Elon Musk spent some time over this past holiday week answering questions posed by fans on Twitter, and one addressed the growing catalogue of entertainment options available in-car via the Tesla Theater software feature: Musk said that Disney+ will be “coming soon” to the list of available streaming services drivers can access in their cars. Tesla Theater was introduced in the V10 software update that went out in September via over-the-air-update, and added streaming media from Netflix and YouTube, as well as Tesla vehicle feature tutorials.

Tesla also issued a new software update that began rolling out just before Christmas, which included the addition of Twitch to Tesla Theater, as well as support for popular farming sim game Stardew Valley, the ability to set dashcam video clips to automatically save whenever you honk the horn, support for voice commands and much more.

Tesla has put a lot of effort into its continuous software updates for vehicles, which are available to all cars in the fleet regardless of generation and which really do add a lot of post-purchase value, especially when compared to the traditional automaker practice of gating new features and improvements to only current and recent model year releases.

Tesla Theater’s streaming media options are only available when the car is in park and not driving, but it’s a feature that is more valuable to Tesla owners than you might think – especially when you consider that Tesla cars require time to charge at charging stations, meaning even at a high-speed Supercharger you’ll likely be looking at a wait of half-an-hour or more depending on how much you’re looking to charge up.

Via Teslerati

American automotive technology startup Rivian has raised $1.3 billion in new funding, the company announced today. The new investment is the fourth round of capital announced by the company in 2019 alone, following prior announcements of $700 million from Amazon, $500 million from Ford (which includes a collaboration on electric vehicle technology) and $350 million from Cox Automotive.

That’s a lot of money, but Rivian’s not your typical startup, since it’s aiming to bring fully electric vehicles to market, including the R1T pickup truck and the R1S sport utility vehicle. Both of those are consumer cars, which the company aims to bring to market starting at the end of next year – and Rivian is also working with Amazon on all-electric delivery vans, of which the commerce giant has ordered 100,000 with a target of starting deliveries of the first of those in 2021.

Rivian’s new monster round includes participation from Amazon and Ford Motor Company, along with funds advised by T. Rowe Price Associates and BlackRock, the company said in a release. It’s not adding any new board seats attached to this funding, and it’s not sharing any further details on the specific funds involved in the investment at this time.

The company, founded in 2009, has R&D facilities in a number of cities globally, and also has a 2.6-million square-foot manufacturing facility in Normal, Illinois. It debuted its pickup and SUV at the LA Auto Show last November, and the the vehicles will launch with higher-end trim levels first, including up to 410 miles of range on a single charge. Base prices for the R1T pickup start at $69,000 before any tax credits are applied, while the R1S SUV starts at $72,500, and Rivian has been taking pre-order reservations available with a $1,000 deposit.

For a company that in many ways has seemed to appear out of nowhere, Rivian’s capitalization and partnerships make it one of the better existing contenders to take on Tesla, especially in the truck and SUV categories, where Tesla has less presence with only the high-end Model X actually available to purchase so far.

Tesla is making progress on its plan to build its European gigafactory in Berlin, Bloomberg reports. The Elon Musk-run automaker is working with state officials in Brandenburg on the contract to secure around 740 acres of land just outside Berlin in Gruenheide, and the government has agreed to the contract as currently written and is now awaiting Tesla’s final sign-off.

On top of the contract, Tesla has also filed the requisite documents with local environmental monitoring authorities that outline the impact of the factory build, a required step in order to secure approval to break ground.

Musk revealed that he had selected an area just outside of Berlin as the site of the company’s European Gigafactory during an awards acceptance ceremony in November. The location is near the new Berlin airport, which has been under construction for many years and will replace Berlin’s aging and cramped Tegel airport once completed.

The Berlin Gigafactory will be building vehicles, starting with the forthcoming Tesla Model Y compact SUV, but it will also build batteries and powertrains, Musk said on Twitter at the time. Eventually, the new facility could employ as many as 10,000 people and produce up to 500,000 new vehicles per year, Bild reported previously.

A little over a year after sparking a legal firestorm for musing that he would take Tesla private for $420, Elon Musk is likely glad he didn’t.

