Lifeboat Foundation

Saving the world’s automakers from fines made Tesla nearly $9 billion since 2009.

Independent of the smart-corridor project, two major companies behind self-driving big rig technology told KXAN they plan to remove safety drivers and go completely driverless by the end of the year.

A spokesperson for the California-based company Kodiak Robotics told KXAN it started operating self-driving big rigs on routes around Texas in 2019, always with backup safety drivers.

In that time, “the bulk of Kodiak’s deliveries have been between our Dallas operations hub and Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Oklahoma City, and Atlanta,” Kodiak spokesman Daniel Goff said.

Just like smartphone GPS has harmed our sense of spatial cognition and memory, artificial intelligence may soon impair our ability to make decisions for ourselves — an outcome that would be, one expert warns, “catastrophic.”

In an interview with PsyPost, neuropsychology expert Umberto León Domínguez of the University of Monterrey in Mexico said that his new research shows that AI chatbots may end up not just mimicking our speech patterns, but significantly harming our cognitive functioning in general.

Like many other educators, Domínguez said he’s concerned about how his students are using tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Spurred by those concerns, he told PsyPost, he began to explore ways AI chatbots “could interfere with higher-order executive functions to understand how to also train these skills.”

Futuristic advancements in AI and healthcare stole the limelight at the tech extravaganza Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2024. However, battery technology is the game-changer at the heart of these innovations, enabling greater power efficiency. Importantly, electric vehicles are where this technology is being applied most intensely. Today’s EVs can travel around 700km on a single charge, while researchers are aiming for a 1,000km battery range. Researchers are fervently exploring the use of silicon, known for its high storage capacity, as the anode material in lithium-ion batteries for EVs. However, despite its potential, bringing silicon into practical use remains a puzzle that researchers are still working hard to piece together.

Enter Professor Soojin Park, PhD candidate Minjun Je, and Dr. Hye Bin Son from the Department of Chemistry at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH). They have cracked the code, developing a pocket-friendly and rock-solid next-generation high-energy-density Li-ion battery system using micro silicon particles and gel polymer electrolytes. This work was published on the online pages of Advanced Science on the 17th of January.

Employing silicon as a battery material presents challenges: It expands by more than three times during charging and then contracts back to its original size while discharging, significantly impacting battery efficiency. Utilizing nano-sized silicon (10-9m) partially addresses the issue, but the sophisticated production process is complex and astronomically expensive, making it a challenging budget proposition. By contrast, micro-sized silicon (10-6m) is superbly practical in terms of cost and energy density. Yet, the expansion issue of the larger silicon particles becomes more pronounced during battery operation, posing limitations for its use as an anode material.

Stellantis was the last major automaker to commit.

More spy pictures are emerging of the as yet unnamed BYD pickup truck. Most importantly there are pictures indicating that right-hand drive models are already being tested. This means that it will almost certainly be heading to the Australian market and possibly the South African market soon.

Chinese media has been keen on talking about the RHD version of this car being spied but as you will see none of the pictures clearly show the steering wheel on the right. However, if you look at the windscreen wipers, on the near head on spy shot, these appear to be positioned for a car driven from a seat on the right.

There’s a bold real estate experiment underway in Tempe, Arizona. Culdesac is the nation’s first rental community designed and built specifically for car-free living. Residents say it has helped them get to know there neighbors better. But the real test will be when temperatures climb this summer. CNBC Senior Real Estate Correspondent Diana Olick reports.

YangWang U9 might be BYD’s most expensive car yet.

Tesla has officially opened orders for its next-generation Powerwall 3 battery on its website, after the company spent much of last year quietly deploying the new hardware.

You can now order a Powerwall 3 from Tesla directly through its website in the U.S., offering updated specs from the previous generation Powerwall 2. Tesla listed the specs for the updated energy storage hardware on its website in September, and it also caught the attention of CEO Elon Musk, who commented on the generation’s improvements after some Powerwall 3 installations had already been spotted.

At the time of writing, the Powerwall 3 doesn’t appear to be available in other North American markets, Canada and Mexico, nor does it appear to be available in Europe or Asia.