At CES, BMW today unveiled its new i Vision Dee concept car, an E Ink-clad four-door sedan that can shift colors on demand. Why ‘Dee,’ you surely ask? It stands for Digital Emotional Experience. We’ll leave it at that, but what matters here is that it’s BMW’s platform for showing off its new head-up display, which is all about giving drivers a choice of how much augmented reality they want to see as they drive.

Using a five-step selection, drivers can choose if they only want to see driving-related information or if they want to add data from their communications systems, an augmented reality project or a completely virtual experience with blacked-out windows (while driving autonomously).

Obviously, this is a concept and I don’t think we’ll see people lounge and play VR racing games in their car while their autonomous chauffeur handles the mundane task of driving them to their next meeting. But BMW also says that some of this technology will make it into production in its ‘Neue Klasse’ — its next generation platform — launching in 2025. This will include a head-up display that will use the entire width of the windscreen.

Continental recently showed off its Scenic View HUD, which also spans the entire windscreen (though only as a small strip at the bottom of the window), while automotive technology company Harman also today announced its new head-up display hardware, which isn’t quite as futuristic, but also focuses on larger fields of view and includes integrations with driver-assistance systems and real-time 3D object detection.

And while BMW previously talked about using E Ink as the outer skin of its vehicles, the i Vision Dee now brings this to life with an exterior that’s covered by 240 E Ink segments that can display 32 colors. The car maker actually worked with E Ink to develop the technology that allows it to adapt these display films for curved surfaces. There’s no word yet on when this technology will come to a production model. Earlier this week, VW showed off its light-up paint, so it’s probably only a matter of time before we see cars with these chameleon-like capabilities on the street.

“A BMW lives by its unparalleled digital performance. BMW i Vision Dee is about perfect integration of virtual and physical experiences” said Frank Weber, member of the Board of Management of BMW AG responsible for Development. “Whoever excels at integrating the customer’s everyday digital worlds into the vehicle at all levels will succeed in mastering the future of car-building.”

BMW reimagines the head-up display by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

Meet Vianova, a French startup that is building a data platform for shared mobility companies as well as local governments. The company acts as both a data repository and a data visualization dashboard.

It has raised a $6.4 million (€6 million) Series A funding round led by Baloise VC with XAnge as well as existing investors RATP Capital Innovation and Ponooc also participating.

Many cities have changed drastically with the rise of free-floating bikes, electric scooters, moped scooters and cars that you can unlock with your phone. Cities have also changed their rules over time and embracing micromobility in different ways.

The good news is that these mobility fleets all have some form of connectivity with a GPS chip and a cellular modem. In other words, companies and local governments can use data to make those services more efficient and safer for people using them and everyone else living in these cities.

Right now, Vianova tracks one million connected vehicles on its platform. Some companies use the platform to manage their fleet and make sure the vehicles are in the right spots at the right time.

Policymakers and data scientists can also leverage this platform to discover some trends. It can be used to improve infrastructure, create slow-speed zones or parking areas through geofencing and more.

All of this can be done through a SimCity-like dashboard with map overlays and real-time data. The idea is that you can use Vianova as real-time dashboard and as an analytics tool to generate historical reports and see how well you’re doing — whether you are a mobility company or a local government.

But an analytics tool without any data would be a bit useless. That’s why you can combine your own data with different mobility data sources. This can be particularly interesting for cities that want to access data from private companies to better understand what’s happening.

For instance, the city of Stockholm and Voi both use Vianova to improve shared mobility services in the city. Mobility companies decide who they want to share their data with.

Vianova uses APIs to fetch data from mobility operators so that you see live data on the platform. Data can be aggregated and anonymized.

Some of Vianova’s customers include the cities of Zurich, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Marseille, as well as mobility operators like Bolt and Voi. Some big infrastructure companies are also using the platform, such as RATP, Aéroports de Paris and KTH University.

