Electric Vehicles & Cars - Page 76

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), following a months-long investigation, has declared the use of hoverboards -- and self-balancing scooters -- currently on the market to be unsafe. Consequently, retailers, manufacturers, and importers are now required to follow safety standards in order to sell current and future boards, lest they face legal action. Until now, no safety standards were in place. The news is expected to result in mass recalls.

Although it has admitted open flame was never achieved in its testing (which comprised examining hoverboard circuit boards, batteries, and burned hoverboards, as well as dynamometer tests), the CPSC witnessed enough melting and overheating to feel comfortable making their move. No doubt the 52 hoverboard fires constituting $2 million in property damage and killing two dogs and nearly three children -- all between December 1 and February 17 -- helped to that end as well.

New, certified hoverboards should start selling later this year.

One of the coolest new features being rolled out to the Model S is its new "Summon" feature, which is part of Tesla Motors' v7.1 software for the Model S.

Summon will allow Model S owners to park, and retrieve their Model S vehicles without being inside of the car, or even near it. But, Consumer Reports' latest video has some testing done with Summon, which failed some of their safety tests. They found if you exited the Tesla app on the iPhone 6S while the Model S was moving out of its park, the car would continue to move - which is worrying.

Telsa has been playing with the smartphone app, limiting its Summon abilities for this very reason. The key fob that Model S owners have will be able to stop the car, but not drive it - while the app itself will require users to have their finger on the screen for the feature to work.

Most people would love to own a Tesla, but their price keeps them away from the average consumer - which is why the electric car maker is working on the Model 3.

According to Bloomberg, the Model 3 could be found as low as $25,000 when it arrives, after tax subsidies drops it from its starting price of $35,000. Tesla spokeswoman Khobi Brooklyn told Bloomberg: "We can confirm it's $35,000 before incentives. We haven't changed our minds".

If we consider the average American wants to spend $31,000 on a new car (according to an analysis by Salim Morsy of Bloomberg New Energy Finance), the $35,000 starting price on the Model 3 from Tesla is getting very close to that point. Adding in tax subsidies and hitting $25,000 - well then, it's looking very good for consumers.

CES 2016 - NVIDIA held its CES 2016 press conference, announcing its new Drive PX 2 system. The predecessor to NVIDIA's in-car computer is liquid-cooled and as powerful as 150 of Apple's MacBook Pros.

Drive PX 2 features 12 CPU cores and 8 TFLOPS of processing power. When it comes to the GPU side of things, it features NVIDIA's next-gen Pascal GPU baked on the 14nm process. NVIDIA claims that Drive PX 2 has the same processing power as six Titan X video cards, which is saying quite a lot.

All of the horsepower that NVIDIA's Drive PX 2 is capable of is required to pull in all of the stuff around it - people, cars, and everything else. It has a bunch of maps and sensors that it needs to deal with on-the-fly, with NVIDIA cramming in a liquid-cooled, 250W system powered by Pascal.

NASA's aeronautics department has developed and refined green technology through its Environmentally Responsible Aviation (ERA) project the past six years, and the results are excellent. It says what it's done could "cut airline fuel use in half, pollution by 75 percent and noise to nearly one-eighth of today's levels."

For airlines, this means a potential $255 billion in savings between 2025 and 2050. And before you think the savings won't be passed onto you, airline prices have actually dropped by 50 percent the last three decades.

The project cost NASA $400 million, with an additional $250 million put up by industry partners. Its intent was to explore new vehicle concepts and technologies that would reduce the environmental impact of aviation. One example: a "radical new morphing wing technology that allows an aircraft to seamlessly extend its flaps, leaving no drag-inducing, noise-enhancing gaps for air to flow through" (pictured above). While the rest of the developments are yet to be confirmed as on track for commercialization (they will be discussed at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Sci-Tech Conference in San Diego this week), this one has already been picked up by FlexSys and Aviation Partners of Seattle.

In a milestone that pushes humanity one step closer to science fiction, ArcaSpace has created the world's first real hoverboard.

