Motive, the fleet telematics company best known for electronic logging devices and AI dashcams in long-haul trucking, has launched AI agents for a different kind of fleet. The target is landscaping, pest control, plumbing, HVAC and other field service crews: small vans and pickups, shared between workers, running dozens of short jobs a day. Motive is showing the product this week at NALP ELEVATE, the landscaping industry’s trade show, in Tampa.

Skyways, an Austin drone company, said on November 9 that it and Shell Pipeline Company have received FAA approval to fly an uncrewed aircraft from the US coast out over the high seas, beyond the pilot’s line of sight. Skyways calls it the first authorization of its kind for an uncrewed aircraft. The same day it launched Skyreach, the production version of its long-range cargo drone, with customer flights starting in December.

Three warehouse robotics stories landed on November 4 and 5, from China, South Carolina and Amsterdam. Each one is about the same scarce thing. A robot that works in the lab can still fall apart on a real loading dock with mixed cartons, bad lighting and people walking past, and the companies that own those docks now have something to sell. Cainiao rents out reality Cainiao, Alibaba’s logistics arm, launched an industry partnership that opens its operating network to AI and robotics companies as a training and testing ground.

Humble Robotics, a San Francisco startup less than a year old, closed a $51 million Series A on November 5. Obvious Ventures led. Eclipse and Energy Impact Partners, which backed the company’s $24 million seed round six months ago, came back in. Total funding is now $75 million, and the company hasn’t moved a single load of paying freight yet. What it is building is the Humble Hauler, an electric truck with no driver’s cab at all.

Ask online how much range an electric scooter loses in winter and the usual answer is 20 to 50 percent. Apollo Scooters, a Montreal brand that sells in the United States, Canada and Australia, says its own riders lose about 12 percent at freezing. That’s a big gap, and it’s worth being clear up front about where the smaller number comes from: a manufacturer measuring its own scooters and publishing the result in a press release on October 30.

On January 1, 1914, Tony Jannus flew former St. Petersburg mayor Abe Pheil across Tampa Bay in a flying boat. It was the world’s first scheduled commercial airline flight. On Friday, Joby Aviation flew the same crossing in its electric air taxi, from Albert Whitted Airport in downtown St. Petersburg to Tampa International, to open a week of piloted flights across Florida. The flights run with the Florida Department of Transportation under the federal eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, or eIPP, which the US Department of Transportation announced in March.

The railroad that runs Long Island’s freight trains is getting federal money to fix its oldest engines. The New York and Atlantic Railway (NYA) has been selected for a $6.5 million grant from the Federal Railroad Administration’s Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements program, better known as CRISI. The FRA’s own selection list puts the award at up to $6,540,000. The grant covers part of a $10.9 million project. New York State adds $2 million and NYA puts in $2.

Air cargo shippers often pay for trackers that record exactly what went wrong on a shipment. What they rarely get from that data is money. A program shown at the TIACA Air Cargo Forum in Miami Beach this week is built to close that gap. TRACinSURED was presented at the forum, which ran October 26 to 29 at the Miami Beach Convention Center, by three companies. Solent Freight Services is a neutral wholesale forwarder based at JFK.

Every truckload in the United States moves on a clock set by federal regulation. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s hours of service rules decide how long a driver can drive, how long their working day can stretch, and how much rest they need before they start again. Those rules shape freight capacity as much as the number of trucks does. A driver who runs out of hours 40 miles from the warehouse is a truck that isn’t moving.