Apple EV expected 2025.
It’s all but confirmed now: Apple is working on its very own electric vehicle, no matter what the company says, and the debut is expected to take place in 2025 at the earliest.
In the lead up to the 2019 election, Scott Morrison said Labor’s target of 50 per cent of all new vehicles being electric by 2030 would “end the weekend”. Now he’s backing them with the new $250 million “future fuels” fund.
Laser lidar startup Luminar, founded and led by the youngest self-made billionaire tracked by Forbes, will supply its sensors to Nvidia for a new autonomous vehicle technology platform that the chip and computing powerhouse is developing for automakers to install in consumer cars and trucks. The news pushed Luminar’s shares up more than 20%.
Nvidia aims to supply the DRIVE Hyperion system, powered by its Orin “systems on a chip” computing hardware, AI-enabled software and Luminar’s long-range Iris lidar, to automakers starting in 2,024 Luminar said at Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia’s annual GTC conference. The platform, which also integrates cameras and radar for additional sensing capability, includes everything needed for mass-production vehicles to operate autonomously in highway driving, Nvidia said earlier this year.
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Nvidia may be best known for graphics cards you can’t find in stores, but the company also makes some interesting software tools. An example of this is the noise removal feature known as RTX voice, which was upgraded to work with all GeForce cards earlier this year, and does an excellent job of cleaning up background noise.
Now Nvidia (Thanks, 80.lv) has been showing off a new tool in beta this year involving sound. Audio2Face is an impressive looking auto rigging process that runs within Nvidia’s open real-time simulation platform, Omniverse. It has the ability to take an audio file, and apply surprisingly well matching animations to the included Digital Mark 3D character model.
Beats road traffic any day.
As the world progresses towards electric vehicles and flying cars, a team of researchers from the Washington State University is working with ZEVA Aero, a Tacoma-based start up to test different components to create a single passenger, electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft.
It’s interesting to note that ZEVA Aero has already completed a functional prototype of a very futuristic looking eVTOL vehicle which has been assigned to use by first responders and emergency services before the general public. The prototype is capable of flying at 160 mph for up to 50 miles (80km). When it takes off from the ground, it hovers just like a helicopter and then tilts horizontally to fly more efficiently like a plane. This enables it to take advantage of the reduced drag and travel at faster speed as compared to other eVTOL vehicles.
Japanese inventor, Akinori Ito, has created a household appliance which converts plastic bags into fuel for heat generators and some stoves.
Let’s talk numbers. On average, Americans use 100 billion plastic bags a year, which are produced with 12 million barrels of oil. When you think about the fact that one plastic bag takes 1,000 years to degrade, that’s a lot of waste lying around in landfills or poured into the ocean. What’s worse is that these plastic bags don’t even break down completely. They get polluted by the sunlight and turn into microplastics that absorb toxins, polluting the environment.
Continue reading “Japanese Inventor Built a Machine That Turns Plastic Bags into Oil” »
What do the founders and leaders of Tesla, YouTube, and LinkedIn have in common? They all started their early careers at PayPal, the online payment company. This group of highly ambitious twenty and thirty-year-olds has been dubbed the “PayPal mafia” and once even dressed up as mafia members for the cover of Fortune magazine.
They went on to found or run some of the largest tech companies in the world. Elon Musk was absent the day of the shoot because of a scheduling conflict. This is by no means all of them. Peter Thiel estimates that the “mafia” is around 220 people.
Thiel is a famous start-up investor often referred to as the “don” of the PayPal mafia. PayPal began when Thiel and Max Levchin created software company Confinity as a way to transfer money through the once-popular Palm Pilot.
Twitter users said Mr. Musk should sell 10% of his Tesla shares after the billionaire chief executive polled them and pledged to abide by the outcome of the vote.
As promised, Walmart has started doing fully driverless box truck deliveries in partnership with startup Gatik between its own locations on a fixed 7-mile loop, the companies announced. Despite those limitations, the route in Bentonville, Arkansas involves “intersections, traffic lights and merging on dense urban roads,” the companies said. It’s another shot of good news for the progress of self-driving vehicles after GM’s cruise launched its self-driving taxis into testing last week.
The Gatik trucks are bringing grocery orders from a Walmart fulfilment center (dark store) to a nearby Walmart Neighborhood Market grocery store in Bentonville, the host city of the company’s headquarters. The route covers the “middle mile” transportation of goods between warehouses and stores. The program effectively got launched following the December 2020 approval by the Arkansas State Highway Commission, and has been driverless since this summer.
Gatik, a Silicon Valley-based developer of robotic technology to handle “middle-mile” deliveries from distribution centers to stores, has begun hauling goods for Walmart in autonomous trucks without a human backup at the wheel for the first time.
Gatik, which has been making delivery runs for Walmart since 2019 in the retail giant’s Bentonville, Arkansas, hometown, is operating two fully autonomous trucks that are hauling goods on a fixed, 7.1-mile route between an e-commerce distribution facility there to a Walmart Neighborhood Market store. This new phase started in August and is the first time any autonomous trucking company has operated commercial delivery routes without a human backup, the companies said.
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