Lyft is making 200 new long-range EVs available to rideshare drivers as part of its Express Drive program, the company revealed today. Express Drive is a program that Lyft offers to provide rental cars to drivers on its platform, as an alternative to options like long-term leasing. Express Drive members get unlimited miles, as well as included insurance, maintenance and roadside service, with the ability to return the car after a rental period of as little as just a week.

These 200 new EVs (all Kia vehicles for this particular deployment, Lyft tells me) will be available to Express Drive Lyft drivers in December, and the rideshare company says that this is “the largest single deployment of EVs in Colorado’s history” – and there’s good financial reasoning for the timing of Lyft’s introduction of the program – in May, Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed a bill into law that provides rental programs for rideshare operators with the same incentives that it provides consumers at the state level: as much as $5,000 per car purchased.

EV deployments of this nature have benefits across all aspects of the rideshare economy: Lower operating costs for drivers are one immediate effect, for instance and Lyft says that it’s seen costs drop between $70 to $100 for drivers on average based on existing EV fleet deployments in both Seattle and Atlanta. For cities and residents, it’s obviously beneficial in terms of lowering net emissions resulting from cars on the road. The jury is still out on whether rideshare and ride-haling programs ultimately decrease the total number of cars on the roads, but if programs like this can speed the adoption of EVs and ensure they represent a higher percentage of the mix of vehicles that are driving around cities, that’s a net win.

Large fleets of EVs in operation also provide incentives for infrastructure operators to ensure that there’s a good charging network on the ground for these vehicles to take advantage of. That, in turn, means that the infrastructure is present for consumers to take advantage of, which helps with the general EV adoption curve.

Lyft also says it’s aiming to “electrify more of the Lyft fleet each year moving forward,” so expect additional cities and fleet deployments to follow as it works on those goals.

Flying cars are fine – but why use a car when you can have a motorcycle instead? YC-backed startup JetPack Aviation wants to answer that question with the world’s first flying motorcycle, a personal aircraft dubbed ‘The Speeder,’ a name that Star Wars fans will surely appreciate. Now, JetPack has raised a seed round of $2 million from investors indulging Draper Associates, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, YC, Catheis Ventures and a group of angels that it says will fund the development of the Speeder’s first functional prototype.

Back in March, JetPack revealed its plans for the Speeder, which it says will provide a fully stabilized ride that’s either pilot-controlled or fully autonomous. It can take off and land vertically, and reach top speeds of potentially over 400 MPH. There are not exposed rotors systems, which make it a lot safer and easier to operate than a lot of other VTOL designs and helicopters, and the company says it can also be refuelled in under 5 minutes, which is a dramatically shorter turn around time for powering up vs. an electric vehicle.

This isn’t JetPack’s first aerial rodeo: The company, led by CEO and founder David Mayman, has already created an actual jet pack. Mayman himself has demonstrated the personal aerial jet pack numerous times, and it’s been certified by the FAA, plus it landed a CARADA agreement with the U.S. Navy Special Forces for use in short-distance troop transportation. The jet pack also boasts a lot of features that sound, on paper, like diene fiction: Over 100 mph top seed, and suitcase-sized portability, for instance.

That track record is why when Mayman tells me this $2 million round “should fully fund the first full scale flying prototype, including all modelling designs and build,” I tend to believe him more than I would just about anyone else in the world making a similar claim.

Part of the reason the Speeder is more viable near-term than other VTOL designs is that it will rely on turbine propulsion, rather than battery-based flight systems. This is because, in Mayman’s opinion, “current battery energy density is just too low for most electrically powered VTOLs to be truly practical,” and that timelines optimistically for that to change are in the 5 to 10 year range. The Speeder, by comparison, should feasibly be able to provide quick cargo transportation for emergency services and military (its first planned uses before moving on to the consumer market) in a much shorter period.

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.”

Autonomous drone-based transportation startup Volocopter has revealed its first partner for its new VoloDrone industrial and commercial electric vertical take-off and landing craft: John Deere . The agricultural and industrial heavy equipment company is working with Volocopter on a VoloDrone-based aerial crop-dusting system.

VoloDrone, which Voloctoper unveiled at the end of last month, has 18 rotors and a fully electric power system that can provide up to 30 minutes of flight time for the aircraft, and carry up to 440 lbs. It’s designed to operate fully autonomously along a set path, or be piloted remotely for manual control if needed. John Deere is equipping the VoloDrone with a sprayer and tank array mounted to its cargo connection points, which will be able to dispense pesticides, liquid fertilizer, anti-frost agents for unseasonable inclement weather and more. Both partners also see potential in applications like sowing seeds for new crops from the air.

