Lifeboat Foundation

Toyota’s first car in its new Beyond Zero brand will be the bZ4X electric SUV. Look for it before the end of 2022.

Car companies love to create new brands. The Japanese Big Three gave us Lexus, Infiniti, and Acura 30+ years ago when they wanted to go upmarket with high profit premium cars. People who would never consider dropping $30000 on a Toyota were happy to spend double that on a Lexus. Such is the power of branding.

In the electric car era, several companies have have created new brands for their battery powered cars. Mercedes has its EQ division, Volkswagen its ID branded cars, BMW uses a simple “i,” while Hyundai is employing the Ioniq moniker for its battery electric cars. While all those companies have been ramping up EV offerings, Toyota has been largely content to hang out in the background and sell variations of its Synergy hybrid powertrain, cars it often misleadingly characterizes as “self charging electric cars.”

Continue reading “Toyota Introduces Beyond Zero Electric SUV At Shanghai Auto Show” »

Long-haul aviation, like everything else in the human world, needs to be totally decarbonized, and in the race to zero emissions for international airliners, liquid-hydrogen powertrains look like one of the only viable possibilities.

Airbus is working on a number of hydrogen-powered aircraft, and it’s just found a new angle on cryogenic liquid H2 fuel: using it to supercool the powertrain down to superconducting temperatures, possibly unlocking huge weight and efficiency savings.

Circa 2020

Today’s internal combustion engines in aircraft can be modified to run on alternative fuels for improved environmental performance. Now, hydrogen combustion—either via gas or liquid—is emerging as one of the most promising options in this respect. Airbus is exploring the technology’s potential in preparation for its zero-emission aircraft programme.

EcoTech Recycling’s patented thermodynamic process turns waste rubber into a nontoxic synthetic material for new tires, auto parts and insulation.

If you’ve ever seen a tire graveyard piled high with trashed rubber, you can easily understand that Israeli company EcoTech Recycling has a green gem of an idea.

EcoTech’s nontoxic process produces a unique material, Active Rubber (AR), from end-of-life tires. With1.6 billion tires manufactured annually, and 290 million tires discarded each year in the United States alone, tires are the world’s largest source of waste rubber.

Continue reading “Here’s a cool green way to upcycle millions of old tires” »

These days we tend to give the Renault Fluence Z.E. the honor of being the world’s first mass-production electric car. Others point to the Leaf, as it was the first one to be successful. And the vast majority of us tend to credit Tesla with the birth of the electric car revolution.

We have everything we need here Especially in Texas no one ever needs to freeze again if they come out of the Fossil Fuel stone age.

The idea is that when electric vehicles are not in use, the energy stored in their batteries is going to waste. If you make it possible for that energy to feed back into the grid, then it can help balance out dips in supply as renewables go offline, rather than relying on fossil-fuel plants to pick up the slack.

The technology that can make that happen is still in its infancy, though. When an electric vehicle is charged, the alternating current from the grid is converted to direct current that can be stored in its batteries. But most charging stations and cars don’t have the hardware to allow this process to run in reverse, meaning the power can’t be fed back into the grid.

Continue reading “A Small Dutch City Is Using Electric Cars to Feed the Grid” »

The aircraft can lift up to 2722 kg with unmatched performance in hot and high conditions.

Kaman Air Vehicles performed the maiden flight with the world’s first heavy-lift unmanned helicopter for the commercial market, the K-MAX TITAN, last month.

Kaman’s K-MAX helicopter has been flying unmanned cargo missions for US forces in Afghanistan for roughly a decade now. Now, the company is introducing a commercial version to the market.

Continue reading “K-MAX TITAN, the world’s first commercial heavy-lift unmanned helicopter” »

“Programmable matter” technique could enable product designers to churn out prototypes with ease.

When was the last time you repainted your car? Redesigned your coffee mug collection? Gave your shoes a colorful facelift?

You likely answered: never, never, and never. You might consider these arduous tasks not worth the effort. But a new color-shifting “programmable matter” system could change that with a zap of light.

Billy Hurley, Digital Editorial Manager.

Metal-air batteries are light, compact power sources with a high energy density, but they have had a major limitation: They corrode.

A new design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology uses oil to reduce the corrosion and extend the shelf life of single-use metal-air batteries.