Lifeboat Foundation

Germany has on Tuesday opened its first e-highway, where hybrid trucks connect to overhead power lines while driving underneath.

Germany spent 84 million euros developing the Siemens-made eHighway and a hybrid truck, which Siemens say will massively lower fuel costs.

“Tensegrity” robots could safely explore disaster zones, or even the surface of Saturn’s moon.

When traveling at five times the speed of sound or faster, the tiniest bit of turbulence is more than a bump in the road, said the Sandia National Laboratories aerospace engineer who for the first time characterized the vibrational effect of the pressure field beneath one of these tiny hypersonic turbulent spots.

“The problem is that these patches of turbulence are really fast and really small,” said researcher Katya Casper. “There are thousands of turbulent spots every second in hypersonic flow, and we need really fast techniques to study their behavior.”

The pressure field is key to understanding how intermittent turbulent spots shake an aircraft flying at Mach 5 or greater, Casper said. Hypersonic vehicles are subjected to high levels of fluctuating pressures and must be engineered to withstand the resulting vibrations.

Continue reading “High-speed experiments improve hypersonic flight predictions” »

After its release, Tesla owners could instruct their vehicles to autonomously pull in or out of a parking space or garage with the push of a button. They just couldn’t expect the car to make any turns.

In late 2018, Musk began teasing a major update to Summon, which Tesla began rolling out in March — and a newly released video of Enhanced Summon in action shows just how far autonomous tech has come in three years.

Continue reading “See Tesla’s Enhanced Summon Pick up a Driver in a Parking Lot” »

“The future is electric,” Ducati CEO Claudio Domenicali said during an event in Spain, according to Electrek’s translation, and that the company is “not far from starting series production.”

READ MORE: Ducati CEO confirms ‘The future is electric’, says electric Ducati is coming [Electrek]

More on the bike: BMW’s Self-Driving Motorcycle Could Help Keep Bikers Safe.

Continue reading “Ducati Is Working on a Futuristic Electric Motorcycle” »

A new update pushed to Tesla vehicles includes a “live issue detection” feature, which enables them to “keep tabs on certain components to let you know if they need replacing and order parts ahead of your next service visit,” according to a company statement sent to Electrek.

Once the vehicle figures out which replacement part it needs, it pre-orders it to the closest Tesla Service Center. Owners can then schedule a visit through the Tesla app.

Two hypersonic vehicle prototypes developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force are due to fly by the end of the year, the agency’s director said May 1.

One vehicle is part of the hypersonic air-breathing weapon concept, or HAWC, program. The other is the tactical boost glide, or TBG, effort, said Steven Walker.

“We’re on track for both to have flights … before the calendar year ends,” he told reporters during a breakfast meeting in Washington, D.C. However, that might be questionable because once “you actually get into the building of these things and qualifying the hardware, … things tend to slip.”

Continue reading “JUST IN: DARPA Hypersonic Vehicle Prototypes to Fly in 2019” »

Volkswagen is about to open its order book for the ID all-electric hatchback, the first all-electric vehicle built on its new MEB platform made to mass produce electric vehicles.

We now get a rare new look at a camouflaged ID prototype ahead of the production version unveiling.

Continue reading “New look at VW’s ID all-electric hatchback” »