In case you missed it, Elon Musk called BS on the field of nanotechnology last week. The ensuing Twitter spat was admittedly rather small on the grand scale of things.
But it did throw up an important question: just what is nanotech, and where does the BS end and the science begin?
I have a sneaky suspicion that Musk was trolling with his initial nano-comment. After all, much of the tech in his cars, solar cells and rockets relies on nanoscale science and engineering.
Self-driving cars have plenty of benefits — but the American public still doesn’t trust them. A report from the American Automobile Association released Tuesday shows that 73 percent of drivers would be too afraid to ride in a self-driving car, a marked jump from the 63 percent reported late last year, with millennial distrust jumping from 49 percent to 64 percent over the same period.
The results of the survey come despite autonomous-vehicle makers reporting strong signs of progress. Waymo, which started life as Google’s self-driving car project, announced in March that it’s accumulated over 5 billion miles in virtual driving and 5 million miles in real-world driving, after opening its autonomous minivan service to the public last year. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who said in February he’s “pretty excited about how much progress we’re making on the neural net front,” has predicted autonomous driving for existing vehicles could surface in a matter of months. Companies like Aurora are predicting their systems could hit the markets in 2021.
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SpaceX is taking a commanding role in the rocket business — but Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president and chief operating officer, expects the satellite business to be more lucrative.
Shotwell sized up SpaceX’s road ahead in a CNBC interview that aired today in connection with the cable network’s latest Disruptor 50 list. For the second year in a row, the space venture founded by billionaire Elon Musk leads the list.
Billionaire Elon Musk says he’s almost completed a tunnel under a Los Angeles suburb to test a novel transportation system that would scoot commuters underground on electric sleds called skates.
Musk tweeted Thursday that, pending regulatory approvals, free rides will be offered to the public in a few months. He also posted an Instagram video of the interior of the tunnel.
Last year, the Hawthorne City Council approved an approximately 2-mile (3.2-kilometer) test tunnel from Musk’s SpaceX rocket plant to a point east of Los Angeles International Airport.
We’ve all dreamed of owning, or at the very least being a passenger of, a flying car. It’s the sci-fi dream that never transpired — until recently, that is. With a growing emphasis of developing flying taxis among several different companies, one wonders if the revolutionary Tesla Motors has plans to join in on this new venture.
Could Elon Musk’s random tweet from late last year be an indicator of Tesla’s interest in flying cars and their joining of this brand new “space race?”
