Eviation Aircraft Planning On Bringing 9-Seat Electric Airplane To Market By 2021, Following Closing Of Battery Supply Agreement With Kokam

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Now that the firm has reportedly closed a battery supply agreement with South Korea’s Kokam, the electric aviation startup Eviation Aircraft is now aiming to bring its 9-seat electric aircraft to market by 2021, the company’s CEO has revealed.

Electric Eviation AircraftThe Israel-based firm went with Kokam as its battery supplier due to the relatively small client base that it maintains — which means that the expectation is for a relatively high degree of flexibility and access to customization.

The CEO of Eviation, Omer Bar-Yohay, was quoted by Reuters as saying (in a phone interview): “If I would go today to Samsung or Panasonic or LG Chem or Tesla for that matter and say I need a different cell size, they will probably laugh because the number of cells we are going to buy is not significant enough to start the design process.”

A reasonable enough perspective. It’s also worth noting, of course, that many of the firms above are currently stuck in production bottlenecks anyways.

Reuters provides more:

“The battery will have 9,400 cells distributed throughout the aircraft including the ceiling, floor, and wings, weighing 3.8 tonnes, or 60% of the maximum takeoff weight…Eviation’s ‘Alice’ airplane is expected to have a range of up to 650 nautical miles (1200 kilometers), compared to 1000 nautical miles for a similar-sized conventional Cessna Caravan. It will cost $2 million-plus, on par with the Cessna, but have far lower fuel and maintenance costs, Bar-Yohay said.

“Eviation hopes to fly the Alice demonstrator for the first time by the end of the year, with the first public display at the Paris Airshow in mid-2019, he said. Moving to commercial production after that would require raising around $100 million of capital.”

In related news, the startup Zunum Aero recently announced plans to bring a 12-seat hybrid aircraft to market by 2022. Numerous other aviation firms are now working on similar designs as well.


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James Ayre

James Ayre's background is predominantly in geopolitics and history, but he has an obsessive interest in pretty much everything. After an early life spent in the Imperial Free City of Dortmund, James followed the river Ruhr to Cofbuokheim, where he attended the University of Astnide. And where he also briefly considered entering the coal mining business. He currently writes for a living, on a broad variety of subjects, ranging from science, to politics, to military history, to renewable energy.

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