Going beyond previous unmanned helicopters that featured “advanced autopilots” or “the beginning of autonomy,” a new DARPA experiment showed off a pilotless Bla… See more.
Software once designed to be a digital co-pilot is taking the wheel.
Category: transportation – Page 236
Tesla has released a quick sneak peek of the paint shop inside Gigafactory Berlin, which the automaker has been taunting as “its most advanced paint shop” yet – and it should enable new colors.
It’s literally has been years since Tesla has launched a new vehicle paint color.
Back in the early days of the Model S, Tesla used to offer a variety of colors, but the automaker decided to streamline options, and it now offers only a handful of color options that have remained the same for the last few years.
Fraunhofer ISE has developed a process for recycling the silicon in old solar panels.
The big knock on new technology like electric cars and solar panels is that they are not recyclable. People haven’t cared a flying fig leaf about recycling stuff for the past 100 years. If they did, citizens would be at the gates of the corporate headquarters of Nestlé, Coca Cola, and Pepsi with flaming torches and pitchforks demanding they stop inundating the Earth with their endless profusion of waste products.
But suddenly, people are all atwitter about what will happen to the batteries of electric cars. Fearmongers on the internet are telling people they will have to drive their old electric cars into lakes and rivers when they stop working. The amazing thing is, people believe that codswallop and repeat it to their friends as if it were carved on the stone tablets Moses brought down with him when he descended the mountain. So much for public education making people smarter.
Another cry you hear from the anti-technology crowd is that millions of old solar panels will be dumped into landfills to fester for centuries. Horse-puckey! Do we need a way to recycle solar panels? Yes, we do. And are responsible adults working on such systems as we speak? Yes, they are. Calm down, people. Everything you read on Twitter or Facebook is not gospel. And let’s not get started on the deliberate misinformation spewed by the talking heads on Faux News 24 hours a day.
Circa 2020
Autopilot has been around longer than you think. Indeed, in 1914, just 11 years after the Wright Brothers first ushered humanity into the aviation age, a fellow named Lawrence Sperry built a gyroscopic self-stabilization system into a Curtiss C-2. It was capable, he claimed, of keeping an aircraft straight and level and pointed in a consistent direction on the compass, and he put on a spectacular public demonstration at the Seine just outside Paris to prove it.
First, he did a pass by the crowd with his hands clearly up in the air. Then, he did the same with an assistant standing on one of the wings, moving about to throw the weight balance off. Then he made a third pass where both pilot and passenger went out and stood on the wings. The crowd went bananas. Those magnificent men and their flying machines!
Is this the future of hypersonic transportation? Russia’s version of Elon Musk thinks so.
Conventional batteries are a lot like camels. They’re great for storage and transportation, but they’re not exactly speedy.
For technologies that require a fast discharge of energy, such as heart defibrillators, alternative materials are often used; foremost among them, antiferroelectrics.
There is only a handful of known antiferroelectric materials, and most of them contain lead, so they aren’t safe enough for everyday applications. Now, a Cornell-led collaboration has discovered a new approach for making a lead-free antiferroelectric that performs as well as its toxic relatives.
Autonomous, electric vehicles are driving around Yellowstone National Park in a new test program that could become a permanent mode of transportation.
Last week, the park debuted its new “TEDDY” program — or The Electronic Driverless Demonstration in Yellowstone.
“As visitation continues increasing in Yellowstone, we are looking at a range of visitor management actions that focus on protecting resources, improving the visitor experience, and reducing congestion, noise, and pollution,” Superintendent Cam Sholly said in a statement. “Shuttles will unquestionably play a key role in helping achieve these goals in many of the busiest areas of the park.”
An EV may be your next tow vehicle — and the options just keep getting better.
If you’re looking for the best EV for towing a trailer or boat, you’re in luck. There are more electrified cars and trucks available in the automotive marketplace today than ever before, and quite a few are engineered to tow some substantial weight.
A complete compendium of those EVs offering maximum trailer weight ratings of at least 1,500 pounds could go on forever. You don’t have forever, so we rounded up a representative group of the electric vehicles available today that offer maximum trailer weight ratings ranging from 1,500 to 10,000-plus pounds. One of these smart and powerful EVs just might be your best EV that can tow.