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.

NASA and its commercial astronaut program partners are laser-focused on getting crew into space, but to get to space you first have to get to the rocket, and that’s where the Airstream Astrovan II comes in. This vehicle, which is the sequel to the original Astrovan that brought America’s astronauts to the launch pad in the days of the Shuttle Program, features modern updates, and is heading straight from being on display at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington to Cape Canaveral to ready for Boeing’s first CST-100 Starliner crew launch next year.

I got a chance to take a look at the Astrovan II in person, but the Airstream staff on site had cordoned off the door to the van and when I asked if I could go in, they explained it was off limits to attendees – for good reason, since this is literally the van that will be used by NASA’s commercial crew astronauts during the first launches next year.

The original Astrovan had that signature Airstream ‘silver bullet’ look, as you can see in the photo below. The updated version looks more like your standard commercial shutter van, but what it lacks in exterior styling it makes up for in interior creature comforts.

The outside of the Astrovan II has a full-wrap which shows off Boeing’s CST-100 Starline capsule, which is the spacecraft that Boeing is developing for NASA as part of its commercial crew program, along with second supplier SpaceX, which is simultaneously readying its Crew Dragon capsule for service.

[gallery ids="1903180,1903175,1903174,1903176,1903177,1903178,1903179"]

The Astrovan II status up to eight passengers (compete with flight suits) and is a custom version of the Airstream Atlas Touring Coach that was handbill in Jackson Center, Ohio. As you can see, they opted for a minimalist, sci-fi stainless steel look on the inside, with large, comfy looking chairs that should provide a smooth ride before the considerably rockier one commercial crew will experience strapped to a massive, powerful rocket en route to the International Space Station.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on the company’s earnings call today that the company’s full self-driving mode, in a feature-complete release, could arrive as early as the end of this year. That would be made available in an ‘early access’ mode which is essentially a limited beta, and Musk qualified that this isn’t a sure thing.

“While it’s going to be tight, it still does appear that will be at least in limited in early access release of a feature complete self-driving feature this year,” he said on the call.

He added that it’s “not for sure,” but that it “appears to be on track” for a limited private beta by year’s end.

This follows the release of Tesla’s Smart Summon automated parking lot driverless parking lot hailing feature. It allows Tesla owners to call their cars from their parking spots to pick them up from a curbside within the parking lot. The feature has been used plenty of times with mixed results reported from early use, but Musk also said that the company will be releasing an updated version of the software with improvements in the next “week or so.”

The Smart Summon update is an improvement built on the data taken from the “over a million” uses of the feature by Tesla owners already since its release at the end of September.

To make use of the full self-driving mode that Tesla plans to introduce, vehicle owners will have to own the FSD upgrade package, which is a $7,000 upgrade after it increased from $6,000 in August.

Tesla began shipping its new full self-driving computer hardware in all new vehicles beginning in April, moving to its own custom chip. This was to ensure that enabling the FSD feature would be a software-only update, which is something the company had claimed would be possible with a previous generation of self-driving computing hardware, but the challenge has clearly been more difficult than expected – estimated timelines for the feature’s deployment have also slipped multiple times.

Musk added in response to a question later in the call that while he thinks ‘early access’ availability could be late this year, but full self-driving “reliable enough that you do not need to pay attention, in our opinion” won’t be available until “the end of next year.”

Alphabet -owned drone delivery spin-out Wing is starting to service U.S. customers, after becoming the first drone delivery company to get the federal go-ahead to do so earlier this year. Wing is working with FedEx Express and Walgreens on this pilot, and their first customers are Michael and Kelly Collver, who will get a “cough and cold pack,” which includes Tylenol, cough drops, facial tissues, Emergen-C and bottled water (do people who have colds need bottled water?).

The Collvers are receiving their package in Christianburg, Virginia, which is where Wing and Walgreens will run this inaugural pilot fo the drone delivery service. Walgreens gets a noteworthy credit in the bargain, becoming the first U.S. retailer to do a store-to-customer doorstep delivery via drone, while FedEx will be the first logistics provider to delivery a e-commerce drone delivery with a separate shipment.

