He has separate motors for vertical and horizontal flights, which simplifies the design, but creates a rather bad inefficiency, the vertical motors create lots of drag during the horizontal flight.
Maybe it's not a big deal, I'm not sure. Making motors rotate would add weight for sure, thus reducing the range.
With this config, the cruise motors and prop are optimally sized for cruise - which gives non trivial gains to both eta for propulsive motor efficiency and prop efficiency.
Vs a tiltrotor/wing/body in which the cruise motor has to do double duty as lifting motors. Given it takes anywhere from ~4-7x more power to hover (depending on disc loading) than to cruise, you can see how the motors are not in an optimal throttle/rpm band in this case. Archer's CTO Munoz has actually said this publicly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_Aviation#/media/File:Wing...
Adam Savage did a video tour of their factory recently, worth a watch
Thanks! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BXm6dTHvY0
I'm a big Waymo and Wing fan, but hadn't seen that.
Tilt-rotor on all 4 motors with an extra twist: the wing shape adds to the lift in vertical mode, so you can use smaller motors, so they're more efficient even in horizontal mode.
> the wing shape adds to the lift in vertical mode
Wings require airspeed to work, which there presumably aren't a lot of in vertical mode.
This is also the most the penalty will ever be as electric motors continue increasing in specific power, and quite rapidly this century so far.