Vianova builds the location data platform for shared mobility companies and cities by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

Tesla is battening down the hatches against the possibility of a worsening economy, according to a new report from Electrek. The automaker will conduct a new round of layoffs in the first quarter of 2023, per the blog’s source, and will also freeze hiring across the board — after having just resumed hiring during the latter half of 2022 following a prior freeze and first round of layoffs in June.

Of course, macroeconomic conditions don’t look like they’re going to improve anytime soon, so that could definitely be a reason for Tesla to implement measures to slow or reduce spending on headcount. But the EV company is also facing additional pressures from its recent steep stock price drop, which began in late September/early October and worsened again toward the end of October when Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter.

Musk has recently said that the problem is a general one regarding the stock market itself that results from rising bank account interest rates and general market volatility rather than any specific challenge facing Tesla. But critics still point to Musk’s general distraction as a contributor to the company’s poor performance with investors of late.

Tesla said to be conducting a fresh round of layoffs next quarter by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch

The SPAC route to listing on public markets was incredibly popular in 2020 and 2021, but many companies that took this avenue didn’t exactly fare well after going public. So why did consumer car rental marketplace Getaround decide to list by merging with a blank-check company?

To answer that question, we need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

In hindsight, the 2020-2021 SPAC boom was unable to materially diminish the rising unicorn backlog. In 2022, unicorns continued to be minted faster than M&A and public offerings could convert their illiquid equity into liquid capital. It’s become a difficult time for high-priced startups: The traditional gateway to the public markets — the venerable public offering — remains closed, would-be acquirers are looking to trim costs instead of getting adventurous with their balance sheet and SPAC performance has proved abysmal.

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Per SPAC Insider data, companies that merged with blank-check companies recently have seen their value fall sharply. SPAC combos worth $300 million to $2 billion in pro forma equity are off around 71% on a median basis since 2009, to pick a data point. Smaller blank-check combinations are down even more over the same time frame, while larger deals did slightly better.

Why the SPAC route makes sense for Getaround by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

Tesla owners: Go check your car. You have some new toys. The latest OTA update added a bunch of features, most notable, Steam, which brings along thousands of games. This app, however, is limited to Model S and X vehicles with 16GB of RAM (only found in vehicles made in 2022).

Elon Musk tweeted that Tesla was adding Steam support in July. The Beta version in this update even adds support for Steam’s cloud synchronization, allowing for games to be resumed in the vehicle or any Steam device. Better yet, the OTA update finally added Bluetooth support gaming controllers while using Arcade Mode. Tesla’s release notes state the PS5 controller works the best.

But this update has something for everyone, too. There’s an updated Dog Mode that allows owners to access the in-vehicle camera from the mobile app. Media controls were relocated, and Apple Music and Zoom was added, too. Tesla also updated the navigation UI, pinning the next turn information window to the top of the screen while the rest of the navigation information is located at the bottom. Drivers can relive Mario Kart memories and drive on a rainbow road, turn signals can automatically turn off, and the door handles have new options while parked at home.

And just in time for the holiday’s, Tesla’s long-popular light show mode now allows it to sync with other Tesla vehicles. Now, you and your buddies can line up your Tesla vehicles, and together, they’ll put on a show to the same song. Festive.

Tesla’s latest OTA update adds Steam games, Apple Music, Zoom and a wild light show mode by Matt Burns originally published on TechCrunch

Defense technology continues to get a lot of attention from investors, and today, one of the bigger startups in the space is announcing more funding. Shield AI — which develops platforms and planes for autonomous flying systems, targeting the U.S. military and its allies as customers — has raised $60 million in funding, money that it will be using to continue developing its technology.

The money is coming in as an additional part of Shield AI’s Series E, and it brings the total round to $225 million. Shield AI announced the previous $165 million tranche in June, which gave the startup a valuation of $2.3 billion. We’ve confirmed with Brandon Tseng, Shield AI’s president, who co-founded the company with his brother, CEO Ryan Tseng, that this extension came in at the same valuation.

This latest $60 million came from a single investor, Hollywood producer Thomas Tull. (Previous investors in the company include Snowpoint Ventures, Riot Ventures, Disruptive, Homebrew, Point72 Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Breyer Capital and SVB Capital.) Interestingly, the company actually closed this extra funding a week after the last round was announced.

