There’s no facts to support the statement “…making it likely to be the first to be certified.”
Joby’s “success” is to get a basis of certification after 5 years of work. It is simply a basis, and gets them to Page Zero of certification. I can look at 14 CFR Part 460 and see my basis of certification of Carl’s Space Program. Is me having a copy of the rules ensuring that I will be the first to be certified. I can go to the Federal Election Commission website and see the exact steps to become President of the USA - does me having the basis of being president mean you are going to see Carl in the White House in 2024?
There are 40+ very complex items in this doc that the FAA plainly says do not have any industry consensus standard they are willing to accept, and that for each, Joby will have to create issue papers. Read 8110.112A, “Standardized Procedures for Usage of Issue Papers and Development of Equivalent Levels of Safety Memorandums.” and tell me how easy this will be. If they actually had a production-ready prototype with the specs of all of these area finalized that could be tested that would be one thing, but they have not completed development.
Look at the Honda Jet certification process: it used mature, understood technology and had a well established certification path. GE was their engine partner and has decades of powerplant cert experience. GE and Honda have bottomless pockets. GE and Honda are premier engineering and manufacturing organizations.
Even with all this going for them, the Honda Jet took 20+ years and cost $2 billion. They will never break even at $6m / aircraft.
I sincerely wish all of these eVTOL projects good luck, but to think that getting a certification basis finalized (which has dozens of complex areas that still have no established criteria) is some major accomplishment on the path to certification is misleading. It’s a long and expensive road ahead and they are just getting started.