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Category: transportation – Page 562

In just a few years, we could see an electric car on the market that doesn’t need a charging station to ‘fuel up.’

The biggest apparent stumbling blocks for electric vehicles (EVs) seems to be their range — the distance that can be driven between charging — and the time it takes for an EV battery to be charged. When competing against gas cars, which can be filled up in just a few minutes, and can cover a range of several hundred miles per tank, the idea of having a limited range and a longer ‘fueling’ time with an EV isn’t one that most of us are comfortable with. And when considering the easy availability of fuel from the vast number of gas stations (as opposed to the EV charging stations that are few and far between in most areas), switching from gas to electric mobility is a bit of a stretch for many people (not even taking into account the higher cost for EVs).

However, as costs go down, and as EV ranges increase (along with the growing numbers of dedicated EV charging stations), electric transport options will start to become more and more desirable (especially in times of rising gas prices), but will still most likely need to be tethered to charging points, unless the next generation of electric cars follows in the footsteps of one Chinese company.

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BAE systems and a professor at Glasgow University have revealed a way to really grow drones with an advanced form of chemical 3D printing.

The news has already swept the mainstream news sites, even though this is little more than a theoretical exercise right now. Professor Lee Cronin, the man behind the concept, freely admits that he has a mountain to climb to turn this dream into a reality.

The video, then, which depicts a pair of printer heads laying the absolute basics in a vat before the drone literally grows from almost nothing, is really a pipe dream right now.

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One of the biggest things driverless vehicles is going to do to the average person is to take away the semi driver jobs.

It’s an unfortunate fact and one that will continue to spread to other facets of the workforce, but for now we won’t have to worry, that’s a while off. Either way there’s still the first in what will hopefully be a long line of elegant driverless semi’s, and the two you’re about to see come straight from the geniuses at Audi. The first of these beautiful trucks is the street truck, designed for active use on the road. The second is their show truck, and looks to be much less practical but much cooler to be in!

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Joshua Brown, 40, believed in the power of engineering. He was a former Navy SEAL, a technology consultant, and a Tesla fan. He had posted YouTube videos of himself driving a Tesla Model S on autopilot, taking his hands off the wheel to show how the car could avoid a collision on its own. He had nicknamed his car “Tessy.”

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The driver of a Tesla car died in Florida in May after colliding with a lorry.

Under scrutiny is Tesla’s Autopilot feature, which automatically changes lanes and reacts to traffic.

In a statement, Tesla said it appeared the Model S car was unable to recognise “the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky” that had driven across the car’s path.

Tesla is being investigated following a crash in which a man died after colliding with a lorry in Florida.

Continue reading “US opens investigation into Tesla after fatal crash” | >

Exponential Finance celebrates the incredible opportunity at the intersection of technology and finance. Apply here to join Singularity University, CNBC, and hundreds of the world’s most forward-thinking financial leaders at Exponential Finance in June 2017.

One day in the future, we’ll look back in wonder at how our physical objects used to be singular, disconnected pieces of matter.

We’ll be in awe of the fact that a car used to be just a piece of metal full of gears and belts that we would drive from one place to another, that a refrigerator was a box that kept our food cold — and a phone was a piece of plastic we used to communicate to one other person at a time.

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Imagine a future full of electric cars where everyone’s a passenger. Where traffic is not only managed but controlled by a digital network. Where on-demand ride-sharing services have become the norm, and the only human drivers are emergency crews behind the wheel of super-fast vintage “antiques” tasked with taking down AI cars that have gone haywire.

Some of that sounds like the vision of today’s automakers, city planners, tech visionaries and the like, who all salivate at the thought of removing the human element from our roadways as much as possible. Recent developments in driverless technology are surprisingly close to the vision of autonomy portrayed in Kōsuke Fujishima’s 2000 Japanese anime series éX-Driver, which has even more to say about what could become our future in transportation.

éX-Driver follows the adventures of Lisa, Lorna, and their new teammate Sōichi as they wrangle autonomous vehicles that have run amok. These out-of-control “AI cars” endanger not only the helpless passengers inside, but other road users as well. Not looking forward to “autonomobiles”? This could be the perfect gig for you.

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