Our goal at Impossible is
to build the highest performance
unmanned aircraft that can possibly
be built with electric propulsion.
Spencer Gore and his team
at Impossible Aerospace want to
make air travel all electric and
do away with polluting jet fuel.
For the time being, it's
focused on completely rethinking
drone design and built a battery
in the shape of the
drone's fuselage, therefore
maximizing flight time.
Gore was inspired in large part
by his time as a battery
engineer at Tesla, where he lived
in an RV in the parking lot when he started.
If you think about the two
things that stress people out in
Silicon Valley the most, it's
commuting and paying rent.
If you don't have to do
those two things, life is pretty good.
I can't imagine a better
place to have learned really
important lessons about shipping
products and building
functional teams and getting
through difficult times than
that team at that time.
Gore has come a
long way since then.
Impossible Aerospace has raised more
than $11 million from
investors like Airbus, Bessemer
Venture Partners and an
ex-Tesla executive from Eclipse
Ventures to rethink
aviation. Where I think Impossible
and Tesla similar is
that we both started with
some pretty fundamental math that
showed that if you want to
make a compelling and useful
vehicle, you need a
pretty big battery pack.
And I think that what most
automakers have done with their
electric cars and what most
drone companies have done with
their electric drones is to start
by designing the car and
designing a drone before they
think about the battery.
Typically, that leads to too small
of a percentage of the
vehicle's weight and volume being
being made of a battery.
Your iPhone is basically a battery
of the screen on it.
A MacBook is basically a battery
and a keyboard and a
screen. Model S, X, 3, they
are batteries with seats on
them and you know,
some cosmetic stuff attached.
Our drone is a battery
with propellers on it.
Its first product, US-1, can fly for
up to two hours on a single charge.
Just as Tesla had rethought how
cars should be built from
the ground up based on the
physics, so had we for aircraft.
Quite a bit more than half
the aircraft mass is made of
battery cells and in fact,
the entire structure is one battery pack.
US-1 is now available
to first responders.
It can fly in certain configurations
up two hours on a battery charge.
And we also offer a
configuration for first responders
today that has a flight time
of about an hour and 20
minutes that contains a
ruggedized tactical enclosure, dual
optical and thermal cameras.
Drones have become a valuable
tool for first responders,
aiding police and firefighters
with aerial operations.
Within minutes, they can be
launched to help law enforcement
with situational awareness.
Fight fires and aid in
search and rescue operations.
Drones are quickly replacing helicopters
to do these tasks.
There are 18,000 municipal
police departments across the
country and I think 32,000
fire departments across the
country. And about 60 municipalities
have access to a
helicopter. And part of the reason
for that is that police
helicopters can cost
$5 million.
And what we've all realized is
that a drone can provide
about half of the utility of
a helicopter at less than 1 percent of the price.
And that's a really big deal.
The problem is that with most
drones that are out there
today, you have a flight time
with cameras that's on the order of about 25 minutes.
What we're able to do is
offer the endurance of a
helicopter, but with the convenience
and cost of a drone.
But the company's ambitions stretch
far beyond drones for first responders.
It is hoping to take the
same engineering approach used for
US-1 and apply it to aircraft.
These drones are the
world's first production electric
aircraft, and they are direct
predecessors to the aircraft
that I think we'll be
flying on in the future.
Electricity from renewable sources can
be very cheap, and
in parts of the country
it's ridiculously cheap, like the Pacific Northwest.
Compared to jet fuel, flying
will be a bargain.
There are some really exciting
options, I mean we're really
just scratching the surface with
what is possible with this
new this new
propulsion paradigm.
There are other companies
working towards electric airplanes like Pipistrel and Eviation.
But Gore says Impossible
Aerospace plans to completely
redesign the airplane.
Are you building a battery that's
flying or are you trying
to put batteries where
they really don't belong?
And it's no different than
what the early automakers did.
By taking cars that were built
for gas engines, taking out
the engines and putting in batteries,
and you end up with
something that drives for
60 to 80 miles.
Compared to what Tesla did, of
building a battery pack that
was shaped like a car, and
then putting a car around it.
And I think that Impossible's
contribution is to really push
the envelope of what is
possible from a performance
standpoint with
electric propulsion.
To build battery electric aircraft
that can compete with
and substitute for
conventionally fueled aircraft.
The aircraft that need to be
flying 30 years from now need
to be in development today,
and and so it's really
important we get started.
We're not going to stop
until it's possible to travel
anywhere in the
world emissions free.
It has to be done.
