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Still more Lithium batteries ablaze - >>> Truck carrying batteries catches fire, causing daylong closure on SB County freeway
FOX 11 Digital Team
July 27, 2024
https://www.yahoo.com/news/truck-carrying-batteries-catches-fire-214219072.html
SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY, Calif. - A major highway connecting Los Angeles and Las Vegas has been closed for more than a day, after a truck carrying lithium batteries caught on fire. Now, crews are dealing with a hazmat situation in triple-digit temperatures.
It happened around 10 a.m. Friday, in the northbound lanes of Interstate 15 near Baker, the San Bernardino County Fire Department reported. The truck overturned around mile marker 113, leaking fuel, which then caught fire. Adding to the difficulty, the truck was carrying lithium-ion batteries, which also started to burn.
That's a problem, the SBCFD says, because when lithium-ion batteries catch fire, it "can escalate to thermal runaway, needing massive amounts of water to extinguish."
Both sides of the 15 Freeway were closed near Baker for most of Friday, with the southbound lanes reopening around 3 p.m. As of Saturday afternoon, the northbound lanes remain closed.
Crews working on the scene Saturday have three big challenges: the traffic, the heat, and the container.
Temperatures near Baker Friday reached 110 degrees Friday, and 111 Saturday afternoon. The county fire department said that dispatch has received numerous calls since the closure for people suffering heat-related emergencies, including many people who were trapped on the roads in the heat without water.
To help with that, the SBCFD brought supplies to the Clyde V Kane Rest Stop off of the northbound lanes of the 15, south of Afton Canyon Road.
For the traffic, the California Highway Patrol has been alternating traffic using just the southbound lanes. But officials ask anyone planning to travel in the area to use Interstate 40 instead.
As of Saturday afternoon, crews are still working to move the container from the side of the road, but it weighs more than 75,000 pounds, officials said, which "has made these efforts unsuccessful so far."
The fire has also raised air quality concerns in the area, because of the hazardous chemicals that have burned. Crews are monitoring the air for chemicals like hydrogen cyanide and chlorine, which fire officials say are "particularly dangerous even at low concentrations."
It's not yet clear when the northbound lanes of the 15 Freeway will reopen, but crews are urging the public to avoid the area.
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More lithium battery fires - >>> A father whose home was destroyed in a fire started by a charging e-bike battery has said he has lost “every memory he ever had”.
by Naj Modak
BBC News
7-29-24
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/family-torn-apart-after-battery-fire-destroys-home/ar-BB1qOgbX?cvid=cabd17fe3ab14ebdc9d26ba87cedda68&ei=142
Simon Blanshard’s home in Doncaster was gutted when fire ripped through the property causing extensive damage on 9 July.
The family have since been given notice by their landlord due to the extensive damage.
Mr Blanshard said his partner and five children have been living apart since the blaze and said all they wanted was to be reunited in a new home.
Mr Blanshard’s stepson Cameron was in the house at the time of the blaze and alerted neighbours to the situation.
“I had a phone call from a neighbour that the house was on fire," Mr Blanshard said.
“When I saw it I just broke down, there is nothing else I could do, it had already gone.”
He added that he did not let his partner Laura Natale and the rest of children see the devastation because it would “destroy them”.
His daughter Katelyn, 16, who was staying with her mum, said she ran to the property in Bentley when she heard about the fire.
“I just wanted my cat, I was going to go in and try and find my cat," she said.
Though the family's pets were rescued from the fire one of the cats died from smoke inhalation.
Miss Blanchard said since the fire the family had received a lot of support from neighbours and friends.
"It’s just mind blowing, I get goose bumps thinking about it," she added.
The family said they had been receiving support from friends and family
Mr Blanshard said the family have received an eviction notice from their landlord giving them two months to leave the property.
The landlord said he had no choice because of the amount of work needed to restore the property and confirmed he had given the family money towards their future.
"The one thing we are in need of right now is somewhere to live," Mr Blanshard said.
"The kindness of everyone around us has helped us get everything we need for when we find a home.”
The family's landlord has given them notice but has also offered financial help
A spokesperson for South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue said: “A fire investigation determined that the fire was caused by lithium-ion batteries, which had become overcharged.”