Tesla’s stock just hit a record high yesterday, brushing close to $400 per share and putting the company within striking distance of that $420 figure that cost Musk $20 million in fines with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Since Tesla announced a surprise profit in the third quarter of the year the stock has been on a tear, recovering from its year-long tumble wrought by Musk’s Twitter tirades and extracurricular shenanigans.

The company’s core business is looking very strong, thanks in part to a weak performance by rival automakers electric vehicle offerings and the seemingly successful ramp up of manufacturing and sales in China.

There’s also another tailwind at the back of Tesla’s business and that’s in its far smaller (for now) energy business.

Lost in the hubbub over the decisions to slash costs of its Chinese manufactured vehicles by 20%; the success of the new gigafactory in the country; and the beginnings of a new gigafactory in Berlin was the news that the company had sold its first Megapack — a massive lithium ion battery installation — to a utility in Alaska.

Like it or loathe it, Uber changed the face of modern urban transportation by providing a relatively pain-free way to order a car to take you from A to B. But the company’s growth has done more than catapult Uber into the ranks of the biggest (and most-watched) tech companies: it’s helped open the door to a new raft of transportation startups.

But while Uber’s aggressive growth has been fueled by huge fundraises and hefty losses, its approach is not the only way ahead. Blacklane, a transportation-on-demand startup from Berlin, provides a template for another kind of strategy, one based on minimal outside funding, a focus on very specific customer segments and slow growth that relies on partner ecosystems to achieve global reach.

“We’ve never been distracted. We have always wanted to be a channel player, largely playing a local game,” said CEO Jens Wohltorf in an interview in Berlin earlier this month.

Some have described Blacklane as something similar to what Uber was like when it first started out, and on the surface, there is some truth to that: users order cars through its app, and the vehicles are always “black cars;” larger sedans and comfort-oriented vehicles. But unlike Uber, which from its earliest days always traded on the idea of providing five-star service at an affordable price, Blacklane aims at the higher end of the market, targeting corporate workers, executives and those who have the means to pay extra for higher levels of service when they travel.

And its success has led to a whole new level of interest in the company.

“In the first couple of years, VCs always asked me the question of how we would react to the big ride-hailing players. How do we compete, and how could we be more similar?” said Wohltorf. “Today, it’s changed 180 degrees. Now the question is ‘what’s your strategy to be different?'”

Indeed, for those building or thinking about building or investing in a transportation-on-demand startup, it’s worth considering Blacklane’s example: for all of the outsized nature of biggies like Uber and Didi, Blacklane, with around $77 million in funding, is much closer to the average player in the world of transportation-on-demand.

Collectively, nearly $81 billion has been raised by 428 ride-sharing startups, according to data from Crunchbase. But it’s a very uneven spread: about 75% of that has been highly concentrated in about ten companies led by Uber and Didi (respectively raising around $25 billion and $21 billion), with the list rounded out by the likes of Grab, Lyft, Ola, Chinese trucking company Manbang, and bike companies like Ofo, HelloBike and Meituan.

If you take the rest of the funding and distribute it equally among the rest of the field, it works out to a significantly more modest $48 million per startup — with many raising far less than that (and some still significantly more, if not $25 billion more).

The most recent financials for the company cover 2017, when it reported revenues of 44 million euros and a net loss of 10.5 million euros. From what we understand, it’s managed to keep that net loss rate steady in 2018 and 2019 while revenues have continued to grow.

This also makes Blacklane a relatively rare thing in the ride-sharing world: a quiet but healthily growing startup.

The message here is that for the rest of the field, and for any other founders looking at building a transportation or on-demand-distribution-of-anything startup, there is an interesting lesson to be learned about whether it’s possible to build a long-term company in this space without going large like an Uber, and if so… how.

The concept for Blacklane first came to cofounders Jens Wohltorf and Frank Steuer in 2009 — the same year Uber was conceived, as it happens.

Small satellite launch company Rocket Lab just officially declared its second launch pad open, but it’s already broken ground on a third. The new one will be located in New Zealand on the Mahia peninsula, right next to its first launch pad at the company’s original launch facility – which is already the first and only privately-owned and operated rocket launch facility on Earth.

