Tesla’s iconic electric vehicles are taking on a slightly different shape.
Category: transportation – Page 122
Zach Kirkhorn’s replacement, Delhi-trained accountant Vaibhav Taneja, has kept a low profile since joining Tesla in 2016—a very low profile.
On any given day, Dallas motorists traveling along I-20 or I-45 are likely to be sharing the road with a self-driving truck that has the equivalent of a learner’s permit.
Why it matters: Dallas is the hub of autonomous truck testing and development, thanks to its vital freight corridors, business-friendly policies and generally favorable weather.
Fuel cells are compact energy conversion units that utilize clean energy sources like hydrogen and convert them into electricity through a series of oxidation–reduction reactions. Specifically, proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs), an integral part of electric vehicles, utilize proton-conductive membranes for operation. Unfortunately, these membranes suffer from a trade-off between high durability and high ion conductivity, affecting the lifetime and performance of PEMFCs.
To overcome this issue, scientists have synthesized chemically and physically modified perfluorosulfonic acid polymer membranes, such as Nafion HP, Nafion XL, and Gore-Select, which have proven to be much more durable than unmodified membranes conventionally employed in fuel-cell operations.
Unfortunately, none of the existing proton-conductive membranes have fulfilled the highly challenging technical target—passing an accelerated durability test or a combined chemical and mechanical test—set by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to facilitate their use in automobile fuel cells by 2025.
The two materials, the researchers found, can be combined with water to make a supercapacitor — an alternative to batteries — that could provide storage of electrical energy. As an example, the MIT researchers who developed the system say that their supercapacitor could eventually be incorporated into the concrete foundation of a house, where it could store a full day’s worth of energy while adding little (or no) to the cost of the foundation and still providing the needed structural strength. The researchers also envision a concrete roadway that could provide contactless recharging for electric cars as they travel over that road.
The simple but innovative technology is described this week in the journal PNAS, in a paper by MIT professors Franz-Josef Ulm, Admir Masic, and Yang-Shao Horn, and four others at MIT and at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
MIT engineers created a carbon-cement supercapacitor that can store large amounts of energy. Made of just cement, water, and carbon black, the device could form the basis for inexpensive systems that store intermittently renewable energy, such as solar or wind energy.
Great Wall Motor will use Baidu’s Ernie 3.5 foundational language model which rivals OpenAI’s ChatGPT4.
Marking the entry of AI systems into mass-market cars, Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor (GWM) is set to integrate Baidu’s ChatGPT-like AI system, which enables conversation between driver and car.
According to South China Morning Post (SCMP). GMW has partnered with technology firm Baidu to produce automobiles integrated with the latter’s chatbot tool, Ernie Bot, bolstering a push to make cars more intelligent and user-friendly.
Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries power smartphones, electric vehicles and storage for solar and wind energy, among other technologies.
They descend from another technology, the lithium-metal battery, that hasn’t been developed or adopted as broadly. There’s a reason for that: While lithium-metal batteries have the potential to hold about double the energy that lithium-ion batteries can, they also present a far greater risk of catching fire or even exploding.
Now, a study by members of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA reveals a fundamental discovery that could lead to safer lithium-metal batteries that outperform today’s lithium-ion batteries. The research was published today in the journal Nature.
Scientists at Purdue University are propelling the future of robotics and autonomous systems forward with their patent-pending method that improves typical machine vision and perception.
Zubin Jacob, the Elmore Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and research scientist Fanglin Bao have developed HADAR, or heat-assisted detection and ranging. Their research was featured on the cover of the July 26 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Nature.
Jacob said it is expected that one in 10 vehicles will be automated and that there will be 20 million robot helpers that serve people by 2030.