Electric Aircraft Startup Lilium Ceases Operations, 1,000 Workers Laid Off (techcrunch.com) 23
Lilium, once a darling in the nascent industry of electric aircraft that raised more than $1 billion before going public, has ceased operations and laid off about 1,000 workers after efforts to gain financing and exit insolvency failed. From a report: Lilium co-founder and CEO Patrick Nathen confirmed on LinkedIn that the 10-year-old company had stopped operating. "After 10 years and 10 months, it is a sad fact that Lilium has ceased operations. The company that Daniel, Sebastian, Matthias and I founded can no longer pursue our shared belief in more environmentally friendly aviation. This is heartbreaking and the timing feels painfully ironic," wrote Nathen. The layoffs cover the bulk of the company's workforce and come a few days after about 200 workers were let go, according to a regulatory filing on December 16.
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CEO Malpractice (Score:4, Funny)
What were they doing? (Score:2)
1000 people? What exactly were they all doing?
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While it's probably inflated from reality, you still need quite a few people for aircraft design work to proceed apace. Everything from engineers to actual makers to compliance specialists to investor relations people.
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Re: Maybe we will (Score:2)
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Until they're not. I personally wouldn't bet on seeing practical electric planes in the next decade, but I wouldn't care to bet on it never happening.
E-fuels (Re:Maybe we will) (Score:2)
just have to give up on heavier than air flight. I don't see a way of doing it without burning carbon based fuels.
The problem isn't carbon based fuels, it is that the primary source has been from digging it out from the ground. We can produce carbon based fuels in a carbon neutral manner, they are called electrofuels or e-fuels. Well, not exactly carbon neutral but really really close to carbon neutral. All "zero carbon" energy does emit some carbon from the ground because we dig in the Earth for raw materials to produce any energy, it's far too small of a contributor to be concerned about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w [wikipedia.org]
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Petroleum isn't going to get harder to find any time soon.
The only way efuel is going to compete on price with oil is if demand shifts and oil loses some its economy of scale advantage.
That's not going to happen very easily while we have several countries who's economy is based primarily on oil export. If demand shifts to something else, they'll just sell their oil for cheaper to keep the money flowing.
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It's a net loss no matter how you sell it.
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So Pipistrel will need to stop selling their electric plane they have been selling for 9 years and the 2 other electric planes they have been selling for 4 years? Harbour Air will have to stop the commercial certification process for their working prototype?
Do not confuse an unrealistic electric plane project focused on funding rounds with the functional ones that actually did the math. Electric planes right now today are functional for short flights, about 1 hour or 100 miles.. Harbour Air's routes are us
the "darling"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Nothing here sounded right from the beginning yet, like so many pie-in-the-sky bullshit tech presentations lately (eg Commonwealths announced new FUSION power plant construction in VA...) , they seemed to be able to harvest 10-digit funding based on nothing more than fancy CGI and hope.
Batteries are heavy as fuck, even heavy for cars & trucks (heavy enough that presentations of commercial grade delivery trucks dance their statistics into ephemera when you ask direct questions about load capacity). And planes need a lot of energy to get off the ground.
So the idea they they were just going to imagineer a design for a plane that could a) get off the ground for b) a meaningful amount of time was already a very, very high engineering bar
And then to add the expectation of VTOL? Why not just also plan for a kitchen sink in there too?
I don't want to malign the founders because I don't know them, I'll hope that they were native optimists. But this whole thing looked to me more like it was something designed to fly only through venture capital funding rounds.
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Batteries are heavy as fuck, even heavy for cars & trucks (heavy enough that presentations of commercial grade delivery trucks dance their statistics into ephemera when you ask direct questions about load capacity). And planes need a lot of energy to get off the ground.
I don't know from which source you drink your wisdom, but Scania, MAN, Renault, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo sell electric semi trucks in Europe. and transport companies are buying them.
And nobody with a clue is surprised (Score:2)
This thing was a nice tech-demo. Tech-demos are typically not useful in the real world.