Jaguar Land Rover has introduced a new concept vehicle that cuts a very different figure relative to its usual fare: It’s a four-wheeled electric urban mobility concept called ‘Project Vector’ that looks more like a low-floored airport shuttle train car than a traditional car.

This is a look that’s increasingly become popular among automakers designing for a future in which shared electric autonomous mobility plays a big role: Cruise, for instance, debuted a very similar looking long rectangle of a vehicle in January, with the crucial difference that its vehicle is a production model instead of just a concept.

Externally, JLR’s Vector concept looks very similar, with a front and end that could easily pass for one another, as well as sliding doors that open from the middle to allow the maximum amount of space for entry and exit. The floor is low to the ground to similarly accommodate easy onboarding and disembarkation, and that same floor houses the battery and drivetrain that make the vehicle go.

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Unlike Cruise’s strictly driverless design, however, the Jaguar vehicle features front-facing seats and a steering wheel for human control, though the interior is also “configurable” to eventually allow autonomous use, and to also offer flexibility for accommodating goods delivery as well as passenger transportation.

Jaguar Land Rover’s concept isn’t just the kind to get your noodle churning, either: The company says that it aims to work together with the Coventry City Council and the West Midlands Combined Authority to actually deploy a pilot mobility service using the Vector starting as early as “late 2021,” which it says will act as a “living laboratory for future mobility on the streets of Coventry.”

Most people probably don’t love the idea of hearing their streets will be made into a laboratory, but on the other hand pioneering shared electric transportation that more closely resembles public transit than traditional ride-hailing is likely a good thing.

Bluespace.ai, a new autonomous driving startup focused on mass transit, announced today that it has raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by Fusion Fund.

Other investors include YouTube co-founder Steve Chen; UMC, the Taiwanese semiconductor foundry; Kakao Ventures; GDP Ventures; Atinum; Wasabi Ventures; Blue Ivy Ventures; Plug n Play; and SLV Capital.

The startup develops software systems for autonomous mass transit fleets and is currently in meetings with cities and transit providers. Its founding team includes CEO Joel Pazhayampallil, previously co-founder of Drive.ai, which was acquired by Apple earlier this year, and president and COO Christine Moon, whose experience includes serving as head of partnerships for Google’s Nexus program.

Bluespace.ai’s team also has people who have worked at AV companies like Zoox, Lyft Level 5 and Voyage. Their combined experience includes launching AV fleets in Texas, California and Florida.

In an email, Moon told TechCrunch that Bluespace.ai’s software “enables verifiably safe AV operation without the millions of miles of testing needed by current generation AVs. This enables our mission of making urban mobility more equitable, accessible and sustainable through mass transit automation in the near term.”

Several major automakers, including Volvo and Toyota, and startups like May Mobility and Optimus Ride, are also working on AV solutions for mass transit.

Moon said Bluespace.ai’s specific focus is on “increas[ing] the overall ability and efficiency across trunk transit routes with higher rider capacity.” While other startups have primarily focused on first- and last-mile solutions for slow-speed vehicles that are part of main transit systems, Moon added that Bluespace.ai’s aim is to safely enable full-size vehicles that can travel on public roads at road speed, therefore serving more passengers at a time.

In a press statement, Fusion Fund managing partner Lu Zhang said “After looking at many investment opportunities in the AV space, we found that BlueSpace stood out with their revolutionary technology approach and providing near term market application. The founding team has an incredibly strong technology background and significant deployment experience, having launched AV services in Florida, Texas and California.”

Electric vehicle startup Nio is laying off 141 people at its North American headquarters. According to a filing from Employment Development Department of California, the employees at its San Jose office received notice on December 6.

Nio, whose global headquarters are in Shanghai, announced last month that it is partnering with Intel’s Mobileye to develop autonomous vehicles for consumers. Under the agreement, Nio will engineer and produce a self-driving system designed by Mobileye.

The Intel partnership was a spot of bright news after a difficult year for Nio. Nio’s third quarter saw an uptick in sales, thanks in part to competitive pricing, but its share prices have fallen about 78% since the end of February.

The company reported losses in the first and second quarters of the year and in June, voluntarily recalled 5,000 of its ES8 electric SUVs after battery fires in China, impacting its production and delivery. CEO William Li said during the company’s earnings report in September that it would implement cost-cutting measures, including reducing its workforce from 9,900 people down to 7,800 by the end of the third quarter. Nio has offices in 11 cities, including Beijing, London and Munich.

