“In May, GM spent $1 billion to buy Cruise Automation, a small startup with promising self-driving software.”
The July 29, 2017, tests hit record test speeds traveling nearly the full distance of the 500-meter DevLoop track in the Nevada desert.
‘This is the beginning, and the dawn of a new era of transportation,’ said Shervin Pishevar, Executive Chairman and Co-founder of Hyperloop One.
Continue reading “Hyperloop tests its ‘passenger pod’ in historic 310mph run” »
Paint these days is becoming much more than it used to be. Already researchers have developed photovoltaic paint, which can be used to make “paint-on solar cells” that capture the sun’s energy and turn it into electricity. Now in a new study, researchers have created thermoelectric paint, which captures the waste heat from hot painted surfaces and converts it into electrical energy.
“I expect that the thermoelectric painting technique can be applied to waste heat recovery from large-scale heat source surfaces, such as buildings, cars, and ship vessels,” Jae Sung Son, a coauthor of the study and researcher at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), told Phys.org.
“For example, the temperature of a building’s roof and walls increases to more than 50 °C in the summer,” he said. “If we apply thermoelectric paint on the walls, we can convert huge amounts of waste heat into electrical energy.”
Continue reading “This Paint Allows Walls to Convert Heat into Electricity” »
In 10 years, when autonomous driving is mainstream, we’ll have a fundamentally different relationship with our cars and driving in general.
Every major car company is fully aware of this, but not all are reacting to this change with the same degree of urgency. Earlier this month, BMW hosted its Innovation Days at its technology office in Chicago, where the company showcased the current state of its connectivity services and laid out its vision for the future.
Unlike other manufacturers, BMW has decided that it wants to retain full control over the in-car experience and that it doesn’t want to outsource this to a big technology firm. While the company offers support for Apple CarPlay, it’s not going to support Android Auto anytime soon (and even the CarPlay support isn’t something it seems all that excited about). Instead, BMW has decided that its job as a premium brand is to own the customer experience and make it fit the rest of the driving experience.