The VoloDrone is potentially a better, more precise and more cost-effective alternative to using a helicopter for these applications, Volocopter says. They’ll be working with John Deere to test and prove that out with initial pilots to be conducted during the next agricultural growing season.

Add another one to the list of companies piloting small wheeled autonomous robots for small package and food delivery: Yandex . Russia’s search and services giant has expanded its ambitions in the world of autonomous transportation, building on its work with self-driving cars to deploy a six-wheeled robot that adopts the popular cooler on wheels style pioneered by Starship Robotics.

The small autonomous robot, appropriately dubbed ‘Rover,’ has a suite of sensors, including that prominent lidar array on top, and it moves at “average walking speed” according to the company. It includes software that can help it avoid people walking in its path, pets, and just about any other objects that might block the sidewalk while it’s in motion on its way to its destination.

The initial pilot includes testing on the main Yandex corporate campus in Moscow, across a range of weather conditions, and during both the day and at night. The Moscow HQ hosts over 7,000 employees, and spans both office buildings, restaurants and parking garages. Ynadex is providing food deliveries and groceries from its own Yandex.Eats and Yandex.Lavka platforms, respectively, and also small goods transportation is another area of potential expansion, since Yandex owns and operates its own e-commerce platform Beru. The company also says Rover could find a home within its warehouses and data centres for in-office transportation.

That’s what most differentiates the Yandex wheeled delivery bot from most of the other ones current in service or in development: At Yandex, there are a lot of other businesses in-house that could benefit from autonomous last-mile transportation. Companies like Postmates and Amazon also have primary businesses that benefit, while Starship and other dedicated companies need to sell to clients to stand up their revenue generation. Yandex might be unique in the breadth of in-house businesses for which an autonomous wheeled small parcel robot could have knock-on benefits.

Richard Branson’s small satellite launch company Virgin Orbit announced today that it has secured final approval on a £7.35 million ($9.5 million) grant from the UK Space Agency (UKSA), funds which will be used by Virgin Orbit to help set up its Cornwall-based launch facility. Virgin Orbit has been putting together funding and securing regulatory approvals to establish the new launch site, which will be called Spaceport Cornwall and which will be part of Cornwall Airport Newquay.

This site will provide a UK-based launch site for Virgin Orbit, giving the UK domestic launch capabilities and providing a way for UK-based entities to do everything from build to launch within the country. The company is also working on developing a movable ‘ground operating system,’ which is essentially a series of towable trailers that Virgin Orbit can use to house ground crews that will support the missions of its LauncherOne vehicle, which is the airborne launch platform it’s developing for high-altitude small payload launches.

Virgin Orbit is one of two Virgin-branded space companies founded by billionaire Branson. The other, Virgin Galactic, just went public through an arrangement with Social Capital Hedosophia, a funding vehicle set up by Chamath Palihapitiya and partners specifically for the purpose. While both companies make use of modified terrestrial aircraft used as high-altitude launch platforms for vehicles designed to then reach space. Virgin Orbit’s launch system supports small satellites aiming for orbit, however, whereas Virgin Galactic’s launch vehicle is designed to propel a sub-orbital passenger vehicle just beyond the edge of Earth’s atmosphere.

Orbit’s commercial goals give it a clearer path to revenue generation and profitability, since other companies including SpaceX and Rocket Lab have built businesses on the demand for launch capabilities, with small satellites making up a big percentage of that mix. If all proceeds as planned with Spaceport Cornwall, the company hopes to be launching payloads from the location as early as 2021.

Uber will become an ad platform, selling space inside its Eats app to restaurants hoping to lure in more food delivery orders. A recent Uber job listing spotted by TechCrunch seeks an Uber Eats Ads Lead “to lead the team and efforts responsible for creating a new ads business that enables eaters to discover new foods and restaurants to grow their customer base.”

An Uber spokesperson confirmed the company would be entering the ads business, telling TechCrunch “We are exploring relevant ads in Eats.” Selling ads could help it improve margins on Eats, where it only takes 10.7% of gross bookings as adjusted net revenue since it pays out so much to restaurants and drivers.