Lyft has another year of building out its autonomous driving program under its belt, and the ride-hailing company has been expanding its testing steadily throughout 2019. The company says that it’s now driving four times more miles on a quarterly basis than it was just six months ago, and has roughly 400 people worldwide dedicated to autonomous vehicle technology development.

Going into next year, it’s also expanding the program by adding a new type of self-driving test car to its fleet: Chrysler’s Pacifica hybrid minivan, which is also the platform of choice for Waymo’s current generation of self-driving car. The Pacifica makes a lot of sense as a ridesharing vehicle, since it’s a perfect passenger car with easy access via the big sliding door and plenty of creature comforts inside. Indeed, Lyft says that it was chosen specifically because of its “size and functionality” and what those offer to the Lyft AV team when it comes to “experiment[ing] with the self-driving rideshare experience. Lyft says it’s currently working on building these test vehicles out in order to get them on the road.

Lyft’s choice of vehicle is likely informed by its existing experience with the Pacificas, which it encountered when it partnered with Waymo starting back in May, with that company’s autonomous vehicle pilot program in Phoenix, Arizona. That ongoing partnership, in which Waymo rides are offered on Lyft’s ride-hailing network, is providing Lyft with plenty of information about how riders experience self-driving ride-hailing, Lyft says. In addition to Waymo, Lyft is also currently partnering with Aptiv on providing self-driving services commercially to the public through that company’s Vegas AV deployment.

In addition to adding Pacificas to its fleet alongside the current Ford Fusion test vehicles it has in operation, Lyft is opening a second facility in addition to its Level 5 Engineering Center, the current central hub of its global AV development program. Like the Level 5 Engineering Center, its new dedicated testing facility will be located in Palo Alto, and having the two close together will help “increase the number of tests we run,” according to Lyft. The new test site is designed to host intersections, traffic lights, roadway merges, pedestrian pathways and other features of public roads, all reconfigurable to simulate a wide range of real-world driving scenarios. Already, Lyft uses the GoMentum Station third-party testing facility located in Concord, California for AV testing, and this new dedicated site will complement, rather than replace, its work at GoMentum.

Meanwhile, Lyft is also continually expanding availability of its employee self-driving service access. In 2019, it increased the availability of self-driving routes for its employees three-fold, the company says, and it plans to continue to grow the areas covered “rapidly.”

Self-driving vehicle technology company Waymo has expanding its business relationship with automotive retail company AutoNation, the companies announced today. The new extension builds on the existing partnership between Waymo and AutoNation, which began as a way for Waymo to service its Phoenix, Arizona-based vehicles, and which grew last year into an arrangement wherein Waymo would provide autonomous transportation to AutoNation customers on their way to the dealerships.

Now, the partnership enters a new, third real of business: business-to-business goods transportation. Waymo vehicles in the Phoenix, Arizona area will now be used to move car parts between AutoNation’s Toyota Tempe locations and other repair shops in the area, including those run by independent third parties.

Waymo has been focused primarily on passenger transportation, launching and operating a pilot ride-hailing service using its autonomous cars in the Phoenix testing area where its vehicles are cleared to operate. The Alphabet-owned company’s CEO John Krafcik told a group of reporters on Sunday in Detroit that driverless delivery likely has a better chance of catching on early vs. passenger transportation, which could explain why this latest pilot sees Waymo look towards repeatable delivery routes for commonly transported goods.

We’re still not at the point where autonomous vehicles systems can best human drivers in all scenarios, but the hope is that eventually, technology being incorporated into self-driving cars will be capable of things humans can’t even fathom – like seeing around corners. There’s been a lot of work and research put into this concept over the years, but MIT’s newest system uses relatively affordable and readily available technology to pull off this seeming magic trick.

MIT researchers (in a research project backed by Toyota Research Institute) created a system that uses minute changes in shadows to predict whether or not a vehicle can expect a moving object to come around a corner, which could be an effective system for use not only in self-driving cars, but also in robots that navigated shared spaces with humans – like autonomous hospital attendants, for instance.

