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Category: transportation

Boston-based company Regent has taken US$465 million in pre-orders for its super-fast electric “Seaglider.” Using the wing-in-ground effect, this 180-mph (290-km/h) beast promises twice the range of an electric aircraft, and a revolution in coastal transport.

“The speed, comfort, and navigation systems of an aircraft with the convenience, maneuverability, and affordability of a boat,” reads the Regent press release, marking approximately the first time boats have ever been called affordable or maneuverable.

So, what is this thing? Well, it’s the latest incarnation of a ground-effect vehicle, or GEV – with a couple of twists. GEVs are aircraft designed to fly so low (within one wingspan of the water’s surface) that they ride on an air pressure cushion between the wing and the surface, giving them extra lift and radically boosting their efficiency. They can’t – or at least, don’t – fly outside the ground effect, enabling them to be certified and registered as boats in certain areas.

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And it’s not a Tesla.

Swiss multinational company ABB a reputed name in the power and automation sectors has formally launched its electric vehicle charger, Terra 360 which is not only the fastest but can also power up to four vehicles at a time, said a company press release.

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On the northwest coast of Taiwan, nestled between mudflats teeming with fiddler crabs and sweet-scented persimmon orchards, sits the world’s most important company that you’ve probably never heard of. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., or TSMC, is the world’s largest contract manufacturer of the semiconductor chips—otherwise known as integrated circuits, or just chips—that power our phones, laptops, cars, watches, refrigerators and more. Its clients include Apple, Intel, Qualcomm, AMD and Nvidia.

Inside its boxy off-white headquarters in sleepy Hsinchu County, technicians in brightly hued protective suits—white and blue for employees, green for contractors and pink for pregnant women—push polished metal carts under a sallow protective light. Above their heads, “claw machines”—nicknamed after the classic arcade game—haul 9-kg plastic containers containing 25 individual slices, or “wafers,” of silicon on rails among hundreds of manufacturing stations, where they are extracted one by one for processing, much like a jukebox selecting a record. Only after six to eight weeks of painstaking etching and testing can each wafer be carved up into individual chips to be dispatched around the planet.

“We always say that it’s like building a high-rise,” one TSMC section manager tells TIME, pointing to how his technicians diligently follow instructions dictated to them via tablet. “You can only build one story at a time.”

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Waymo, Alphabet Inc.’s autonomous driving company, is vague on exactly when semis controlled by its technology will be hauling cargo, without drivers, across the U.S. but has a detailed list of challenges to be mastered first, ranging from rough winds and slick roads, stray pedestrians on the highway and figuring out how robot trucks can deploy safety flares when they have to pull over.

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While the idea of the automobile was invented in the late 1800s in Germany and France, the true commercial revolution of the industry occurred in the 1920s in the U.S. There were 40+ years of experimentation between 1,880 and 1,920 with different form factors such as steering sticks, drive systems, and even names (like the Stanley Steamer). Brands and technologies were secondary until the true mass production of one common form, and with that development in the 1920s came the exceptional volumes and growth rates that led to the tripling of registered drivers in the U.S. between 1920 and 1930.

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The automobile industry has recently been inclining towards electrical vehicles and governments are doing everything to support this transition. Tesla has been a pioneer and an example in this field. It has launched smart vehicles and maintained the standard. However, no, the company has a rival, and it might be a threat to Tesla’s models.

Lucid Motors is another automobile company making electric vehicles. It just earned a rating of 520 miles (837 km) from the Environmental Protection Agency for the firm’s model of Air Dream Edition. This makes the Lucid Air the longest-range EV the EPA has ever rated, according to a recent press release.

However, EPA has very specific and low context settings for trials. Hence, the speed and other specifications will perform differently in real road scenarios. This model is the longest-range production EV so far. The company’s CTO and CEO Peter Rawlinson has scored a win as the Air Dream Edition exceeds Tesla’s longest-range vehicle, the Model S Long Range Plus, by a staggering 100 miles (161 km).

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You are driving along on a highway and enjoying the open road.

Up ahead, a curve is coming. You are currently zipping along at the topmost allowed highway speed (well, plus a tad bit faster, though you would never admit that). The curve doesn’t look overly onerous, at first glance.

So, you proceed apace.

Turns out that as you begin to take the curve, you suddenly and shockingly discover that you are moving way too fast for this curve. The wheels of the car begin to lose traction. You can feel the vehicle pulling fervently and you are fighting dearly with the steering wheel to stay on the roadway. It is pretty much too late to try and slow down since you are already deep into the curve.

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Honda builds much more than cars and trucks — power equipment, solar cells, industrial robotics, alternative fuel engines and even aircraft are all part of the company’s production capacity. On Thursday, Honda announced that it is working to further expand its manufacturing portfolio to include Avatar-style remote telepresence robots and electric VTOLs for inter-and intracity commutes before turning its ambitions to building a fuel-cell driven power generation system for the lunar surface.

For its eVTOL, Honda plans to leverage not only the lithium battery technology it’s developed for its EV and PHEV vehicles but also a gas turbine hybrid power unit to give the future aircraft enough range to handle regional inter-city flights as well. Honda foresees air taxis as a ubiquitous part of tomorrow’s transportation landscape, seamlessly integrating with both autonomous ground vehicles and traditional airliners (though they could soon be flown by robots as well). Obviously, the program is still very much in the early research phase and will likely remain so until at least the second half of this decade. The company anticipates having prototype units available for testing and certification by the 2030s and a full commercial rollout sometime around 2040.

Honda will have plenty of competition if and when it does get its eVTOLs off the ground. Cadillac showed off its single-seater aircar earlier this year, while Joby (in partnership with NASA) already has full-scale mockups flying. In June, Slovakian transportation startup, Klein Vision, flew from Nitra and to the Bratislava airport in its inaugural inter-city flight — and then drove home after the event. But building a fleet of flying taxis is no easy feat — just ask Bell helicopters — and we’re sure to see more companies drop out of the sector before eVTOLs become commonplace.

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“DeepGreen is offering a false or dystopian choice,” Deep Sea Conservation Coalition cofounder Matthew Gianni told The Guardian.

Dangling the possibility of widespread electric vehicle adoption by securing the resources necessary to manufacture more and better batteries is certainly tantalizing. But scientists told The Guardian that getting those metals from the seafloor — especially with machines that would cause a poorly-understood environmental impact in an area that’s nearly impossible to monitor and regulate — would come at too great a cost.

“There are some very significant questions being raised by scientists about the impacts of ocean mining,” University of California, Santa Barbara researcher Douglas McCauley told The Guardian. “How much extinction could be generated? How long will it take these extremely low-resilience systems to recover? What impact will it have on the ocean’s capacity to capture carbon?”

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China’s new rules on auto data require car companies to store important data locally.

Cars today offer high-tech features and gather troves of data to train algorithms. As China steps up controls over new technologies, WSJ looks at the risks for Tesla and other global brands that are now required to keep data within the country. Screenshot: Tesla China.

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