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Category: transportation – Page 71

“I think this material could have a big impact because it works really well,” said Dr. Mircea Dincă. “It is already competitive with incumbent technologies, and it can save a lot of the cost and pain and environmental issues related to mining the metals that currently go into batteries.”

Electric vehicles (EVs) have become a household name in the last few years with several companies fighting to compete in the everchanging EV landscape as EV technology continues to improve in cost, efficiency, and the materials used to manufacture the batteries responsible for sustaining this clean energy revolution. While EV batteries have traditionally used cobalt for their battery needs, a recent study published in ACS Central Science discusses how organic cathode materials could be used as a substitute for cobalt for lithium-ion batteries while potentially offering similar levels of storage capacity and charging capabilities, as cobalt has shown to be financially, environmentally, and socially expensive.

“Cobalt batteries can store a lot of energy, and they have all of features that people care about in terms of performance, but they have the issue of not being widely available, and the cost fluctuates broadly with commodity prices,” said Dr. Mircea Dincă, who is a W.M. Keck Professor of Energy at MIT and a co-author on the study.

For their study, the researchers constructed a layered organic cathode comprised of cellulose, rubber, and other Earth-based elements. The team then subjected their organic cathode to a variety of tests, including energy storage, delivery, and charging capabilities. In the end, they found their cathode’s capabilities exceed most cobalt-based cathodes, including a charge-discharge time of 6 minutes. Additionally, while battery cathodes are known for significant wear and tear due to cracking from the flow of lithium ions, the researchers noted that the rubber and cellulose materials helped extend the battery cathode’s lifetime.

Continue reading “Revolutionizing Electric Car Batteries: MIT’s Cost-Efficient, Cobalt-Free Solution” | >

An intrepid DIY Tesla Model Y owner has done what many dream of doing — directly powered his Tesla with solar panels. That’s right, not happy with simply powering his car with house rooftop solar panels, he’s doing it with a solar panel array on the roof of his crossover.

This Tesla Model Y Performance owner created a folding solar array capable of charging 20-60mi per day via a 2000W-4000W system.

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Tesla late on Thursday started customer deliveries of its semi-trailer truck, which is dubbed the Semi.

The first customer was Pepsi, which placed an order for 100 of the Class 8 trucks following the debut in 2017. Budweiser and Walmart are among the other customers for the fully electric semi truck which features a central driving position, just like the McLaren F1 supercar.

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To back up the decision, Waymo pointed to its safety record and history building and operating self-driving trucks on highways. (The company shuttered its self-driving truck project last year to focus on taxis.) Including highways should also decrease route times for riders—especially from the airport—with some rides taking half the time.

Although highways are simpler to navigate than city streets—where cars contend with twists, turns, signs, stoplights, pedestrians, and pets—the stakes are higher. A crash at 10 or 20 miles per hour is less likely to cause major injury than one at highway speeds. And while it’s relatively straightforward (if less than ideal) for a malfunctioning robotaxi to stop or pull to the side of the road and await human help in the city, such tactics won’t do on the highway, where it’s dangerous for cars to suddenly slow or stop.

But learning to drive on the highway will be a necessary step if robotaxis are to become an appealing, widely used product. After years of testing, the question of whether companies can build a sustainable business out of all that investment is increasingly pressing.

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How hard would it be to train an AI model to be secretly evil? As it turns out, according to AI researchers, not very — and attempting to reroute a bad apple AI’s more sinister proclivities might backfire in the long run.

In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed new paper, researchers at the Google-backed AI firm Anthropic claim they were able to train advanced large language models (LLMs) with “exploitable code,” meaning it can be triggered to prompt bad AI behavior via seemingly benign words or phrases. As the Anthropic researchers write in the paper, humans often engage in “strategically deceptive behavior,” meaning “behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently to pursue alternative objectives when given the opportunity.” If an AI system were trained to do the same, the scientists wondered, could they “detect it and remove it using current state-of-the-art safety training techniques?”

Unfortunately, as it stands, the answer to that latter question appears to be a resounding “no.” The Anthropic scientists found that once a model is trained with exploitable code, it’s exceedingly difficult — if not impossible — to train a machine out of its duplicitous tendencies. And what’s worse, according to the paper, attempts to reign in and reconfigure a deceptive model may well reinforce its bad behavior, as a model might just learn how to better hide its transgressions.

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Hyperion, a California-based company, has unveiled a hydrogen-powered supercar the company hopes will change the way people view hydrogen fuel cell technology.

The Hyperion XP-1 will be able to drive for up to 1,000 miles on one tank of compressed hydrogen gas and its electric motors will generate more than 1,000 horsepower, according to the company. The all-wheel-drive car can go from zero to 60 miles per hour in a little over two seconds, the company said.

Hydrogen fuel cell cars are electric cars that use hydrogen to generate power inside the car rather than using batteries to store energy. The XP-1 doesn’t combust hydrogen but uses it in fuel cells that combine hydrogen with oxygen from the air in a process that creates water, the vehicle’s only emission, and a stream of electricity to power the car.

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DARPA is preparing to revolutionize flight as it moves forward with the development of its experimental X-plane, which the agency says will upend a century of flight technology with an aircraft featuring no moving control surfaces.

The X-65, a technology demonstrator with a 30-foot wingspan weighing slightly more than 7,000 pounds, is expected to be capable of reaching Mach 0.7.

The agency has been working with its partners at Aurora Flight Sciences, who were recently given the green light to construct a full-scale experimental aircraft that will demonstrate the company’s novel active flow control (AFC) actuators for its flight control system.

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