A Test Drive of the Most Advanced Driverless Cars. A silver BMW 5 Series is weaving through traffic at roughly 120 kilometers per hour (75 mph) on a freeway that cuts northeast through Bavaria between Munich and Ingolstadt. I’m in the driver’s seat, watching cars and trucks pass by, but I haven’t touched the steering wheel, the brake, or the gas pedal for at least 10 minutes. The BMW approaches a truck that is moving slowly. To maintain our speed, the car activates its turn signal and begins steering to the left, toward the passing lane. Just as it does, another car swerves into the passing lane from several cars behind.
The BMW quickly switches off its signal and pulls back to the center of the lane, waiting for the speeding car to pass before trying again. Putting your life in the hands of a robot chauffeur offers an unnerving glimpse into how driving is about to be upended. The allure of automation for car companies is huge. More comprehensive autonomy could reduce traffic accidents further still. Connected Cars: How Long Must We Wait? The advocates of an entirely different way of driving will tell you that we're within sight of the threshold, and connected cars are coming. But maybe not before manufacturers and developers agree on how different kinds of cars and apps will link together. Industry standards are buzzwords in the connected-car universe. Developer A wants to be able to code a great app once and then have what they design work in any manufacturer's in-vehicle system.
"An industry standard for cars will do the same for autos as the USB cable has done for the computer world," says Jake Sigal, CEO at Livio, which was acquired by Ford Motors in September to streamline the connected car concept. Meanwhile, the promise of a connected car, for many drivers, sounds like a dream — but when will it come true? Let's take a look at the possibilities that are on the table, and which ones are next in line from some of the developers involved. Why Connect? Consumers used to approach their cars as mechanical devices. What the Future of Driverless Cars Will Actually Look Like - Emily Badger. We've heard a lot about the projected benefits of driverless cars (whenever we get them, that is). The roads will become safer, as we remove distracted, flawed drivers (and human error) from behind the wheel.
Congestion will decrease, as cars that drive themselves and communicate with each other are able to more efficiently share roadways. Fuel economy will go up as a result, and emissions will go down. We'll need to devote less space to parking, as automated vehicles come to function more like public transit, remaining perpetually in motion. Which is all well and good. The Eno Center for Transportation this week released a helpful paper that corrals many of these estimates. Below, Eno has estimated several impacts of AVs in a graduated future in the United States where 10 percent, then 50 percent, then 90 percent the market shares this capability: "Preparing a Nation for Autonomous Vehicles" by the Eno Center for Transportation The right column above is pretty far into the future.
The Tesla Model S and Ford Model T kicked off revolutions in mobility. What is the future of the automobile? One hundred years ago, America was in the midst of a mobility revolution as the Ford Model T put the nation on wheels for the first time. Today, we’re seeing the next era of mobility begin to unfold, and much of the credit goes to that EV icon, the Tesla Model S. After more than a century of driving gasoline and diesel-powered cars, hybrids and fully electric vehicles are finally beginning to chip away at the market share of their fossil-fueled forefathers. So what has a century of progress wrought?
I recently had the chance to get two revolutionary cars – a 1913 Ford Model T and a 2013 Tesla Model S – together at the same time to see where we’ve been and where we’re headed. While electric vehicles today seem like something from a science fiction future, the truth is they’re as old as cars themselves. <div>Please enable Javascript to watch this video</div> Gasoline and diesel went on to power our world. The Model T: Where the world’s road trips began. The Aluminum Airship of the Future Has Finally Flown. It's Not Just Hyperloop: The World's 5 Wackiest Transportation Projects. Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk is at it again. Having already revolutionized electric cars and space exploration, the 42-year-old Musk unveiled on Monday his latest flight of fancy: a super-fast train that would whisk passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in a ridiculous 30 minutes.
Rocketing riders at 760 miles per hour, the train system, known as the Hyperloop, would use low-pressure tubes in which pod-like transporters jet forward at high speeds atop an air cushion. Musk has described the system as a cross between an air hockey table, a rail gun, and a Concorde. As if that wasn't enough, Musk also claims that it would be cheap to build. With a price tag of $6 to $10 billion, the Hyperloop would cost a fraction of California's current high-speed rail project, which aims to connect Sacramento to San Diego by 2026 and would leave the state with an estimated $68 billion bill. If it all sounds too good to be true, that's probably because it is. The Space Elevator The Moon Elevator. Physics of teleportation: It doesn't work. Wouldn't it be great to just be able to "beam up" and arrive nearly instantaneously someplace else?
