Hyundai's electric aircraft spin-off has demonstrated an eVTOL air taxi design that the company believes will "set the gold standard for advanced air mobility." Supernal showed off its S-A2 prototype based on a new airframe architecture at CES. Supernal has a huge advantage over most of the leaders in the eVTOL space: It's a subsidiary of an automotive giant with huge revenue and proven high-volume manufacturing capabilities. But despite having a team of 600 people, it doesn't seem to be working as hard as startups like Joby, Lilium or Archer.
The companies say they aim to have the aircraft certified and in commercial service by 2025 (Lilium is targeting 2026), while Supernal doesn't expect to be operational until 2028 and has yet to fly a full-scale prototype; the team hopes to achieve that goal sometime this year. Still, there are benefits to taking your time, especially in an area like this where regulations are still being negotiated and uncertainty is high.
Regardless, four years after the introduction of the S-A1 (the first eVTOL design Hyundai/Uber unveiled at CES 2020), the company has launched a new five-seat hot-selling model.
The S-A2 simplifies the fuselage of the original aircraft to a certain extent; the S-A1 uses a mix of tilting propellers and fixed lift propellers in propulsion pods on the wings and at the top of the V-shaped tail, while the new aircraft completely abandons the tail propellers and replaces them with eight tilting propellers, all suspended in pods on the wings.
The front rotor tilts upward and the rear rotor tilts downward, so as they move horizontally for cruising flight, the front rotor becomes a tractor rotor and the rear rotor becomes a push rotor.
Top speed is a bit disappointing at 120 miles per hour (about 200 kilometers per hour), and endurance seems even more disappointing; Supernal doesn't explicitly claim endurance, but says the plane is designed for short cross-town flights of no more than 40 miles (64 kilometers). It claims about 65 decibels of noise during vertical takeoff, which is equivalent to the noise level of a dishwasher.
The cabin outline may be mistaken for Archer's "Midnight" aircraft design: there are landing gear under the nose and extending back behind the wings to create a three-point footprint. The four passengers in the back will have two large upper and lower windows for sightseeing purposes, and the pilot will be able to see quite a bit of the landing pad during approach, but mainly to the sides.
"From here, we will develop this concept into a revolutionary commercial product," Supernal Chief Technology Officer Ben Diachun said in a press release.
"Revolutionary" feels a bit optimistic for a design that's scheduled to arrive three years after the leader, with a significantly reduced maximum range -- but Supernal is definitely likely to become a major player in the eVTOL space, and competitors' accelerated timelines are likely to be frustrated by the brutal grind of the certification process and endless red tape.