exhibition flight overseas in Japan.
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