They added: “Our advice with lithium-ion batteries is to always the follow the manufacturer’s instructions when charging and only charge batteries whilst you are awake and in the house.”
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>>> Stellantis tells owners of over 24,000 hybrid minivans to park outdoors due to battery fire risk
AP
7-18
https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/stellantis-tells-owners-of-over-24-000-hybrid-minivans-to-park-outdoors-due-to-battery-fire-risk/ar-BB1qeC9N?cvid=8ef0a411f663480e9bc4044294c43675&ei=101
AUBURN HILLS, Mich. (AP) — Stellantis is telling the owners of more than 24,000 plug-in hybrid minivans to park them outdoors away from buildings, and to stop charging them due to the possibility of battery fires. (!!)
The company said Thursday that it's recalling certain 2017 through 2021 Chrysler Pacifica plug-in hybrids, mainly in North America. Some are being recalled for a second time. All can still be driven.
Stellantis, maker of Jeep, Chrysler, Ram and other vehicle brands, said its investigation is ongoing but the company has linked the problem to a rare abnormality in individual battery cells. The risk of fires is reduced when the battery is depleted. (LOL)
A company review of warranty data discovered seven fires within the group of vans being recalled. All happened when the vehicles were turned off, and some occurred during charging, Stellantis said. Four customers reported symptoms of smoke inhalation.
Engineers are still testing the remedy, which involves a software update designed to detect the battery abnormality. If a problem is found, dealers will replace the high-voltage battery at no cost to owners.
Owners will be notified by mail when to take their minivans in for service. After July 24, they can go to recalls.mopar.com or checktoprotect.org and key in their vehicle identification numbers to see if their vans are part of the recall. Later models have an improved manufacturing process and are not being recalled, the company said.
The recall comes six months after U.S. safety regulators began investigating a 2022 recall of nearly 17,000 of the vans. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in documents that it would review the effectiveness of the recall and try to understand the cause of the battery fires.
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Rickards - >>> Green New Scam Is Dying
BY JAMES RICKARDS
JULY 2, 2024
https://dailyreckoning.com/green-new-scam-is-dying/
Green New Scam Is Dying
It’s no secret that the vast majority of the so-called elites are advocates of climate alarmism and are taken in by the Green New Scam.
Whether this preference is based on ignorance of the science, ideological zeal, a willful desire to hurt American growth or simple greed because of their investments in Green New Scam infrastructure varies case by case.
The typical upper-income supporter of the climate cult including academics, media figures and celebrities is probably ignorant of the fact that there is no evidence that CO2 emissions cause climate change and that the real causes are solar cycles, volcanoes, ocean currents and atmospheric moisture not caused by humans.
Climate Alarmists Have It Backward
The historical record actually demonstrates that warming periods produce higher CO2 levels — not the other way around. CO2 doesn’t cause warming. It’s caused by natural warming.
In other words, climate alarmists have causation completely backward.
Climate alarmism is based almost entirely on computer models, which depend on the inputs the modelers themselves build into them. A model is only as good as the inputs and assumptions programmed into it.
Virtually every one of these models has overestimated warming, sometimes by orders of magnitude, because it’s based on faulty assumptions that overestimate the impact of CO2 on climate.
In other words, it’s junk science. But they keep relying on these models because their political agenda requires it.
Climate: The New Communism
There’s no doubt that a fair number of neo-Marxists embrace the climate scam because they know it damages U.S. industry, raises costs to U.S. consumers and helps to undermine the U.S. economy.
Following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, anti-capitalistic collectivists admitted that they needed to promote the climate agenda because the only way to combat global warming is through collective action. It requires a coordinated global effort that limits national sovereignty.
The neo-Marxists are impervious to evidence; they just want to hurt America and wasting money on windmills instead of building new refineries is a good way to do it. That leaves the greed crowd.
The Real “Green” in the Green Agenda
They’re early investors in windmills, solar modules, lithium car batteries, EVs, charging stations, carbon credits and other infrastructure of the climate scam. They stand to make billions of dollars off the narrative with help from extravagant government subsidies.