We’re in a tricky period for fundraising: investors have tightened their purse strings in reaction to tech companies, from the top down, seeing a slowdown in business. Then startups finding it harder to raise money have had to cut costs to extend their runways and demonstrate to their backers that they have business ideas that will grow and be profitable. And even if they do all that, they might still run out of money and have to shut down.

Amidst all that, defense tech has been one of the categories that has stood out, not least because of world events: tensions between nations, terrorism and wars are all being played out on a technological level these days, and that means not only equipping those in combat with better tools, but also potentially using technology to carry out any action in order to reduce casualties.

“Military and government spending is countercyclical,” said Tseng in an interview. “When you talk to a consumer or enterprise business, spending goes down in a recession. But the government is a Steady Eddie. Modernizing the military requires a path and a plan and so it will continue to execute on that.”

All of that is what’s driving business for the best startups in the space, and that in turn is getting investors interested, too.

“Automated defense capabilities will play an increasingly essential role in our defense programs and are critical to our ability to remain competitive,” said Tull in a statement. “Shield AI is a leader in this space, developing some of the most advanced and cutting-edge technology for AI piloting. We are proud to be able to support Shield AI and the work they are doing in defense.”

Shield AI is based out of San Diego, which we previously described as the Silicon Valley of the defense industry: it’s the home port of the U.S. Pacific fleet, and according to stats gathered by the city’s chamber of commerce, outside of Fairfax County, Virginia (where the Pentagon is based), greater San Diego gets more defense spending than any other place in the U.S. Shield is based there, among dozens of other major and smaller defense contractors.

The company already has a number of aircraft as well as its Hivemind autonomous flying software on the market and deployed with customers (e.g., in the F16 plane pictured above) — Shield AI is part of the U.S. Department of Defense Program of Record — and it’s working on a number of other projects, including VTOL autonomous plane software and hardware, and “swarming” capabilities to jam signals or to help their customers communicate when their signals are being jammed.

Indeed, the large size of Shield AI’s round, $225 million, is a sign not just of that demand, but also of the high costs associated with developing for this industry. It comes just 11 days after Anduril, another defense tech startup working on autonomous systems, confirmed that it had raised close to $1.5 billion at a $7 billion valuation.

Shield AI raises another $60M at a $2.3B valuation for its military autonomous flying tech by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Uber’s delivery business in Spain has settled with local labor unions which were challenging its dismissal of more than 4,000 riders in August last year ahead of a labor law reform coming into force — acknowledging the dismissed couriers as staff and agreeing to pay severance equivalent to 45 days’ salary per year worked (via Reuters).

In a statement emailed to TechCrunch, an Uber spokesperson said:

“This agreement with worker unions in Spain aims at compensating couriers who were not able to access our app following the introduction of the Rider Law in 2021. We have since then launched a new model in full compliance with the new local regulatory framework and remain open to dialogue with all relevant parties to continue to improve independent work for all.”

The ‘Riders Law’, as the 2021 Spanish labour law reform is known, was aimed at platforms perceived to be falsely classifying delivery couriers as self-employed — introducing a presumption of employment for those providing such services through digital platforms.

Uber’s decision to let go of thousands of couriers ahead of this change in their employment status was dubbed a de facto collective dismissal by unions FeSMC-UGT and CCOO-Servicios — who challenged its action before the National Court. The court initially dismissed the challenge but in a ruling in July the Supreme Court revoked the lower court’s decision, deciding that the unions could challenge the dismissal and triggering a retrial.

Uber appears to have settled to avoid this, as the retrial in the National Court was scheduled for today.

The unions said 4,404 couriers who were dismissed by Uber last year should receive compensation under the settlement.

“This is a historic agreement,” they write in a press release (which we’ve translated from Spanish). “For the first time a collective dismissal of delivery people has been recognized in court and guarantees the collection of compensation for each of those affected, in amounts that are better than those established in law.”

