Cosmic Log
Delivering items with drones instead of trucks is likely to reduce carbon dioxide emissions for short-range trips, or on routes with few customers, according to a study conducted by transportation engineers at the University of Washington. The study, set for publication in Transportation Research Part D, suggests that trucks have the environmental advantage for longer-range trips and routes with lots of stops. Also, size matters.
Now anybody can fly like a VIP: All you have to do to take Deer Jet’s super-elegant 787 Dreamliner for a ride is fork over $70,000 an hour.
Just don’t call it luxury travel.
“This plane is not ‘luxurious,’ The philosophy for the design is natural. … It’s to make you feel very comfortable, so you can save your energy and you can do your job better,” Frank Fang, vice president of China-based Deer Jet, told GeekWire during a tour of the plane, which was sitting in front of Seattle’s Museum of Flight.
“It’s just a little bit expensive,” Fang added with a smile.
Bugged by I-5 traffic to Sea-Tac? Alaska Airlines is promising a work-around: The Seattle-based airline says it will start running regularly scheduled passenger flights out of Everett’s Paine Field starting next year.
“As our region continues to grow at a record pace, and Sea-Tac Airport nears capacity, the time is right to bring air service to our valued guests living in the North Sound,” Alaska Airlines CEO Brad Tilden said today in a news release. “Today’s news means less time stuck in traffic on Interstate 5 and more time enjoying your vacation or making the most of your business trip.”
Alaska said it would offer nine daily flights from Paine Field, using Boeing 737s and Embraer 175 regional jets, subject to government approvals.
“We’re not quite ready to share details of the routes,” John Kirby, Alaska’s vice president of capacity planning, said in an airline blog posting. “But I can tell you they won’t be limited to short, regional flights. We’re talking daily, nonstop flights to some of our most popular destinations.”
It’s been a good day on the streets and in the courts for Waymo, the driverless-car company that was spun out from Google as another Alphabet subsidiary last year.
First off, Waymo opened up its closed trial for autonomous driving in the Phoenix metropolitan area for public signup. This means Arizonans can apply to become “early riders” in the self-driving minivans and SUVs that Waymo is testing.
In a blog post, Waymo CEO John Krafcik said the rider pool will be expanded from a handful to hundreds over the course of the trial. “The goal of this program is to give participants access to our fleet every day, at any time, to go anywhere within an area that’s about twice the size of San Francisco,” he said.
The cars will be made available for free to the households of applicants selected for the trial, with rides provided in an area including Phoenix, Chandler, Tempe, Mesa and Gilbert. To accommodate the extra riders, Waymo’s fleet of self-driving Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans will be expanded from 100 to 600 vehicles, Krafcik said.
Uber has been talking about flying cars for months, but today the ride-sharing company fleshed out its plan to become a flight-sharing company in 2020.
“We actually get to live in this era of flying cars,” Jeff Holden, Uber’s chief product officer, said today at the first-ever Uber Elevate Summit in Dallas. “I hate that term, by the way, but we’ll have to live with it.”
The Dallas-Fort Worth region in Texas and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates have been targeted as the pilot cities for the Uber Elevate Network, Holden said. Eventually, the company sees urban aviation as a service that can roll out to the hundreds of cities that Uber serves around the world.
Lilium’s all-electric prototype airplane looks impressive as it makes a vertical takeoff and landing in a demonstration video released today – but will the concept fly as a commercial aircraft? The jury is still out.
SpaceX’s second Hyperloop competition for student-led teams is coming up in August, with the University of Washington’s crew listed among two dozen contestants.
Hyperloop Pod Competition II, set for Aug. 25-27 at SpaceX’s test track in Hawthorne, Calif., follows up on the first round of pod races that took place in January. The mile-long, low-pressure tube is designed to simulate high-speed transit trips on a scaled-down basis.
Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, came up with the Hyperloop concept four years ago as a means of getting from, say, San Francisco to Los Angeles in just a little more than a half-hour.
Getting the Tesla Model 3 electric car on the road clearly isn’t enough to occupy Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX: Today he tweeted the time frame for unveiling Tesla’s autonomous, all-electric Semi truck and a smaller pickup truck.
But wait … there’s more: The Tesla Roadster, which was the first vehicle the company put on sale, is coming back. And this time, it’ll be a convertible.
Musk’s timetable for executing the next steps of his “Master Plan, Part Deux” spilled out in a series of tweets.
For a time on April 10, Tesla edged out GM in market capitalization to become the most valuable U.S. automaker, even though Tesla is on track to lose almost a billion dollars this year while GM is expected to make a $9 billion profit.
The share prices for both car companies dipped today, putting GM ever so slightly back in the lead with a market cap of just less than $51 billion. What’s more, U.S. automakers still fall short of foreign companies such as Toyota and VW. Nevertheless, the rapid rise in Tesla’s share price left some observers predicting a sea change in the auto industry – while others were left just shaking their heads.
“Clearly General Motors is undervalued and Tesla is overvalued,” AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson was quoted as saying at a forum setting the stage for this week’s New York Auto Show. He said Tesla was “either one of the great Ponzi schemes of all time or it’s gonna work out.”
Four years after its founding, Zunum Aero is finally going public with a plan to build hybrid electric airplanes that could revolutionize service to regional airports in the 2020s.
“This is our coming out of stealth,” said Ashish Kumar, the founder and CEO of the company, which is headquartered in Kirkland, Wash.
Zunum, whose name comes from the Mayan word for hummingbird, aims to develop 10- to 50-seat aircraft that can pave the way for what Kumar calls a “golden age of regional travel.”
To follow through on that vision, the company has patented its concept and has won backing from the Boeing Co. as well as from JetBlue Technology Ventures, a subsidiary of JetBlue Airways.