Wing is also working with Virginia’s Sugar Magnolia, a retailer local to the state, and that part of the equation is focused on proving out how Wing and drone delivery can service last-mile e-commerce customers at their homes. Sugar Magnolia customers can get small items, including chocolates and paper goods, delivered directly to them via drone through the new pilot.

Wing was able to do this with a new Air Carrier Certificate from the FAA that clears it for expanded service, specifically allowing Wing’s pilots to manage multiple aircraft flying without any human pilot on board at the same time, while providing service to the public.

It’s a big milestone when it comes to U.S.-based drone delivery, and another sign that people should get ready for these services to start to be a more regular fixture. Earlier this month, UPS also secured FAA approval to operate a commercial drone delivery service, so the trials will probably come fast and furious at this point – though widespread service is probably still quite a ways off as both regulators and operators look to learn from their first limited deployments.

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.

The biggest wave in consumer products right now has all the hallmarks of another bubble of misplaced investor expectations and sadly lower margins.

Cloud kitchens (the category, and not just CloudKitchens the startup service) is essentially WeWork for restaurant kitchens. Instead of buying an expensive restaurant site on a heavily-walked street, a cloud kitchen is developed in a cheaper locale (an industrial district perhaps), with dozens of kitchen stations that are individually rentable for short periods of time by chefs and restaurant proprietors.

It’s a market that has exploded this year. CloudKitchens, which has been funded by former Uber founder and CEO Travis Kalanick, is perhaps the most well-known example, but others are competing, and none more so than meal delivery companies. DoorDash announced that it was opening a shared kitchen in Redwood City just this week, Amazon has announced it is getting in the game, and around the world, companies like India-based transportation network Ola are building out their own shared kitchens.

That has led to laudatory headlines galore. Mike Isaac and David Yaffe-Bellany talk about “the rise of the virtual restaurant” at the New York Times, while Douglas Bell, contributing to Forbes, wrote that “Deliveroo’s Virtual Restaurant Model Will Eat The Food Service Industry.”

And there are not just headlines, but predictions of doom as well for millions of small-business restaurant owners. Mike Moritz, the famed partner at Sequoia, wrote in the Financial Times earlier this year that:

The large chain restaurants that operate pick-up locations will be insulated from many of these services, as will the high-end restaurants that offer memorable experiences. But the local trattoria, taqueria, curry shop and sushi bar will be pressed to stay in business.

Latent in these pieces (there are dozens of them published on the web) lies a superficial storyline that’s appealing to the bright but not detail-oriented: that there are high software margins (or ‘cloud’ margins if you will) to come from a world in which kitchen space is suddenly shareable, and that’s going to lead to a complete disruption of restaurants as we know them.

It’s the same sort of storyline that propelled WeWork to meteoric heights before eventually crashing the last few weeks back down to reality. As Jesse Hempel wrote in Wired a few years ago about the shareable office startup: “Over time, this could be a much bigger opportunity than coworking spaces, one in which everything WeWork has built so far will simply feed an algorithm that will design a perfectly efficient approach to office space.”

Clearly, the AI algorithm for office efficiency (“WeWork Brain”?) wasn’t as profitable as hoped, with WeWork expected to lay off 500 software engineers in the coming weeks.

And yet despite the seeming collapse of WeWork and the destruction of its narrative, we still haven’t learned our lesson. As Isaac and Yaffe-Bellany discuss in their NYT piece, “No longer must restaurateurs rent space for a dining room. All they need is a kitchen — or even just part of one.” Now I know what the two mean here, but let’s be uncharitable for a moment: you can’t rent a part of a kitchen. No one rents the stovetop and not the prep area.

But it is that quickly slippery logic that can cause an entire industry to rise and eventually crumble. Just as with the whole “WeWork should really be valued as a software company” meme, the term ‘cloud kitchens’ implies the flexibility (and I guess margins?) of data centers, when in reality, they couldn’t be further away in practice from them. Commercial kitchens require regulatory licenses and inspections, constant monitoring and maintenance, not to mention massive kitchen staffs (they aren’t automated kitchens!).

So let’s look at how margins and leverage play out for the different players. If you are the owner of one of these cloud kitchens, how exactly do you get any pricing leverage in the marketplace? Isaac and Yaffe-Bellany again write, “Diners who order from the apps may have no idea that the restaurant doesn’t physically exist.”