The fresh opportunity in ads comes at a critical time when Uber is desperate to show its future potential in the face of a sagging share price that closed at $28.02 yesterday, down 40% from a high of $46.38 in June. Today, Uber’s post-IPO stock lock-up expires and early investors are able to sell their shares, putting newfound pressure on its stock.

TechCrunch was the first to discover a prototype of Eats ads in Decembe called Specials, where restaurants could get featured placement in the app in exchange for offering a discount. This demonstrated Uber’s ability to steer hungry users to order from particular restaurants.

I followed up with Uber’s senior director and head of Eats product Stephen Chau, who hinted at the company’s aspiration in the ads business. “There’s a bunch of different ways we can work with restaurants over time. If we have all the restaurants on the marketplace and we give them tools to help them grow, then this will be a very efficient marketplace. They’re going to be spending those ad dollars somewhere,” Chau told me. We’ve been checking on the company’s progress in ads ever since.

As we predicted, now instead of just a quid pro quo where Uber exchanges added visibility to restaurants willing to offer discounts that could keep users loyal to Uber Eats, it plans to formally sell ads.

“As this is a brand new space for Uber” the Toronto-based Eats Ads Lead “will be responsible for defining the vision for this new product area and determining where to start building.”

The job listing also notes whoever takes the role will “Help formulate our business, product and go-to-market strategy for ads” and “Creatively experiment and quickly iterate on early tests”. Signaling global ambitions for Eats ads, the Lead will “Customize and scale this offering across the world.”

The effort is separate from Uber’s own marketing efforts that see it spend over $1 billion per year to recruit riders, drivers, and Eats customers. Uber will start selling the ads, not just buying them.

The potential for Eats ads stems from Uber’s place as a destination for choosing what to eat, not just ordering it. Wherever there is discovery, there are opportunities for paid discovery. And as Uber focuses on cross-promoting Eats inside its main ride hailing app, it could suck in more users that are open to suggestions that restaurants pay to provide.

We don’t have details on exactly how Uber’s ads will look. However, you could imagine them appearing on the home page, the browse section, or even in search results for certain cuisines or restaurants. Restaurants hoping to boost orders could pay to appear to users who are hungry but don’t know what they want to eat, or to appear before competitors in the same food style.

Amazon successfully navigated a similar expansion from marketplace to ad platform. eMarketer expects Amazon’s US ads business will grow 33% this year to reach $9.85 billion, and claim 7.6% of the total US ad market which makes it the biggest search ad player behind Google.

Uber could use any revenue it can get. This quarter the company lost $1 billion, with $316 million of that loss coming from Eats. But Eats’ revenue grew 64% year-over-year, showing it’s increasingly popular, and could command enough user attention to make advertising lucrative.

Ads could also serve as a wedge for Uber to move deeper into business intelligence services for restaurants. It could apply its data on food delivery demand to help kitchens to optimize prices, allocate staff, and improve menus.

To save its share price, Uber’s best bet is to find new streams of cash it doesn’t have to share with drivers or restaurants. It may still be years until self-driving vehicles arrive to rescue Uber from its tremendous costs.

Crowdsourced transit app Pigeon, developed within Google’s Area 120 lab for experimental projects, is today rolling out to five new cities across the U.S., in addition to New York — including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. Unlike traditional transit apps that rely on schedules and updates from a local transit authority, Pigeon takes more of a Waze-like approach where commuters help one another by reporting delays, crowds, and other issues.

The result is a transit app that can better inform users about unexpected incidents, as well as real-time crowds and offer more context about delays. The app will also send out alerts to users about things like power outages or major service changes, in addition to personalized alerts sent before commuters leave their home or office so they can plan around the delays, reroutes or weather-related incidents.

While the app’s goal is to offer better transit information to riders, it’s also working to develop a community within Pigeon.

Similar to Waze where users establish profiles and communicate with friends, Pigeon offers a social component. Users can post not only about delays, but also other transit happenings with both comments and images. These reports are then shared along a rider’s route in an activity feed.

For example, users may post about dirty or unsafe conditions, crowds, or escalator outages, then share a photo along with that information. But some of the posts may be more positive — like those applauding a local entertainer or noting a cute dog.

If anything, Pigeon could encourage more of these kinds of social posts as its users, unlike on Waze, aren’t stuck behind the wheel and only able to quickly tap a button to share a report with the crowd.

However, even users who don’t want to contribute directly can benefit from the app’s push notifications about unexpected delays and incidents.

