Electric Vehicles & Cars News - Page 58

NVIDIA is always my first CES booking, with the company announcing their CES 2018 press conference date in a new "Save the Date" email that will see the company hosting their presser at the MGM Grand Conference Center in Las Vegas, with the reception starting at 7PM and the press conference kicking off between 8PM and 9:30PM.

NVIDIA says "We hope you can attend NVIDIA's 2018 CES press conference, where we'll showcase amazing new technology innovations on Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018, at 8-9:30 pm (PT). A reception with food and drinks will start at 7 pm, at the MGM Grand Conference Center located in the back of the MGM Hotel".

We should expect some new announcements in the world of self-driving car technologies, where NVIDIA has used previous CES press conferences to announce DrivePX, Tegra, and other car-related technologies. NVIDIA won't announce a new graphics card during CES as it has its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) where it will most likely unveil its new Volta-based GeForce cards. We could see some surprises in the Shield department of course, where I'm still expecting NVIDIA to unveil their own VR or AR headset in the Shield family, eventually.

With all of the talk of the largest lithium-ion battery facility in the world being built in my home town of South Australia, news of LG building the largest electric vehicle battery production facility in Europe is of just as large importance.

LG has announced news of a new car battery facotry in Poland, a first of its kind in Europe, that will help the growing demand of batteries by electric vehicle makers. VP of LG Chem, Chang-Beom Kang, said: "The company has chosen Poland as the most competitive location for production to satisfy the needs of European and global car producers".

The new facility will cost $1.63 billion, with LG about to break ground in the city of Wroclaw, which is awfully close to Germany, which is a major car manufacturing hub in Europe. LG Chem plans to manufacture up to 100,000 electric vehicle batteries in 2018, while they create 2500 people in the process. The new EV battery factory will also include an R&D center, too.

Tesla isn't far away from changing yet another industry, with the company now finishing off its first electric semi-truck prototype. Tesla Motors and SpaceX founder and CEO, Elon Musk confirmed the news over Twitter.

The company did plan on showing off the world's first electric semi-truck at a media event later this month, but Musk has confirmed the unveiling event has been pushed back to November 16. Musk took to Twitter to explain, where he said: "diverting resources to fix Model 3 bottlenecks and increase battery production for Puerto Rico and other affected areas".

Musk also confirmed that Tesla has been sending out updated invites to the media saying that the "first Tesla Truck prototype is completed". Musk continued his Twitter rampage, saying that the "specs are better than anything I've seen reported so far". Musk also said that the engineering and design teams have done amazing work on the electric truck, adding that their work "is aces" and that "other needs are greater right now".

Amazon wants to cut down on its reliance of third-party companies delivering its goods once they leave their respective distribution centers, with Bloomberg reporting the everything giant is testing its own delivery service.

This move would allow Amazon to reduce overcrowding its factory warehouses, as well as providing two-day Prime shipping on more of its products. Amazon is already delivering goods in India, but will be making its big splash in delivering goods in the US very soon with trials already kicking off near the West Coast. Bloomberg reports that Amazon's delivery services will be made available to other states soon.

Amazon's delivery service is reportedly called Seller Flex, which is... well... really odd. Amazon Delivery or Amazon To You (or something like that). The Verge received a statement from FedEx, one of two companies that would be directly impacted by Amazon's new Seller Flex program.

Airbus will be taking to the skies with its new flying taxi concept, with its first flight to take place by the end of 2018, according to the company.

The first flips will be unmanned, I'm guessing for safety concerns, but there are plans for human pilots and a four-person aircraft that will fly people around in cities by 2023, before they become completely autonomous.

Airbus announced the autonomous flying taxi concept back in August 2016, with the company looking at using quad-rotor designs. Airbus is using a VTOL method (vertical take-off and landing), mixed with an electric-powered aircraft, it should fly four people around very easily through cities.

Tesla has most of the electric vehicle market in its hands, with so much of its marketing hype winning over the world for all the right reasons, and soon it'll be an entirely different industry... the trucking industry.

Tesla will unveil their new electric semi-truck on October 26, with a new photo of the purported truck showing up on the internet today. Someone posted the photo of the Tesla electric semi-truck, which looks absolutely incredible. It looks super thin and contained, versus the beefy front of a normal semi-truck.

Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has teased before that the entire unveiling event for the electric semi-truck is going to be "unreal". The semi-truck will, according to Musk "will deliver a substantial reduction in the cost of cargo transport, while increasing safety and making it really fun to operate".

So... in all my 16,500+ articles here at TweakTown, never did I think I'd be writing about limited edition submarines. Well, here I am... writing that Aston Martin has just unveiled their new limited edition submarine.

The flagship project comes from Aston Martin Consulting, with the submarine still in the concept stages right now under codename Project Neptune. Project Neptune is a futuristic submarine that Executive Vice President and Chief Creative Officer at Aston Martin, Marek Reichman, explains: "Project Neptune is defined by its sleek, elegant exterior. We have used forms and proportions that express the same devotion to design, engineering and beauty that shape our cars".

Aston Martin hasn't been open with specifications or details on Project Neptune, so we don't know how deep it'll go, how fast it'll cut through the depths of the oceans, or whether Lex Luthor has pledged towards the project. Time will tell.

AMD is now making custom AI processors for Tesla, and now it seems NVIDIA is losing another piece of the electric car makers' pie, with Intel taking over the infotainment systems according to sources of Bloomberg.

What makes this news even more interesting is that Tesla, NVIDIA, and Intel have declined to comment. Tesla shipped around 76,000 vehicles in the last financial year, so while it's not a carmaker that ships millions of vehicles, it does get a lot of press because of the technology inside of the cars.

Tesla's Autopilot 2 system is still powered by NVIDIA designs, but it seems like it's one of the last parts of Team Green inside of Tesla cars with AMD and Intel both making big moves with the electric car giant.

After countless Australia-US trips in the last few years, there's nothing better than the thought of improved Wi-Fi on flights. This is something that Netflix is helping airlines with, to improve on-board Wi-Fi.

Netflix is offering their encoding technology that they developed for mobile devices, with airlines across the world in the hopes of building new partnerships. What benefit would there be to the airlines, exactly? Netflix says that streaming high quality video during a flight would reduce airlines' bandwidth-related costs by up to 75%... impressive.

Whichever airlines partner with Netflix would benefit by providing customers with a greatly improved in-flight media experience, especially if they can provide much faster in-flight Wi-Fi for constant connectivity to mobile devices.

The Japanese Cartivator project aims to have a big spectacle ready for the 2020 Olympic Games: a real flying car.

Many old sci-fi films predicted the 21st Century would give rise to amazing inventions, including a Jetson's-like flying car. While our day-to-day transit is mostly earthbound, the Cartivator project aims to make those sci-fi dreams a reality. The project, which is backed by Toyota, sees a number of key Japanese engineers working on the Skydrive, a prototype flying concept car that's been in development since 2012.

According to reports from Nikkei Asian Review, the engineers hope to have the Skydrive flying car ready for the 2020 Olympics, which will be held in Tokyo, Japan. To accelerate the project the team is developing a two new bases of operation in Tokyo and Toyota City, and Fujitsu will also lend efforts to the project. The team has released a finalized specification for the Skydrive prototype which is included below. If the engineers are successful, the 2020 Olympic Games will be a true milestone in human history.