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It’s probably a good time to buy an electric car.

Ford is slashing the price of its electric Mustang Mach-E by as much $6,000, keeping pace with Tesla’s sweeping price cuts, announced just weeks before.

Ford is also increasing production of the Mach-E in an attempt to shorten wait times, which Marin Gjaja, chief customer officer of Ford’s electric Model e division, said can be up to 150 days currently.


Ford has already set its sights on Tesla. Now it’s the first to hit back in a pricing war started by Elon Musk earlier this month.

It’s rare to hear a new invention that has this much impact potential and doesn’t really need any more work to go commercial.


These strangely-shaped twisted-toroid propellers look like a revolutionary (sorry) advance for the aviation and marine sectors. Radically quieter than traditional propellers in both air and water, they’re also showing some huge efficiency gains.

Elon Musk has killed the little hope some had for Tesla in offering a retrofit to the new Autopilot/Self-Driving hardware (HW4) to current Tesla owners.

Tesla is expected to announce a new Autopilot/Self-Driving hardware suite, which has been referred to as Hardware 4.0 (HW4), any day now.

There have been quite a few indications that some major changes are coming. For example, after famously removing radar sensors from its hardware suite, we learned in December that Tesla is planning to add one as soon as this month.

Musk also teased that new products are under development, which presumably could be a new car model. Wall Street analysts expect a lower-cost EV that they have dubbed the “Model 2.”

“I should also say that we have other products in development. We’re not going to announce them obviously but they’re very exciting and I think we’ll blow people’s minds when we reveal them,” Musk said.

Other areas of growth for the company include Tesla insurance, which is currently at an annual premium run rate of $300 million. “We’re growing 20% a quarter so it’s growing faster than the growth in our vehicle business,” CFO Zachary Kirkhorn said.

Paula and Bill Lishman spent many winters in a poorly-insulated A-frame cabin before realizing they needed to go underground to use the earth’s energy to stay warm, so they knocked the top off a hill, dropped in ferro-cement domes, and covered it up again with dirt.

Thanks to skylights cut into every dome and the white-powdered marble that covers the interior, their earth-sheltered home is naturally well-lit despite being below the frost line.

Fifteen feet below ground, the soil temperature remains about equal to the annual average temperature of the area’s surface air so earth-sheltered homes use sod’s constant temperature to stay warmer in winter and cooler in summer.

Bill Lishman believed in rethinking not just the conventional home, but also how we live. He reimagined his home’s refrigerator by building a round appliance that pops up out of the countertop so the heavier cool air stays inside when opened (via compressed air).

In 1986, Bill Lishman began training Canada Geese to follow his ultralight aircraft and to “teach” the birds migration routes to avoid a threatened extinction. His work on “Operation Migration” brought him popular recognition with the 1996 movie Fly Away Home starring Jeff Daniels.

Paula Lishman also believes in rethinking convention. In 1979 she began her fashion label reinventing the fur trade by using spun fur to knit her clothing.

Year 2019 face_with_colon_three


For high-cobalt cathodes such as lithium cobalt oxide (LCO) conventional pyrometallurgical (see section ‘Pyrometallurgical recovery’) or hydrometallurgical (see section ‘Hydrometallurgical recovery’) recycling processes can recover around 70% of the cathode value11. However, for other cathode chemistries that are not as cobalt-rich, this figure drops notably11. A 2019 648-lb Nissan Leaf battery, for example, costs US$6,500–8,500 new, but the value of the pure metals in the cathode material is less than US$400 and the cost of the equivalent amount of NMC (an alternative cathode material) is in the region of US$4,000. It is important, therefore, to appreciate that cathode material must be directly recycled (or upcycled) to recover sufficient value. As direct recycling avoids lengthy and expensive purification steps, it could be particularly advantageous for lower-value cathodes such as LiMn2O4 and LiFePO4, where manufacturing of the cathode oxides is the major contributor to cathode costs, embedded energy and carbon dioxide footprint95.

Direct recycling also has the advantage that, in principle, all battery components20 can be recovered and re-used after further processing (with the exclusion of separators). Although there is substantial literature regarding the recycling of the cathode component from spent LIBs, research on recycling of the graphitic anode is limited, owing to its lower recovery value. Nevertheless, the successful re-use of mechanically separated graphite anodes from spent batteries has been demonstrated, with similar properties to that of pristine graphite96.

Despite the potential advantages of direct recycling, however, considerable obstacles remain to be overcome before it can become a practical reality. The efficiency of direct recycling processes is correlated with the state of health of the battery and may not be advantageous where the state of charge is low97. There are also potential issues with the flexibility of these routes to handle metal oxides of different compositions. For maximum efficiency, direct recycling processes must be tailored to specific cathode formulations, necessitating different processes for different cathode materials97. The ten or so years spent in a vehicle—followed, perhaps, by a few more in a second-use application—therefore present a challenge in an industry where battery formulations are evolving at a rapid pace. Direct recycling may struggle to accommodate feedstocks of unknown or poorly characterized provenance, and there will be commercial reluctance to re-use material if product quality is affected.