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Archive for the ‘transportation’ category: Page 223

Jun 15, 2021

GM Reveals New Ultium Batteries and a Flexible Global Platform to Rapidly Grow its EV Portfolio

Posted by in categories: business, economics, sustainability, transportation

WARREN, Mich. – Starting today, General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM) is gathering hundreds of employees, dealers, investors, analysts, media and policymakers to share details of its strategy to grow the company’s electric vehicle (EV) sales quickly, efficiently and profitably.

“Our team accepted the challenge to transform product development at GM and position our company for an all-electric future,” said Mary Barra, GM chairman and CEO. “What we have done is build a multi-brand, multi-segment EV strategy with economies of scale that rival our full-size truck business with much less complexity and even more flexibility.”

The heart of GM’s strategy is a modular propulsion system and a highly flexible, third-generation global EV platform powered by proprietary Ultium batteries. They will allow the company to compete for nearly every customer in the market today, whether they are looking for affordable transportation, a luxury experience, work trucks or a high-performance machine.

Jun 15, 2021

Southwest Airlines cancels 500 flights after second technology issue in two days

Posted by in category: transportation

Southwest Airlines canceled 500 flights, 15% of its schedule, Tuesday as it struggled with connectivity issues, a day after technical problem with a weather data supplier delayed hundreds of flights.

The Federal Aviation Administration briefly issued a nationwide ground stop for Southwest, which prevents its flights from taking off to avoid overwhelming destinations.

More than 1690 Southwest flights were delayed on Tuesday, close to half of the carrier’s schedule, according to flight tracking site FlightAware. The airline said operations were returning to normal by Tuesday afternoon.

Jun 14, 2021

Meet Apples Latest Invention: The Apple Car

Posted by in categories: innovation, transportation

Meet Apple’s Latest Invention: The Apple Car

Jun 14, 2021

Tesla CEO Elon Musk Says He Is Selling His Last Home In A Week, Heres Why

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, sustainability, transportation

The Tesla chief’s tweets about his homes come only a week after news outlet ProPublica reported that billionaires like Musk, along with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Berkshire Hathway CEO Warren Buffett paid little income tax relative to their outsize wealth.

Jun 14, 2021

Inventor of the graphite anode – key Li-ion battery tech – says he can now charge an electric car in 10 minutes

Posted by in categories: energy, sustainability, transportation

Morocco-born Dr Rachid Yazami has lived all over the world, thanks to an invention he made in his first year as a PhD student – the graphite anode – which is one of the key components that make lithium-ion batteries perform so well.

With electric vehicles on the rise, he believes the invention will soon take you everywhere, too.

Yazami’s story starts in the mid-1970s when scientists knew that graphite could help to form molten or powdered lithium into a usable energy storage material but struggled to turn it into a product. In 1983 Yazami and co-author Ph. Touzain cracked the problem by using a solid polymer electrolyte.

Jun 13, 2021

This Bonkers Tri-Wing Jumbo Jet Concept Reduces Fuel Consumption by 70%

Posted by in categories: energy, transportation

The high-lift wing shapes are more aerodynamic than conventional aircraft, giving the SE200 more efficiency and shorter takeoff and landing capabilities. Courtesy SE Aeronautics.

SE points to its integrated monocoque structure as a breakthrough for performance and safety. The company notes aircraft manufacturers bolt together large sections called “barrels,” in order to maximize production. “This is usually where fuselages break apart in an accident,” SE says. “SE will build a single-piece, tough composite fuselage.”

The monocoque design and composite materials will make the aircraft the most efficient ever built, claims the company, with a 50-year service life. “We will also be able to build these aircraft in less than half the time it takes to normally build an aircraft of its size,” it says.

Jun 13, 2021

You Can Gas Up Your Car With Garbage, If Its The 2015 Chevrolet Impala Bi-Fuel

Posted by in categories: nuclear energy, time travel, transportation

Circa 2015


With the 2015 Chevrolet Impala Bi-Fuel, drivers can top off their tank with waste byproducts, almost like Dr. Emmett Brown — aka “Doc” — did with his time-traveling DeLorean in the movie “Back to the Future.”

