Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:07:44 · Gustaf Alstromer, Anders Forslund, S3
[00:07:44] S0: The whole plant is wired like one giant test bench. [00:07:48] S1: You can deconstruct it like a Picasso painting. And here's the cockpit, here's the cabin, here's the tail. And all of this is being fed, you know, 1.6 megawatts of power. You could keep the aircraft in the air from just everything that's happening here. We're gonna be testing fault injection. So everything from, like, putting in programming error to cutting a wire, everything's gotta work, even if everything goes wrong. It looks like the first time you get into Model three and you're like, oh, it's [00:08:19] S0: just one screen. Yeah. [00:08:20] S1: I think that's a lot of the idea here. As the guy designing this, he worked on the Dragon capsule. You can fit up to 36 passengers. [00:08:28] S0: Yep. But most common probably gonna be 30 passengers, which means everybody's gonna get, like, six inches of extra leg room. And the heart of the operation is the battery lab, where the team is choosing the cell for the next aircraft. [00:08:41] S3: This is the battery cell lab where we are trying to determine what our cell is going to be. We have lots of different cells which are on display here from Chinese, American, and Korean manufacturers. We can determine which one's gonna have, you know, the most flight cycles, the best safety, cost, and energy density. [00:09:01] S1: We talked about Elon coming to MIT twelve years ago and talking about, like, 400 watt hour per kilogram batteries. Do we have any cells that are, [00:09:09] S0: like, 400 watt hour per kilogram?
00:09:09 · Gustaf Alstromer, S3, Anders Forslund
[00:09:09] S0: like, 400 watt hour per kilogram? [00:09:10] S3: The highest thing that we have on this table right now is about 370. One of the manufacturers is producing something at that 400 level, that we're expecting to have within the next couple months. Easily meets our targets for the first generation of the aircraft. [00:09:24] S1: So you got the countdown timer there. Twenty three days. Inspired by YC demo day. [00:09:30] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Chrome extension. The hardest problem had nothing to do with the motor or the battery. [00:09:35] S1: It's probably the biggest challenge we've had in the company. One in every thousand flights in The US gets diverted to another airport. You kinda need forty five minutes of loiter, and then you need to go to something that could be like a 100 miles away. [00:09:49] S0: Yeah. [00:09:50] S1: So if you build a battery electric aircraft, you kinda have to carry two thirds of your battery needs to be for reserves. [00:09:56] S0: Unlike jet fuel's batteries don't get lighter. Their answer is a hybrid engine. [00:10:01] S1: We're basing it on on a very simple turboprop engine. It's one of the most inexpensive ones. We don't have to use it for most flights, but it's still adding about, I guess, 20% of the upfront cost of the aircraft. And I think it's worth it. You can fly up to to 125 miles all electrically, and then you fly up to 500 miles with a hybrid system operational range. [00:10:23] S0: That call comes out of the philosophy that Anders borrowed from SpaceX about how you should treat risk.
00:10:23 · Gustaf Alstromer, Anders Forslund
[00:10:23] S0: That call comes out of the philosophy that Anders borrowed from SpaceX about how you should treat risk. [00:10:29] S1: Traditional aerospace is like, well, impact is always catastrophic, so let's minimize the probability. We don't know anything until we know everything. Whereas if you look at, hey, how do we minimize impact to getting it wrong? Then you can select a process that's a lot cheaper, that's a lot easier to iterate on. Planes don't crash these days because of a broken wing. They crash because of broken logic. We want to build a software defined vehicle, so the computer own wings. [00:10:54] S0: Anders has heard all the doubts. For example, why not just build flying taxis first? [00:10:59] S1: It's super cool. Like, they're really trying to build a flying car. We're attacking not the helicopter market, but the mainline, you know, like, airplane market. While these these companies have, like, three or four passengers, we have, you know, 36. We're also operating from an infrastructure that is already there. You know, there's 5,000 airports in [00:11:20] S0: The US. Another common question he gets is why not use hydrogen? [00:11:23] S1: And the same with hydrogen. The great thing about using hybrid electric is that it's a... It's already now at a at a at a significant, like, negative green premium. So you're surfing on a much bigger wave. The planes we're trying to replace, they're 40 years old. It becomes an appreciating asset. The plane will actually be better in ten years than when you buy it. It becomes like buying a house.
00:11:23 · Anders Forslund, Gustaf Alstromer
[00:11:23] S1: And the same with hydrogen. The great thing about using hybrid electric is that it's a... It's already now at a at a at a significant, like, negative green premium. So you're surfing on a much bigger wave. The planes we're trying to replace, they're 40 years old. It becomes an appreciating asset. The plane will actually be better in ten years than when you buy it. It becomes like buying a house. [00:11:43] S0: 36 seats is only the beginning. [00:11:45] S1: We love to build bigger planes. The large market is the narrow bodies. The seven thirty seven is the A320. There's ridiculous backlogs. Somebody doing what SpaceX did with rockets on airplanes just makes sense. [00:11:59] S0: Longer term, the plane is built for a world with fewer pilots in the cockpit. [00:12:04] S1: A remote pilot that is supporting many aircraft, kind of like there's remote operators of the way most. Then we're gonna see autonomy happening in cargo where there's, you know, lower stakes and then, you know, eventually making its way into, to aircraft. Obviously, a lot less noise. There's a lot less vibration as well. There's gonna be more flights. There's gonna be cheaper ticket. So you're gonna be able to go [00:12:31] S0: to your neighborhood airport and take a plane in the way you actually could in the past. It's also why Heart is building it here in LA, the new center of gravity for this kind of company.
00:12:31 · Gustaf Alstromer, Anders Forslund
[00:12:31] S0: to your neighborhood airport and take a plane in the way you actually could in the past. It's also why Heart is building it here in LA, the new center of gravity for this kind of company. [00:12:41] S1: This is the ground zero, the most historic place when it comes to aviation. You have the new space ecosystem that's kind of coming from SpaceX. You know, companies don't build planes, people do. Just a moment of seeing seeing it literally take off. This is obviously a moment I've imagined imagined for the last seven years. And even seeing it going down the runway is kind of gives me the goosebumps. So it's... Hopefully, I'll get a moment where I kind of start seeing the forest for all the trees kind of thing. [00:13:11] S0: When this airs, you will have flown the largest electric airplane in the world. Come a long way from demo day seven years ago. [00:13:17] S1: Oh, man. It's... I'm so grateful that you got that opportunity, and now the day is here. [00:13:22] S0: It's gonna be amazing. Seven years of hard work finally led to this. Their first flight on Wednesday, August 12 in Plattsburgh, New York. If you start a new hardware startup today Yeah. Everything that you know about building heart and your entire career, how how would you get started? [00:14:06] S1: I'm a pretty good duck. Right? Like, know a little bit how to swim. I know a little bit how to fly, and I know a a little bit how to walk. And that's enough for me to know when I find somebody that's [00:14:17] S0: great.
00:14:17 · Gustaf Alstromer, Anders Forslund
[00:14:17] S0: great. [00:14:17] S1: I would never start a company based on the fact that I wanted to have a company or be a founder. I would start because I really enjoy, you know, a problem. If we can get stuff that is lower emission, lower cost, lower pollution, just better quality of life. We should be doing it.