Florida received hundreds of millions of dollars through the federal National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program to expand public EV charging. Instead, the state’s Department of Transportation wants to redirect nearly $197 million of that money toward something else entirely: landing pads for flying taxis.
Under FDOT’s updated Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Deployment Plan, the state would build 32 “vertiport” sites, at roughly $5.6 million each, capable of charging, launching and landing electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOLs). Planned locations include golf courses, luxury apartment buildings, military bases and airports, part of what the state is calling an “Aerial Highway Network.” FDOT’s rationale is that the private sector has already built out enough of the state’s highway fast-charging network without public funds, so the remaining allocation is better spent elsewhere.
Critics, including transportation advocates, argue that’s a misreading of what NEVI was designed to fix. The program specifically targets gaps the private sector tends to skip, including rural corridors and dense urban areas where fast chargers aren’t privately profitable. Florida has the second-highest number of registered EVs in the country, yet lags the national average for public chargers per vehicle, with the real shortage concentrated in places like Miami-Dade, Broward and Orange counties, where large numbers of drivers live in apartments and condos without home charging access.
The eVTOL side of the plan also remains almost entirely theoretical. No eVTOL company has FAA approval to carry paying passengers on a scheduled commercial route in the United States; Joby Aviation, the furthest along, has cleared four of five FAA certification stages but isn’t expected to receive full type certification until later this year at the earliest. The proposal still needs federal sign-off before any of the redirected funds can actually be spent.