Delivery workers who are affected by the settlement should receive an email from Uber’s local delivery firm, which is called Portier Eats Spain, informing them of the agreement and the amount of compensation they should receive, per the unions.

In order to claim compensation due they need to reply within a month of receipt of the message, accepting the compensation and confirming their bank details for transferring the payment — which should be remitted within four months.

Affected couriers who no longer have access to the email address they previously used to communicate with Portier Eats Spain are instructed to contact FeSMC-UGT immediately by email — at plataformasdigitales@fesmcugt.org — in order for the union to manage the payment of their compensation.

Change of compliance gear

While Uber has agreed to recognize that these former couriers were employees, it has recently changed how it responds to Spain’s Riders Law.

An Uber spokesperson told us the company now operates two different models in Spain — one of which entails working with third party fleet partners who employ couriers directly. But it has also, since September, launched a tweaked model which enables couriers to remain independent (i.e. self employed) without — it claims –breaching the Rider Law.

Delivery platforms in Spain responded in a variety of ways to the change in the labor law last year — including pulling out of the market altogether (in the case of Deliveroo). Others claimed to have adapted their models, such as homegrown rival Glovo, which claimed it would take on some riders as staff but does not appear to have employed the vast majority of its couriers.

That led to some tension with Uber — which earlier this year penned an open letter accusing Glovo of flouting the labor reform and complaining it was unable to contract enough couriers to secure its service because so many were opting for ongoing ‘self-employment’ with Glovo.

Fast forward a few months and Uber has reworked its playbook to steer closer to Glovo’s.

That may not be the soundest compliance strategy, however, as the latter continues to face regulatory bumps on home turf — such as a $78M penalty it was hit with in September for employment law breaches attached to its employment classification of riders.

The company claimed that sanction pre-dated the entry into force of the Riders Law but fresh challenges to its tweaked model — and to Uber’s — are all but certain.

Zooming out, last year, European Union lawmakers proposed a bloc-wide reform aimed at improving conditions for workers on gig economy platforms — proposing legislation to bring in a rebuttable presumption of employment across EU Member States with the goal of enforcing minimum standards in areas like pay, conditions and social protections.

However the file — and the proposed legal presumption of employment for platform workers — has proved divisive, as Euractive reported recently, with divisions emerging between national delegations and no compromise position yet adopted by the Council.

Uber’s food delivery platform agrees to pay severance to couriers let go ahead of Spain’s Riders Law by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

Dat Bike is on a mission to put more electric bikes on Vietnam’s roads. The startup said today it has raised $8 million led by returning investor Singapore-based firm Jungle Ventures, just seven months after its first round of funding was announced. GSR Ventures and Delivery Hero Ventures also participated in this round, along with Wavemaker Partners and Innoven Capital.

The new round brings Dat Bike’s total raised to $16.5 million. It will use its new funding on tech and product development, hiring for its sales, support, R&D and product teams, and building more capacity in its factories.

Dat Bike was founded in 2018 by Son Nguyen, who learned how to build bikes from scrap while working as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. The company says that over the past 12 months, its revenue has grown 10x.

Its bikes are sold through three stores in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and Da Nang, with more stores planned. It will expand to Quang Ninh, Hai Phong, Nha Trang, Binh Duong and Can Tho over the next few months.

Dat Bike is also available through online channels and stores, with plans to get a fast feedback loop to increase the speed of innovations and developments in each release of its products.

Nguyen told TechCrunch that since Dat Bike’s last funding round, it has scaled its production capacity and go-to-market teams while continuing to invest in research and development. Dat Bike is also available in all three regions of Vietnam now.

Dat Bike’s customer strategy is to first deliver an e-bike with good after sales service, Nguyen said, and its goal is to convert gasoline bike users to electric.

Dat Bike claims that its newest model, the Weaver 200, has a range of 200 kilometers compared to 50 kilometers for most other electric bikes, and a charging time of one hour for 100 km and three hours for a full 200 km charge, compared to 6 to 8 hours for other e-bikes.