Rocket Lab’s new launch pad at Launch Complex-1 (LC-1) will provide it with the ability to launch with even more frequency. Already, the company intends its LC-1 to be the locus of its rapid response and high volume business, while its new launch pad on Wallops Island in Virginia is primarily designed to unlock access to clients who require U.S.-based launch operations from American providers (Rocket Lab is now officially headquartered in LA).

The company has been doing a lot of work to increase its ability to launch multiple missions in quick succession – this year, it unveiled a new room-sized carbon composite manufacturing robot that can turn parts of its Electron launch vehicle construction process that used to take weeks into something that is done in just hours. It’s also now in the process of developing a way to recover the first-stage booster of Electron, which would save it even more time and money on building new ones between missions.

Ultimately, Rocket Lab wants to get runaround time between missions to mere days, and having two active pads at the same site will mean it has a lot more flexibility to do things like bumping a customer up the queue should conditions allow, or adding a new customer with tight timelines on an ad hoc basis.

Autonomous aircraft transportation seems like a sure thing at this point – in particular for cargo, where safety concerns around potential harm to people isn’t as much of an issue. One company pursuing this goal is Elroy Air, which has developed a hybrid-electric vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft that can carry over 300 lbs of cargo for up to 300 miles – a good distance for replacing some medium haul ground freight routes.

Now, Elroy Air is demonstrating some new aspects of their system, including the ability to pick up cargo containers on its own without any loading processes needing to be handled by humans. That’s a mighty interesting feature, and one that could potentially make possible a lot of efficiency gains in a cargo operation, like round-the-clock operation and relatively low-lift urgent deliveries of large volumes of emergency supplies.

Elroy is betting that its approach, which includes the autonomous cargo loading and loading features, as well as a hybrid fuel system that offers efficiency but also doesn’t require any major charging infrastructure to operate, could help it commercialize its services ahead of other types of designs. It’s aiming to serve a range of customers across commercial, humanitarian and military industries, and completed its first test flight earlier this year.

These days, it seems like everyone is building their own electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. The race is clearly on to develop these vehicles in a bid to anticipate the next major sea change in how we get around cities, but what we’ve seen so far of these vehicles is usually quick clips and heavily edited highlight reels. Lilium, a Munich-based startup building their own urban air mobility vehicles, is showing off a lot more than that today.

The footage above is actually from a test conducted at the beginning of October, and Lilium says it’s now completed that phase of testing and is working on phase two. But this look at its Jet in action is an illuminating three minutes, showing the aircraft going through its vertical take-off and landing process, as well as flying around and making turns before returning to its origin point.

This is a relatively low-speed demonstration compared to what the Lilium Jet can achieve with its unique propulsion method – the company has flown at speeds of up to 100 km/h (~60 mph) since, and is also working on moving the flaps for its jets to a full flat angle, which should help it move horizontally even faster. Ultimately, Lilium will look to use its jet (with a pilot controlling the vehicle at least for the first few years of operation) in an air taxi service ferrying people around cities.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the grey space in between.

Today we’re looking into Uber’s bike bet and what the push could mean for Lime and other micromobility companies working to find a sustainable business model. As profitability comes back into vogue among investors at the expense of growth, both Uber and a cadre of mobility-focused startups are hoping that electric- and pedal-powered transport pay off.

Let’s take a look.

Uber’s bike push

Uber is most famous for its ride-hailing business, and the on-demand car-hire service that Uber was founded upon still generates the bulk of its revenue. In its most recent quarter, for example, Uber’s ride-hailing segment generated $2.86 billion in adjusted net revenue. The next-largest Uber business, its Uber Eats segment, generated a comparatively modest $392 million in adjusted net revenue.

Which brings us to the smaller Uber efforts. Freight, its aptly-named hauling business, brought in $218 million in adjusted net revenue in the same quarter (Q3 2019). And finally, Uber’s “Other Bets” segment was responsible for $38 million in adjusted net revenue. That was the smallest result, but also the fastest-growing, exploding from $3 million in adjusted net revenue in the year-ago quarter.

