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Uber is on an autonomous vehicle partnership spree.

The ride-hail and delivery giant announced Wednesday a deal to bring WeRide’s robotaxis to the Uber platform starting in Abu Dhabi later this year.

The WeRide tie up is Uber’s latest push to lock in AV partnerships. Waymo vehicles joined the Uber app in Phoenix in October 2023, and that partnership will expand into Austin and Atlanta in early 2025. Cruise robotaxis will also join the Uber app next year, and Uber is working with U.K.-based Wayve, as well.

WeRide secured a license to test its vehicles in the United Arab Emirates in July, part of a growing movement among Chinese AV and EV companies to look to the Middle East — with its friendly regulations and ample funding — to go to market.

WeRide is attempting to go public in the United States, but its IPO has been delayed.

Radian Aerospace has moved one step closer to achieving the “holy grail” of spaceflight: a reusable space plane that can take-off from an airfield and land on a runway like a conventional airplane. The startup just announced completion of a series of ground tests in Abu Dhabi earlier this summer.

The tests were completed with a sub-scale prototype flight vehicle that the company is calling PFV01. The main purpose of the testing was to generate data on how the vehicle would fly and handle, and to compare this data to simulations the company’s been doing over the last several years. While the vehicle did not fly, it did perform a series of small hops on the runway, executives told TechCrunch in a recent interview.

PFV01 is much smaller than the final vehicle at around 15 feet long, but the data still helps inform key pieces of the final design and flight control systems, like where the landing gear should be located, or where the center of gravity should be to maximize stability midair, cofounder CTO Livingston Holder explained.

“This vehicle gives us the ability to adjust the center of gravity forward and aft, up and down, it gives us the ability to adjust the location of the landing gear. Those adjustments give us real world feedback into what our analytical data says,” he said. “Wherever there’s ambiguity… that’s one of the things that the PFV really gives us the opportunity to do, is drive uncertainty down so that we have better fidelity with our analytical processes as we go faster with the vehicle and do more flights.”

The plan is for the Radian One space plane to take off from a roughly two mile-long rail sled, ignite engines on orbit, then return to Earth back on a normal runway. The concept is considered a holy grail because removing the necessity for a launch vehicle makes space, in a way, as accessible to space vehicles as the upper atmosphere is to airplanes.

The economics are promising, too: a reusable space plane could take trips to and from space on a daily basis or even more frequently, and with better margins to boot. It’s been tried before; one of the most notable examples is NASA’s X-33 program to develop a suborbital space plane. Holder led Boeing’s X-33 effort.

“The least interesting thing this system has the potential to do is launch satellites,” Radian cofounder and CRO Jeff Feige said. “What’s really impressive about Radian is that it’s a system that can do a wide, wide range of missions so it basically accesses a much larger market than a traditional rocket. Not only could you potentially launch something, but you can service it, you can recover it. We can bring entire payloads or satellites down from space. We can carry people up. We can dip in the atmosphere and theoretically, either drop things or observe things on the planet. So there’s just a much wider range of capability.”

The design is dramatically different from a vertical rocket, and this means the development process differs as well, noted Feige: “You have to retire a lot of risk early.” So while rocket companies must build full-scale vehicles, the stepwise fashion of spaceplane development more closely resembles how an airplane is developed.

The Seattle-based startup isn’t disclosing any technical specs of the tests, like the top speeds of the vehicle or how long it was taxiing for, but Holder did say PFV01 “reached its velocity for takeoff.” Now the company will spend some time analyzing all the data it collected from the tests before embarking on a series of higher-speed taxi tests and the start of actual flight testing. Parallel to that, the company will be working on getting regulatory approval to operate out of a different UAE-based airport and fly there.

Company executives say they are hoping to start full scale flights of the Radian One space plane in 2028. The company has raised $27.5 million to date in known funding from investors including Fine Structure Ventures, EXOR, The Venture Collective, Helios Capital, SpaceFund, Gaingels, The Private Shares Fund, Explorer 1 Fund, and Type One Ventures.

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Paris-based organisation says big economies have ‘turned a corner’ on inflation and need to consolidate budgets

Governments need to cut spending and raise taxes to bring down debt and recover the fiscal firepower needed to respond to future economic shocks, the OECD has warned.

Large economies have now “turned the corner” in tackling inflation, the Paris-based organisation said on Wednesday. In its new forecast, the OECD said price pressures would continue to ease and global GDP growth was set to stabilise at 3.2 per cent in 2024 and 2025.

This should create space for central banks to continue cutting interest rates, although the timing and pace of reductions would need to be “carefully judged”, the OECD said. But it urged governments to step up efforts to contain spending and boost tax revenues to rebuild fiscal buffers.

“Fiscal issues have not been given enough importance in the past few years,” said Álvaro Pereira, the OECD’s chief economist, noting the growing pressures of ageing populations, climate change, rising defence spending and higher debt service burdens. “The sooner the better in restoring fiscal discipline.”

The OECD’s intervention came against a backdrop of growing alarm over France’s ability to close its budget deficit, with Paris asking for a delay in submitting its plans on how it will comply with EU rules.

Bank of France governor François Villeroy de Galhau on Wednesday said it was “not realistic” for the French deficit to meet the EU rule of 3% of its GDP in the next three years, but that this could be achieved within five years.

France’s 10-year bond yields traded at the same level as those of Spain on Tuesday as finance minister Antoine Armand said Paris was looking at ways to raise new tax revenues from the wealthy and from corporations to tackle “one of the worst deficits in our history”.  

Pereira declined to comment on France’s situation but said it was “certainly very possible” for high debt levels in certain countries to lead to market upsets.

“We are advocating fiscal discipline, not the return of austerity,” he added. The OECD believes many countries need to reform pension and wider welfare systems, while raising more revenue through indirect and property taxes, and scrapping tax exemptions.  

The end of the inflationary crisis is not yet guaranteed, however, Pereira warned: in many countries, a decline of 1 percentage point or more in services price inflation was still needed to bring core inflation back to rates consistent with central banks’ targets.

There was also a “disconnect” between the direction of policy and people’s daily experience in countries where wages had not yet caught up with food prices, he added, noting. “People still feel the pinch when they go to the supermarket.”

Meanwhile the relative reliance of global growth hides a sharp transatlantic divergence. The US economy is set to grow by 2.6 per cent in 2024 and 1.6 per cent in 2025 on the new OECD projections, while the eurozone is expected to grow by just 0.7 per cent this year and 1.3 per cent in 2025.

Pereira said one route to lift long-term growth would be to break down barriers to competition in the services sector — especially in regulated professions and in energy, telecoms and transport.