Amsterdam-based Squad Mobility’s solar powered electric two-seater quickly caught our fancy the last time we covered it. Now the Squad Solar City Car is back with updated design options for the solar-powered microcar.
Category: transportation – Page 387
An electric-powered Cessna 208B Grand Caravan lifted off a Moses Lake runway on 28 May, marking another milestone in a project that aims to bring all-electric flight to consumer air travel.
In taking flight, the Caravan became, according to the companies behind the project, the largest all-electric passenger or cargo aircraft ever to fly.
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on Business Insider.
The U.S. Air Force has been experimenting with turning its cargo and transport planes into munitions trucks able to drop devastating bundles of standoff weaponry, the service has revealed.
The Air Force Research Laboratory said Wednesday that Air Force Special Operations Command successfully dropped simulated palletized munitions from a MC-130J Commando II multi-mission combat transport/special operations tanker in a test at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah in January.
Tilt-wing applications were first used in the 1960s, but MOBi-One’s new design is on the leading edge of the eVTOL revolution.
A group of scientists from NUST MISIS developed a ceramic material with the highest melting point among currently known compounds. Due to the unique combination of physical, mechanical and thermal properties, the material is promising for use in the most heat-loaded components of aircraft, such as nose fairings, jet engines and sharp front edges of wings operating at temperatures above 2000 degrees C. The results are published in Ceramics International.
A group of cyclists managed to charge a Tesla Model X electric SUV with their own power.
One of the best things about electric vehicles is that you get to choose where the energy powering your car comes from.
Even if your choices are somewhat limited, there are still a lot more options than with gasoline and diesel vehicles, which will of course each only take their own fuel.
Microsoft and Altran release Code Defect AI to identify potential problems in software development and suggest fixes.
Henry Ford’s Model T was famously made partly from hemp bioplastic and powered by hemp biofuel. Now, with battery-powered vehicles starting to replace those that use combustion engines, it has been found that hemp batteries perform eight times better than lithium-ion. Is there anything that this criminally-underused plant can’t do?
The comparison has only been proven on a very small scale. (You weren’t expecting a Silicon Valley conglomerate to do something genuinely groundbreaking were you? They mainly just commercialise stuff that’s been invented or at least funded by the state.) But the results are extremely promising.
But Ben Shneiderman, a University of Maryland computer scientist who has for decades warned against blindly automating tasks with computers, thinks fully automated cars and the tech industry’s vision for a robotic future is misguided. Even dangerous. Robots should collaborate with humans, he believes, rather than replace them.
A computer scientist argues that the quest for fully automated robots is misguided, perhaps even dangerous. His decades of warnings are gaining more attention.
In March, Lauren McDonald was on hand for GM’s EV Day, during which much of the discussion was about the new Ultium batteries GM and LG Chem will be manufacturing at a new battery factory just down the road from the former Lordstown, Ohio assembly plant. That factory is projected to have an annual capacity of 30 gigawatt-hours of battery cells. While GM made a bunch of grandiose claims about its campaign to bring electric cars to market that day, few actual details about the Ultium battery emerged during the presentation.