They don’t really care if it all collapses in the end (which it will) as long as they get rich at taxpayer expense in the meantime. All of this behavior is clear as far as it goes. What is not clear is the extent to which the Green New Scammers are doing this with your money.
The best example is multibillionaire Larry Fink, who runs the giant BlackRock investment fund. Fink has been aggressive in promoting the climate scam along with racial quotas, DEI and defunding police.
He’s entitled to his opinions. But is he entitled to pursue his radical agenda with pension fund money from conservative states and institutions? Fortunately, a backlash has begun against Fink and his fellow wokesters.
More state pension fund managers are beginning to pull their funds from BlackRock and other investment managers that pursue far-left policies not in the best interests of their beneficiaries. This backlash may not change Larry Fink’s lifestyle. But over time, it might change the world for the better.
The EV Sham
A major part of the climate agenda includes electric vehicles (EVs). I’ve been warning for years that EVs aren’t feasible as a transportation solution for more than relatively few Americans and that they are little more than glorified golf carts despite the $70,000-and-up price tags.
In the first place, EVs don’t cut carbon emissions. The car itself does not have emissions, but it’s charged with electricity from power plants that do.
The batteries are made with poisonous chemicals and metals including lithium, cobalt, copper and nickel that come from mining operations that use enormous amounts of water and electricity to extract the needed materials.
It takes thousands of tons of ore to extract enough critical minerals to make one battery. EVs don’t take a charge in extreme cold, and the batteries can’t hold a charge. Travel range is grossly overstated for many reasons, including the fact that EV car heaters drain the batteries (with internal-combustion engines, ICEs, the engine makes heat which can easily be directed into the car to keep passengers comfortable with no additional energy required).
Resale values of EVs are close to zero because buyers of used EVs have to shell out $25,000 or more for new batteries after the vehicle is about seven years old. The list of drawbacks goes on.
Most Americans have resisted EVs because they understand the disadvantages. But many Americans were drawn to the false promise of emission-free transportation and other ridiculous claims by the Green New Scammers. Now even the most committed EV buyers are waking up.
I Want My ICE Car Back
A new survey by consulting firm McKinsey and Co. shows that 29% of EV owners in nine major economies want to return to ICE vehicles. When the sample is narrowed to just the U.S., 46% of those surveyed want to return to ICEs.
The McKinsey officials who conducted the survey claim to be “surprised” by those results. That probably says something about the fact that McKinsey experts are just as deluded about EVs as the buyers surveyed.
When breaking down the results, 45% say EVs are too expensive, 33% say they have charging concerns and 29% are concerned about the limited driving range.
The truth is that the EV was invented in 1837 and reached the peak of its popularity in 1910 just before the mass production of internal-combustion cars by Henry Ford. The American public got it right when they flocked to the Model T.
It sounds like they’re getting it right again after a brief infatuation with the false promise of the EV. The bottom line is that the Green New Scam is falling apart.
It can’t happen soon enough.
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Kinetic Automation - >>> Startup unveils robotic system that use AI-eyes to fix EV damages
Kinetic Automation claims to fill a significant gap in the collision repair aftermarket.
Interesting Engineering
Jun 21, 2024
by Prabhat Ranjan Mishra
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/kinetic-automation-robots-electric-cars
Kinetic Automation
A California-based startup has developed a robotic system to quickly diagnose issues with an electric vehicle’s digital system.
Kinetic Automation’s system uses computer vision and machine-learning software to provide diagnostics and recalibration of the high-tech systems in modern vehicles.
The robotic system’s rapid diagnosis is likely to increase EV sales, which has cooled down in 2024 due to increasing cost of repairs for EV models.
Kinetic Automation maintains that today’s modern vehicles have more technology in them than ever before. “Repairing them is an urgent need and an extraordinary opportunity,” the company says.
Kinetic Automation leverages robotics, proprietary AI
The company claims that it leverages robotics, proprietary AI, and specialized expertise to automate digital collision repair across all makes and models.
“We help businesses adapt to the evolving automotive landscape by repairing digital collision damage in minutes rather than hours, increasing capacity, and growing revenue with unparalleled speed and precision.”