The startup recently launched Dat Charge, a charging station for its bikes, which it says reduces charging time by a third. Dat Charge is currently available in the center Ho Chi Minh City, with plans to expand it nationwide over the next few years.

In a statement about Jungle Ventures’ investment, vice president My Tran said, “This is our third investment in Dat Bike and we continue to be amazed by the incredible execution by the team. The growth is testament to the electric future that Son is building with Dat Bike.”

Dat Bike gets another $8M to put more e-bikes on Vietnam’s roads by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Well, those Bird results were wrong.

It recently came to light that Bird, a former startup unicorn in the once-hot scooter rental market, overstated its revenue for several years, leading to the company stating in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that several of its “audited consolidated financial statements [ … ] should no longer be relied upon.”

The errors impact the company’s results for 2020 and 2021, along with the first two quarters of 2022. Given that Bird announced its plan to go public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company in mid-2021, a transaction predicated on its trailing results, the accounting mess is consequential.

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For many investors, we reckon that the admission of error is a bit too late. Back when the Bird-SPAC deal was voted on, shares of the blank-check company fell. And then kept falling. Since the merger of the two companies, Bird has lost nearly all of its value, falling from a 52-week high of $9.05 per share to just 30 cents per share as of early morning trading today, according to Google Finance data.

More simply, Bird lost nearly all of its value after going public, which we presume means that some regular folks took a bath. Now it turns out that it went public using partially incorrect historical data. Even more, the company’s latest earnings report notes that as of the end of Q3 2022, Bird “will not be sufficient to meet the Company’s obligations within the next twelve months” with its existing cash balance of $38.5 million.

How Bird clipped its own wings by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

Last year YASA, a British electric motor startup with a revolutionary “axial-flux” motor, was acquired by Mercedes-Benz to develop ultra-high-performance electric motors for Mercedes’s AMG.EA electric-only platform.

YASA’s axial-flux electric motors had previously garnered a reputation for efficiency, high power density, small size, and low weight.

However, the team behind YASA did something quite clever. While Mercedes acquired that automotive rights, they passed on the rights to an aerospace version of the engine. That was taken up by a new entity, complete with YASA’s founders, called Evolito, to develop an electric motor it described as ultra-high-performance, low-weight and best for future EV aircraft.

Evolito’s lead investors are Waypoint Capital and Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE).

YASA’s ‘axial-flux’ motors makes them one-third the weight of other electric motors, more efficient, and with 3x higher power densities than even Tesla’s, according to the company.

It’s now emerged that former YASA CEO Dr. Chris Harris will lead Evolito on its path to commercialize electric flight.

 
Harris joined YASA in 2012, scaling the company from 20 employees to more than 300, following 15 years’ leading other high-growth businesses in the UK, Europe and US. He stepped down from his CEO role at YASA in September 2022, but will remain a Non-Executive Director at the wholly-owned Mercedes-Benz subsidiary. A director of Evolito since the company’s spin-out and incorporation, he now becomes Evolito CEO effective immediately.
 
Evolito acquired UK battery company Electroflight in July 2022, which means it can also offer aerospace OEM & eVTOL customers fully-electric powertrain  solutions.

In a statement, Harris said: “Electric flight requires ultra high-power density, super low-weight electric powertrains. Evolito provides best-in-class powertrain solutions for OEMs, leveraging  next-generation axial-flux electric motor technology that’s already proven in automotive.”

Evolito, with an axial-flux motor lighter than Tesla’s, starts ramping up its team by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

A couple caveats for those going apoplectic over the headline: I mean self-driving isn’t going to be a thing A) in our lifetimes and B) with any kind of omnipresent scale. So in terms of the daily lived experience of most people reading this, truly autonomous vehicles just aren’t going to happen. The evidence pointing to this has been mounting for years now, if not decades, but it’s now tipped the balance to where it’s hard to ignore for a reasoned observer – even one like myself who has previously been very optimistic about self-driving prospects.

