SkyDrive, a Toyota-affiliated startup in Japan, has crossed a major hurdle on the path to bringing flying cars to everyday life.
According to New Atlas, the company’s electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, the three-seat “SkyDrive,” has officially been issued a G-1 certification basis by the Japan Civil Aviation Bureau — a critical step toward full approval and commercial use.
“The road to aircraft certification is broad and complex, particularly for new aircraft such as eVTOLs,” the company noted, adding that this latest agreement “provides further clarity and direction.”
Vertical Aerospace has notched a world’s first for its VX-4 eVTOL hybrid-electric air taxi prototype, completing the first flight between two airports through public airspace for an aircraft of its type during the Royal International Air Tattoo.
🛻 Q: How did the Cybertruck perform in safety tests? A: The Cybertruck received a 5-star rating from NITSA, achieving the lowest overall probability of injury and lowest chance of rollover ever for a tested pickup truck.
🤖 Q: What role do humanoid robots play in Tesla’s future valuation? A: Tesla’s humanoid robots at massive scale are considered a key factor in reaching a potential $20 trillion valuation, according to Elon Musk’s modeled scenarios.
Expansion of Autonomous Services.
🚕 Q: What are Tesla’s plans for robotaxi service in San Francisco? A: Tesla plans to launch a robotaxi service in San Francisco this weekend, with drivers in the driver’s seat to collect data for regulatory approval.
📊 Q: How quickly is Tesla expanding its robotaxi service in Austin? A: Tesla’s autonomous vehicles have collected thousands of intervention-free drives in Austin, with robotaxis expanding their service area in less than 3 weeks after launch.
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving technology is on the verge of a significant breakthrough, with potential approvals and expansions in multiple states and countries, paving the way for widespread adoption in robo-taxis and personal vehicles.
Questions to inspire discussion.
FSD and Robotaxi Progress. 🚗 Q: What is the most important catalyst for Tesla investors? A: Tesla’s Robo Taxi and FSD progress, with a 10x expansion in Austin area in 2 weeks, exponential increase in service area, and unsupervised FSD available for personal use in Texas and California by year-end.
To confront this growing labor crisis, Boris Sofman—a Carnegie Mellon robotics Ph.D. and early Waymo executive—cofounded Bedrock Robotics in 2024. Instead of building autonomous machines from scratch, Bedrock retrofits existing construction equipment like excavators, bulldozers, and loaders with AI-powered operating systems, sensors, and lidar to make them fully autonomous.
Sofman has brought together fellow engineers from Waymo, Google, and Caterpillar (CAT), many of whom were instrumental in scaling autonomous technologies in some of the world’s most complex machines. The team shares a fundamental belief: the future of construction lies in autonomy, not more manpower.
“I saw the powerful potential of applying modern ML approaches we developed at Waymo to construction. This is a problem you could not solve without the modern approaches we saw to be so effective, and helped deploy, in transportation, so it felt like a huge opportunity to address this critical need,” Sofman tells Fast Company. “We can get to a deployed product for a fraction of the cost it took Waymo, and continue to build toward the full potential while growing revenues and serving real customers.”
When a 100-year flood hits a city, traffic doesn’t suddenly stop or disappear—it adapts.
“In spite of increasing flood risks, more and more people are moving into flood-prone areas,” said Jianxi Gao, associate professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “This makes it even more urgent to understand how resilient our infrastructure is—and how people adapt when disaster strikes.”
Gao is part of an international team studying how urban transportation systems adapt to extreme weather events like floods. Their work, “Adaptive capacity for multimodal transport network resilience to extreme weather,” published in Nature Sustainability, uses an innovative modeling approach to uncover a universal law governing how travelers shift between private vehicles and public transit during such disruptions. This law reveals that shifts between transport modes, such as from cars to buses, follow predictable patterns driven by changes in travel demand, the density of transport networks, and how modes either compete or support each other.
Air rings blown by dolphins swimming underwater and rings of smoke emitted by jet engines are just two examples of vortex rings. These doughnut-shaped structures and their mesmerizing movement have been studied for decades given their role in propulsion and—in the case of jellyfish and other invertebrates—biological locomotion.
A team of researchers at New York University and NYU Shanghai has uncovered a remarkable property of vortex rings that has been overlooked for more than a century—one that illuminates how these rings respond when they move through water and reach air (i.e., at the water-air interface).
When a vortex ring traveling sideways and up through water reaches the surface and meets air, it can rebound while largely maintaining its shape—much like a tennis ball bouncing off a wall. After the reflection, the ring loses only a small fraction of its energy. However, if the vortex ring moves more directly upward, it breaks apart instead of bouncing.