Only 26% of US consumers are likely to consider purchasing an EV
The innovative repair method comes as a 2024 study by J.D. Power found that only 26% of US consumers are very likely to consider purchasing an EV in the next twelve months, while more than 20% are very unlikely to consider an EV purchase.
The startup claims to fill a significant gap in the collision repair aftermarket, providing digital repair solutions for a wide range of businesses from national collision chains to dealerships and fleets.
Kinetic Hub can support up to 80 calibrations per day
According to the company, every state-of-the-art Kinetic Hub can support up to 80 calibrations per day. And with cycle times under 60 minutes, from drop-off to delivery, this gives collision repair businesses the flexibility and capacity to accept more customers and grow revenue without burdening their own staff, and without adding additional equipment or floor space.
When a customer’s car rolls up to one of Kinetic’s service bays, it is first scanned from bumper to fender with machine vision sensors, some on a robotic arm that peers over the top of the vehicle. The scan determines which systems need to be precisely programmed or need a recalibration, reported CNBC.
Then Kinetic’s software, which is connected to the vehicle’s systems, will initiate and track the completion of those fixes.
The company claims that all new vehicles have at least 3 sensor modules, with most modern vehicles having 30 or more. “New capabilities such as camera, lidar, radar and ultrasonic-based technologies are exponentially increasing the complexity of repairing today’s vehicles.
Kinetic Automation aims that one day it will provide its services to robotaxi fleets, and to the owners of other autonomous vehicles.
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>>> Tesla to unveil robotaxi self-driving car in August, Elon Musk says
by Anthony Robledo
USA TODAY
4-5-24
https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/tesla-to-unveil-robotaxi-self-driving-car-in-august-elon-musk-says/ar-BB1l9DpE?OCID=ansmsnnews11
Elon Musk announced that Tesla will unveil its robotaxi this summer.
The X owner and Tesla CEO unveiled the Aug. 8 release date on a post Friday.
The entrepreneur has previously discussed efforts to create Tesla cars without human controls and for existing vehicles to gradually improve its Full Self-Driving Capability, which are not fully autonomous.
The technological feat has been a longtime goal for Musk, who has said autonomous taxis could revolutionize modern transportation by becoming more popular than human-driven cars and that automaker would be "worth basically zero."
Musk wanted to release robotaxis in 2020
In April 2019, Musk revealed that he expected Tesla robotaxis to be fully operating by 2020.
The company predicted that driverless vehicles would withstand 11 years and 1 million miles, earning the company $30,000 in annual profit. He also shared that the cars would would be accompanied by a ride-share app similar to both Uber and Airbnb.
U.S. and Chinese regulators have currently only approved self-driving cars in limited and experimental instances on public roads.
The automotive company faces lawsuits and investigations related to crashes with its existing autopilot and Full Self-Driving driver-assistance systems, which the company has Tesla has explained were the result of inattentive drivers.
Tesla shares down after low-cost EV plans are scrapped
Musk's announcement comes after a Reuters report revealed that Tesla has scrapped plans for its long-promised inexpensive car, according to three sources familiar with the matter and company messages.
Investors have been relying on the project to drive its growth into a mass-market automaker, according to Reuters.
Musk has often described affordable electric cars for the masses as a primary mission. In 2006, he said his "master plan" had to prioritize manufacturing luxury models before financing a "low cost family car."
Tesla shares closed down $6.21, or 3.63%, at $164.90 on Friday.
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SoundHound AI - >>> Nvidia Just Bought 5 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks, and 1 Is Up 142% Already
by Anthony Di Pizio
Motley Fool
April 6, 2024
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-just-bought-5-artificial-095900069.html
Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) was a $360 billion company at the beginning of 2023. It has added $1.8 trillion in value since then, and it's now the third-largest company in the world behind only Apple and Microsoft.
The heightened interest in artificial intelligence (AI) is the primary driver of that value creation. Nvidia makes the industry's most powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) for data centers, which developers use to build, train, and deploy their AI models. Those chips drove Nvidia's data center revenue to more than triple in fiscal 2024 (ended Jan. 28), and the momentum looks set to continue in fiscal 2025.
Nvidia is now using some of its newly acquired wealth to invest in other AI companies, which could hint at where the next wave of AI value is created.