This system employs standard optical cameras, and monitors changes in the strength and intensity of light using a series of computer vision techniques to arrive at a final determination of whether shadows are being projected by moving or stationary objects, and what the path of said object might be.

In testing so far, this method has actually been able to best similar systems already in use that employ LiDAR imaging in place of photographic cameras and that don’t work around corners. In fact, it beats the LiDAR method by over half a second, which is a long time in the world of self-driving vehicles, and could mean the difference between avoiding an accident and, well, not.

For now, though, the experiment is limited: It has only been tested in indoor lighting conditions, for instance, and the team has to do quite a bit of work before they can adapt it to higher speed movement and highly variable outdoor lighting conditions. Still, it’s a promising step and eventually might help autonomous vehicles better anticipate, as well as react to, the movement of pedestrians, cyclists and other cars on the road.

Porsche will begin selling its vehicles online in the U.S. for the first time, the company announced on Monday. To begin with, the company is proceeding with a pilot program that will be offered with 25 of its U.S.-based dealer partners, but the automaker says it could expand to cover the U.S. market more broadly across a larger group of the 191 independent Porsche dealers that currently operate in the U.S.

The pilot project will let Porsche buyers pick out and submit an order for both new and used in-stock vehicles, but the process isn’t entirely online – buyers will still have to show up at a dealership to sign the final paperwork, and to take delivery of their new car. All the heavy lifting is handled online, however, including things like financing and payment calculators, as well as credit approvals and any insurance options that a buyer chooses to append to their purchase.

U.S. online shoppers will be able to do all of this through new sections integrated into the websites of the dealers participating into the program. Meanwhile, at the same time in Germany, Porsche is introducing online vehicle sales centralized through their own ‘www.porsche.de’ website, which itself is a pilot designed to test the waters for a broader European roll-out.

Online auto sales are not new, but they still aren’t really a widespread thing in most markets, especially in the U.S. where the existing independent dealership system persists. Tesla leaned heavily into online vehicle sales, however, due in part to its unwillingness to work with independent dealer partners, and to the inflexibility of state laws that protect that system. The automaker’s investment in automotive ecommerce has clearly inspired others to follow suit, however, and I don’t expect Porsche will be the last to dip its toes in these waters.

Volvo Group has established a new dedicated business group focused on autonomous transportation, with a mandate that covers industry segments like mining, ports and moving goods between logistics hubs of all kinds. The vehicle maker has already been active in putting autonomous technology to work in these industries, with self-driving projects including at a few quarries and mines, and in the busy port located at Gothenburg, Sweden.

The company sees demand for this kind of autonomous technology use growing, and decided to establish an entire business unit to address it. The newly-formed group will be called Volvo Autonomous Solutions, and its official mission is to “accelerate the development, commercialization and sales of autonomous transport solutions,” focused on the kind of transportation “where there is a need to move large volumes of goods and material on pre-defeined routes, in receptive flows.”

Their anticipation of the growth of this sector comes in part from direct customer feedback, the automaker notes. It’s seen “significant increase in inquires from customers,” according to a statement from Martin Lundstedt, Volvo Group’s President and CEO.

Officially, Volvo Autonomous Solutions won’t be a formal new business area under its parent company until January 2020, but the company is looking for a new head of the unit already, and it’s clear they see a lot of potential in this bourgeoning market.

Unlike autonomous driving for consumer automobiles, this kind of self-driving for fixed route goods transportation is a nice match to the capabilities of technology as they exist today. These industrial applications eliminate a lot of the chaos and complexity of driving in, say, urban environments and with a lot of other human-driven vehicles on the road, and their routes are predictable and repeatable.

Waymo and Renault are working with the Paris region to explore the possibility of establishing an autonomous transportation route between Charles De Gaulle airport and La Défense, a neighbourhood just outside of Paris city limits that plays host to a large number of businesses and skyscrapers, including a large shopping center. This is part of the deal that Renault and Nissan signed with Waymo earlier this year, to work together on potential autonomous vehicle services in both Japan and France.

This route in particular is being explored as a lead-up project to potentially be ready in time for the Paris Olympic Games, which are taking in place in Summer 2024. The goal is to offer a convenient way for people living in the Île-de-France area where Paris is located to get around, while also providing additional transportation options for tourists and international visitors. The region is committing €100 million (around $110 million) to developing autonomous vehicle infrastructure in the area to serve this purpose, across a number of different projects.

