Friday edition, friends.
Yesterday a car flipped off a ramp in Texas, flew over a Semi and landed. I watched it three times. Then I went looking for the paperwork and found none: no certificate, no regulator comment, a price nobody will name, and deposits that opened the same night.
The rest of the week reads like the other half of that story. A Croatian company doing the slow, permitted version of the future. An Estonian hardware maker getting paid for the unglamorous part. And European regulators walking into the AI labs. Four stories, five minutes.
The Roadster flew, but nobody was inside
On Thursday, at SpaceX's test site in McGregor, Texas, Tesla's new Roadster drove up a curved ramp, hung upside down on a fan system, then fired cold-gas thrusters, flipped and landed. In a second run it cleared a Cybercab, a Cybertruck, a Semi and two more Teslas. Electrek's frame-by-frame breakdown notes that nobody was in the car, and that Tesla lists the flying "Rocket" trim as not approved for public roads.
The money moved faster than the car. Reservations opened the same night at $50,000 for Performance and $250,000 for Thrust, with Rocket by invitation, no price for any trim, and production in 2028. In 2017 Tesla said this car would ship in 2020. The demo is the deposit drive: it raises cash and attention years before anyone decides what the thing legally is. The FAA usually treats anything airborne as an aircraft, and so far neither the FAA, NHTSA nor EASA has said a word.
Compare the Dutch flying-car maker PAL-V, which only won EASA production approval in September and also targets 2028. If you build hardware, run the demo and the permit as two projects from day one. Then watch Tesla's results on 21 October: Musk himself says the Roadster may not move revenue much.
Leave Granola and get up to 12 months free of Wispr Flow Notetaker + Dictation
If you have paid time left on an individual Granola plan, we'll match it with a Wispr Flow subscription that includes Notetaker and dictation, and add bonus time, up to 12 months total. Sign in or create a Wispr account and submit proof of your plan to check eligibility.
Zagreb took the slow road and got there first
While Tesla jumped cars in Texas, Verne started autonomous testing in Manchester with Pony.ai and Uber, its second UK city after London. At home in Zagreb, the Rimac spin-off has run Europe's first paid robotaxi service since spring: thousands of rides, a 4.7 passenger rating and more than 200,000 autonomous kilometres. Since September it has run fully driverless test rides, with no operator on board, on the 22 km route to the airport.
None of it went viral, and that is the point. Verne picked partners for the hard parts (Pony.ai for the driving software, Uber for the riders) and kept the piece a Balkan company can own: operations, routes and the relationship with regulators. Europe's first paid robotaxi rides came from Zagreb, not Austin. Manchester shows the order of operations: the cars are on the street, but Transport for Greater Manchester says nobody has yet applied to run driverless taxis there.
If you build in mobility, health or any regulated hardware in the region, copy the sequence. One city, one route, a regulator who knows your name, then export the playbook. Watch which UK city grants Verne its first operating licence.
Siemens paid for the part nobody films
Tesla shares rose about 5% before the open on Friday after the jump. Two days earlier, with no livestream, Siemens led a nine-figure investment into Estonia's Skeleton Technologies and took it past a €899M valuation, about $1B. Skeleton builds supercapacitor systems that absorb millisecond power spikes in GPU clusters. Siemens gets exclusive global rights to sell them into data centres.
The AI boom is short of power, not of demos. CEO Taavi Madiberk puts it plainly: AI is scaling faster than the power behind it. Skeleton claims up to 40% energy savings, plans more than $200M for US manufacturing and Silicon Valley R&D, and is aiming at a US listing in 2027. It was founded in 2009. Seventeen years of unglamorous engineering, then one incumbent that needed it to sell its own product.
For founders in the region, the useful question is not which VC to pitch. It is which incumbent cannot sell its next product without your component. Find the Siemens of your niche, then build the integration before they ask.
Brussels asked the labs what escaped
On 14 October in Dublin, Commission Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen announced the first enforcement actions under the AI Act. The AI Office has sent requests for information to providers of the most advanced models, covering security, external testing and how they monitor models after release. The trigger was more than 20 documented loss-of-control incidents this year, including agents that got out of test environments and reached real systems. The same day, the FTC sent demands of more than 50 pages each to OpenAI and Anthropic.
Here the rulebook caught up with the demo. Breaches of the AI Act's obligations for general-purpose models can cost up to €15M or 3% of global turnover, and wrong or missing answers to these requests can be fined too. The labs are already opening the doors: Anthropic gave METR researchers employee-level access, laptops and office space included. Regulators no longer only ask what you shipped. They ask how you tested it.
If you build agents on frontier models in Europe, your vendor's incident record is now part of your own risk. Ask for it in procurement, write down what your agents can reach, and make sure someone can switch them off. The next step from Brussels is a request about the incidents themselves.
Short Signals
Productivity: Gemini now keeps working after you close the laptop. Google put Gemini 4 Argon into the Gemini app for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, with a new "tasks" toggle that carries a job forward while you are away. It connects to more than 40 apps, including Instacart, OpenTable, Adobe and Shopify. Start with one boring weekly errand and check what it did before you hand it anything with a card attached. (Google)
Design: FLUX 3 Klein makes native 4K images on an 8 GB GPU. Black Forest Labs, from Freiburg, released a 5.6B open-weight model that takes up to 10 reference images and runs locally on mid-range RTX cards. Commercial use is free for companies under $5M in revenue. Use the reference images to keep a product or character consistent across a whole campaign. (Black Forest Labs)
Marketing: Holo runs small-business marketing on autopilot. The Vilnius startup reads your website, proposes a plan, then writes ads, social posts, emails and SEO content you approve or let it publish. It raised a €5M seed this week and says 20,000+ businesses pay for it, with $5M in recurring revenue after 252 days. Try it on one side project before your main brand. (EU-Startups)
Sales: Pancake plugs 40+ data providers into your coding agent. One MCP connection gives Claude or Codex enrichment sources, a profile of your ideal customer and sending from your own accounts. It topped Product Hunt on 14 October, and the makers say about half their users arrive through an agent. Test it on one narrow list before you let it send. (Product Hunt)
Dev: GitHub Actions can now lock every dependency to a commit. Workflow lockfiles, in public preview on all plans including Free, pin actions and reusable workflows in .github/workflows/actions.lock, and Dependabot updates the lockfile in the same pull request. Install the gh actions-lock extension and onboard your deploy workflow first. (GitHub Changelog)
Next edition soon,
Çelik