Nvidia bought five AI stocks at the end of 2023
Nvidia filed its first-ever 13-F with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Feb. 14, and it publicly revealed new holdings in five different stocks:
SoundHound AI (NASDAQ: SOUN), which develops voice recognition and conversational AI technologies.
Arm Holdings, which designs processors for the world's largest chip companies. This was Nvidia's largest investment with a value of $147 million at the end of 2023.
Nano-X Imaging, which is improving patient outcomes by using AI to enhance medical imaging. This stock was Nvidia's smallest investment with a value of less than $0.4 million at the end of 2023.
Recursion Pharmaceuticals, which is using AI to help with drug discovery.
TuSimple Holdings, which developed an autonomous driving platform for the trucking industry.
SoundHound AI stock has been the best performer of the bunch so far, with a 142% gain in 2024 already. It values Nvidia's stake at around $8.7 million, which doesn't sound like much, but SoundHound is only a $1.5 billion company.
So should investors follow Nvidia into the conversational AI specialist?
SoundHound has a growing portfolio of AI products
Most of us are familiar with AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. They were originally designed to ingest text-based prompts, and they are capable of generating text content, images, videos, and computer code on command. SoundHound focuses on conversational AI, which is designed to recognize voice-based prompts and respond in kind.
That opens up a range of possibilities, especially in use cases where hands-free functionality is required. For example, restaurant chains use SoundHound's Employee Assist technology to help workers get fast answers to questions in high-pressure situations, like when they might be serving customers or completing operational tasks.
Similarly, SoundHound's technology is popular with automotive manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz and Stellantis, which use it to power their in-car virtual assistants. It means drivers can instantly retrieve information about their vehicle's functionality, in addition to weather forecasts, sports results, and information about local restaurants (to name a few capabilities).
SoundHound recently announced a new partnership with Nvidia's Drive platform, which will allow car makers to deliver AI on the edge. That means drivers won't need network connectivity to use their voice assistant, which makes it available in more places and enhances data privacy.
The Drive platform is Nvidia's end-to-end solution for car manufacturers wanting to install autonomous self-driving capabilities into their new vehicles. Drive could become a key distribution channel for SoundHound's technology over the long term, considering it already serves many of the world's leading car brands.
SoundHound generates little revenue, and large losses
SoundHound brought in $45.8 million in revenue during 2023, which was a 47% increase compared to 2022. The company is still in the scale-up phase, although it did finish last year with a $661 million order backlog -- and that number doubled from the end of 2022.
Management's forecast for 2024 points to around $70 million in revenue, which would represent an accelerated growth rate of 54%.
That's great news, but SoundHound's bottom line warrants some concern in the near term because the company lost $91.7 million last year. While it's normal for small technology companies in their growth phase to lose money, SoundHound only has $95.2 million in cash and equivalents on its balance sheet, so it can't afford another year like that in 2024.
Risk-averse investors shouldn't follow Nvidia into SoundHound stock
The financial picture outlined above makes SoundHound stock a risky investment relative to other AI stocks like Nvidia or Microsoft. There is a strong possibility the company will need a cash injection within the next year or two to continue operating, and that creates uncertainty.
With that said, Nvidia's investment in SoundHound stock is a big vote of confidence, and it could breed more unique deals like the one with its Drive platform. Plus, SoundHound's order backlog could lead to accelerated revenue growth in the coming years.
But remember this: Nvidia's stake in SoundHound is only worth $8.7 million. If it went to zero, it would have virtually no impact on the $2.2 trillion chip giant. It would be the equivalent of someone with a net worth of $100,000 losing $0.39 -- yes, 39 cents.
Not only does the average investor have fewer resources than Nvidia, but they might also have a very different risk appetite. Therefore, buying SoundHound stock should be reserved for investors with a stomach for volatility, and the potential for losses.
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>>> Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) -- 14-day RSI: 31.26
https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/5-oversold-blue-chip-stocks-to-buy-right-now-1274453/2/
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 82
Based in Austin, Texas, Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA), designs, develops, manufactures, sell and leases fully electric vehicles and energy generation and storage solutions. Its current portfolio of products includes Model 3 and Model S sedans, Model Y, Model X SUVs, and Cybertruck, while upcoming products include Tesla Roadster and Tesla Semi – a light commercial vehicle.