That sounds plausible, but if consumers don’t know where these restaurants physically are, what is stopping an owner from switching its kitchen to another ‘cloud’? In fact, why not just switch regularly and force a constant bidding war between different clouds? Unlike actual cloud infrastructure, where switching costs are often extremely prohibitive, the switching costs in kitchens seems rather minimal, perhaps as simple as packing up a box or two of ingredients and walking down the street.

That’s why we are seeing almost no innovation coming from early-stage startups in this space. Deliveroo, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Ola, and more — let alone Amazon — are hardly under-funded startups.

In fact, this supposed rise of the cloud kitchen gets at the real crux of the matter: the true ‘expense’ of restaurants isn’t rent or labor, but in fact is really marketing: how do you acquire and retain customers in one of the most competitive industries around?

Isaac and Yaffe-Bellany argue that restaurants will join these meal delivery platforms to market their foods. “…[T]hey can hang a shingle inside a meal-delivery app and market their food to the app’s customers, without the hassle and expense of hiring waiters or paying for furniture and tablecloths.”

Let me tell you from the world of media: relying on other platforms to own your customers on your behalf and wait for ‘traffic’ is a losing proposition, and one that I expect the vast majority of restaurant entrepreneurs to grok pretty quickly.

Instead, it’s the meal delivery companies themselves that will take advantage of this infrastructure, an admission that actually says something provocative about their business models: that they are essentially inter-changeable, and the only way to get margin leverage in the industry is to market and sell their own private-label brands.

For example, I get the same food delivered from the same restaurants regularly, but change the service based on which coupon is best this week (for me, that’s Uber Eats, which offered me $100 if I spent it by Friday). That inter-changeability makes it hard to build a durable, profitable business. Uber Eats, for instance, is expected to be unprofitable for another half decade or more, while GrubHub’s profit margins remain mired in the single digits.

The great hope for these companies is that cloud kitchens can fill the hole in the accounting math. Private brands drive large profits to grocery stores due to their higher margins, and the hope is that an Uber Burger or a DoorDash Pizza might do the same.

The question, of course, is whether consumers “just want food” or whether they specifically want the pad thai from that restaurant down the street they love because it is raining and they don’t want to walk to it. Food brands have a prodigiously long gestation period, since food choices are deeply personal and take time to shift. Just because these meal delivery platforms start offering a burger or a rice bowl doesn’t suddenly mean that consumers are going to flock to those options.

All of which takes us back to those misplaced investor expectations. Cloud kitchens is an interesting concept, and I have no doubt that we will see these sorts of business models for kitchens sprout up across urban cities as an option for some restaurant owners. I’m also sure that there will be at least one digital-only brand that becomes successful and is mentioned in every virtual restaurant article going forward as proof that this model is going to upend the restaurant industry.

But the reality is that none of the players here — not the cloud kitchen owners themselves, not the restaurant owners, and not the meal delivery platforms — are going to transform their margin structures with this approach. Cloud kitchens is just adding more competition to one of most competitive industries in the world, and that isn’t a path to leverage.

The biggest wave in consumer products right now has all the hallmarks of another bubble of misplaced investor expectations and sadly lower margins.

Cloud kitchens (the category, and not just CloudKitchens the startup service) is essentially WeWork for restaurant kitchens. Instead of buying an expensive restaurant site on a heavily-walked street, a cloud kitchen is developed in a cheaper locale (an industrial district perhaps), with dozens of kitchen stations that are individually rentable for short periods of time by chefs and restaurant proprietors.

It’s a market that has exploded this year. CloudKitchens, which has been funded by former Uber founder and CEO Travis Kalanick, is perhaps the most well-known example, but others are competing, and none more so than meal delivery companies. DoorDash announced that it was opening a shared kitchen in Redwood City just this week, Amazon has announced it is getting in the game, and around the world, companies like India-based transportation network Ola are building out their own shared kitchens.

That has led to laudatory headlines galore. Mike Isaac and David Yaffe-Bellany talk about “the rise of the virtual restaurant” at the New York Times, while Douglas Bell, contributing to Forbes, wrote that “Deliveroo’s Virtual Restaurant Model Will Eat The Food Service Industry.”