“France is a recognized global mobility leader, and we look forward to working with the Ile-de-France Region and our partner Groupe Renault to explore deploying the Waymo Driver on the critical business route stretching from Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport to La Défense in Paris,” said Waymo’s Adam Frost, Chief Automotive Programs and Partnerships Officer, in a emailed statement.

Defined routes designed to meet a specific need, especially in time for showcase events like the Olympics, seems to be a likely way that Waymo and others focused on the deployment of autonomous services will work in terms of pilot deployments, since it’s a perfect blend of demand, regulatory exemption and motivation and city/partner support.

Gogoro, the Taiwanese electric vehicle company, revealed its newest vehicle today, a lightweight scooter designed for people who want something smaller than one of the company’s Smartscooter mopeds, but more powerful than an electric bike. Called the Viva, the scooter can run for 85 kilometers on one of Gogoro’s swappable batteries, which are charged at the same stations as its Smartscooters.

Horace Luke, co-founder and CEO of Gogoro, tells TechCruch that the Viva was created as an environmentally-friendly alternative to 50cc to 100cc gas scooters. It will be available starting in October, launching first in Taiwan next year before being released in some international markets.

Made from recyclable scratch-proof solid-core polypropylene and available in five color combinations, the Viva weighs 80 kilograms and has up to 21 liters of storage. It will retail at USD $1,800, with about 100 optional accessories available, including baskets and racks.

As in many other Asian cities, mopeds are popular in Taiwan and serve as the primary vehicle for many drivers, transporting multiple passengers and deliveries. Luke says Gogoro’s scooters now account for 95% of the country’s electric vehicle market share and about 17% of all new vehicles sold in Taiwan, including gas ones.

Viva was created to attract customers who don’t want to deal with the costs, including maintenance visits and parking, of owning a bigger moped.

“The Viva is aimed toward the population going no more than 5 kilometers a day, who don’t want to worry about scratches, cost of ownership, having to take it to the shop for maintenance or parking,” he adds. “We have 17% market share and now the question is how do you get to 25% or 35% market share?”

Like Gogoro’s mopeds, the Viva is also connected to the company’s iQ system, which lets users unlock their vehicles and monitor mileage and maintenance with a smartphone app. With Taiwanese government subsidies for electric vehicles, it will cost NTD $25,980 (about USD $837), making it competitive with the pricing of high-end electric bikes. Gogoro will also offer two years of free maintenance for Vivas sold in Taiwan.

Gogoro has now sold more than 200,000 Smartscooters and is present in international markets including the European Union (through a partnership with scooter-sharing service Coup), South Korea, where it recently launched electric scooters designed for delivery drivers, and Japan. It also runs a mobility platform designed to be a white-label solution for ride-sharing companies.

VC firm Target Global has just announced it’s expanding its European network by adding a local office in Barcelona, Spain — building on its existing presence in Berlin and London, plus Tel Aviv and Moscow.

The firm has €700 million under management and a broad investment range that covers SaaS, marketplaces, fintech and insurtech, as well as a big focus on mobility.

TechCrunch sat down with general partner Shmuel Chafets and investor director Lina Chong, who will be heading the firm’s push into Spain, to talk about its decision to set up shop in Barcelona — discussing how they see the local and national ecosystem, as well as picking their brains on wider investments trends and regulation in Europe.

Want to know what it takes to get a meeting with Target Global and factors they weigh when they’re deciding whether to cut a check or not? Read on…

The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. 

TechCrunch: Why choose Barcelona and why now? Why not Spain’s capital, Madrid — or even a city like Paris?

Shmuel Chafets: First of all have you been outside!?

I started coming to Barcelona four or five years ago just to see things and we had some angel investments here and it feels to me today — or when Lina and I started getting more serious about Barcelona it seemed to us that Barcelona has the attributes of Berlin eight or nine years ago. When I at least started coming to Berlin and Lina moved to Berlin, it has the same attributes. It looks like it’s just about to happen

I think it has a few factors. The first one is that it’s a great place to live and you can’t ignore that. In Europe, if you’re a team and you’re an international team there are very few places that you can live in. So London is the original ex-pat city of Europe and it still is amazing but very, very expensive. Berlin is the second one. And I think a lot of Berlin’s early success was fuelled by people who were not necessary German and definitely not Berliners coming and starting a company there.

