Electric Vehicles & Cars - Page 72

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.

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.

This is something I didn't think I'd be typing, but Toyota has been working on a car that runs on your poop. The company has turned human waste into renewable hydrogen fuel to power its new electric car.

Chief Engineer of Toyota's Hydrogen Fuel Cell Car, Yoshikazu Tanaka, said that human waste is expected to solve Toyota's big 'chicken or the egg' problem. Toyota has said that nobody wants to buy their hydrogen cars when there are no hydrogen fuel stations, adding that no one wants to build a hydrogen fuel station when there are not a mass amount of hydrogen cars on the road.

Toyota is now producing the human waste-based fuel in a wastewater treatment plant in Fukuoka, Japan. How does it work? The sewage is separated into solids and liquid, with the solid waste called sewage sludge. In order to break down the solid waste, microorganisms are added, creating a biogas - which is around 60% methane, and 40% carbon dioxide.

The electric car market is heating up, but the mainstream market needs to adopt them, and won't do that until they begin appearing for less than $50,000 - and much less. Chevrolet's upcoming Chevy Bolt electric vehicle will be priced starting at $29,995 after a federal tax credit of $7,500.

General Motors announced the news that its first electric car will be capable of over 200 miles on a single charge, for under $30K. Future owners of the Chevy Bolt will have to pay at least $7,500 in federal income tax in order to be eligible for the full tax credit, as it's not a refundable purchase, reports The Verge.

Before the credit, the Chevy Bolt will cost $37,495 for the LT trim model, while the higher-end Premium trim starts at $40,905. The base trim features a bunch of standards like 10.2-inch touchscreen, a 60kWh battery that should have you driving around 238 miles, and a powertrain that pushes out 200 horsepower, and 266 pound-feet of torque.

Apple has reportedly made swift changes to its Project Titan car project, with sources of The New York Times stating "dozens" of layoffs have taken place.

The New York Times isn't the only outlet with information, with a Bloomberg report stating that under new leadership with Bob Mansfield, Apple's focus on the automotive industry has changed from its own car, to just autonomous driving technology. The NYT reports that the layoffs were internally pushed as being part of a reboot of the project, while Apple works out what it wants to do.

Apple has been ripping employees away from the likes of Tesla and EV battery makers, so these new plans might leave some of those staff who left their jobs out in the lurch.

Almost four months after being spotted in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, self-driving Uber cars have shown up in the streets of San Francisco, California, according to an SFist report.

The vehicles in question sport the sensor array and Uber ATC logo, indicating they are the real deal.

The company is not publicly listed as having a testing permit in the state, so either a permit has been required very recently and the information has not been updated, or it's circumventing laws, as it's been known to do before. Uber declined to comment on the reports.

Volkswagen has been in the headlines throughout 2016 for all of the wrong reasons, but the German automotive giant has just te ased that it will be pushing into electric vehicles in a big way in the future.

The company has just teased its first next-gen electric vehicle, with VW set to officially debut the EV at the Paris motor show in October. VW promises a Golf-like sized electric vehicle with an interior that is similar to the Passat, with recharge speeds on the battery being rather impressive - just 15 minutes of charge will provide around 300 miles of driving.

VW Group CEO Matthias Müller confirmed the news with Autocar, adding that the price tag would be lower than a comparable combustion engine vehicle. Volkswagen should have the EV on the road towards the end of 2018, or early-2019, but we might not see it released in a global way until 2025.

Tesla has just announced a new, even faster version of its Model S electric vehicle; the P100D. The new P100D is capable of going from 0-60mph in just 2.5 seconds, with Tesla adding its the third-fastest production car ever. The only ones that beat it are the Ferrari LaFerrari, which costs a huge $1.4 million, and the Porsche 918 Spyder, which costs $845,000.

Tesla's new P100D starts at only $135,000 and it's quicker than a huge list of expensive cars, something that most people wouldn't have thought was possible a few years ago. The new P100D has a range of 315 miles, up from the 294 miles on the 90kWh battery, an increase of around 7%. The new Model X P100D is capable of 289 miles, up from 250 miles on the previous Model X P90D. The larger battery will be made available exclusively for the all-wheel drive model with the Ludicrous Mode option.

There are small changes and improvements with the P100D, including some upgrades made to the wiring harness and other small differences, but the drivetrain remains the same. The new 100kWh battery uses the same cell technology, but Tesla executives have teased the advancements in the battery pack technology being a leap in itself. Tesla CTO JB Straubel explains: "It's a pretty big change in the battery module and pack technology. It's a complete redo on the cooling architecture".

Tesla is in the headlines again with another Model S owner experiencing an Autopilot hiccup, where Model S owner Mark Molthan enabling Autopilot on the highway in "ideal weather conditions", reports BGR - but during a bend in the road, the Model S didn't adjust for the turn, slamming into a guard rail.

Bloomberg reported that Molthan said in the seconds leading up to the crash, he reached into his glove compartment to get a piece of cloth to clean his dash - you know, as you do when the car is in autonomous mode, you can do stuff. With the Autopilot mode enabled, you're meant to have your hands close to the wheel in case of emergencies - but this was just a few seconds. Also, you'd think that having Autopilot enabled, it would've been able to detect a simple turn - and it didn't, imagine if that was another car or a guard rail next to a cliff.

Molthan said: "I used Autopilot all the time on that stretch of the highway, but now I feel like this is extremely dangerous. It gives you a false sense of security. I'm not ready to be a test pilot. It missed the curve and drove straight into the guardrail. The car didn't stop - it actually continued to accelerate after the first impact into the guardrail".