The Japanese automaker is forming a manufacturing joint venture with the Santa Cruz based electric aircraft startup to take on mass production, but FAA certification still gates U.S. service.
Toyota is betting another half-billion dollars that the bottleneck for electric air taxis is not the aircraft. It is the factory floor.
The Japanese automaker and Santa Cruz-based Joby Aviation are forming a joint venture to mass-produce Joby's battery-powered vertical-takeoff aircraft, the companies announced on Tuesday. Toyota's cumulative investment in Joby now stands at roughly $900 million, up from about $400 million in 2020, a bet that the auto industry's manufacturing playbook can crack a problem no air-taxi startup has solved yet: making these things by the thousand, affordably.
What Toyota brings is not capital alone. The Japanese automaker has built more than 50 million cars and trucks across 14 manufacturing plants, operating under a production methodology — the Toyota Production System — that its global supplier network has spent decades learning and that the broader automotive industry still treats as the standard for manufacturing efficiency. The JV, called Joby Toyota Aero Manufacturing Preparation Company (JTAMPC), is majority-owned by Toyota at 51%, with a five-member board dominated by Toyota executives, placing the automaker's production-scale know-how — tooling, supply-chain management, and quality systems — directly behind a startup that has built only a handful of prototypes.
The joint venture is structured specifically around manufacturing scale, not flight testing. "Together, we share a vision of making aerial mobility an everyday reality, and we look forward to delivering on that promise together," Joby CEO and founder JoeBen Bevirt said, per the LA Times report. Toyota Chair Akio Toyoda framed the deeper partnership as a step toward "the future mobility society," but the focus in both companies' commentary is production, which is Toyota's traditional strength.
The aircraft itself is four-passenger, single-pilot, all-electric, with six tilting propellers that let it lift vertically and then transition to forward flight at speeds up to roughly 200 mph. The design has been demonstrated in test flights; what has not been demonstrated is whether a startup that had built only a handful of prototypes can credibly deliver them at the volumes its order book would require. That is the problem Toyota is being brought in to solve.
The deal marks a continued capital escalation. Toyota's initial 2020 investment was around $400 million. The new joint venture pushes cumulative commitments to roughly $900 million, a figure documented in a Joby material-event filing and an amended Schedule 13D/A disclosing the latest stake.
For U.S. readers wondering when they might actually hail one, the answer remains: not yet, and not for a while. Joby's commercial path runs through two regulatory gates. The first real-world proving ground is the United Arab Emirates, where the company plans to begin service this year under a February 2026 partnership with Uber. U.S. service is contingent on full FAA type certification, which Joby is still working through. In the meantime, the company has lined up early flight operations in New York, Texas, and Arizona under a White House program that lets electric vertical-takeoff aircraft operators run limited routes ahead of full certification; California flights wait for the full green light.
That makes the Toyota-Joby JV less a "flying cars are here" story than a "the hard part starts now" story. Mass-production tooling, supply chains for components like electric motors at scale, and quality control for a new vehicle category are problems Toyota knows how to solve, and problems Joby could not solve alone on a startup budget.
The competitive backdrop sharpens the stakes. Joby's Bay Area rival, Archer Aviation, is racing toward the same commercial-launch window, and the two companies are now fighting on two fronts. Joby has accused Archer of corporate espionage, and Archer has alleged Joby's ties to China triggered a U.S. International Trade Commission investigation. Both matters remain unresolved, which helps explain why Toyota's deepening commitment matters: in a market where first-mover advantage may be decided by who can actually build and certify at scale, an automotive giant's manufacturing muscle is not a minor asset.
Investors reacted with measured enthusiasm. Joby shares climbed roughly 3% on Tuesday to $8.92, a real but muted move in a stock that is still down more than 30% year to date. The market is reading this as a manufacturing vote of confidence, not a commercial-launch event.
The next test is whether the Toyota-Joby factory plan produces aircraft at the rate and cost the joint venture's economics will demand. Until then, the FAA's certification timeline is the variable that turns a manufacturing commitment into an airline.