Citroën is launching the Ami, a new ~$6,000 mini electric car that can cost just $20 per month and it can be legally driven by a 14-year-old can in France.
We call it an electric car because it looks like a small city car, like a smart, but Citroën is calling Ami a “light quadricycle.”
It’s accessible to people from 14 years old in France, though the French automaker says that only 16-year-olds on average are going to be allowed to drive in most European countries. Another advantage (or risk depending on how you look at it) is that in some places, you won’t even need a driver’s license to get behind the wheel of an Ami.
Northwestern University researchers tested their invention on a swarm of 100 robots
Algorithm for self-driving vehicles could reduce traffic and crashes Northwestern University. Researchers have developed an algorithm that could stop self-driving vehicles from getting in crashes and traffic jams. The team from Northwestern University (NU) claims their invention is “the first decentralized algorithm with a collision-free, deadlock-free guarantee.”
The algorithm divides the ground beneath the machines into a grid. The robots learn their position through technology similar to GPS and coordinate their movements through sensors that assess where there’s free space to move.
“The robots refuse to move to a spot until that spot is free and until they know that no other robots are moving to that same spot,” said Northwestern Engineering’s Michael Rubenstein, who led the study. “They are careful and reserve a space ahead of time.”
In poor visibility, your car could look for landmarks — under the surface of the road.
MIT is working on self-driving technology that allows cars to “see” through the ground up to a depth of ten feet below the surface of the road. The idea is to allow self-driving cars to figure out exactly where they are — especially when snow, heavy fog, or other bad weather obscures road markings.
Current-generation self-driving cars typically rely on cameras and light detection sensors (LIDAR) to position themselves on roadways. But once the snow starts falling and covers up lane markers, it can get tricky for the car to tell where it is — and that could spell disaster, especially at highway speeds.
A team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab have come up with a new system they call “Localizing Ground Penetrating Radar” (LGPR) that can create a real-time map of the ground below the road’s surface.
The latest automaker to experiment with alternate ownership models
Car subscriptions: they’re totally a thing! The latest automaker to test the waters on subscriptions is Nissan, which just launched a new, two-tier service in Houston, Texas. It’s called “Nissan Switch,” and it will feature a variety of models, including the all-electric Nissan Leaf Plus, the Titan pickup, and the GT-R sports car.
Nissan Switch has two tiers: the $699-a-month “Select” plan, which includes the Altima, Rogue, Pathfinder, and Frontier; and the $899-a-month “Premium” plan, which includes the Leaf Plus, Maxima, Murano, Armada, Titan, and 370Z coupe. The GT-R sports car is available to either Select or Premium customers, but includes an additional $100-a-day fee and can only be taken out for a maximum of seven days.
McAfee researchers were able to trick a Tesla’s autonomous systems.
Researchers at McAfee were able to trick two Teslas into autonomously speeding up by 50 mph.
The researchers stuck a 2-inch strip of tape on a 35-mph speed sign, and the car’s system misread it as 85 mph and adjusted its speed accordingly.
The safety of Tesla’s autopilot features has come under close scrutiny, but CEO Elon Musk has predicted the company will have “feature-complete full self-driving” this year.
It turns out all it takes to fool a Tesla’s camera system is a little tape.
When it comes to startup investment, automakers are still going full speed ahead.
From ride-hailing apps to driverless car technology, transportation startups have attracted unprecedented sums of investment capital from auto manufacturers in recent years. In the past few quarters, that trend has been accelerating.
An analysis of Crunchbase data shows that since the beginning of 2019, the world’s largest car and truck manufacturers have led financing rounds valued at more than $6 billion. Over that period, they’ve participated in more than 50 deals for several million dollars and up, indicating an expanded willingness to pump significant sums into rounds.
“It has been a continuation of the trends for many of the automakers that have been particularly active over the past few years,” said Chris Stallman, a partner at Detroit-based transport venture firm Fontinalis Partners. “In 2019 and 2020, however, it has been interesting to see a few automakers—particularly those in Asia—aggressively ramping up their innovation efforts.”
