When the Mini Vision Urbanaut is parked, the dashboard can turn into a daybed among other lounging-related abilities in the concept car.
Travel + Leisure reports the same company that operates luxury, glass-domed trains in Western Canada, Rocky Mountaineer, plans to launch a new route from Denver to Moab beginning August 2021. The route, named Rockies to the Red Rocks, will be two days with one night in a hotel in Glenwood Springs.
The train ride focuses on great views in glass-domed trains with outdoor viewing decks, gourmet dining and tremendous service while passing on the sleeping arrangements — leaving that up to the hotel in Glenwood Springs.
“Rocky Mountaineer will bring a new luxury train tour to explore the historic rail route between Denver and Moab. Over the past 30 years, Rocky Mountaineer has become renowned for our world-class train travel experiences, and now we are opening our newest train experience in the region where train travel history began,” said Peter Armstrong, founder of Rocky Mountaineer. “This region, with its magnificent scenery, national parks, vast opportunities to explore, will delight millions.”
To be built in Northern California, the limited-edition vehicles will have a top speed of 260 mph and start at $2.3 million each.
XTI Aircraft has teamed up with VerdeGo Aero to build the TriFan 200, an unmanned, autonomous vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft.
Denver, Colorado-based XTI and Florida-headquartered VerdeGo say on 19 November that the TriFan 200, a small brother of the in-development passenger TriFan 600 aircraft, will be capable of transporting 227kg (500lb) of cargo on missions of more than 200nm (108km).
“The TriFan 200 aircraft will open up a significant new market for XTI to address the needs of cargo and logistics operators globally,” says XTI’s chief executive Robert LaBelle.
In the near future, large vessels carrying vehicles or other cargo across the ocean could be powered by wind, thanks to innovative sail technology.
Oceanbird, designed by Swedish engineering company, Wallenius Marine, is a futuristic concept for a PCTC (Pure Car and Truck Carrier) with capacity to carry 7,000 cars on long-distance ocean journeys. The project aims to prove that the global shipping community can transport goods in a sustainable way, and that low or zero-emission shipping is possible by using wind as the main energy source.
“We are proud to present our third iteration of our design, which we have worked with for several years,” said Per Tunell, COO of Wallenius Marine. “Shipping is a central function in global trade and stands for 90% of all transported goods, but it also contributes to emissions. It is critical that shipping becomes sustainable. Our studies show that wind is the most interesting energy source for ocean transports and with the 80-metre-high wing sails on Oceanbird, we are developing the ocean-going freighters of the future.”
The automotive industry is knee deep in the vast transition to electric, but one place where gas is still going strong is out on the water. Seattle startup Zin Boats wants to start what you might call a sea change by showing, as Tesla did with cars, that an electric boat can be not just better for the planet, but better in almost every other way as well.
With a minimalist design like a silver bullet, built almost entirely from carbon fiber, the 20-foot Z2R is less than half the weight of comparable craft, letting it take off like a shot and handle easily, while also traveling a hundred miles on a charge — and you can fill the “tank” for about five bucks in an hour or so.
Waiting for the other shoe to drop? Well, it ain’t cheap. But then, few boats are.
ADIFO stands for All-DIrectional Flying Object. This miniature prototype could someday turn into a supersonic vehicle capable of suborbital flight as well as flying upside down!
If there’s one major thing that’s holding back an electric revolution in the aviation world, it’s energy storage. But there are a ton of very clever people banging away at the problem of how to increase the energy density of batteries, and another growing faction working to make long-range, fast-fueling hydrogen-fuel-cell powertrains the standard for future flight.
Either way, it’s going to happen in the coming decades, and one new company out of Minneapolis is turning its attention to the other critical element of the propulsion system. H3X Technologies is bursting out of the gate with an integrated electric motor design it says can deliver the same sustained power as some of the best motors on the market at a third or less of the total weight.
Continue reading “H3X claims it’s tripled the power density of electric aircraft motors” »
From time to time, Fully Charged receives an offer that is too good to refuse, and when a long-term friend of the show offered us his electrified Ferrari 308, we didn’t hesitate.
This is part of an ongoing collaboration between Fully Charged and Electrek.
Continue reading “Electric Ferrari — time to give classic cars a new lease of life?” »
With lithium-containing batteries facing constraints on many of the metals they contain, Nina Notman looks at whether its group 1 neighbour sodium can supply the answer.
The lithium-ion battery powers much of our modern lives, a fact reflected in this year’s Nobel prize. It resides in devices ranging from very small wearable electronics, through mobile phones and laptops, to electric vehicles and ‘the world’s biggest battery’ – the huge 100MW/129MWh Tesla battery installed on an Australian wind farm in 2017.
‘Lithium-ion has a massive span of applications,’ explains Jonathan Knott, an energy storage researcher at the University of Wollongong in Australia. ‘It is being used as a hammer to crack every nut and we need to start getting a little bit more sophisticated in the use of the best tool for the job.’