And there are not just headlines, but predictions of doom as well for millions of small-business restaurant owners. Mike Moritz, the famed partner at Sequoia, wrote in the Financial Times earlier this year that:

The large chain restaurants that operate pick-up locations will be insulated from many of these services, as will the high-end restaurants that offer memorable experiences. But the local trattoria, taqueria, curry shop and sushi bar will be pressed to stay in business.

Latent in these pieces (there are dozens of them published on the web) lies a superficial storyline that’s appealing to the bright but not detail-oriented: that there are high software margins (or ‘cloud’ margins if you will) to come from a world in which kitchen space is suddenly shareable, and that’s going to lead to a complete disruption of restaurants as we know them.

It’s the same sort of storyline that propelled WeWork to meteoric heights before eventually crashing the last few weeks back down to reality. As Jesse Hempel wrote in Wired a few years ago about the shareable office startup: “Over time, this could be a much bigger opportunity than coworking spaces, one in which everything WeWork has built so far will simply feed an algorithm that will design a perfectly efficient approach to office space.”

Clearly, the AI algorithm for office efficiency (“WeWork Brain”?) wasn’t as profitable as hoped, with WeWork expected to lay off 500 software engineers in the coming weeks.

And yet despite the seeming collapse of WeWork and the destruction of its narrative, we still haven’t learned our lesson. As Isaac and Yaffe-Bellany discuss in their NYT piece, “No longer must restaurateurs rent space for a dining room. All they need is a kitchen — or even just part of one.” Now I know what the two mean here, but let’s be uncharitable for a moment: you can’t rent a part of a kitchen. No one rents the stovetop and not the prep area.

But it is that quickly slippery logic that can cause an entire industry to rise and eventually crumble. Just as with the whole “WeWork should really be valued as a software company” meme, the term ‘cloud kitchens’ implies the flexibility (and I guess margins?) of data centers, when in reality, they couldn’t be further away in practice from them. Commercial kitchens require regulatory licenses and inspections, constant monitoring and maintenance, not to mention massive kitchen staffs (they aren’t automated kitchens!).

So let’s look at how margins and leverage play out for the different players. If you are the owner of one of these cloud kitchens, how exactly do you get any pricing leverage in the marketplace? Isaac and Yaffe-Bellany again write, “Diners who order from the apps may have no idea that the restaurant doesn’t physically exist.”

That sounds plausible, but if consumers don’t know where these restaurants physically are, what is stopping an owner from switching its kitchen to another ‘cloud’? In fact, why not just switch regularly and force a constant bidding war between different clouds? Unlike actual cloud infrastructure, where switching costs are often extremely prohibitive, the switching costs in kitchens seems rather minimal, perhaps as simple as packing up a box or two of ingredients and walking down the street.

That’s why we are seeing almost no innovation coming from early-stage startups in this space. Deliveroo, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Ola, and more — let alone Amazon — are hardly under-funded startups.

In fact, this supposed rise of the cloud kitchen gets at the real crux of the matter: the true ‘expense’ of restaurants isn’t rent or labor, but in fact is really marketing: how do you acquire and retain customers in one of the most competitive industries around?

Isaac and Yaffe-Bellany argue that restaurants will join these meal delivery platforms to market their foods. “…[T]hey can hang a shingle inside a meal-delivery app and market their food to the app’s customers, without the hassle and expense of hiring waiters or paying for furniture and tablecloths.”

Let me tell you from the world of media: relying on other platforms to own your customers on your behalf and wait for ‘traffic’ is a losing proposition, and one that I expect the vast majority of restaurant entrepreneurs to grok pretty quickly.

Instead, it’s the meal delivery companies themselves that will take advantage of this infrastructure, an admission that actually says something provocative about their business models: that they are essentially inter-changeable, and the only way to get margin leverage in the industry is to market and sell their own private-label brands.

For example, I get the same food delivered from the same restaurants regularly, but change the service based on which coupon is best this week (for me, that’s Uber Eats, which offered me $100 if I spent it by Friday). That inter-changeability makes it hard to build a durable, profitable business. Uber Eats, for instance, is expected to be unprofitable for another half decade or more, while GrubHub’s profit margins remain mired in the single digits.

