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$50M contest sparks buzz over electric vehicles

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A plug-in hybrid vehicle gets an electric boost from a charging station in Portland, Ore. (Credit: PGE)

The winner of the $50 million Smart City Challenge won’t be announced until next month, but the organizers have already picked at least one winning technology for transforming transportation and reducing greenhouse-gas emissions: electric vehicles.

Switching over to electric vehicles will be a “central pillar” for urban transportation strategies, said Spencer Reeder, senior program officer for climate and energy at Seattle billionaire Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc. Vulcan is contributing $10 million to support the challenge, while the U.S. Department of Transportation has pledged up to $40 million.

The challenge started last December, with the aim of encouraging mid-sized cities to develop safer, more efficient and more environmentally sound transportation systems. Seventy-eight cities submitted proposals, and in March, the field was trimmed down to seven finalists: Austin, in Texas, Columbus in Ohio, Denver, Kansas City in Missouri, Pittsburgh, Portland in Oregon and San Francisco.

The final submissions are due on May 24, and the winning city will receive the lion’s share of the prize money to help turn its plan into a demonstration project.

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Elon Musk sleeps at Tesla to monitor speed-up

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Tesla Motors’ Model 3 electric car is due to go into production in late 2017. (Credit: Tesla)

Tesla Motors says it will ramp up production of its best-selling Model 3 electric car much more quickly than planned, with a target of producing 500,000 automobiles starting in 2018 rather than 2020.

The plan, announced as part of Tesla’s first-quarter financial update, comes in the wake of phenomenal advance sales for the Model 3, Tesla’s lowest-priced model to date. More than 325,000 reservations were placed during the first week of sales last month. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that pace was two to four times stronger than even he expected.

Model 3 production is due to begin in late 2017. During a conference call to discuss the quarterly earnings, Musk said that suppliers are being asked to deliver their parts by mid-2017 in order to meet Tesla’s timetable. “As a rough guess, I would say that we aim to produce 100 to 200,000 Model 3’s in the second half of next year,” he said. “That’s my expectation right now.”

He said he was so focused on the production issue that he’s taken to sleeping in Tesla’s factory in Fremont, Calif.

“My desk is at the end of the production line,” Musk said. “I have a sleeping bag in a conference room adjacent to the production line which I use quite frequently. The whole team is super-focused on achieving rates and quality at the target cost.”

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Tesla Model 3 update: 325,000 cars ordered

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The Tesla Model 3’s design is still in flux, Elon Musk says. (Credit: Tesla Motors)

In the week since Tesla Motors unveiled its Model 3 electric car at the not-so-ludicrous price of $35,000, would-be owners have put in orders for more than 325,000 cars, company CEO Elon Musk reported April 7.

Even Musk admitted that the response was two to four times higher than he expected it to be. “No one at Tesla thought it would be this high,” he said in a tweet.

In a blog post, Tesla Motors noted that the reservations could translate into $14 billion in sales. (That’s based on the assumption that the average option package would bring the per-car cost to $43,000.)

When Model 3 production ramps up, starting in late 2017, Musk is aiming to turn out as many as 500,000 cars a year. But hitting that mark could pose a challenge.

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Tesla Model 3 electric car gets a 5-star reveal

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The Model 3 electric car will become Tesla Motors’ most affordable model. (Credit: Tesla Motors)

Tesla Motors’ Model 3 electric sedan may be geared for mass-market affordability, but CEO Elon Musk made it clear at tonight’s unveiling that he doesn’t intend it to be a third-rate car.

“It will be five-star in every category,” Musk told a standing-room-only, occasionally raucous crowd at Tesla’s warehouse-sized design studio at Hawthorne, Calif.

The $35,000 Model 3’s promised capabilities were arguably the biggest surprise of the evening: Musk said the scaled-down sedan would still have ample room for five people, thanks to a design that moves the instrument panel farther forward than the panel in the $70,000 Model S.

Even the base model will go from zero to 60 mph in less than 6 seconds, Musk said. And the driving range will be at least 215 miles on a charge.

“These are minimum numbers,” Musk said. “We hope to exceed them.”

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Hundreds line up to sign up for Tesla’s latest car

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Sid Bharadwaj, the first buyer in line at Tesla Motors’ Bellevue Square store, has his picture taken after putting down a $1,000 deposit for a Model 3 electric car. (Credit: Sid Bharadwaj / Tesla Motors)

BELLEVUE, Wash. – As the clock counted down to the big reveal for the Tesla Model 3 electric sedan, would-be buyers lined up by the hundreds today to put down a deposit, sight unseen.

The phenomenon was reminiscent of the hullabaloo that typically accompanies Apple’s launch of a new iPhone.

The Model 3 is way more expensive than an iPhone: List price, before tax incentives, is expected to be around $35,000. But that’s low for a Tesla, and that’s the point. All those folks who have been salivating over a $70,000 Model S sedan or an $80,000 Model X SUV are finally seeing something in a lower price range.