While Q3 2019 was better for Uber than its preceding periods regarding growth, the company’s slowing expansion and stiff losses (its net loss in the period came to $1.16 billion), have left the global transportation giant hunting for new revenue. And its Other Bets segment, which includes incomes from “dockless e-bikes and e-scooters,” is growing like heck.

This recent news item was therefore not surprising:

“We want to double down on micromobility,” Christian Freese, Jump’s head of EMEA, told CNBC in an interview. “We have seen how beautifully it works with our core business and ride sharing, and want to invest more and deeper, especially in Europe.”

Uber claims adoption of Jump’s bikes and scooters in Europe has outpaced that of the U.S. in the last eight months. It says more than 500,000 Europeans rode the vehicles in the last eight months alone, racking up 5 million trips in total.

The move by Uber makes good sense. The firm needs to grow, it has found a vein of consumer interest to mine, and it has the scale (financial, and in terms of an existing userbase) to pull off the scheme.

Of course, even if Uber quadrupled its Other Bets income (which includes more than just micromobility dollars), the segment would only add up to around 4% of its Rides adjusted net revenue (using the company’s Q3 figure for reference.) Growth, however, is growth, and investors love a story.

Uber is not the only company that wants to make bikes and scooters work at scale. There are a number of startups around the world that have raised rafts of capital to do just that. And they don’t want Uber to win.

Lime’s new 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.”

Boeing might be taking the last crucial steps to prepare for its first crewed Starliner capsule spaceflight, but it’s also busy turning sci-fi into reality right here on Earth – by helping Disney build X-Wing large-scale starfighters to celebrate the opening of the ‘Rise of the Resistance’ ride at Disney World in Florida.

Earlier this week when the ride opened during an evening ceremony, X-Wings “roughly the size of a family van” flew over the event, as described by The Drive, which first identified earlier spy shots of the vehicles as potentially being based on Boeing’s aerial cargo drone. Boeing has since confirmed its involvement, but they aren’t providing more info than that the X-Wings were indeed their aircraft.

In the clip below, you can see the X-Wings ascend vertically into the night sky, then hover and rotate before heading out. Don’t go squinting to see if you can spot Poe Dameron at the controls, however – these are unpiloted drones based mostly likely on the Cargo Air Vehicle design Boeing has recently shown off, which sports six rotors (you can see them in close-ups of the X-Wing included in the gallery at the end of this post).

Astute observers and Star Wars fans will note that the X-Wings feature the split-engine design introduced in the T-70 variant that are flown by the Resistance in the current trilogy, as opposed to the full cylinder engine design on the T-65 from the original trilogy. That makes perfect sense, since the Rise of the Resistance ride takes place during an encounter between the Resistance and the First Order during the current trilogy timeline.

As for Boeing’s CAV, it recently completed a three-minute test flight during which it demonstrated forward movement, after flying outdoors during a hover test for the first time earlier this year. The cargo drone is designed for industrial applications, and can carry up to 500 lbs of cargo, but it’s still in the testing phase, which makes this Star Wars demonstration even more interesting.

[gallery ids="1921346,1921347,1921348,1921349"]

Lego seems to have been inspired by recent events to bring its own vision fo the truck of the future to the world – behold this bold design statement in all its glory. Clearly, Lego is having a go at Elon Musk and the Tesla Cybertruck that he unveiled last week – which was… divisive in its reception, to say the least.

The Lego version is “guaranteed shatterproof,” Lego notes on Twitter, which is a jab at the failed demo wherein Musk had designer Franz von Holzhausen hurl a large metal ball at the driver and rear passenger windows of the Cybertruck, only to have them smash instantly upon contact. Musk has since said that this only happened because Holzhausen’s prior sledgehammer strikes to the driver door panel undermined the structure of the windows, but it was still highly memorable and memeable moment.

Despite launch day hiccups and a lot of poking fun at its looks, Musk has said that so far, more than 250,000 customers have signed up and put down a refundable $100 deposit for the Cybertruck, so it’s garnering enough interest for at least that level of commitment.

No word on Lego’s truck availability or pre-orders, but maybe they’ll challenge Ford to a truck duel, too.