It’s over for oil.
Every car sold in India will be powered by electricity by the year 2030, according to plans unveiled by the country’s energy minister.
The move is intended to lower the cost of importing fuel and lower costs for running vehicles.
“We are going to introduce electric vehicles in a very big way,” coal and mines minister Piyush Goyal said at the Confederation of Indian Industry Annual Session 2017 in New Delhi.
FOR years Elon Musk, a South African-born tech entrepreneur, has been telling anyone who will listen that the future of travel is the hyperloop. (Although he thinks it might also be driverless cars. Or perhaps affordable space travel.) Dubai may be about to test the limits of Mr Musk’s imagination.
The hyperloop is a train that moves along a tube that is kept at a thousandth of the normal atmospheric pressure at sea level. Because air resistance is one of the biggest obstacles to high-speed travel, all but eliminating it means that hair-raising velocity becomes possible. The proposed technology could shunt passengers along tunnels at perhaps 745mph, which is faster than a jet plane.
Yesterday I wrote about a poll conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan that found people were interested in flying cars if they were autonomous, shared and electric. As soon as I posted that, I found an email in my inbox saying that ChargePoint and Uber Elevate, among others at the recent conference on flying vehicles, had partnered to prepare for just that exact scenario.
ChargePoint announced the Express Plus charging platform at CES 2017, which allows for faster, more powerful charging and modularity. That means that owners of the stations can expand their charging options as they need to — which includes charging electric flying cars. The latest estimates say that it will take a minimum of 300 kW to charge a flying car 25 percent in 5 minutes, or 25–90 percent in 15 minutes. ChargePoint’s Express Plus stations can deliver up to 400 kW per port right now, so operators could add a station for flying vehicles in the future without ripping out infrastructure that’s already in place.
ChargePoint already knows that charging quickly generates a lot of heat, which is why it developed liquid-cooled hoses for its Express Plus stations. But charging a flying vehicle would likely require extended cooling, even around the battery pack itself during fast charging. The vehicle needs to be able to ascend to altitude within about 90 seconds, and the batteries need to be cool enough to take that strain.