The app was developed internally at Google, through its in-house incubator Area 120, and launched to New York users in September 2018. (TechCrunch actually spotted it go live in May 2018, but Google wasn’t sharing much information at the time.)

Since then, Pigeon has helped its early adopters across hundreds of thousands of transit trips each month, the company says. It’s also releasing an NYC Subway Insights Report detailing some of those learnings — like which lines had the most rush-hour delays or most crowds, which station was reported to be the hottest in the summer, and more.

Google’s app isn’t alone in tackling public transit from a new angle. Startups like Transit, Moovit, Citymapper, and others are also participating in this space — sometimes with their own crowdsourced components.

Today, Pigeon is live on iOS in these half-dozen U.S. cities and supports transit information for subway, bus, rail, ferry and cable car.

Android users can sign up for the waitlist to be alerted as to when Pigeon becomes available.

Better than expected revenues couldn’t divert investor attention from the fact that Uber still managed to lose more than $1 billion in the most recent quarter as the company’s stock fell in after-hours trading.

There are bright spots in the latest earnings report, not least that the company managed to stanch the bleeding that had cost the company over $5 billion in the previous quarter.

Revenue grew to $3.8 billion, up from $2.9 billion in the year-ago period, representing a 30% boost. But even as Uber’s core business shows signs of stabilizing and its core markets continue to show growth, its other business units appear to be hemorrhaging cash at increasingly high rates.

“Our results this quarter decisively demonstrate the growing profitability of our Rides segment,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, the company’s chief executive, in a statement. “Rides Adjusted EBITDA is up 52% year-over-year and now more than covers our corporate overhead. Revenue growth and take rates in our Eats business also accelerated nicely. We’re pleased to see the impact that continued category leadership, greater financial discipline, and an industry-wide shift towards healthier growth are already having on our financial performance.”

Losses in earnings at the company’s Uber Eats business grew 67% to $316 million from $189 million in the year-ago period. And performance in the company’s freight division looks even worse. Losses in freight ballooned by 161%, growing to $81 million from $31 million in the same quarter of 2018.

Also contributing to the company’s losses for the quarter were stock-based compensation expenses, which added another $401 million to the tallies against the company.

Given that the lock-up period is about to end for institutional investors, that could spell even more trouble for the company — as institutional investors who bought into the company before its public offering may look to sell.

That said, Uber has taken a number of steps to correct its course and put the company on a path to profitability, which Khosrowshahi says should happen in the next two years.

In October, the company announced the last of three rounds of sweeping layoffs at the company that saw 1,185 staffers lose their jobs. Khosrowshahi called the layoffs a chance to ensure that the company was “structured for success for the next few years.” In an email to staff, he wrote, “This has resulted in difficult but necessary changes to ensure we have the right people in the right roles in the right locations, and that we’re always holding ourselves accountable to top performance.”

With the layoffs behind it, Uber can now focus on some of the big operational challenges it had set for itself through the reorganization that the company has announced. That includes adding new features and technologies to its Uber Eats delivery program (despite what recent losses at GrubHub may imply about the food delivery business) and pressing forward with another darling of the tech set these days — the company’s financial services platform.

The launch of this new platform, coupled with a slew of announcements from the company in September, show that Uber may have dialed back on its ambitions, but not by much. As Khosrowshahi said at the event, “We want to be the operating system for your everyday life…. A one-click gateway to everything that Uber can offer you.”

Researchers at MIT have developed a new method of navigation for robots that could be very useful for the range of companies working on autonomous last-mile delivery. In short, the team has worked out how a robot can figure out the location of a front door, without being provided a specific map in advance.

Most last-mile autonomous delivery robots today, including the ‘wheeled cooler’-style variety that was pioneered by Starship and has since been adopted by a number of other companies, including Postmates, basically meet customers at the curb. Mapping isn’t the only barrier to having future delivery bots go all the way to the door, just like the humans who make those deliveries today.

MIT News points out that mapping an entire neighborhood with the level of specificity required to do true front-door delivery would be incredibly difficult – particularly at national (let alone global) scale. Since that seems unlikely to happen, and especially unlikely for every company looking at building autonomous delivery networks to source separately, they set out to devise a navigation method that lets a robot process cues in its surroundings on the fly to figure out a front door’s location.

