Lifeboat Foundation

LANSING, Mich. — Michigan has finalized a contract to build the country’s first wireless charging road system in Detroit, the state announced Tuesday.

The Michigan Department of Transportation awarded the project to Electreon, an electric vehicle solutions firm that will construct a 1-mile stretch of road open to the public and capable of charging battery-powered cars and trucks in real time.

The road where it will be built hasn’t been selected yet, the state said. It will be located somewhere in Detroit.

Ford Motor Co. is working with Israeli startup Electreon to construct a mile-long road near Detroit’s Michigan Central Terminal that will charge electric vehicles as they travel on it. The pilot program will deploy an inductive in-road charging system in partnership with the Michigan Department of Transportation, the Michigan Office of Future Mobility and Electrification and the Michigan Economic Development Corp. “As we aim to lead the future of mobility and electrification by boosting electric vehicle production and lowering consumer costs, a wireless in-road charging system is the next piece to the puzzle for sustainability,” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer said in a statement. Also supporting the project, which is expected to be operational in 2023, are Next Energy and the Jacobs Engineering Group. Ford purchased the long-abandoned train station and is converting it to be the hub of what it calls its “mobility innovation district,” where software developers and others will focus on making electrified and autonomous transportation more practical.

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Stelco, which is a steelmaker producing flat-rolled, cold-rolled, and hot-rolled steel products, has announced that it is entering the electric vehicle battery recycling market through agreements with Primobius GmbH.

The company executed binding licensing and option agreements with Primobius to commercialize Primobius’ EV battery recycling and processing technologies in North America. Under the agreement, Stelco will be able to advance commercial lithium-ion battery feedstock sourcing agreements. It will also allow the company to begin the engineering and approval processes. The agreement enables Primobius the right to acquire between 25% and 50% equity in Stelco’s wholly-owned subsidiary.

The proposed Lake Erie Works refinery will enable Stelco to join the ranks of lithium-ion battery recycling leaders in North America. The integrated shredding and hydrometallurgical refinery will produce up to 18,400 net tons per year of nickel, manganese, and cobalt sulfates, and lithium hydroxide and carbonate. It’s expected to generate up to 40,000 net tons per year of scrap steel that Stelco will recycle into its steelmaking operations.

With a touch of modern engineering, da Vinci’s 15th century invention is more plausible than not.

Circa 2016

There are few people insane enough to strap on a jetpack and jump out of a helicopter, but Rex Pemberton is apparently one of them.

Dubbed the “Quark,” the motor weighs just 63 pounds.

Koenigsegg is also marketing an EV drive unit made up of two Quark motors, plus its small-but-powerful inverter, and small low-ratio planetary gearsets at each output shaft. The unit is called the “Terrier,” and serves up 670 hp and 811 lb-ft in a package that weighs just 187 pounds, and which offers torque vectoring across an axle. A Terrier can be bolted directly to a car’s monocoque as well.

More information on the Terrier unit is forthcoming, and presumably, it will be featured on future Koenigsegg products. As ever, the numbers are deeply impressive and entirely unsurprising from the innovative Swedish firm.

Continue reading “Koenigsegg’s Tiny Electric Motor Makes 335 HP and 443 LB-FT of Torque” »

Elon Musk announced that Tesla is going to be shifting its product development to make Tesla Bot, a humanoid robot also known as Optimus, a priority in 2022.

This is quite a surprising change of strategy.

When Tesla Bot was announced, Musk presented the project as something Tesla could do by leveraging existing work and parts from the development of self-driving technology, and if they don’t do it, someone else will, and they might not do it as well or as safely as Tesla can.

Elon Musk recently said that Tesla’s humanoid robo t project is the “most important product development we’re doing this year.”

On Wednesday, during Tesla’s earnings call, Musk said Tesla’s humanoid robot has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time’ and it is the most important product development they are doing in 2022. Musk introduced the concept of Tesla’s humanoid robot back in August, 2021 during Tesla’s AI event.

Tesla’s humanoid robot aka Tesla Bot is a 5-foot-8-inch and 125-pounds robot aims to do the dangerous, repetitive, physical tasks in the future. Elon Musk joked that Tesla Bot will be friendly and also mentioned that it will be built from lightweight materials.

Ask 50 people what the metaverse means, right now, and you’ll get 50 different answers. If a metaverse is where the real and virtual worlds collide, then Instagram is a metaverse: you create an avatar, curate your image, and use it to interact with other people. What everyone seems to agree on, however, is that it’s worth money. Epic Games and the recently rebranded Facebook are investing billions a year in this idea. When Microsoft bought video game publisher Activision for $70bn last week, it was described as “a bet on the metaverse”.

The tech world seems to be leaning towards some kind of early 00s conception of wearing a VR headset and haptic suit and driving a flying car towards your perfect pretend mansion in a soothingly sanitised alternate reality, where you can have anything you want as long as you can pay for it. Look at Mark Zuckerberg’s now-infamous presentation of the future of his company, with its bland cartoonish avatars and emptily pleasant environments. It is the future as envisioned by someone with precious little imagination.

I do not deny that some people want this vision. Ready Player One was a runaway hit. But the metaverse as envisioned by the people currently investing in it – by tech billionaires such as Zuckerberg and Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, by techbro hucksters selling astonishingly ugly generative-art NFTs and using words like “cryptoverse” – can only be described as spiritually bereft. It holds no interest for me.