Lifeboat Foundation

A Tesla engineer has given a rare update on the Tesla Semi electric truck program amid new EPA rules that should give it a boost.

Tesla Semi is currently only in low-volume production at a facility outside Gigafactory Nevada.

In January 2023, Tesla announced a massive expansion of Gigafactory Nevada to add production of Tesla Semi trucks and 4,680 battery cells and to finally expand the factory to its originally planned size.

Cars today roll along a production line where components are added at set stations and Tesla now wants to implement a completely new assembly process.

DARPA and Boeing’s Aurora are moving ahead with their research into the creation of an active flow control aircraft with no control surfaces.

As AFP reports, in a meeting with industry experts, an economy ministry official outlined a target completion date of post-2035. To achieve this ambitious goal, a significant investment of five trillion yen ($33 billion) will be allocated over the next decade, fueling research and development of the new passenger plane.

This latest endeavor seeks to establish Japan as a leader in passenger aircraft production – a position it hasn’t held in over half a century. Building on the challenges that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) encountered, which canceled its long-delayed passenger jet project in 2023, the new public-private consortium strongly emphasizes clean energy.

The two brands are already part of an alliance, and now they look to leverage that in pursuit of more success in America.

Japanese carmaker Nissan has announced plans to boost its electric vehicle lineup with an additional 34 models, and is aiming for price parity with internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles by 2030.

This week, at a press conference in Atsugi, near Tokyo, Nissan revealed its medium to longer-term business roadmap. The plans, which cover the period from 2024 to 2030, include a dramatic expansion of vehicle electrification, a significant reduction in costs, and a number of technological innovations.

Tesla seems to be making some serious headway with its Full Self-Driving (FSD) suite with the release of V12.3. But while FSD is currently the company’s flagship advanced driver-assist system, basic Autopilot still plays a huge role in Tesla’s electric cars. With this in mind, Tesla seems to be doubling down on educating drivers about the proper use of basic Autopilot, as well as the system’s limitations.

As could be seen in the company’s Tesla Tutorials channel on YouTube, the company has released a thorough tutorial focused on basic Autopilot’s features and proper use. The video is over four minutes long, and all throughout its duration, Tesla highlighted that the features of basic Autopilot does not make vehicles autonomous. The company also emphasized that basic Autopilot is designed to work with a fully attentive driver.

The video fully discussed the capabilities and limitations of basic Autopilot’s two main features, Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (TACC) and Autosteer (Beta). The Tesla Tutorial video discussed how to engage both features, how to set their specific parameters, and how they are disengaged. Overall, it is quite encouraging to see Tesla publishing a tutorial that’s purely focused on basic Autopilot.

Researchers create a compact, all-optical device with the lowest microwave noise ever achieved for an integrated chip.

In a new Nature study, Columbia Engineering researchers have built a photonic chip that can produce high-quality, ultra-low-noise microwave signals using only a single laser. The compact device — a chip so small, it could fit on a sharp pencil point — results in the lowest microwave noise ever observed in an integrated photonics platform. The achievement provides a promising pathway towards small-footprint ultra-low-noise microwave generation for applications such as high-speed communication, atomic clocks, and autonomous vehicles.

BEIJING, Feb 6 (Reuters) — Freezing rain, snow and ice have snarled traffic in central, eastern and southern China as millions of people travel home ahead of the Spring Festival holiday in the blistering cold that has swept through parts of the country over the past week.

Southern Hunan and central Hubei provinces bore the brunt of the severe weather, which deteriorated over the weekend, slowing highway traffic to a crawl, cancelling hundreds of trains and delaying flights.

The disruptions coincide with the biggest mass travel migration in the world as people across the country flock home to see their families for the Chinese New Year holiday, which officially begins on Saturday.