“Increasing automation limits the ability of authorities to profit off human error.”
Category: transportation – Page 614
A Tesla Model S has reportedly been driven 452.8 miles (728.7 km) on a single charge in a feat that, according to driver Bjørn Nyland and the World Record Academy, sets a new world record for an electric production car.
Castrol Edge & Video Games technologies: Racing a Real Car in Virtual Reality.
Castrol EDGE has premiered its latest Titanium Trial driving challenge, featuring Formula Drift professional Matt Powers driving his Roush Stage 3 Mustang whilst wearing a state-of-the-art Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 headset: blind to the real world around him, but fully-immersed in a rapidly changing 3D virtual world.
In a world first, Castrol EDGE fused video games technology and a real world driving experience, using a modified car and virtual reality technology, so a computergenerated world responded to the driver’s and car’s movements in real time.
The video game-like experience featured a mind-blowing landscape of falling boulders, crumbling track, tunnels, sheer cliff drops and even a cameo virtual appearance from another racing icon — with the landscape’s shifts reacting to Matt Powers’ every driving move.
V2V communication is a viable way to mitigate accidents amongst autonomous vehicles.
Engineers have known for some time that if cars could only “talk” to each other, they could avoid a lot of accidents.
Vehicles could be driven more safely with information about another car, obstacle or pedestrian around a blind curve, for example.
But the hurdles to implementing these systems are numerous: they require a legal framework and the allocation of wireless spectrum to enable vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications.
If you pry open one of today’s ubiquitous high-tech devices—whether a cellphone, a laptop, or an electric car—you’ll find that batteries take up most of the space inside. Indeed, the recent evolution of batteries has made it possible to pack ample power in small places.
But people still always want their devices to last even longer, or go further on a charge, so researchers work night and day to boost the power a given size battery can hold. Rare, but widely publicized, incidents of overheating or combustion in lithium-ion batteries have also highlighted the importance of safety in battery technology.
Now researchers at MIT and Samsung, and in California and Maryland, have developed a new approach to one of the three basic components of batteries, the electrolyte. The new findings are based on the idea that a solid electrolyte, rather than the liquid used in today’s most common rechargeables, could greatly improve both device lifetime and safety—while providing a significant boost in the amount of power stored in a given space.
Apple is definitely working on a self-driving car project, and according to some new documents, Project Titan appears to be further along than anyone thought.
Rumors of Apple’s car project first starting surfacing at the beginning of this year, with an announcement not expected until 2020 at the earliest, but the Guardian reports that Apple is already trying to secure a super-secret Bay Area test facility for the electric car.
Highways England are embarking on a trial to see if electric charging technology can be installed underneath roads across the country.
Sunlight can be brutal. It wears down even the strongest structures, including rooftops and naval ships, and it heats up metal slides and bleachers until they’re too hot to use. To fend off damage and heat from the sun’s harsh rays, scientists have developed a new, environmentally friendly paint out of glass that bounces sunlight off metal surfaces—keeping them cool and durable.
The researchers present their work today at the 250th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
“Most paints you use on your car or house are based on polymers, which degrade in the ultraviolet light rays of the sun,” says Jason J. Benkoski, Ph.D. “So over time you’ll have chalking and yellowing. Polymers also tend to give off volatile organic compounds, which can harm the environment. That’s why I wanted to move away from traditional polymer coatings to inorganic glass ones.”