It’s a good place to live, it’s also a cheap place to live, and it’s a cheap place to do business. Salaries here are quite low but the quality of living is quite high and that makes it very good for startups. Particularly when you need young people, developers, creative people to move. It’s an easy place to convince people to move to.

It doesn’t have a dominant industry. And that is very similar to Berlin — Berlin is not where Germany economically is, and that means that the smartest people around want to go in for startups. That’s the best employment option. There is no banking industry sucking people in with high salaries. And also driving costs up. It is in its culture a very creative city, a very open, very creative city and that I think is also very important.

And lastly, there are these early success stories that fuel the idea of entrepreneurship and also fuel financial entrepreneurship. So one of the interesting things about entrepreneurship is that people who start need to know where it ends or where it’s going to. And the early success stories — first of all they make the smartest kid graduating — who has a McKinsey job offer and a Goldman Sachs job offer and a startup idea — he needs to know that the startup idea has a future. That there’s a future in being an entrepreneur and he needs to look up to people around him. It’s not enough to know that Mark Zuckerberg dropped out — that’s fine but that’s very far and very large.

Image via Getty Images / Pol Albarrán

But to look at Carlos [Pierre, founder and CEO] from Badi and say okay there’s a guy, he’s a few years older than me, he started a company, he’s doing very well — this is the path that I want to take.

Also, there are more and more mentors. People who’ve done it before. And they can help you figure things out. You have to be able to call someone up and say hey let’s have breakfast and explain how they do it.

And there’s more money — for seed. Because you look at a lot of people starting funds, and we were just talking on the way about the Ticketbis guys. They’re starting a fund. And that’s a great example of one of these early success stories and now they’re putting it back into the ecosystem and helping it grow.

Rocket Internet did a lot of that in Germany. They had early exits and then they went and plowed it all back into the ecosystem in their own particular way. People like [serial entrepreneur] Lukasz Gadowski — who we work with a lot. He built Spreadshirts… [then later] he founded Delivery Hero. So through Team Europe. So people who were early, early entrepreneurs — and then in the second wave helped build an ecosystem. So I think there are more and more people like that that we see here.

That usually fuels the ecosystem. Also as companies here start to scale and as more of these European startups start to build hubs here there’s more experience. You can find people who’ve been through a couple of rounds.

And the last thing which is not about Barcelona it’s about Spain in general. There’s a decent local domestic market and there is a natural second market in South America. And actually in the US too — because Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language in America so when you start a company here you have that second market built-in. Which is very important — you can scale it.

Latin America is a fascinating market right now, a fascinating time. So in a way, it’s a way for us to make a side bet on Latin America in a way without going out of Europe and insetting far. My first boss told me never to do business in a place where there’s no direct flight from where I live and I adhere to that. If things go belly up you don’t want to be stuck in transfer in some airport sitting there waiting for a transfer.

TechCrunch: So in a way being in a second city — this isn’t Madrid, Spain’s capital — is a more interesting proposition for startups because there’s less competition for talent?

Chong: It’s a bit of an underdog here. There are not these big dominant industries. It’s not cosmopolitan like how Madrid is perceived. There’s a lot of creativity, a lot of people who are more entrepreneurial in spirit.

Gogoro, the Taiwanese electric vehicle and mobility platform company, announced today that it has partnered with motorcycle company TIC Corporation to bring its B2B-focused electric scooters to South Korea. Gogoro 2 Utility, a version of the company’s Smartscooters created for logistics and delivery fleets, will be available for purchase through TIC, starting in Seoul.

Today’s launch means that Gogoro is now present in six countries, including its home market of Taiwan, Germany, France, Spain and Japan. In Europe, one of Gogoro’s main partners is scooter-sharing service Coup. Its alliance with TIC Corporation in South Korea is a new step for the Gogoro because it is geared at business clients instead of consumers.

Launched in 2011, Gogoro has spent the past eight years focused on the development of its Smartscooters, which are now the top-selling electric scooters in Taiwan. Over the past few months, the company has begun unveiling its international expansion strategies, including the launch of a vehicle-sharing platform intended to serve as a turnkey solution for partners, and deals with manufacturers, including Yamaha, that will make scooters using Gogoro’s technology, including its swappable batteries.