Unlike hoverboard "impostors" like the uni-wheeled gyro skateboard or Lexus' SLIDE board, the ArcaBoard actually levitates up to a height of one foot over surfaces. Although the ArcaBoard is an authentic hoverboard, it's very much unlike Marty McFly's 80's kistch sci-fi wonder: as the tech is still in its early stages, the board is quite bulky, weighing it at 180lbs. With that kind of heft, it's more like a floating coffee table rather than a svelte aerodynamic street-hopper.

The ArcaBoard's hovering action is powered by a massive array of 36 high-powered electric fans that generate up to 272 horsepower and 430 lbs of thrust. The board can also hit a top speed of 12.5 miles-per-hour. Sadly the levitating fun will be short-lived as the fan system drains the board's batteries in six minutes flat. Additionally, it takes about six hours or so to get the board charged again, but ArcaSpace also sells a quick-charging ArcaDock for $4,500 that will have you up and levitating again in half an hour.

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk was at the Stanford FutureFest recently, where he updated his timeline for the progression of AI.

During the chat, Musk said "If any given year you find your predictions are going further out or coming closer in, that actually one way to think of acceleration [of progress] because otherwise what's the quantitative measure of AI?"

While talking with Fortune's Kirsten Korosec, Musk said "We're going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years". Now, keep in mind that Musk is referring to a "level 4 autonomous vehicle", which The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) describes as a "vehicle designed to perform all safety-critical driving functions and monitor roadway conditions for an entire trip".

Following Google's discovery driverless cars are a bit too good at driving for their own good, the company is said -- according to three sources aware of the plans -- to be partnering with classic car maker Ford to make new ones. This news is in line with what co-founder Sergey Brin said earlier in the year: it wants manufacturing partners interested in its self-driving technology.

The deal is said to be non-exclusive, meaning it can partner with other companies if it pleases. As well, it's understood Ford will not be liable for any accidents to come out of the venture.

The Ford deal makes sense because the head of Google's self-driving car project, John Krafcik, worked 14 years at the company. Other employees attached to the project have history there, too. More, Ford's previous chief executive Alan Mulally is on the Google board as of 2014. Giving additional credence to the rumor is Ford CEO Mark Fields consistent support of a future where it sells cars as "on-demand services".

Programmers and engineers at Google and the GM-Carnegie Mellon Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab, among other institutions, are finding driverless cars are too good at what they do, and it's causing a crash rate double that of cars with human drivers. That is to say, a robot driver that obeys the law to the letter every time doesn't mesh so well with human drivers that don't do the same. For example, a driverless car will go the speed limit on a busy highway whereas everyone else will be going well above it, or be wanting to, thus increasing the probability of a crash. As well, the reflexes of a driverless car are better, which can catch a human off guard.

Though all crashes have been minor and none of them the fault of a driverless car, researchers are of course debating what to do about the situation. One possibility: programming the vehicles to behave more like humans and better fit into the "social game" (as Google describes it) that is driving, even if that means making them a little less lawful.

"It's a sticky area," says Brandon Schoettle, co-author of the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute's study. "If you program them to not follow the law, how much do you let them break the law?"

It looks like Google will be making a self-driving unit within its Alphabet company, according to "a person briefed on the company's strategy", reports Bloomberg.

Google's autonomous vehicles have clocked up over 1 million miles (or 1.6 million kilometers) on public roads throughout San Francisco, and Austin, Texas. These cities are where Alphabet (or Google, or whatever) will roll out their autonomous vehicles first, with an Uber-like service. The person that Bloomberg talked with asked not to be identified as "the plans are private". The new autonomous vehicles would be deployed in confined areas at first, such as "campuses, military bases or corporate office parks", according to Bloomberg's source.

One of Google's main goals with autonomous vehicles is to reduce traffic accidents, which claim around 33,000 lives every year in the United States alone. Back in September, Google and Alphabet co-founder Sergey Brin said that self-driving cars would first reach humanity as a form of service, saying that countless people could try the technology, and that having "the vehicle come back to us every day" meant that Google could update the machines at a much higher rate than consumer-owned autonomous cars.