Toggle light / dark theme

As prices top $4 a gallon, should you consider an electric vehicle? One consideration: They’re more expensive to insure and repair. Here’s why

Tesla will sell car insurance, but electric-vehicle insurance and repairs are more expensive than for traditional cars. Here’s why.


The average cost of repairs are nearly 3% higher for a small EV versus a small internal-combustion engine car, says CCC Intelligent Solutions, a data and consulting firm that has examined the impact of EVs on the automotive, insurance and repair industries.

The same researchers found that spending on replacemet parts as a share of the overall repair costs was higher for a small EV despite that EV having 9.1 parts replaced per claim on average, versus 9.6 parts for small ICE cars. Access the full report here.

“The repair and replacement parts for many components of EVs are different from gasoline cars, and their relative scarcity/lack of economies of scale, plus their higher price, means that the insurance premiums to cover them are also higher,” said Lane of the University of Kansas.

Microsoft Azure ‘AutoWarp’ Bug Could Have Let Attackers Access Customers’ Accounts

Details have been disclosed about a now-addressed critical vulnerability in Microsoft’s Azure Automation service that could have permitted unauthorized access to other Azure customer accounts and take over control.

“This attack could mean full control over resources and data belonging to the targeted account, depending on the permissions assigned by the customer,” Orca Security researcher Yanir Tsarimi said in a report published Monday.

The flaw potentially put several entities at risk, including an unnamed telecommunications company, two car manufacturers, a banking conglomerate, and big four accounting firms, among others, the Israeli cloud infrastructure security company added.

America Was Wrong About Ethanol — Study Shows

Using corn for fuel seems like a dumb idea in light of new research.

Recommended Books & Car Products — http://amzn.to/2BrekJm.
EE Shirts! — http://bit.ly/2BHsiuo.

Ethanol makes up 10% of most of the gasoline sold in the United States. A large part of why Ethanol is so prevalent is that the Renewable Fuel Standard, created in 2005, wanted to reduce the emissions of the fuels we use. Ethanol created from corn is renewable, because the corn takes carbon from the atmosphere to grow, creating a cycle that minimizes how much carbon is added to the atmosphere. At least, that’s the story we were told.

New research out of University of Wisconsin — Madison, suggests that “the carbon intensity of corn ethanol is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24% higher.” What’s the solution? We need to choose options that have a greater percentage of net emissions reductions, so that we don’t unintentionally increase emissions if regulators estimated predictions are incorrect.

Video References:
Main Study — https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2101084119
EPA Impact Analysis — https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/sites/production/files…r10006.pdf.
UW Article — https://news.wisc.edu/at-bioenergy-crossroads-should-corn-et…ew-mirror/
Oxygenated Fuels — https://www.epa.gov/ust/fuel-oxygenates-and-usts.
TEL to MTBE to Ethanol — https://doi.org/10.1080/10406026.2014.967057
Octane Numbers — https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/MIT-LFEE-08-001-RP.pdf.
Harvard Law Research — https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/2020/09/next-generation-complia…odern-era/
Harvard Law Research Pt. 4 — http://eelp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/Cynthia-Giles-Part-4-FINAL.pdf.
Renewable Fuels Standard — https://www.epa.gov/renewable-fuel-standard-program.
US DOE — https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/ethanol_fuel_basics.html.
Pro Corn Ethanol Study — https://afdc.energy.gov/files/u/publication/ethanol-ghg-reduction-with-greet.pdf.
Counter Study — https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2e35/meta.

Engineering Explained is a participant in the Amazon Influencer Program.

Huawei’s competitor to Tesla electric cars is set to hit China’s streets on Saturday

BEIJING — The first electric car with Huawei’s HarmonyOS operating system is set to begin deliveries at a ceremony on Saturday in Shanghai, according to an announcement on social media.

In December, Huawei’s consumer business group CEO Richard Yu spent an hour at a winter product launch event promoting the car, the Aito M5. But the Chinese telecommunications company has emphasized it will not make cars on its own, rather working with auto manufacturers on autonomous driving and other technology.

Seres is the automaker behind the Aito M5. The company is also known as SF Motors and is a Silicon Valley-based subsidiary of automaker Sokon, which is based in Chongqing, China, according to the parent company’s website.

Tritium partners with Wise EV to roll out national US charging network

Charging station manufacturer Tritium (Nasdaq: DCFC) has formed a partnership with Wise EV, a subsidiary of renewable energy service provider Wise Power, to provide DC fast chargers for a new national EV charging network.

The new network is expected to start with 25 locations at Florida gas stations. Florida is the number-two US state for EV sales, and received the third largest state allocation under the new National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program Guidance.

Wise EV plans to build its network using a hub-and-spoke strategy, centering the charging around metropolitan hubs and connecting those cities with Interstate highways as spokes. The eventual goal is to build a coast-to-coast charging network. The company plans to establish its metropolitan charging hubs in 2022, and connect those hubs with Interstate charging spokes in 2022 and 2023.

We’re Building Computers Wrong

Visit https://brilliant.org/Veritasium/ to get started learning STEM for free, and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium subscription. Digital computers have served us well for decades, but the rise of artificial intelligence demands a totally new kind of computer: analog.

Thanks to Mike Henry and everyone at Mythic for the analog computing tour! https://www.mythic-ai.com/
Thanks to Dr. Bernd Ulmann, who created The Analog Thing and taught us how to use it. https://the-analog-thing.org.
Moore’s Law was filmed at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.
Welch Labs’ ALVINN video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0igiP6Hg1k.

