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Solar car is better option.


The influx of electric vehicles into Australia could put an additional load of 20 gigawatts a day — or a doubling of peak electricity demand — on the electricity grid by 2030 if most owners charged up at the same time every night, a new report has found.

The $350 million research collaboration between industry, universities and government has identified a raft of challenges for the arrival of EVs which are expected to make up 80 per cent of new vehicles sales by the end of the decade, making up almost 25 per cent of Australia’s total car fleet.

While there will be huge benefits from taking petrol-guzzling cars off the road, the arrival of EVs – which need to be charged either at home or at public charging stations – creates a range of new headaches, not the least for the electricity grid.

For over a decade, Israeli atmospheric water generator (AWG) company Watergen has been one of the players working to refine and grow air-to-water technology that can efficiently pull water vapor out of the air and collect it as fresh, filtered drinking water. Its previous work has focused heavily on large installations to supply communities, businesses and households, and its latest innovations shrink the water-harvesting tech into a form portable enough for overlanders, RVers, tiny home dwellers and other off-grid explorers.

The last time we ran into Watergen’s work was at CES 2,019 where it showed the Automotive AWG system. The center-console-integrated system was one of the wondrous highlights of the show, but it seemed an odd, limited use for a technology with such potential, a strange detour on a larger journey. Does the average passenger car driver really need a water tap over the cupholders?

If a mobile air-to-water generator is to find a following amongst drivers, it would be a far better fit for vehicles that spend long hours traveling through places without much access to water – motorhomes and camping trailers, specialized remote-work trucks and vans, and perhaps long-haul tractor-trailers, to name a few examples.

US-based Wright Electric has announced a 100-seat electric short-hop aircraft slated to go into service by 2026. It’ll either be powered by hydrogen, or it’ll use recyclable metal in what the company calls an “aluminum fuel cell.”

Wright is working on a number of large electric aircraft projects, including an even bigger 186-seater it’s developing in conjunction with European airline EasyJet and BAE Systems. This would be a “low-emissions” electric, presumably using a fossil-fueled range extender to top up its batteries and extend its flight range to around 1,290 km (800 miles). The partnership is pitching it as a “path” towards clean aviation, a kind of Prius of the skies, that will prove the electric powertrain while waiting for energy storage to come up to scratch.

Wright’s latest project, however, will be totally zero-emissions, and will use high-density energy storage to tackle flights up to an hour in duration – that’s enough for the ~1,000-km (620-mile) hop between Sydney and Melbourne, or London-Geneva, or Tokyo-Osaka, or LA-San Francisco.

Circa 2020


A newly recruited firefighter in Los Angeles put out a major fire even before being formally introduced at a news conference. That new recruit is a robot.

The Thermite RS3, the first robotic firefighting vehicle in the United States, was scheduled to arrive at the news conference the morning of October 13 but it was diverted to a major emergency structure fire in the fashion district in Downtown Los Angeles earlier that day.

“It was exciting to see this unique piece of apparatus put into action on its first day in service,” said Los Angeles Fire Department Capt. Erik Scott.

Laser lidar startup Luminar, founded and led by the youngest self-made billionaire tracked by Forbes, will supply its sensors to Nvidia for a new autonomous vehicle technology platform that the chip and computing powerhouse is developing for automakers to install in consumer cars and trucks. The news pushed Luminar’s shares up more than 20%.

Nvidia aims to supply the DRIVE Hyperion system, powered by its Orin “systems on a chip” computing hardware, AI-enabled software and Luminar’s long-range Iris lidar, to automakers starting in 2,024 Luminar said at Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia’s annual GTC conference. The platform, which also integrates cameras and radar for additional sensing capability, includes everything needed for mass-production vehicles to operate autonomously in highway driving, Nvidia said earlier this year.

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Nvidia may be best known for graphics cards you can’t find in stores, but the company also makes some interesting software tools. An example of this is the noise removal feature known as RTX voice, which was upgraded to work with all GeForce cards earlier this year, and does an excellent job of cleaning up background noise.

Now Nvidia (Thanks, 80.lv) has been showing off a new tool in beta this year involving sound. Audio2Face is an impressive looking auto rigging process that runs within Nvidia’s open real-time simulation platform, Omniverse. It has the ability to take an audio file, and apply surprisingly well matching animations to the included Digital Mark 3D character model.