Lifeboat Foundation

Tesla’s impressive third-quarter delivery performance overshadowed the automotive industry’s ongoing struggle with the semiconductor chip shortage. Among all of the world’s automakers, Tesla has been basically the only car company to avert the crisis as it has not had any overwhelmingly public stoppages in vehicle production. Morgan Stanley’s new investor note, drafted by lead analyst Adam Jonas, examines Tesla’s ability to avoid detrimental production stoppages, which effectively helped the company capture its best quarter in company history.

Jonas titles Morgan Stanley’s most recent investor note, “How Did Tesla Find Chips?” In all honesty, this riddle was solved during the Q2 2021 Earnings Call, where Tesla stated in its Shareholder Deck that it used a combination of in-house microcontrollers to avoid any major catastrophes in the manufacturing of its vehicles. The company wrote:

“Our team has demonstrated an unparalleled ability to react quickly and mitigate disruptions to manufacturing caused by semiconductor shortages. Our electrical and firmware engineering teams remain hard at work designing, developing and validating 19 new variants of controllers in response to ongoing semiconductor shortages.”

The researcher warns that there is a new APT hacker group that targets the fuel, electricity, and aviation industries.

Long gone are the days where tires were kind of boring.

Tires are there to make cars roll. They serve a simple function and should therefore be rather simple and boring. Right? Wrong! Now, in this video, we bring you advanced We dare you to watch them in action and not be impressed.

Full Story:

Boston-based company Regent has taken US$465 million in pre-orders for its super-fast electric “Seaglider.” Using the wing-in-ground effect, this 180-mph (290-km/h) beast promises twice the range of an electric aircraft, and a revolution in coastal transport.

“The speed, comfort, and navigation systems of an aircraft with the convenience, maneuverability, and affordability of a boat,” reads the Regent press release, marking approximately the first time boats have ever been called affordable or maneuverable.

Continue reading “Regent to build high-speed electric ground-effect ‘seagliders’” »

And it’s not a Tesla.

Swiss multinational company ABB a reputed name in the power and automation sectors has formally launched its electric vehicle charger, Terra 360 which is not only the fastest but can also power up to four vehicles at a time, said a company press release.

On the northwest coast of Taiwan, nestled between mudflats teeming with fiddler crabs and sweet-scented persimmon orchards, sits the world’s most important company that you’ve probably never heard of. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., or TSMC, is the world’s largest contract manufacturer of the semiconductor chips—otherwise known as integrated circuits, or just chips—that power our phones, laptops, cars, watches, refrigerators and more. Its clients include Apple, Intel, Qualcomm, AMD and Nvidia.

Inside its boxy off-white headquarters in sleepy Hsinchu County, technicians in brightly hued protective suits—white and blue for employees, green for contractors and pink for pregnant women—push polished metal carts under a sallow protective light. Above their heads, “claw machines”—nicknamed after the classic arcade game—haul 9-kg plastic containers containing 25 individual slices, or “wafers,” of silicon on rails among hundreds of manufacturing stations, where they are extracted one by one for processing, much like a jukebox selecting a record. Only after six to eight weeks of painstaking etching and testing can each wafer be carved up into individual chips to be dispatched around the planet.

“We always say that it’s like building a high-rise,” one TSMC section manager tells TIME, pointing to how his technicians diligently follow instructions dictated to them via tablet. “You can only build one story at a time.”

Waymo, Alphabet Inc.’s autonomous driving company, is vague on exactly when semis controlled by its technology will be hauling cargo, without drivers, across the U.S. but has a detailed list of challenges to be mastered first, ranging from rough winds and slick roads, stray pedestrians on the highway and figuring out how robot trucks can deploy safety flares when they have to pull over.

Full Story:

While the idea of the automobile was invented in the late 1800s in Germany and France, the true commercial revolution of the industry occurred in the 1920s in the U.S. There were 40+ years of experimentation between 1,880 and 1,920 with different form factors such as steering sticks, drive systems, and even names (like the Stanley Steamer). Brands and technologies were secondary until the true mass production of one common form, and with that development in the 1920s came the exceptional volumes and growth rates that led to the tripling of registered drivers in the U.S. between 1920 and 1930.

Full Story:

The automobile industry has recently been inclining towards electrical vehicles and governments are doing everything to support this transition. Tesla has been a pioneer and an example in this field. It has launched smart vehicles and maintained the standard. However, no, the company has a rival, and it might be a threat to Tesla’s models.

Lucid Motors is another automobile company making electric vehicles. It just earned a rating of 520 miles (837 km) from the Environmental Protection Agency for the firm’s model of Air Dream Edition. This makes the Lucid Air the longest-range EV the EPA has ever rated, according to a recent press release.

However, EPA has very specific and low context settings for trials. Hence, the speed and other specifications will perform differently in real road scenarios. This model is the longest-range production EV so far. The company’s CTO and CEO Peter Rawlinson has scored a win as the Air Dream Edition exceeds Tesla’s longest-range vehicle, the Model S Long Range Plus, by a staggering 100 miles (161 km).