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AUSTIN (Austin Business Journal) — Tesla Inc.’s growing footprint in the Austin area now includes a sizable facility in Hutto. But what it’s for remains unclear.

The Austin Business Journal visited the 36,000-square-foot site at 200 County Road 199 in the fast-growing industrial hub northeast of Austin in late December. The parking lot was full and a nondescript warehouse-style building was bustling with employees in construction vests and helmets, but there were no signs listing any companies and no clear indications of who was occupying it. The only traces it could be Tesla were a handful of the company’s electric vehicle charging stations out front.

But Elon Musk’s EV manufacturing and clean energy company is linked to the site in state filings, and it has been confirmed by Hutto officials. Tesla’s expansion to Hutto underscores the company’s wide-reaching plans for the region — as far south as San Antonio and, now, as far north as Hutto — as it continues buildout of its multibillion-dollar operation in eastern Travis County. The Hutto site is about 30 miles directly north of its gigafactory, which serves as the company’s headquarters, along State Highway 130.

Samsung is planning to release what might be the most advanced cleaning robot yet: a robot vacuum and mopper that will steam clean floors and use AI to detect stains.

The upcoming “Bespoke Jet Bot Combo” cleaner will have a charging base that will auto wash, clean, and dry the robot’s mop pads.

The device will also use AI to detect floor types, objects, and spot stains. When the robot detects a stain, “it goes back to the clean station to heat the mop pads with high-temperature steam and water and then returns to the area,” says a press release on Samsung’s website.

In today’s tech-savvy world, we’re surrounded by mind-blowing AI-powered wonders: voice assistants answering our questions, smart cameras identifying faces, and self-driving cars navigating roads.


Curious about optimizing AI for everyday devices? Dive into the complete overview of MIT’s TinyML and Efficient Deep Learning Computing course. Explore strategies to make AI smarter on small devices. Read the full article for an in-depth look!

The Chinese automaker sold over 3 million clean energy vehicles, with Tesla reporting just 1.35 million in the first three quarters of the year.

Chinese electric vehicle company Build Your Dreams (BYD) is set to become the largest EV maker in 2023, overtaking Tesla for the second year in a row.


BYD’s strategy of manufacturing budget-friendly vehicles has facilitated its expansion not only within China but also in international markets.

Of the world’s various weather phenomena, fog is perhaps the most mysterious, forming and dissipating near the ground with fluctuations in air temperature and humidity interacting with the terrain itself.

While fog presents a major hazard to transportation safety, meteorologists have yet to figure out how to forecast it with the precision they have achieved for precipitation, wind and other stormy events.

This is because the physical processes resulting in fog formation are extremely complex, according to Zhaoxia Pu, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah.

After a year of record electric vehicle sales, waves of people are spending their first winter with an all-electric car for the first time. They’d do well to pay attention to these five tips for charging in cold weather from the Electrify America charging network.

EVs, just like any other vehicles, operate the best in a certain window of temperatures, outside of which their energy consumption range or charging might be negatively affected.

A common carbon compound is enabling remarkable performance enhancements when mixed in just the right proportion with copper to make electrical wires. It’s a phenomenon that defies conventional wisdom about how metals conduct electricity.

The findings, reported in the journal Materials & Design, could lead to more efficient electricity distribution to homes and businesses, as well as more efficient motors to power electric vehicles and industrial equipment. The team has applied for a patent for the work, which was supported by the Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office.

Materials scientist Keerti Kappagantula and her colleagues at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory discovered that graphene, single layers of the same graphite found in pencils, can enhance an important property of metals called the temperature coefficient of resistance.