Lifeboat Foundation

Self-driving cars do not get drunk, they do not fall asleep, they do not get distracted by text messages, and experts and manufacturers agree they could be the answer to slashing the road toll.

It’s one of the reasons why autonomous vehicles are in the spotlight again, with Tesla promising to unveil a robotaxi in August and Hyundai showing off the results of its driverless car trial in Las Vegas.

But debate is raging in the industry over whether the technology is or will ever be ready to drive in busy, unpredictable environments without any human oversight.

An attention-grabbing report suggests $1 trillion of investment is needed to electrify 100% of the nation’s truck fleet. Here’s what it got wrong.

Questions to inspire discussion.

What do rental car companies need to improve?
—Rental car companies need to improve their education and communication with customers about electric vehicles to prevent incidents like getting trapped due to running out of charge.

Herbert Ong Brighter with Herbert.

Tesla is the latest major company to lay off employees.

The company is eliminating “more than 10%” of staff globally, according to an internal memo sent by Elon Musk on Sunday, which was seen by Business Insider. The layoffs have come shortly after the carmaker posted lackluster delivery numbers.

Musk wrote in the email: “There is nothing I hate more, but it must be done. This will enable us to be lean, innovative and hungry for the next growth cycle.”

Artificial intelligence excels at sorting through information and detecting patterns or trends. But these machine learning algorithms need to be trained with large amounts of data first.

As researchers explore potential applications for AI, they have found scenarios where AI could be really useful—such as analyzing X-ray image data to look for evidence of rare conditions or detecting a rare fish species caught on a commercial fishing boat—but there’s not enough data to accurately train the algorithms.

Jenq-Neng Hwang, University of Washington professor of electrical and computer and engineering, specializes in these issues. For example, Hwang and his team developed a method that teaches AI to monitor how many distinct poses a baby can achieve throughout the day. There are limited training datasets of babies, which meant the researchers had to create a unique pipeline to make their algorithm accurate and useful.

Battery–electric vehicles have become ubiquitous as more people have realized how much less pollution they produce than traditional gas-powered cars. But another type of planet-friendly vehicle, the hydrogen car, has yet to catch on, for a few different reasons.

Now, a new technique developed by researchers at Rice University in Texas may provide the key to making hydrogen cars — and hydrogen fuel as a whole — more viable.

Continue reading “Scientists develop innovative technique to transform plastic waste into powerful clean fuel: ‘[It] could be produced for free’” »

Elon Musk praises the Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system for its role in aiding a Tesla owner during a mild heart attack.

A research team led by Lynden Archer, professor and dean of Cornell Engineering, has developed a new lithium battery that can charge in as little as five minutes. This could help address anxiety associated with the charging time of electric vehicles (EVs) and increase their adoption.

In their bid to reduce emissions from transportation, countries worldwide are looking to electrify various modes of transport. Road-based transport such as cars, buses, and trucks have led this transformation, aiming to even ban the sale of fossil fuel-powered cars in the next decade.