Lifeboat Foundation

For the first time, Volkswagen announced it aims to start producing its most affordable ID.1 electric car, starting at 20,000 euros ($21,700), in 2027. The $20K Volkswagen ID.1 will offer “affordable electric mobility for everyone,” VW brand leader Thomas Shafer said Thursday.

“The working title is ID.1 and the vehicle is planned for 2027,” Shafer confirmed during VW’s annual press conference Thursday.

Work on the ID.1 is already well underway. Shafer said, “We’re already in the middle of it, we know what the car should look like.” However, the biggest challenge will be deciding where to build it.

The battery charges in the time it takes to fill a car with gasoline.

BYD is launching another lower-priced electric model. The Chinese automaker introduced the new BYD e2 Honor Edition, starting under $13,000, in its latest move to steal market share from gas-powered cars.

After declaring a “liberation battle” earlier this year, BYD is launching an aggressive campaign aimed at taking market share from ICE vehicles.

BYD kicked off the campaign last month with the new Qin Plus EV, which starts at around $15,000 (109,800 yuan). The company claimed its new EV opened a “new era of electricity is lower than oil.”

Amazon.com’s self-driving car unit, Zoox, is seeking to stay abreast of rival Waymo by expanding its vehicles’ testing in California and Nevada to include a wider area, higher speeds and nighttime driving.

A liquid hydrogen airliner with a range of over 5,000 miles. It’s feasible per them, by 2030 and limits pollution.

A breakthrough liquid hydrogen-fueled aircraft concept developed in the United Kingdom could take passengers from London to San Francisco with no layover.

That’s because the massive plane would have an operational range of 5,250 nautical miles (equivalent to air miles) and wouldn’t need to land to fill up with gas. This would provide more than enough range for the flight of roughly 11 hours and 4,664 nautical miles.

Continue reading “Aerospace experts design liquid hydrogen-powered jet that can travel halfway around world with no layover: ‘A pivotal moment’” »

Figure has demonstrated the first fruit of its collaboration with OpenAI to enhance the capabilities of humanoid robots. In a video released today, the Figure 1 bot is seen conversing in real-time.

The development progress at Figure is nothing short of extraordinary. Entrepreneur Brett Adcock only emerged from stealth last year, after gathering together a bunch of key players from Boston Dynamics, Tesla Google DeepMind and Archer Aviation to “create the world’s first commercially viable general purpose humanoid robot.”

Continue reading “Video: GPT-enhanced humanoid speaks and reasons as it works” »

Falling just short of hypersonic velocity.

The advent of AI has ushered in transformative advancements across countless industries. Yet for all its benefits, this technology also has a downside. One of the major challenges AI brings is the amount of energy required to power the GPUs that train large-scale AI models. Computing hardware needs significant maintenance and upkeep, as well as uninterruptible power supplies and cooling fans.

One study found that training some popular AI models can produce about 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, the rough equivalent of 300 cross-country flights in the U.S. A single data center can require enough electricity to power 50,000 homes. If this energy comes from fossil fuels, that can mean a huge carbon footprint. Already the carbon footprint of the cloud as a whole has surpassed that of the airline industry.

As the founder of an AI-driven company in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry, I am acutely aware of the environmental impact of our business. Here are a few ways we are trying to reduce that effect.

Automakers were once struggling to keep pace with demand for some new EVs, but now the opposite appears to be true.