This is a variation on what you may have heard of referred to as SLAM, or simultaneous localization and mapping. The MIT team’s innovative twist on this approach is that in place of a semantic map, wherein the robot identifies objects in its surroundings and labels them, they devised a ‘cost-to-go’ map, which uses data from training maps to color-code the surroundings into a heat map wherein it can determine which parts are more likely to be close to a ‘front door’ and which are not, and immediately chart the most efficient path to the door based on that info.

It’s a much, much more simplified version of what we do when we encounter new environments we’ve never seen directly before – you know what’s likely to be the front door of a house you’ve never seen just by looking at it, and you know that essentially because you’re comparing it against your memory of past houses and how those properties have been laid out, even if you’re doing that all without even thinking about it.

Delivery is only one use case for this kind of intelligent local environment mapping, but it’s a good one that might see actual commercial use sooner rather than later.

Omio (née GoEuro) has acquired multimodal travel veteran Rome2rio as it works on building out a global travel aggregator business, having taken the decision to zoom out from its home market of Europe earlier this year.

Financial details of the transaction are not being disclosed. But Omio raised a $150M funding round a year ago so it’s presumably splashing a portion of that capital now.

It’s not Omio’s first acquisition (others have included BusRadar for beefing up its bus search capabilities). But it looks to be the first with its eye on a broader global business horizon.

Rome2rio is based in Melbourne, Australia, and offers search tools for travellers covering multiple transportation options all around the world.

Some 10 million locations are covered by its product which serves results for more than 5,000 train, bus, flight, ferry and intra-city public transportation operators.

The 2010 founded startup has some 18 million users per month. It had only raised a very small amount of VC over nearly a decade of operations, per Crunchbase.

Omio says it will maintain Rome2rio as a separate brand, so the company will be operating two travel aggregator brands going forward. The companies will collaborate to “create new and better experiences” for global travellers by combining Rome2rio’s end-to-end journey planning offer with the extensive transport inventory that’s bookable via Omio, it adds.

Commenting in a statement, Naren Shaam, CEO and founder of Omio, said: “We are excited to welcome the Rome2rio team to Omio. They have built a great product with innovative tech and delivered impressive growth. Together, our two brands will reach half a billion users every year and offer access to thousands of transportation operators globally, helping us deliver our vision to solve consumer travel globally.”

“Joining forces with Omio is a natural extension of our existing product experience,” added Dr Michael Cameron, CEO and co-founder of Rome2rio, in another statement. “We have spent almost a decade refining our ability to help users figure out how to get from one corner of the globe to another. Now, with Omio, Rome2rio customers will be able to book tickets with more transport providers than ever before, and receive support throughout their journey.

“Rome2rio and Omio share a vision of creating simple, intuitive multi-modal transport products for our users. As a team, we are excited about the opportunity to work with Omio, integrate our technologies, and leverage each other’s expertise to scale even more quickly.”

Further acquisitions look to be on the cards for Omio, which says it will look to buy its way into new geographies — as well as seeking to grow organically and via partnering with more transport providers.

Currently the 2013-founded travel business has an average of 27 million monthly users. It also says it has 18 million app downloads to date as well as more than 800 partnerships with transportation providers.

Urban air mobility company Volocopter has focused its efforts to date on getting its passenger electric drone business off the ground – literally, in fact. But now, the German startup has unveiled a new electric vertical take-off and landing craft (eVTOL), which is designed specifically to move large payloads of goods around, without a pilot on board.

The new Volocopter VoloDrone has a familiar ‘crown’ of rotors up top – it’s essentially the same design the company uses for its passenger aircraft. But instead of a cabin for people, the body of the VoloDrone is a squat rectangular platform, with attachments underneath for hooking up cargo, and two tall landing skids.

VoloDrone can hoist up to 440 lbs, either tucked between its landing rotors in cargo containers, or in a payload-holding sling or other similar carrying mechanism. It can fly for 35 miles on a single charge, which is not that far – but the whole point is to serve industries including agriculture, public infrastructure and others where distance isn’t a challenge so much as is navigating complex terrain via ground-based vehicles.

Volocopter says that the new aircraft was developed by a specialized team based near Munich, and that its design was informed by work done with strategic partners from across the target industries the eVTOL is designed for. VoloDrone has also already taken its first demonstration flight this month, so it’s more than just a concept.

This is a good example of how Volocopter can look to extend the fundamentals of its rotor craft platform into new areas with fit-for-purpose customized variants. That’ll probably be a key ingredient as the company looks beyond its current testing and trial phase and into building a sustainable, revenue-generating business.