On January 24, Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) released its financial results for Q4 2023. Its revenue increased by 3% y-o-y to $24.3 billion, while net income surged by 115% y-o-y to $3.7 billion. Its normalized EPS of $0.71 missed consensus estimates by $0.03.
Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) ranks highest on our list of 11 oversold blue chip stocks to buy right now based on the value of shares held by hedge funds. As of Q4 2023, 82 hedge funds owned shares worth $6.3 billion. In its Q4 2023 investor letter, Tsai Capital Corporation, an investment management firm, made the following comments about Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA):
“Tesla has significant and underappreciated competitive advantages across multiple verticals including electric vehicles, software and energy storage. Misunderstood by much of Wall Street – and consequently a favorite of short sellers – Tesla continues to grow rapidly and increase its lead over the competition while delighting consumers in the process. [. . .] While we expect competition for EVs to intensify and for Tesla to lose market share over time, we also believe the company will increase production and deliveries from approximately 1.8 million vehicles today to approximately 15 million vehicles in 2030 and further its lead in autonomous driving capability. In fact, we expect Tesla will eventually license its autonomous driving software, creating high-margin (70-80%), recurring licensing revenue. Tesla is also one of only two companies that dominate the energy storage market, which has the potential to grow to several hundred billion in revenue as power plants around the world increase their focus on renewable energy.”
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>>> Rail Vision Received Order from a Class 1 US Railroad Company for its AI-Based Safety System
GlobeNewswire
Rail Vision Ltd.
Mar 11, 2024
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rail-vision-received-order-class-125800866.html
Ra’anana, Israel, March 11, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rail Vision Ltd. (Nasdaq: RVSN) (the “Company”), a technology company at the forefront of revolutionizing railway safety and the data-related market, today announced that it has received an order for its AI-driven Switch Yard System from a Class 1 freight rail company in the US.
The freight rail company, which is one of the largest in North America, will install and use the system on its locomotive for evaluation and testing different scenarios related to safety.
"We believe that this new order is a milestone for Rail Vision that signifies the industry's trust in our solutions to navigate the complexities of rail operations. By leveraging AI and machine learning, we aim to transform the way railways operate, enhance safety, efficiency reliability and preserve business continuity across a railway network. This is another the beginning of our journey in North America to make rail transportation safer and more efficient for everyone", commented Rail Vision CEO, Shahar Hania.
Rail Vision’s Switch Yard System uses electro-optic sensors (including thermal and day sensors) combined with AI, machine learning and Advance Driver Assistance System (ADAS) solutions, to overcome limited vision issues that expand the range of sight and decrease downtime, while also increasing punctuality, efficiency, and safety. Rail Vision’s solutions address critical issues within the industry with its innovative AI-based Obstacle Detection System (ODS), which enables rail operators to navigate issues easily and swiftly, including on-track obstacles, accidents, high operational costs, lack of personnel, capacity, maintenance issues, heavy traffic on the tracks, extensive driving distances and harsh weather conditions.
About Rail Vision Ltd.
Rail Vision is a technology company that is seeking to revolutionize railway safety and the data-related market. The Company has developed cutting-edge, artificial intelligence-based, industry-leading technology specifically designed for railways. The Company has developed its railway detection and systems to save lives, increase efficiency, and dramatically reduce expenses for the railway operators. Rail Vision believes that its technology will significantly increase railway safety around the world, while creating significant benefits and adding value to everyone who relies on the train ecosystem: from passengers using trains for transportation to companies that use railways to deliver goods and services. In addition, the company believes that its technology has the potential to advance the revolutionary concept of autonomous trains into a practical reality.
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Rail Vision (RVSN) - CEO interview -
>>> Rail Vision Increases Railway Safety with its Next Generation AI Computer
GlobeNewswire
Rail Vision Ltd.
February 12, 2024
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rail-vision-increases-railway-safety-134100702.html
The new development offers high performance and real time AI deep learning inferencing
Ra’anana, Israel, Feb. 12, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rail Vision Ltd. (Nasdaq: RVSN) (the “Company”), a technology company at the forefront of revolutionizing railway safety and the data-related market, has introduced its next generation AI-based computer designed enhance railway safety and prevent accidents. This advanced technology marks a significant step forward in the realm of railway safety, leveraging artificial intelligence to detect potential hazards and mitigate risks effectively.
