<p>Joby Aviation is partnering with Virgin Atlantic to launch electric air taxis in the U.K., marking the seventh country in which the startup hopes to one day commercialize. Joby, which went public in 2021 via a special purpose acquisition merger, did not provide a timeline for when it plans to launch its partnership with Virgin [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! For regular readers of TechCrunch Mobility, you may be wondering, &#8220;Why did this newsletter land in my inbox on Friday?&#8221; Folks, we’re moving days in an effort [&hellip;]</p>

<p>We’ve all experienced that moment of frustration when the GPS glitches and you miss an exit on the highway. The team at Tern AI, which is building a low-cost GPS alternative, says that’s because the current technology is limited by its reliance on satellite positioning.&nbsp; Tern AI says it has figured out how to locate [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Waymo now has more than 300 driverless vehicles zipping passengers around San Francisco, but while they follow traffic laws, parking is another matter entirely. According to city records cited by The Washington Post, these rolling robots racked up 589 citations totaling $65,065 in fines last year for parking violations that ranged from blocking traffic to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Rad Power Bikes has named a new CEO, just a few days after its previous leader stepped down. The e-bike company has tapped Kathi Lentzsch, who has spent the last few decades helping turn around underperforming companies in both the consumer and B2B spaces. The change comes as Rad Power continues to shift away from [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber, made it clear on Wednesday that he believes the company’s decision to abandon its autonomous driving program was a mistake. Said Kalanick at the Abundance Summit in L.A., &#8220;Look, [new management] killed the autonomous car project we had going on. At the time, we were really only behind [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Though the Swedish startup has raised over $14 billion, it has been running short on cash recently.</p>

<p>President Donald Trump said he will label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism, per a transcript shared by the White House pool reporters, a sign of deepening ties with Elon Musk. “Tesla Takeovers” have been breaking out across the globe at Tesla dealerships as people protest what they see as a hostile takeover of [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Last year, Hugging Face, the AI dev platform, launched LeRobot, a collection of open AI models, datasets, and tools to help build real-world robotics systems. On Tuesday, Hugging Face teamed up with AI startup Yaak to expand LeRobot with a training set for robots and cars that can navigate environments, like city streets, autonomously. The [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Waymo will start offering robotaxi rides to people in its &#8220;Waymo One&#8221; early rider program in Mountain View, Los Altos, Palo Alto, and &#8220;parts of Sunnyvale&#8221; starting Wednesday, an expansion that will bring its footprint in Silicon Valley to 27 square miles. The Waymo vehicles will be available around-the-clock, and the new territories add to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>A new venture firm called Leitmotif has been on a quiet blitz for the last 16 months, funding around 20 startups broadly focused on decarbonization. Its portfolio includes EV companies, space and battery plays, and four nuclear fusion startups. But the firm has only said its funding is from “European industrial interests.” Now, Leitmotif has [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Rad Power Bikes CEO Phil Molyneux has stepped down as part of a wider strategic reshuffling at the acclaimed electric bicycle company. The company told TechCrunch that chief financial officer Stephanie Roberts will serve as interim CEO while the company searches for a replacement and that Molyneux will serve as an adviser. The news, first [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Cheaper, lighter, and denser: The trifecta defines an ideal battery. No one has devised a perfect cell quite yet, but one stealthy startup thinks it has found a new material that solves at least two of those challenges. Daqus Energy has been quietly operating for the past four months, refining a compound known as TAQ [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Something special went down in the desert outside of Las Vegas this weekend: Two EVs took on the Mint 400 for the first time. Since the Mint 400 launched back in 1969, vehicles in this iconic desert endurance race have been powered by dead dinosaurs. Spectators and race participants alike are used to the smell [&hellip;]</p>

<p>TechCrunch will be on the ground at SXSW 2025 — the annual tech, music, comedy, and film conference that kicked off Friday in Austin — in search of the zeitgeist of this AI-centric era. Yup, we&#8217;re one sentence in and AI has already made its entrance. And why not? A quick scan of the massive [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Intuitive Machines&#8217; Athena lunar lander is dead, just one day after it touched down at the moon&#8217;s south pole and tipped over. Luckily, the company says it was able to &#8220;accelerate several program and payload milestones&#8221; and deploy a few of the experiments that were riding shotgun before Athena&#8217;s lander ran out of juice. The [&hellip;]</p>

<p>SpaceX&#8217;s Starship spiraled out of control while in space during a test flight Thursday, marking the second launch in a row that the vehicle&nbsp;has run into a fatal problem on its way to orbit. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) briefly halted flights into major Florida airports and appears to have diverted some others out of [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Intuitive Machines has landed a second spacecraft on the moon, just one year after accomplishing the feat for the first time ever. Unfortunately, much like that first attempt, it seems the company&#8217;s spacecraft may have tipped on its side. The lunar lander, called Athena, touched down on the moon&#8217;s surface at around 12:30 p.m. ET [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! TechCrunch’s transportation team — well at least myself and senior reporter Rebecca Bellan — are hittin’ the road. Destination: SXSW, the annual tech, music, film, and culture [&hellip;]</p>

<p>ONE also announced the close of a new funding round.</p>