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The latest sign of regulatory support comes two months after Beijing became the country’s first city to green light open road test for autonomous cars. The National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planning agency, also unveiled a three-year plan in December, making the development of smart cars a national priority.


The latest sign of national regulatory support comes two months after Beijing became the country’s first city to green light open road test for self driving cars.

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But that doesn’t mean the company isn’t working on cool new features. During the earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that within three to six months, he expects Tesla cars to be able to drive autonomously from U.S. coast to coast.

SEE ALSO: Tesla’s bringing Powerwall batteries to 50,000 homes in Australia

Musk originally promised this in Oct. 2016, which is when the company also showed a video of a Tesla car driving itself to work without human intervention. But that was just after the company ended its partnership with Mobileye, the developer of the original self-driving system for Tesla cars, and switched to a system built in-house. It took quite a while for Tesla’s technology to catch up with what Mobileye had built.

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Really wish we were already interplanetary travelers.


Two scientists in spacesuits, stark white against the auburn terrain of desolate plains and dunes, test a geo-radar built to map Mars by dragging the flat box across the rocky sand.

When the geo-radar stops working, the two walk back to their all-terrain vehicles and radio colleagues at their nearby base camp for guidance. They can’t turn to their mission command, far off in the Alps, because communications from there are delayed 10 minutes.

But this isn’t the Red Planet — it’s the Arabian Peninsula.

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Ionity, the new ‘ultra-fast’ joint electric car charging network by BMW, Mercedes, Ford and Volkswagen, is slowly starting to take shape in Europe and now we get to see the map of their planned stations for the first time. This new network is believed by many to be the most important electric vehicle charging infrastructure effort since Tesla’s Supercharger network. They are planning 400 stations with a capacity of up to 350 kW across Europe by 2020. They started work on the first 20 stations last year and they plan to hit a total of 100 stations this year. Now we get to see what that netwo…

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The operators of the first all-electric ferry in Norway are starting to get some good data on the vehicle and it’s nothing short of impressive. They claim that the all-electric ferry cuts emission by 95% and costs by 80% compared to fuel-powered counterparts and the results are attracting customers. The ferry in question is called “Ampere” and it was put into operation back in May 2015 with the aim to reduce NOx and CO2 emissions, as well as noise pollution on the water. It was the result of an extensive partnership between Norled AS, a shipping company and ferry operator, Fjellstrand Shipy…

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SAN JUAN, P.R. — They call what they are building Puertopia. But then someone told them, apparently in all seriousness, that it translates to “eternal boy playground” in Latin. So they are changing the name: They will call it Sol.

Dozens of entrepreneurs, made newly wealthy by blockchain and cryptocurrencies, are heading en masse to Puerto Rico this winter. They are selling their homes and cars in California and establishing residency on the Caribbean island in hopes of avoiding what they see as onerous state and federal taxes on their growing fortunes, some of which now reach into the billions of dollars.

And these men — because they are almost exclusively men — have a plan for what to do with the wealth: They want to build a crypto utopia, a new city where the money is virtual and the contracts are all public, to show the rest of the world what a crypto future could look like. Blockchain, a digital ledger that forms the basis of virtual currencies, has the potential to reinvent society — and the Puertopians want to prove it.

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