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Category: transportation – Page 426
Within 10 Years, We’ll Travel by Hyperloop, Rockets, and Avatars
“The Hyperloop exists,” says Josh Giegel, co-founder and chief technology officer of Hyperloop One, “because of the rapid acceleration of power electronics, computational modeling, material sciences, and 3D printing.”
Thanks to these convergences, there are now ten major Hyperloop One projects—in various stages of development—spread across the globe. Chicago to DC in 35 minutes. Pune to Mumbai in 25 minutes. According to Giegel, “Hyperloop is targeting certification in 2023. By 2025, the company plans to have multiple projects under construction and running initial passenger testing.”
So think about this timetable: Autonomous car rollouts by 2020. Hyperloop certification and aerial ridesharing by 2023. By 2025—going on vacation might have a totally different meaning. Going to work most definitely will.
NASA Unveils Its First Experimental Electric Airplane
The American X-plane series has a long and storied history stretching all the way back to the Bell X-1 that made supersonic flight a reality. NASA, the Air Force, and other parts of the government have used X-planes to explore the flight mechanics of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL), movable wings, and much more. Now, NASA is working on the first manned X-plane in decades, the all-electric X-57 Maxwell.
NASA started working on the X-57 in 2015, but it’s not building its electric plane from the ground up. The team started with a Tecnam P2006T twin-engine propeller plane, which it is modifying in stages. NASA hasn’t flown the aircraft yet, but it has deemed the X-57 ready for its public debut. The press was allowed to view the X-57 last week at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards Air Force Base.
The X-57 is currently in its “Mod II” configuration, which is the first featuring entirely electric flight hardware. The plane has electric cruise motors where two combustion motors were in the original aircraft. Mod III and IV will complete the X-57’s transformation from a noisy combustion plane to a quieter, more efficient electric one.
Hydrogen Truck Maker Nikola Claims It Has Breakthrough Battery Tech—And Doesn’t Care If You’re Skeptical
Nikola Motor, the Phoenix-based startup that wants to disrupt trucking with futuristic electric semis powered by hydrogen, says it has developed a new type of battery cell with double the energy density, only 40% of the weight and half the cost of current lithium-ion batteries used in Teslas and other consumer-market electric vehicles.
But it’s not providing many details for now, and public demonstrations won’t happen for about 10 months.
Battery packs using the new cells, which don’t use nickel, cobalt and other metals typically found in 2170 lithium-ion cells favored by Tesla, could boost range for current electric passenger cars from 300 miles per charge to as much as 600 miles with “little or no increase to battery size and weight,” the company said. Nikola has subjected its cells to heavy-duty testing and says that charging and depleting them “over 2,000 times has shown acceptable end-of-life performance.”
How Tesla’s first Gigafactory is changing Reno, Nevada
Tesla’s first Gigafactory in Reno, Nevada, has a well-documented place in the company’s history, both for how it helped Elon Musk ship his first mass-market electric car and because production problems there nearly doomed the automaker. But what’s been harder to come by is an account of the impact the factory has had on the town it was built for — until this week, that is. USA Today’s The City podcast spent an episode vividly retelling how Tesla’s first Gigafactory came to Reno with a deep dive into the way it’s changed the city.
‘World’s cheapest electric car’
Chinese carmaker unveils the ‘world’s cheapest electric car,’ starting at less than $9,000.