The new AI-based computer from Rail Vision, previously announced, incorporates advanced artificial intelligence algorithms, enabling it to analyze vast amounts of data in real-time. By processing information from various sensors and cameras installed on trains, the AI-based computer can accurately identify obstacles, track infrastructure conditions, and detect potential dangers along the railway tracks. This proactive approach empowers railway operators to take timely actions to prevent accidents and ensure the safety of passengers and personnel.
Rail Vision's new AI solution will be seamlessly integrated into both their Main Line and Switch Yard systems, revolutionizing safety measures across all aspects of railway operations.
Key features of Rail Vision's next-generation AI-based computer include:
Advanced AI Algorithms: Utilizing cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology to analyze and interpret data for accurate hazard detection.
Real-Time Monitoring: Continuous monitoring of railway tracks and surroundings to identify potential risks promptly.
Enhanced Safety Measures: Providing railway operators with actionable insights to implement proactive safety measures and prevent accidents.
Scalable Solution: Designed to integrate seamlessly with existing railway infrastructure and scalable to meet the evolving needs of railway networks.
"Rail Vision's next-generation AI-based computer system, is a significant milestone in railway safety technology. This innovation embodies our unwavering commitment to advancing railway security, marrying cutting-edge AI with real-time processing to prevent accidents and save lives. We believe that our system, technology and cloud connectivity contribute to a transformative leap forward, marking a new chapter in intelligent railway operations", said Shahar Hania, Rail Vision's Chief Executive Officer.
Rail Vision's next-generation AI-based computer is poised to revolutionize railway safety practices, offering an intelligent solution to mitigate risks and prevent accidents. By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, Rail Vision continues to drive innovation in the railway industry, ensuring safer and more efficient transportation systems for the future.
About Rail Vision Ltd.
Rail Vision is a technology company that is seeking to revolutionize railway safety and the data-related market. The Company has developed cutting-edge, artificial intelligence based, industry-leading technology specifically designed for railways. The Company has developed its railway detection and systems to save lives, increase efficiency, and dramatically reduce expenses for the railway operators. Rail Vision believes that its technology will significantly increase railway safety around the world, while creating significant benefits and adding value to everyone who relies on the train ecosystem: from passengers using trains for transportation to companies that use railways to deliver goods and services. In addition, the company believes that its technology has the potential to advance the revolutionary concept of autonomous trains into a practical reality.
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>>> Telematics is an interdisciplinary field encompassing telecommunications, vehicular technologies (road transport, road safety, etc.), electrical engineering (sensors, instrumentation, wireless communications, etc.), and computer science (multimedia, Internet, etc.).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telematics#:~:text=Telematics%20most%20commonly%20relate%20to,machine%20or%20group%20of%20machines.
Telematics can involve any of the following:
Lexus Gen V navigation system
The technology of sending, receiving, and storing information using telecommunication devices to control remote objects
The integrated use of telecommunications and informatics for application in vehicles and to control vehicles on the move
Global navigation satellite system technology integrated with computers and mobile communications technology in automotive navigation systems
(Most narrowly) The use of such systems within road vehicles (also called vehicle telematics)
History
Telematics is a translation of the French word télématique, which was first coined by Simon Nora and Alain Minc in a 1978 report to the French government on the computerization of society. It referred to the transfer of information over telecommunications and was a portmanteau blending the French words télécommunications ("telecommunications") and informatique ("computing science"). The original broad meaning of telematics continues to be used in academic fields, but in commerce it now generally means vehicle telematics.[1]
Vehicle telematics
Telematics can be described as thus:
The convergence of telecommunications and information processing, the term later evolved to refer to automation in automobiles, such as the invention of the emergency warning system for vehicles. GPS navigation, integrated hands-free cell phones, wireless safety communications, and automatic driving assistance systems all are covered under the telematics umbrella.
