Is Joby Aviation Stock a Buy Now?

According to local news, as many as 9,000 helicopter flights can take place across New York City on a fair-weather day. You can see them whizzing over the Hudson, orbiting Liberty Island like big flies, sweeping from the Upper West Side to the Financial District, to the Brooklyn waterfront, around the South Street Seaport. Their whop-whop thrum is inescapable; it penetrates walls and fills the area around you.

If you've stayed with me through this rather lengthy introduction, you might guess where this is going. When we talk about Joby Aviation (NYSE: JOBY), or rather the potential of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, adoption of these flying taxis is usually a major question on the table. Even if a company like Joby gets regulatory approval to fly air taxis, will consumers bite? Will cities or communities adopt them? Will flights get booked?

While only time will tell whether the air taxi concept sticks, several factors suggest that it will.

Image source: Joby Aviation.

Quiet, clean, and safe -- the three pillars that will make Joby a lasting success

In a nutshell, Joby Aviation is trying to build flying taxis. Not the kind in The Jetsons, Back to the Future, Blade Runner, or any other sci-fi depiction of levitating cars. Joby's flying taxi is like a cross between a drone and a Cessna airplane: It takes off vertically like a helicopter, then propels forward as its six rotors tilt.

Joby's battery-powered aircraft produce no emissions in flight, and their large-diameter propellers generate far less noise than that of traditional helicopters.

To put that into perspective, Joby's eVTOLs produce about 55 decibels (dB) of noise during hover, compared to roughly 90 dB for a conventional helicopter. That's the difference between, say, a conversation at a normal sound level and a lawn mower.

Quieter take-off and hovering frequencies aren't even Joby's primary selling point. Its entire business model depends on the frustration and despair that many commuters feel toward the bane of any urban planner's existence: traffic. To give an example: In rush hour, it can take anywhere from an hour to two hours to drive the 15-ish miles from Manhattan to JFK airport. Joby's air taxi service wants to cut that down to 10 minutes or less.

New York City is one of hundreds of cities that Joby could one day service. It's no wonder researchers at Morgan Stanley estimated that the urban air mobility market could be worth $9 trillion by 2050 in a bull-case scenario. But Joby still has a lot of work ahead. Foremost, it needs FAA type certification. After that, it needs to prove, again and again, that its air taxis are safe and reliable; one accident in this industry, especially one as new as eVTOL travel, could be hard to recover from.

Joby Aviation isn't for the squeamish. Without meaningful revenue, the stock will likely get turbulent before it flies straight. For those who can hold on to this stock through the shaky middle, the long-term gains could be immense.

Steven Porrello has positions in Joby Aviation. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.