Lifeboat Foundation

Decarbonising Australia’s transport systems will take more than a transition to electric vehicles. Understanding how and when owners like to charge their cars is important. Our researchers are examining how we might persuade the increasing electricity demand to meet the time-dependent renewable energy supply.

How many people do you know who own an electric vehicle? Most Australians still drive petrol-fuelled cars. But the proportion of electric vehicles (EVs) on our roads is set to boom in coming years, particularly if the government’s plans to introduce a fuel efficiency standard prove successful.

Transport researchers at the University of Melbourne Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology have studied the expectations EV owners have for charging – and what they think of policies and technologies that aim to shape EV charging behaviours.

Specializing in extreme fast charging (XFC) battery technology for electric vehicles, StoreDot aims to solve range anxiety, which is a well-known type of anxiety among EV owners. With its “100inX” technology roadmap, the company aims to achieve a mileage of 100 miles per five minutes of charging by 2024, according to a press release.

The company is at the advanced stages of developing groundbreaking semi-solid state technologies and targets mass manufacturing of its fast-charging battery cells, 100in5, which offer 100 miles of travel in five minutes of charging in 2024, then improve its charging abilities by 40 percent to three minutes by 2028 with 100in3, and finally achieving complete charging in two minutes by improving an additional 33 percent by 2032 with 100in2 batteries.

The METL tire is made from a shape memory alloy, making it elastic like rubber yet strong like titanium.

The much-hyped airless tire technology developed by NASA for its rovers, later commercialized for terrestrial use by The SMART Tire Company (STC), is now available for sale.

Continue reading “Airless bike tires made with NASA technology are now on sale” »

At the recent launch of its new BEV factory, Toyota vowed its next-generation electric vehicles will deliver longer range and faster charging at a lower price. The Japanese automaker now says its new EVs, due out in 2026, will feature nearly 500 miles of range.

At a technical briefing in June, Toyota revealed several new innovations, including advanced battery plans, improvements in aerodynamics, and manufacturing upgrades as it looks to boost EV sales with its next-gen electric models.

The company shared at the launch of its BEV factory, which is not an actual plant but rather “an organization dedicated to battery EVs,” that production of Toyota’s new EVs will begin in 2026.

Self-driving car startup Wayve can now interrogate its vehicles, asking them questions about their driving decisions—and getting answers back. The idea is to use the same tech behind ChatGPT to help train driverless cars.

The company combined its existing self-driving software with a large language model, creating a hybrid model it calls LINGO-1. LINGO-1 synchs up video data and driving data (the actions that the cars take second by second) with natural-language descriptions that capture what the car sees and what it does.

A concept video of Sky Cruise, a giant flying machine that can carry 5,000 passengers and has all the luxuries of the world, has gone viral on the internet. The maker of the video claims that such an aircraft built in the future would have no carbon footprint, The Independent reported.

The concept of a floating world in itself is not new and has been described even in Jonathan Swift’s works from the 18th century, much before the Wright Brothers made their first flight. Fans of animated movies might have also come across the concept in 1986 Japanese movie, Castle in the Sky.

A team of students from ETH Zurich and Lucerne University have hand-built an electrical vehicle that is now officially a world record holder.

On September 1, 2023, a group of speed freak students from ETH Zurich and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Switzerland demolished the electrical vehicle acceleration world record in style. Spending every spare minute building and refining their racing car, called “Mythen,” they managed to get from zero to 62.15 mph (100 kph) in 0.965 seconds over a distance of 40.3 feet (12.3 meters).

Continue reading “Swiss students have broken the 1-second EV acceleration mark” »

From zero to 100 km/h in less than a second: a racing car built by students has broken the world record for electric vehicle acceleration, a Swiss university said Tuesday.

Students from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ) and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences designed and built the “Mythen” vehicle that achieved the feat, ETHZ said in a statement.

“Now, Guinness World Records has confirmed that Mythen broke the previous world acceleration record for electric vehicles,” it said.

Tesla’s latest version of FSD had taught itself how to drive by processing billions of frames of video of how humans do it, Isaacson writes.