My decision to make this call is mostly predicated on one big event from Wednesday: Scooped by our very own Kirsten Korosec, Ford announced that it would be winding down Argo AI, the company backed by itself and fellow automaker Volkswagen focused on developing full level 4 autonomous driving technologies. Ford explained their justification in doing so when they released their Q3 earnings a few hours later, noting that not only were they shutting down Argo, but they were also essentially deprioritizing L4 technologies altogether, to instead focus on advanced driver assistance (ADAS) systems with internal resources.

Ford CEO Jim Farley justified this by saying that “profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a long way off and we won’t necessarily have to create that technology for ourselves” on the company’s earnings call Wednesday evening. The sentiments echoed those of a much younger and more tech-forward automaker CEO from just last week at our Disrupt conference in San Francisco.

While Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe did say the company was eventually aiming to introduce Level 4 autonomy, he also said that the plan is to focus first on L2 and L3 ADAS, with its existing shipping vehicles capped at L3 given their current hardware limitations. He did say that he believes L4 is actually currently possible for companies with the proper advanced hardware kit on cars – with the caveat that those be geofenced to a specific location.

That brings us to the companies who are currently operating driverless vehicles on actual public roads, Waymo and GM’s Cruise. Surely, if two (ostensibly) for-profit companies are already out there doing it, then it’s going to happen, right?

The fact is that these existing services are extremely constrained in terms of geography and operating hours (though the latter is arguably a regulatory issue) and that seems unlikely to change at a pace that would make them ubiquitous in any reasonable timeframe. Plus, the existing services face consistent, vocal criticism from residents who have to share the road with them.

At least Cruise and Waymo’s vehicles are tuned for extreme caution – possibly to a fault. Tesla on the other hand seems much more intent on hard-charging into a future where its so-called ‘Full Self-Driving’ technology actually lives up to its name, with an expanding pool of beta users employing the tech on public streets and frequent software iterations that on at least one occasion have done more harm than good. Musk is also intent on stripping out as many sensors as possible from the Tesla autonomy hardware kit, probably in search of margins, under the misguided belief that compute, AI and optical input will improve and combine to act as a cure-all.

Musk strives to justify Tesla’s approach on the regular, but it looks like he may have to do that explaining in more granular detail to the U.S. Department of Justice if they proceed with any action resulting from an ongoing criminal investigation the government branch is pursuing.

With even early pioneers striking a skeptical note, the time to consider the opportunity costs of shovelling money into the autonomy engine on autopilot is now. Argo AI was considered a leader with solid technological fundamentals by most experts in the field, so its shuttering is a strong signal not to be ignored. Meanwhile, I barely even scratched the surface on regulatory and public acceptance of any true ubiquitous self-driving, which will necessarily lag technological development — and likely by a lot, not a little.

It’s time to admit self-driving cars aren’t going to happen by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch

Tesla is said to be facing a criminal investigation launched by the U.S. Department of Justice facing claims made by the company regarding its ‘Autopilot’ capabilities, Reuters reports, citing “three people familiar with the matter.” The inquiry was launched last year per the sources, and was initiated following over a dozen accidents involving the active use of Tesla’s Autopilot system, some resulting in fatalities.

Tesla, and in particular CEO Elon Musk have been bold in their claims regarding Autopilot’s capabilities: The company’s so-called ‘Full Self-Driving’ or FSD (which is not that at all, by the way, even by the admission of the company’s own materials) beta launched in October of 2020, and now has over 100,000 members enrolled from the larger global Tesla owner population, according to the most recent public numbers.

The automaker still cautions users of ‘Autopilot,’ ‘Enhanced Autopilot’ and ‘Full Self-Driving Capability’ that they must remain “alert,” with their “hands on the steering wheel at all times” and that they “maintain control of [their] car.”

That said, Musk himself has suggested FSD could be “safer than a human” before the end of this year in an earrings call from January. It was a reiteration of a claim from a year prior he made on Twitter, noting that FSD would “work at a safety level well above that of the average driver this year.”

Note that just because the DoJ is investigating doesn’t mean criminal charges will necessarily result – they could opt to pursue civil action, do nothing at all or else level charges.

Tesla said to face criminal investigation by the Department of Justice over self-driving claims by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch