Electric Vehicles & Cars News - Page 56

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics over 3.8 million Americans operate vehicles as their way of income, truck driving being the largest profession employing about 1.7 million people. With these statistics in mind it can be easily said that when self-driving cars become the norm a very substantial amount of Americans will be effected and may result in a country wide job loss across any industry that is in need of a vehicle to operate.

A report from Intel has surfaced and the company has predicted at least $7 trillion will invested into the Passenger Economy by 2050.

The report reads: "Autonomous driving technology will enable a new "Passenger Economy" worth US $7 trillion - more than the projected 2017 GDPs of japan and Brazil combined."

Tesla has just squashed ride-sharing and commercial use of their electric vehicles charging up their Tesla cars at Supercharger stations, with their new Supercharger Fair Use policy prohibiting new commercial drivers from charging up their vehicles at Supercharger stations.

Tesla has been expanding its network of Supercharger stations, where back in April the company said it wanted more than 10,000 Supercharger stations before the end of the year. For the last few months there has been growing concern over the heavy traffic at Supercharger stations, which are now congestion points for drivers... so you can see how that's not good.

At the end of 2016, Tesla announced new fees for charging your electric vehicle, where the company said it would start charging drivers additional costs if they leave their cars at Supercharger stations after their car has finished charging. It was an attempt to eliviate the congestion problems, but now that more Uber and other ride-sharing giants alongside commercial users.

Founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Jensun Huang showed the audience in Tokyo how NVIDIA DRIVE and it's scalable architecture will be the future for autonomous driving software, saying that "It will be a functional safe operating system, with incredible algorithms, and all kinds of applications built on top."

What will be powering NVIDIA's next generation DRIVE platform is called Xavier, which is the worlds most complex system on a single chip. "Xavier is coming out of the fab and we can't wait to put in the hands of car companies and roboticists all over the world" said Huang

On NVIDIA's blog post about Huangs speech they explained what the advantages of Xavier would provide "With Xavier, applications will process sensor data from outside and within the car, using deep neural networks to deliver applications built on 360-degree surround perception coupled with eye tracking, gesture recognition and natural language understanding."

Hyundai and its subsidiary Kia are planning to hit the economically friendly car market hard with plans of bringing a large 38 cars to the market within the next eight years. There are already seven different models planned for the next five years, most of which are electric powered vehicles.

Compared to other companies though Hyundai is falling behind, VW plans to build electric versions of all of it's models by 2020 and GM plans to develop battery-powered versions for 20 of their cars which is also planned for release by 2020.

Hyundai claims that they have been working on green technology for more than a decade now and have already sold 186,000 green vehicles in just the first nine months of the year. What will be interesting is if the technology they have already developed will be ahead of the other companies which plan to release their green cars sooner rather than later.

Since Elon Musk's unveiled the design of his Semi electric trucks many companies have already placed orders since reservations were opened on November 17. Walmart and J.B Hunt were among some of the first companies to place orders and now another company has joined, placing a fleet order of 40 trucks.

Anheuser-Busch, a brewing company based in St. Louis Missouri, has placed an order for 40 Semi trucks, with this large scale order aiming at a reduction of the companies carbon footprint by 30% by 2025.

The $150,000 trucks may not be the only transportation used to move Anheuser-Busch's products, reports of futuristic truck companies such as Otto and Nikola have been mentioned, as well as Otto's self-driving truck having already shipped 2,000 cases of Budweiser.

Japan will see a self-driving car service by 2020, called 'Easy Ride' the service is powered by Nissan and a technology company DeNa. Nissan plan to have this service up and running in Yokohama by at least 2020, hoping for a completion of everything to pick-up and drop-off via mobile payment to having the option of taking the scenic route to your destination.

Nissan is most likely to have all of these problems worked out by 2020, as the Tokyo Olympics is set to be there I can see no reason why Nissan would pass up on the opportunity to promote their self-driving cars throughout this time. The cars that are set to be introduced to the city of Yokohama are Leaf EV's which have already had testing gone underway in the UK.

California being arguably the leading state in allowing for the push of self-driving cars has recently tweaked the rules to get more self-driving cars on roads. The Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has stopped a loophole from General Motors (GM) that would of allowed autonomous car companies the power to not be liable if the vehicle was to crash due to code malfunction.

Californian regulators have read many comments objectifying to the regarding implication of the new rule, furthermore the DMV decided to dismiss the idea entirely due to the public's initial reaction.

Overall, this is beneficial to the people, having laws in place that make the creator of the self-driving car liable in times of malfunction will provide motivation for the company to perfect their product before releasing it to the public. Shifting the blame from the people causing the accidents to the companies creating the cars will mean that if the product is not perfected there will be very large scale costly mistakes, which I doubt companies are willing to put that up for risk.

The Boring Company owned by Elon Musk plans to use underground pods to create a new way for cars to travel over long distances using underground pods that would avoid traffic congestion.

Musk has already begun the process of getting permission for projects to begin in Maryland and will bid on more projects in Chicago to link downtown Chicago with O'Hare Airport.

The City of Chicago is asking for initial proposals for a high speed rail that will reduce the time it takes travelers to get to the city by 20 minutes, underground or above ground trains are the conventional choice but Musk has other idea's and he plans to carry them out with having proposals due by January 23, 2018.

Apple boss Tim Cook has not given up on autonomous cars quite just yet, even with recent reports of engineers leaving - autonomous driving is still the main objective coming into the new year for Apples car plans.

Tim Cook said earlier this year in June that "We're focusing on autonomous systems, It's a core technology that we view as very important." Cook continued by saying that this is "probably one of the most difficult AI projects to work on."

According to Jalopnik, Apple is ready to put these autonomous driving technologies to the test on roads. Reports from Jalopnik say that Apple is set to hire proving grounds in Arizona for road testing, this would include various driving conditions and an array of different scenarios.

There might be websites tacking onto users' CPUs to mine cryptocurrency, but now we're seeing electric cars mining cryptocurrency - with the latest story seeing a Tesla owner using his Model S to mine cryptocurrency, inside of his trunk.

The electricity to mine cryptocurrency is free for this miner, as he's plugging his Model S up to Tesla's Superchargers. If the owner was using a bunch of GTX 1060s the power consumption wouldn't be too bad (150W x 24), but the trunk is small so the heat would be immense, and the airflow would be subpar. As a miner myself, I can't keep my garage cool enough... let alone the trunk of my car.

I don't know anyone who would spend $100K on a car to mine cryptocurrency in the trunk, from free electricity provided by the Tesla Supercharger network... I never thought I'd see the day, but here we are.