But instead of dumping banana peels and backwash from a beer can directly into the DeLorean’s “Mr. Fusion” reactor (see the video clip below), Impala Bi-Fuel owners simply fill up on natural gas, some of which comes from biogas, Chevy points out in its announcement about the new full-size sedan arriving in dealerships soon.

Continue reading “You Can Gas Up Your Car With Garbage, If Its The 2015 Chevrolet Impala Bi-Fuel” »

Jun 12, 2021

BMWs new electric motorcycle patent shows its bike could make history

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

BMW Motorrad may not have arrived very early to the electric motorcycle party, but the company is making up for it now with what could become an industry first electric motorcycle with a driveshaft.

BMW loves its driveshaft motorcycles, but the electric motorcycle industry hasn’t been as keen on them.

Electric motors and batteries have freed motorcycle manufacturers from the typical design constraints of gas-powered drivetrains. Unshackled from traditional gas tanks and bulky internal combustion engines, designers have been granted unprecedented levels of freedom thanks to the modularity of electric motorcycle components.

Jun 11, 2021

ZeRO-Infinity and DeepSpeed: Unlocking unprecedented model scale for deep learning training

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, supercomputing, transportation

Since the DeepSpeed optimization library was introduced last year, it has rolled out numerous novel optimizations for training large AI models—improving scale, speed, cost, and usability. As large models have quickly evolved over the last year, so too has DeepSpeed. Whether enabling researchers to create the 17-billion-parameter Microsoft Turing Natural Language Generation (Turing-NLG) with state-of-the-art accuracy, achieving the fastest BERT training record, or supporting 10x larger model training using a single GPU, DeepSpeed continues to tackle challenges in AI at Scale with the latest advancements for large-scale model training. Now, the novel memory optimization technology ZeRO (Zero Redundancy Optimizer), included in DeepSpeed, is undergoing a further transformation of its own. The improved ZeRO-Infinity offers the system capability to go beyond the GPU memory wall and train models with tens of trillions of parameters, an order of magnitude bigger than state-of-the-art systems can support. It also offers a promising path toward training 100-trillion-parameter models.

ZeRO-Infinity at a glance: ZeRO-Infinity is a novel deep learning (DL) training technology for scaling model training, from a single GPU to massive supercomputers with thousands of GPUs. It powers unprecedented model sizes by leveraging the full memory capacity of a system, concurrently exploiting all heterogeneous memory (GPU, CPU, and Non-Volatile Memory express or NVMe for short). Learn more in our paper, “ZeRO-Infinity: Breaking the GPU Memory Wall for Extreme Scale Deep Learning.” The highlights of ZeRO-Infinity include:

Jun 11, 2021

A California Startup Now Offers a Full EV Battery in Just 10 Minutes

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, sustainability, transportation

(Bloomberg) — On a Wednesday afternoon in May, an Uber driver in San Francisco was about to run out of charge on his Nissan Leaf. Normally this would mean finding a place to plug in and wait for a half hour, at least. But this Leaf was different.

Instead of plugging in, the driver pulled into a swapping station near Mission Bay, where a set of robot arms lifted the car off of the ground, unloaded the depleted batteries and replaced them with a fully charged set. Twelve minutes later the Leaf pulled away with 32 kilowatt hours of energy, enough to drive about 130 miles, for a cost of $13.

A swap like this is a rare event in the U.S. The Leaf’s replaceable battery is made by Ample, one of the only companies offering a service that’s more popular in markets in Asia. In March, Ample announced that it had deployed five stations around the Bay Area. Nearly 100 Uber drivers are using them, the company says, making an average of 1.3 swaps per day. Ample’s operation is tiny compared to the 100000 public EV chargers in the U.S.—not to mention the 150000 gas stations running more than a million nozzles. Yet Ample’s founders Khaled Hassounah and John de Souza are convinced that it’s only a matter of time before the U.S. discovers that swapping is a necessary part of the transition to electric vehicles.