Since July, Toyota has been working on a brand-new design. It features special, much higher efficiency solar panels that are mounted on the hood, roof and even hatchback of the car, charging the car’s batteries even when it’s moving.
Panel Van
The new solar system could allow the Prius to cover 50 kilometers, four days a week, on solar alone, Bloomberg reports.
Put together the best solar panels money can buy, super-efficient batteries and decades of car-making know-how and, theoretically, a vehicle might run forever.
That’s the audacious motivation behind a project by Toyota Motor Corp., Sharp Corp. and New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization of Japan, or NEDO, to test a Prius that could revolutionize transportation.
While pretty much all of the recent obsession with setting Nürburgring Ring lap record times and the rivalry between Tesla and Porsche is sort of idiotic genital-measuring, there is one foolproof way to guarantee that a record will be set: make the criteria for the record so specific that pretty much any result will set a record. That seems to be exactly what Tesla is planning by running a seven-seat Model S.
As with everything important in our world now, this all started with a tweet:
Posted in materials, transportation
The Netherlands is building roads out of plastic waste. Take a journey down the plastic highway 😍😍.
The Netherlands is building roads out of plastic waste. Take a journey down the plastic highway 😍 😍
Harley-Davidson has released full specs for its Livewire electric motorcycle, with the 15.5-kwh battery pack providing a city range of 146 miles and DC fast-charging cutting charge times to an hour.
Update: JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries have postponed today’s launch of the HTV-8 cargo ship due to a fire near the mission’s H-IIB rocket’s launchpad.
An unpiloted Japanese supply ship will launch to the International Space Station today (Sept. 10) and you can watch it leave Earth live courtesy of NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
The robotic spacecraft HTV-8 (also known as Kounotori8) will launch toward the space station from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan at 5:33 p.m. EDT (2133 GMT). It will be 6:33 a.m. local time Wednesday at the launch site. You can watch the launch live here and on Space.com’s homepage via NASA TV at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT). JAXA is offering its own webcast here beginning at 5:07 p.m. EDT (2107 GMT).
Jeff Dahn works with Tesla alongside his individual research pursuits. He’s discovered a chemistry that might make robo-taxis and longer-range EVs a reality.
A startup that spun out of Cambridge University claims a battery breakthrough that can charge an electric car in just six minutes.
It’s something we heard before, but the difference here is that they claim that they can commercialize the new battery as soon as next year.
The startup, Echion Technologies, was founded by Dr. Jean De La Verpilliere while he was studying for his PhD in nanoscience at the University of Cambridge.
Optical microresonators convert laser light into ultrashort pulses travelling around the resonator’s circumference. These pulses, called “dissipative Kerr solitons,” can propagate in the microresonator maintaining their shape.
When solitons exit the microresonator, the output light takes the form of a pulse train—a series of repeating pulses with fixed intervals. In this case, the repetition rate of the pulses is determined by the microresonator size. Smaller sizes enable pulse trains with high repetition rates, reaching hundreds of gigahertz in frequency. These can be used to boost the performance of optical communication links or become a core technology for ultrafast LiDAR with sub-micron precision.
Exciting though it is, this technology suffers from what scientists call “light-bending losses”—loss of light caused by structural bends in its path. A well-known problem in fiber optics, light-bending loss also means that the size of microresonators cannot drop below a few tens of microns. This therefore limits the maximum repetition rates we can achieve for pulses.
