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Category: transportation – Page 353

R-sharing. Hmmm… would you trust the AI to drive for you?

At the end of November, Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) released its Vehicle Safety Report for Q3 2020, which shows that its vehicles using Autopilot are almost 10 times safer than other vehicles on United States roads. While the California manufacturer has directed massive efforts towards achieving Level 5 autonomy, the development of autonomous driving in Europe is at best slow-moving.

Recently, though, researchers in Germany are suggesting that this should change, and for good reason. The researchers indicate that, if Tesla Autopilot were installed on all cars in the Germany now, they would be able to avoid hundreds of thousands of car accidents.

“Legislative procedures that provide legal support for autonomous driving are progressing slowly,” criticizes Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, director of the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) in Duisburg.

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Don’t you wish you had your own robotic exoskeleton?

This would really take away the strain in manual labor.

“In the past, the lifting workers could hardly stay after 2 years as the heavy work would burden them with injuries.”

This company in China is developing robotic exoskeletons to keep workers safe. More Bloomberg: https://trib.al/jllD1cT.

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If this thing becomes successful, I think it could enable plastics to replace steel in a lot of vehicles and machinery.

Engineers are always on the lookout for materials that can improve the performance of their existing products. Carmakers too are always on the lookout to make lighter yet stronger parts to help cars perform better. And, in most cases, these solutions come at a pretty hefty cost.

However, a bunch of Indian engineers at the Bengaluru R&D Facility of Saudi Arabia’s Sabic petrochemical company have created a plastic that is stronger than steel while being extremely lightweight. They’ve created a resin-metal based hybrid solution that they call Noryl GTX.

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Unless you’re a physicist or an engineer, there really isn’t much reason for you to know about partial differential equations. I know. After years of poring over them in undergrad while studying mechanical engineering, I’ve never used them since in the real world.

But partial differential equations, or PDEs, are also kind of magical. They’re a category of math equations that are really good at describing change over space and time, and thus very handy for describing the physical phenomena in our universe. They can be used to model everything from planetary orbits to plate tectonics to the air turbulence that disturbs a flight, which in turn allows us to do practical things like predict seismic activity and design safe planes.

The catch is PDEs are notoriously hard to solve. And here, the meaning of “solve” is perhaps best illustrated by an example. Say you are trying to simulate air turbulence to test a new plane design. There is a known PDE called Navier-Stokes that is used to describe the motion of any fluid. “Solving” Navier-Stokes allows you to take a snapshot of the air’s motion (a.k.a. wind conditions) at any point in time and model how it will continue to move, or how it was moving before.

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Articel from Unilad. The article contains a You Tube video as well on the car’s flight. It looks fantastic to me. To think that flight technology can be made this compact.

It’s not really like the flying car’s we see in sci-fi films, but this may be the first step. Besides, I’m not sure flying cars were practical anyway.

Maybe, this will find it’s own niche. But who knows what the future will bring.

The idea of a flying car has been heavily featured in most sci-fi fantasies, but it seems that the technology could become a reality after a successful test of a flying sports car.

In Slovakia, a winged sports car has taken to the sky and it may signal the beginning of more flying cars being developed. The AirCar is a two-seater car that weighs just 1,100kg with the ability to carry 200kg of weight.

Continue reading “Incredible Test Flight Footage Shows Flying Sports Car Taking To The Skies” | >

I don’t know about you, but I am totally here for the growing trend of putting electric propulsion in classic cars. Much of the pioneering work has been done by small aftermarket shops: Zelectric and EV West in California, Electric Classic Cars in the UK, and so on. But increasingly, OEMs are giving it a go as well. For a while, Jaguar was preparing to sell a (very expensive) conversion kit for its XKE-engined cars, although sadly that has been cancelled. Volkswagen has been working with eClassics on an electric conversion of the Type 1 bus. And here in the US, the annual SEMA show has featured some factory-blessed high voltage hot rods for the last couple of years.

SEMA is going virtual this year, and one of the cars that Chevrolet will show off will be a 1977 K5 Blazer—called the Blazer-E—that previews the company’s new eCrate aftermarket powertrain. The build team traded the Blazer’s huge 6.6L V8, with its meagre 175hp (130kW), for the 200hp (150kW) motor from the Bolt EV, which connects to the Blazer’s four-wheel drive system via a four-speed auto that replaces the original three-speed transmission.

The fuel tank and exhaust also went in the recycling bin, and a 60kWh lithium-ion battery pack was mounted in the Blazer’s cargo area. This is also from the Bolt EV and includes all the wiring and power electronics one needs to manage a modern battery EV powertrain.

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