The great hope for these companies is that cloud kitchens can fill the hole in the accounting math. Private brands drive large profits to grocery stores due to their higher margins, and the hope is that an Uber Burger or a DoorDash Pizza might do the same.

The question, of course, is whether consumers “just want food” or whether they specifically want the pad thai from that restaurant down the street they love because it is raining and they don’t want to walk to it. Food brands have a prodigiously long gestation period, since food choices are deeply personal and take time to shift. Just because these meal delivery platforms start offering a burger or a rice bowl doesn’t suddenly mean that consumers are going to flock to those options.

All of which takes us back to those misplaced investor expectations. Cloud kitchens is an interesting concept, and I have no doubt that we will see these sorts of business models for kitchens sprout up across urban cities as an option for some restaurant owners. I’m also sure that there will be at least one digital-only brand that becomes successful and is mentioned in every virtual restaurant article going forward as proof that this model is going to upend the restaurant industry.

But the reality is that none of the players here — not the cloud kitchen owners themselves, not the restaurant owners, and not the meal delivery platforms — are going to transform their margin structures with this approach. Cloud kitchens is just adding more competition to one of most competitive industries in the world, and that isn’t a path to leverage.

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.

Audi spin-out Holoride is launching to the general public for the first time, though a collaboration with Ford and Universal Pictures . The young company is focused on a unique twist on virtual reality: In-car VR, to be experienced by a passenger while a vehicle is in motion.

VR in cars might sound like a bit of a conflicted or risky proposition, but it actually makes a lot of sense once you understand more about Holoride’s approach. TechCrunch took it for a spin at CES this year, and found that the technology’s ability to match a car’s movements to virtual immersive environment made for a surprisingly impressive experience.

The company has previously shown off underwater adventures, as well last a Marvel Avengers-themed story, but the one it’s launching for the public is a ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ ride which will be on offer for free between October 14 and November 9 at Universal CityWalk in Hollywood. Per the news release describing the adventure, there are virtual monsters and obstacles to overcome, and all of it is mapped to the ride you take inside a new 2020 model year Ford Explorer SUV.

Entertainment technology startup, holoride teams up with Ford and Universal Pictures to create “Universal Monsters Presents Bride of Frankenstein holoride” – a highly immersive VR experience available complimentary to the public at Universal CityWalk Hollywood

The narrative is created by Universal Monsters, the sub-brand of Universal focused on its stable of cinematic ghouls, and Holoride takes in driving data, including speed of the vehicle and steering info to match the VR experience to the actual trip the rider is on.

The Ford partnership is one of the reasons Audi spun out this particularly venture, since it stated when it announced the move that it was hoping to get Holoride in the backseat of vehicles from all automakers.

This first public service offering should provide crucial insight for the Holoride team regarding its eventual commercialization and deployment plans for the technology. VR in cars still seems like a niche use case, but it’s possible it’s the niche that helps VR find some kind of footing among more general population users who aren’t likely to own their own headset at home.

The electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) industry is heating up, with a lot of companies finding dancing partners for what looks like it could be a boom industry – provided the significant technical and regulatory hurdles still standing in the way of viable commercial consumer air travel are overcome. Now, automaker Porsche is throwing its hat in the ring through a new partnership with Boeing, with the two singing a new memorandum of understanding to work together on developing a concept for a “premium” eVTOL.

This new partnership will explore what a “premium” offering might look like in the era of urban air mobility, including working together on the aircraft design (all the way up to developing and testing an actual prototype), as well as figuring out what the potential market for a premium air service would look like.

The irony is that likely for the foreseeable future, any air mobility service will be “premium” in terms of the cost of access and use. Already, Uber and others have launched short distance commuter helicopter service for routes connecting busy airport hubs, but the cost of these trips means they’re not alternatives to mass transit arteries connecting cities and airports, for instance.

Still, it sounds like this Porsche and Boeing tie-up anticipates a future where air mobility ranges in terms of price, level of service and access. The automaker cites a study by its own consulting group that found urban air transportation could increase significantly starting at around 2025, which is one reason it’s entering into this deal now.