▀▀▀
References:
Crevier, D. (1993). AI: The Tumultuous History Of The Search For Artificial Intelligence. Basic Books. – https://ve42.co/Crevier1993
Valiant, L. (2013). Probably Approximately Correct. HarperCollins. – https://ve42.co/Valiant2013
Rosenblatt, F. (1958). The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization in the Brain. Psychological Review, 65, 386–408. – https://ve42.co/Rosenblatt1958
NEW NAVY DEVICE LEARNS BY DOING; Psychologist Shows Embryo of Computer Designed to Read and Grow Wiser (1958). The New York Times, p. 25. – https://ve42.co/NYT1958
Mason, H., Stewart, D., and Gill, B. (1958). Rival. The New Yorker, p. 45. – https://ve42.co/Mason1958
Alvinn driving NavLab footage – https://ve42.co/NavLab.
Pomerleau, D. (1989). ALVINN: An Autonomous Land Vehicle In a Neural Network. NeurIPS, 1305-313. – https://ve42.co/Pomerleau1989
ImageNet website – https://ve42.co/ImageNet.
Russakovsky, O., Deng, J. et al. (2015). ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge. – https://ve42.co/ImageNetChallenge.
AlexNet Paper: Krizhevsky, A., Sutskever, I., Hinton, G. (2012). ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. NeurIPS, (25)1, 1097–1105. – https://ve42.co/AlexNet.
Karpathy, A. (2014). Blog post: What I learned from competing against a ConvNet on ImageNet. – https://ve42.co/Karpathy2014
Fick, D. (2018). Blog post: Mythic @ Hot Chips 2018. – https://ve42.co/MythicBlog.
Jin, Y. & Lee, B. (2019). 2.2 Basic operations of flash memory. Advances in Computers, 114, 1–69. – https://ve42.co/Jin2019
Demler, M. (2018). Mythic Multiplies in a Flash. The Microprocessor Report. – https://ve42.co/Demler2018
Aspinity (2021). Blog post: 5 Myths About AnalogML. – https://ve42.co/Aspinity.
Wright, L. et al. (2022). Deep physical neural networks trained with backpropagation. Nature, 601, 49–555. – https://ve42.co/Wright2022
Waldrop, M. M. (2016). The chips are down for Moore’s law. Nature, 530144–147. – https://ve42.co/Waldrop2016

▀▀▀
Special thanks to Patreon supporters: Kelly Snook, TTST, Ross McCawley, Balkrishna Heroor, 65square.com, Chris LaClair, Avi Yashchin, John H. Austin, Jr., OnlineBookClub.org, Dmitry Kuzmichev, Matthew Gonzalez, Eric Sexton, john kiehl, Anton Ragin, Benedikt Heinen, Diffbot, Micah Mangione, MJP, Gnare, Dave Kircher, Burt Humburg, Blake Byers, Dumky, Evgeny Skvortsov, Meekay, Bill Linder, Paul Peijzel, Josh Hibschman, Mac Malkawi, Michael Schneider, jim buckmaster, Juan Benet, Ruslan Khroma, Robert Blum, Richard Sundvall, Lee Redden, Vincent, Stephen Wilcox, Marinus Kuivenhoven, Clayton Greenwell, Michael Krugman, Cy ‘kkm’ K’Nelson, Sam Lutfi, Ron Neal.

▀▀▀

Panasonic plans new massive battery plant in U.S. to supply Tesla —NHK

TOKYO, March 4 (Reuters) — Japan’s Panasonic Corp (6752.T) is looking to purchase land in the United States for a mega-factory to make a new type of electric vehicle (EV) battery for Tesla Inc (TSLA.O), public broadcaster NHK reported on Friday.

Panasonic is looking at building the factory, to cost several billion dollars, in either Oklahoma or Kansas close to Texas, where Tesla is preparing a new EV plant, NHK reported. NHK gave no timeline for Panasonic’s U.S. project.

NHK did not cite the source of its information. Panasonic said the reported plan was not something it announced.

Tesla unveils Supercharger station built in only 8 days thanks to new pre-fabricated system

Tesla has released footage unveiling its pre-fabricated system to deploy new Supercharger stations in record time.

This new one in Florida was built in just over a week.

Tesla is currently growing its Supercharger network at an impressive rate.

The automaker went from 23,277 Superchargers at 2,564 stations at the end of 2020 to 31,498 Superchargers at 3,476 stations at the end of 2021. That’s growing at a 35% year-over-year pace.

I’ve Dealt With Foreign Cyberattacks. America Isn’t Ready for What’s Coming

Yet the United States lacks an organized response. The weekly reports of ransomware attacks and data breaches make it clear that we’re losing this battle. That’s why America’s leaders must rethink the current cyberdefense system and rally around a centralized regulator to defend both citizens and the private sector against current and future attacks.

The decentralized nature of the American government does not lend itself to fighting foreign cyberthreats. Government agencies handle cyberregulation and threats in the sectors they oversee — an inefficient and ineffective way to address an issue that cuts across our entire economy. In just the past few months, the D.H.S.’s Transportation Security Agency announced new cybersecurity requirements for pipelines and railroads; the Federal Communications Commission put out its own proposal for telecommunication companies; the Securities and Exchange Commission voted on rules for investment advisers and funds; and the Federal Trade Commission threatened to legally pursue companies that fail to fix a newly detected software vulnerability found in many business applications. And on Capitol Hill, there are approximately 80 committees and subcommittees that claim jurisdiction over various aspects of cyberregulation.

These scattered efforts are unlikely to reduce, let alone stop, cybercrime.