Electric Hummers and Cybertrucks are just the beginning when it comes to sustainable trucks and S.U.V.s.
What would it take to unite this divided country?
At this point, we seem to be down to one option: electric pickup trucks.
Our future was teased in a 30-second General Motors ad featuring Lebron James during the Super Bowl. Announcing a “quiet revolution,” the company offered a glimpse of one of the most counterintuitive passenger vehicles in memory: an electric pickup truck under the revived (and, in some quarters, reviled) nameplate Hummer. The company will unveil the GMC Hummer EV in May.
A Chevrolet Volt hybrid car connected to a charging station at a parking garage in Los Angeles.
SEATTLE — When Seattle City Light unveiled five new electric vehicle charging stations last month in an industrial neighborhood south of downtown, the electric utility wasn’t just offering a new spot for drivers to fuel up. It also was creating a way for the service to figure out how much more power it might need as electric vehicles catch on.
Seattle aims to have nearly a third of its residents driving electric vehicles by 2030. Washington state is No. 3 in the nation in per capita adoption of plug-in cars, behind California and Hawaii. But as Washington and other states urge their residents to buy electric vehicles — a crucial component of efforts to reduce carbon emissions — they also need to make sure the electric grid can handle it.
The average electric vehicle requires 30 kilowatt hours to travel 100 miles — the same amount of electricity an average American home uses each day to run appliances, computers, lights and heating and air conditioning.
An Energy Department study found that increased electrification across all sectors of the economy could boost national consumption by as much as 38 percent by 2050, in large part because of electric vehicles. The environmental benefit of electric cars depends on the electricity being generated by renewables.
Tesla stores across Shanghai have been crowded with customers after a new tax break earlier this month, with most orders coming for the most affordable electric vehicle, the Model 3 sedan built at the city’s Gigafactory.
The Model 3 orders spiked amid a cooling electric vehicle market in China after authorities gave dozens of electric vehicle makers a new tax break which lowers the cost of buying a Tesla in China to less than 300,000 yuan (about 43,745 US dollars).
“We have more customers these days looking for test drives and more information,” said a salesperson in a Tesla store in Shanghai.
Named as the Iveco Daily Electric, the RV that can take you anywhere – completely for free.
Cleaner vehicles with minimum emissions make up for a new segment that is currently the most hotly contested around the world. This is not only because of the emission norms of major countries that have compelled manufacturers to do so, but also due to the industry’s trajectory that has encouraged them to be the early bird. A rat race for electrification.
On one hand, there are manufacturers who are spending huge chunks of their revenue in creating eco-friendly offerings and on the other hand, you have Dethleffs’ completely solar RV. You heard right, completely solar. While major auto giants around the world are scrambling for a piece of the pie that is electrification, Dethleffs harnessed solar energy to create an offering that is completely independent of any fuel.
Named as the Iveco Daily Electric, the RV that can take you anywhere – completely for free. The extensive use of solar panels on the RV’s body can produce up to 3,000 watts of energy without a charging point in sight.
Volkswagen has unveiled a new concept for a charging butler robot that can charge electric vehicles in a parking garage using mobile battery packs.
The German automaker says that “mobile robots will charge electric vehicles completely autonomously in the future.”
Mark Möller, Head of Development at Volkswagen Group Components, commented:
“The mobile charging robot will spark a revolution when it comes to charging in different parking facilities, such as multistorey car parks, parking spaces and underground car parks because we bring the charging infrastructure to the car and not the other way around. With this, we are making almost every car park electric, without any complex individual infrastructural measures. It’s a visionary prototype, which can be made into reality quite quickly, if the general conditions are right”,
Almost all major automakers are gearing up to enter the new era of self-driven cars. Taking this concept further is General Motors, which wants to do away with the steering wheel altogether in its latest self-driven model.
The automaker has put in a request to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to allow it to test self-driving cars sans a steering wheel or other human controls on American roads.
The NHTSA revealed that GM and Softbank-backed startup Nuro petitioned the agency in 2018 seeking exemption from U.S. road safety rules that were written a long time ago and are meant to control cars with human drivers.
