Electric Vehicles & Cars News - Page 62

BMW's new Motorrad Vision Next 100 concept motorcycle is straight out of a sci-fi movie.

With its new Motorrad concept futurebike, BMW has envisioned a helmet-less future for motorcyclists. While the bike isn't fully autonomous, it will balance itself at all times--whether at high speeds or stopped--and leverages a unique AI system called the "Digital Companion" that interacts with the operator.

Drivers also get a nifty AR visor that offers a full field of view with a heads-up display that scans and shows vital data like road conditions, weather, and incoming hazards. The bike also monitor's driver's eye movements and makes small adjustments while in transit to ensure a safer, smoother ride.

After the demonstration of power against the Tesla P90D and LaFerrari, Mate Rimac's Concept One, an all-electric hypercar, sparked the appetite of enthusiasts and the motoring press for more.

While the LaFerrari is an extremely impressive car, many called for a race against the Porsche 918 which is the most hybridized and only four-wheel driven member of the so-called Holy Trinity. It is also considered the fastest accelerating production car ever made.

The first to challenge the Concept One against the 918 was Alejandro Salomondrin on the Milan Raceway in Michigan. The Porsche 918 is a car that regularly dominates against McLaren P1 and LaFerrari, the other two members of the Holy Trinity.

A Dutch company RemetzCar, specializes in stretching luxury cars into limousines, did a little something different with Tesla's Model S. They turned it into a hearse. True, a hearse isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you mention Tesla, but here it is!

To make this happen, RemetzCar cut the Model S in half and extended it enough to fit a coffin. A higher roof has been added, as well as huge windows. On their website, the company explained how the "zero-emission sedan proves it is the ideal vehicle for transport during the farewell ceremony."

On top of the SolarCity event on October 28th where Elon Musk should unveil a new product, a roof integrated with solar panels, Elon Musk just revealed that there will be a Tesla Motors event on October 17th. Musk posted this information on his Twitter profile, but he didn't go into specifics.

However, Musk said that the Tesla event on October 17th would reveal a product "unexpected by most". Although it isn't clear what Musk intends to show on this event, there are many ideas floating around - from finished Model 3 design to improved Autopilot software.

The latest electric bicycle coming from Greyp Bikes, whose founder is Mate Rimac, the CEO and founder of Rimac Automobili, will be able to go up to 240 km on one charge. Not surprising considering it has a massive 3kWh battery.

Greyp's current model, the G12S, has a shorter range but it can go faster at 70 km/h. The new model, the G12H will have a maximum speed of 45 km/h.

According to the company, the G12H will have noticeably longer range than anything you can find on the market.

The era of self-driving cars is right around the corner. Google is testing their autonomous vehicles for a while now, and Tesla Motors cars can drive around on their own, of course, under the surveillance of a driver. Other players like Uber have already launched their own self-driving car sharing service and GM is working with Lyft to enable the same.

The self-driving cars should bring better safety to our streets and many believe this is something that will happen within our lifetime. Mate Rimac, founder and CEO of Rimac Automobili, said our children won't have to learn to drive, meaning he believes the self-driving cars will be standard within next few decades.

However, before that happens and the self-driving cars become common, the experts have to solve some problems that are self -imposed.

Australia is a great country, but the states, cities, and towns aren't connected well enough - but this could all change with the introduction of Hyperloop, from Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Rob Lloyd, former Cisco boss, now runs Hyperloop One, with engineers from companies like NASA and Boeing, with them working on "passive magnetic levitation technology".

Hyperloop One is an LA-based company that secured $80 million earlier this year, publicly teasing its propulsion system, the closest yet that we've been to Musk's vision of transportation for the future. Hyperloop One's VP for Worldwide Business Development, Alan James, talked with The Australian, where he said: "We're very keen to explore the potential for doing proof of operations in Australia and the reason for that is there's a clear long-term need for ultra-fast transport on the Australian east coast".

Hyperloop has been teased at taking passengers across distances that would otherwise take hours upon hours, at speeds of up to 621mph (1000kmph), all in freight pods that zoom across large distances in low-pressure tubes. James continued: "Melbourne to Sydney is the third busiest air corridor in the world and we can give you Melbourne downtown to Sydney downtown in 55 minutes. So we would be looking, either in NSW or Victoria, or possibly in ACT, to develop the first section of that route, to prove the operation of Hyperloop, to get regulatory approval".

We've been hearing lots of nuggets of information on Volta, NVIDIA's next generation GPU architecture, and now the company has just pushed its first Volta-based product out with the announcement of Xavier, its new supercomputer designed for autonomous cars.

NVIDIA unveiled Xavier out of the blue at its GPU Technology Conference in Amsterdam, with the Volta-based system-on-a-chip wicked fast, thanks to the new 512 cores from the next-gen Volta architecture. Volta allows the Xavier chip to support dual 8K HDR video inputs, with NVIDIA saying in the past that Volta would be much more memory bandwidth efficient, and smaller than previous designs.

Xavier also supports NVLink thanks to the Volta GPU, with the GPU being joined by IBM's upcoming Power9 chips, with both being installed into the U.S. Department of Energy's Summit supercomputer in 2018. NVLink is 7-10x faster than PCIe 3.0, so the Summit supercomputer will be a huge chunk faster than ever thanks to NVIDIA's new NVLink tech.

Xavier is powered by a custom 8-core CPU, as well as a new computer vision accelerator, which NVIDIA says is the most advanced chip it has ever developed. NVIDIA's new Xavier has 20 TOPS (trillion operations per second) and consumes just 20W, with 7 billion transistors, the 16nm chip is efficient - teasing that Volta should be a very efficient GPU when it hits consumer graphics cards in the future.

NVIDIA explains: "A single Xavier AI processor will be able to replace today's Drive PX 2 configured with dual mobile SoCs and dual discrete GPUs-at a fraction of the power consumption". Considering NVIDIA only unveiled Drive PX 2 at CES 2016 in January, powered by a 12-core CPU and two Pascal-based GPUs, the new Xavier chip is a mighty leap indeed.

The new Xavier chips will be shipped to carmakers in Q4 2017, so we're still a while away from seeing them materialize into the real-world and start driving our cars for us.

Google's self-driving car was involved in yet another accident and this one was the worst so far. The autonomous Lexus sustained major damage in an accident involving a commercial van.

According to the report, the van driver ran a red light and collided with the modified Lexus SUV. The van hit the passenger side of the door and damaged it heavily but no one was hurt. The accident occurred in Mountain View and Lexus had to be towed from the scene.

Thought your expensive new Tesla Model S electric vehicle was safe? Think again, as Chinese hackers have broken into a Model S vehicle that was 12 miles away, where they could even play around with the braking system on the car.

The hackers were from the company Keen Security Lab, which displayed they could hack into a Model S by creating a Wi-Fi hotspot that the car connected to while browsing the web. Once the connection is established, the hackers could use the car's CAN bus (Controller Area Network) which is the system that oversees the systems inside the Tesla.

Once the CAN was controlled, the hackers could close the car doors, slide the seats back and forward, move the side mirrors, adjust the windshield wipers - and the worst, play around with the braking system. The hackers alerted Tesla to the security hole, with the electric car maker pushing out an over-the-air update to protect Tesla owners.

Tesla have said that hackers would require a particular set of circumstances in order to break into their cars, as it isn't anywhere near as easy as the couple of paragraphs I've used to explain it. You would need a Model S nearby that had its web browser open, to then create the malicious hotspot. Tesla told The Guardian: "Our realistic estimate is that the risk to our customers was very low, but this did not stop us from responding quickly".