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Will self-driving cars be good for the planet?

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Volvo’s SARTRE project is aimed at developing fuel-saving approaches to autonomous driving, such as “platooning.” SARTRE stands for “Safe Road Trains for the Environment.” (Credit: Volvo)

Experts expect self-driving cars to make the roads much safer, and driving much more convenient. But what will they do to the environment? A newly published study suggests that, under some scenarios, the shift to autonomous vehicles could double energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions.

The good news is that other scenarios could lead to a nearly 50 percent reduction in those metrics by 2050, which would brighten the picture for coping with climate change. It all depends on how driverless cars are introduced into the marketplace, and how consumers and businesses respond.

“There is lots of hype around self-driving cars, much of it somewhat utopian in nature. But there are likely to be positives and negatives,” University of Washington engineering professor Don MacKenzie said. “By taking a clear-eyed view, we can design and implement policies to maximize the benefits and minimize the downsides of automated vehicles.”

MacKenzie is one of the authors of a study analyzing the range of possibilities, published today in the journal Transportation Research Part A. The survey comes as a plethora of companies, ranging from Ford and Tesla to Google and Apple, are hustling to make vehicles more autonomous and jump through regulatory hoops.

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AI experts say robots could spark unemployment

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Google is testing subcompact self-driving cars. (Photo via Google)

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The robot revolution may put half of us humans out of a job by 2045 – and if that happens, what are the politicians going to do about it?

“This issue of automation and employment, which is going to be one of the biggest policy issues for the next 25 years, if not longer, and now we’re in a presidential election year … this issue is just nowhere on the radar screen,” Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi said Feb. 13 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Washington.

Vardi and other experts on artificial intelligence sketched out a scary picture of what the next couple of decades could bring as machines become smarter, more powerful and more prevalent. It’s a picture that’s developing quickly, thanks to the rise of machine vision and machine learning.

Bart Selman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, said he would not have been as concerned about AI’s downside five years ago. Since then, however, engineers have brought about dramatic improvements in the ability of software systems to see, hear and understand their environment.

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Airbus Ventures backs 3-D printing and design

Image: Local Motors LM3D Swim
Local Motors is working on a 3D-printed car called the LM3D Swim. (Credit: Local Motors)

Airbus Ventures, the European aerospace giant’s Silicon Valley spin-off, says the first investment from its $150 million venture fund is going to Local Motors, a Phoenix-based company that aims to sell 3D-printed cars based on open-source designs.

“Not since the space race has there been a bigger opportunity for aerospace innovation,” Tim Dombrowski, managing general partner of Airbus Ventures, wrote in Friday’s announcement on Medium’s website.

The $150 million fund, Airbus Group Venture Fund I, will take advantage of opportunities to “accelerate innovation in near ground, air and space flight,” Dombrowski wrote.

He acknowledged that Local Motors “may seem like a surprising investment” for Airbus but argued that the deal was a “perfect fit.”

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Toyota, Kymeta work on satellite connected car

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Toyota’s Mirai fuel-cell vehicle is equipped with Kymeta’s satellite antenna system. (Credit: Kymeta)

Redmond-based Kymeta Corp. and Toyota took the wraps off their collaboration on a satellite antenna system that can send data to cars at broadband speeds.

Toyota’s antenna-equipped, hydrogen-powered Mirai fuel-cell vehicle was unveiled today at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. The prototype communication system can download satellite data at 50 megabits per second, which is better than typical LTE wireless service. The transmission speed is expected to rise past the gigabit-per-second mark within a few years.

Kymeta said Mirai Creation Investment Limited Partnership, a Japan-based fund in which Toyota participates, is providing a strategic investment to push the initiative along. The company declined to specify how much is being invested, other than to say that the amount is significant. On Monday, Kymeta said it closed a $62 million investment round that includes money from Mirai.

For now, the satellite antenna system is being installed on Mirai research vehicles, but not on cars being sold to customers. Kymeta President and CEO Nathan Kundtz said that status is likely to change within the next couple of years.

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Tesla adds a new magic spell: Summon your car

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A Tesla Model S owner issues a command using the key fob to have the car back itself out of the garage. (Credit: James Majerus vis YouTube)

Over the weekend, Tesla car owners picked up a new superpower: A feature called Summon can command the Model S or Model X car to drive itself for parking or pickup.

It’s part of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s drive to make the company’s automobiles fully autonomous within the next couple of years.

“In two years, you’ll be able to summon your car from across the country,” Musk told reporters during a Sunday conference call. “If your car is in New York and you are in Los Angeles, it will find its way to you.”

We’re not there yet, though. The current version of Summon is set up so that the car learns how to open the garage door and back itself out to where you want to get in. Or put itself back in the garage when you issue the command.

The latest update, version 7.1, also lets you issue a command with your smartphone or key fob to have the car drive itself into a tight parking spot after you get out, or pull itself out before you get in.

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