Teleportation technology seems like it would solve an awful lot of problems. But even though the technological challenges to turning a human person into pure information and then using information to reassemble a person are daunting, a 2012 paper in the Journal of Special Physics Topics says this only scratches the surface of the problems. According to D. Roberts, J. Nelms, D. Starkey, and S. Thomas bandwidth constraints and the information density of the typical human being mean it would take a surprisingly long time to teleport from the surface of the earth to a space station in geostationary orbit directly overhead. There are 6x109 bits in a human genome and since humans are diploid that means 1.2x1010 bits per cell. Mentally rebuilding a person is not as simple, as a full information transfer of the traveller’s brain is required.
This is a ton of data. The Ethics of Saving Lives With Autonomous Cars Are Far Murkier Than You Think | Wired Opinion. If you don’t listen to Google’s robot car, it will yell at you. I’m not kidding: I learned that on my test-drive at a Stanford conference on vehicle automation a couple weeks ago. The car wanted its human driver to retake the wheel, since this particular model wasn’t designed to merge lanes. If we ignored its command a third time, I wondered, would it pull over and start beating us like an angry dad from the front seat?
Better to not find out. No car is truly autonomous yet, so I didn’t expect Google’s car to drive entirely by itself. Why would we want cars driving themselves and bossing us around? There would still be accidents, not to mention real-life versions of the fictional Kobayashi Maru test in Star Trek. If all goes well, computer-driven cars could help prevent these accidents by having much faster reflexes, making consistently sound judgments, not getting road-rage or being drunk, and so on. Actually, the answer isn’t so simple. The Puzzling Calculus of Saving Lives But, wait. This Electric Skateboard Can Dominate Any Terrain. Andrew Fern had no idea what he was in for when he decided to build a new kind of all-terrain vehicle. The idea was simple: Create a new type of skateboard that works on land, make it fast, and give it treads to conquer any terrain.
The execution — first shown in this YouTube video, shown below — was, in a word, awesome. The vehicle even had a name befitting its extreme nature: the Scarpar. When the video was first posted back in 2006, it quickly went viral among the rapidly growing field of tech blogs. Many sites wrote about it, and the vast majority that did expressed amazement at the idea (full disclosure: One of those sites was mine). That was seven years ago. "After seven years, I'm not impatient anymore," Fern says "After seven years, I'm not impatient anymore," Fern says. Now, finally, this time for real — this time for really real — the Scarpar is a stone's throw from commercial release.
From Concept to Reality Electric Dreams "I asked him, 'Do you think that's fast enough? ' Levitation could be the next big science fiction technology to hit it big. Swiss scientists use sound waves to levitate and manipulate objects, such as water droplets and a wooden toothpick, in mid-air. (Video by Dimos Poulikakos, Daniele Foresti) (Washington Post) Every month, there seems to be news of some fabulous science fiction concept that is ever closer to becoming science fact. In just the past few months, we’ve seen concepts go public for medical tricorders, augmented reality glasses, smart watches (although how much we actually want them is up for debate) and Jurassic Park-style de-extinction. Now, enter levitation, which could very well be the next science fiction concept to hit it big.
If all goes as planned, it may soon be possible for pharmaceutical researchers to levitate molecules in mid-air and for city planners to build super-fast transportation networks filled with levitating vehicles. The latest development is the ability of Swiss researchers to use sound waves to levitate — and then move — particles and objects in mid-air. Here's how Elon Musk's Hyperloop might actually work. Elon Musk has made his name on big ideas, whether it's space tourism or the electric car — but his latest project, mysteriously dubbed the Hyperloop, may be more revolutionary than anything he's done. It started with a simple promise: the ability to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour. As time went on, Musk added more. It would be low-friction, and use such minimal power that the entire thing could be run on electricity from solar panels installed above the tracks. It would use small pods, leaving "whenever you arrive" instead of cleaving to a schedule like an airliner.
He's promised to unveil his alpha design for the project in just under a month's time, but already, observers are speculating on exactly how this next-generation transportation scheme would work. The closest we've got is Japan's bullet train The details Musk has already hinted at tell us a great deal about the project, and outline a number of the challenges he's likely to face. Study Evaluates Impact of Nanotechnology Innovation for Improving Electric Vehicle Li-ion Batteries.
“While Li-ion batteries for electric vehicles are definitely a step in the right direction from traditional gasoline-fueled vehicles and nickel metal-hydride automotive batteries, some of the materials and methods used to manufacture them could be improved,” said Jay Smith, an Abt senior analyst and co-lead of the life-cycle assessment. Smith said, for example, the study showed that the batteries that use cathodes with nickel and cobalt, as well as solvent-based electrode processing, show the highest potential for certain environmental and human health impacts.
The environmental impacts, Smith explained, include resource depletion, global warming, and ecological toxicity—primarily resulting from the production, processing and use of cobalt and nickel metal compounds, which can cause adverse respiratory, pulmonary and neurological effects in those exposed. The study, carried out through a partnership with EPA, the U.S. Source: Nanotechnology in the automotive industry.