The science of telecommunications and informatics applied in wireless technologies and computational systems. 802.11p, the IEEE standard in the 802.11 family and also referred to as Wireless Access for the Vehicular Environment (WAVE), is the primary standard that addresses and enhances Intelligent Transport System.
Share bicycle with solar powered electronics to track and account for its usage
Vehicle telematics can help improve the efficiency of an organization.[2]
Vehicle tracking
Vehicle tracking is monitoring the location, movements, status, and behavior of a vehicle or fleet of vehicles. This is achieved through a combination of a GPS (GNSS) receiver and an electronic device (usually comprising a GSM GPRS modem or SMS sender) installed in each vehicle, communicating with the user (dispatching, emergency, or co-ordinating unit) and PC-based or web-based software. The data is turned into information by management reporting tools in conjunction with a visual display on computerized mapping software. Vehicle tracking systems may also use odometry or dead reckoning as an alternative or complementary means of navigation.[citation needed]
GPS tracking is usually accurate to around 10–20 meters,[3] but the European Space Agency has developed the EGNOS technology to provide accuracy to 1.5 meters.[4]
Trailer tracking
Trailer tracking refers to the tracking of movements and position of an articulated vehicle's trailer unit through the use of a location unit fitted to the trailer and a method of returning the position data via mobile communication network, IOT (Internet of things), or geostationary satellite communications for use through either PC- or web-based software.[citation needed]
Cold-store freight trailers that deliver fresh or frozen foods are increasingly incorporating telematics to gather time-series data on the temperature inside the cargo container, both to trigger alarms and record an audit trail for business purposes. An increasingly sophisticated array of sensors, many incorporating RFID technology, is being used to ensure the cold chain.[citation needed]
Container tracking
Freight containers can be tracked by GPS using a similar approach to that used for trailer tracking (i.e. a battery-powered GPS device communicating its position via mobile phone or satellite communications). Benefits of this approach include increased security and the possibility to reschedule the container transport movements based on accurate information about its location. According to Berg Insight, the installed base of tracking units in the intermodal shipping container segment reached 190,000 at the end of 2013.[5] Growing at a compound annual growth rate of 38.2 percent, the installed base reached 960,000 units at the end of 2018.[citation needed]
Fleet management
Fleet management is the management of a company's fleet and includes the management of ships and/or motor vehicles such as cars, vans, and trucks. Fleet (vehicle) management can include a range of functions, such as vehicle financing, vehicle maintenance, vehicle telematics (tracking and diagnostics), driver management, fuel management, health and safety management, and dynamic vehicle scheduling. Fleet management is a function which allows companies that rely on transport in their business to remove or minimize the risks associated with vehicle investment, improving efficiency and productivity while reducing overall transport costs and ensuring compliance with government legislation and Duty of Care obligations. These functions can either be dealt with by an in-house fleet management department or an outsourced fleet management provider.[6]
Telematics standards
The Association of Equipment Management Professionals (AEMP)[7] developed the industry's first telematics standard.[citation needed]
In 2008, AEMP brought together the major construction equipment manufacturers and telematics providers in the heavy equipment industry to discuss the development of the industry's first telematics standard.[8] Following agreement from Caterpillar, Volvo CE, Komatsu, and John Deere Construction & Forestry to support such a standard, the AEMP formed a standards development subcommittee chaired by Pat Crail CEM to develop the standard.[9] This committee consisted of developers provided by the Caterpillar/Trimble joint venture known as Virtual Site Solutions, Volvo CE, and John Deere. This group worked from February 2009 through September 2010 to develop the industry's first standard for the delivery of telematics data.[10]
The result, the AEMP Telematics Data Standard V1.1,[10] was released in 2010 and officially went live on October 1, 2010. As of November 1, 2010, Caterpillar, Volvo CE, John Deere Construction & Forestry, OEM Data Delivery, and Navman Wireless are able to support customers with delivery of basic telematics data in a standard xml format. Komatsu, Topcon, and others are finishing beta testing and have indicated their ability to support customers in the near future.[10]
The AEMP's telematics data standard was developed to allow end users to integrate key telematics data (operating hours, location, fuel consumed, and odometer reading where applicable) into their existing fleet management reporting systems. As such, the standard was primarily intended to facilitate importation of these data elements into enterprise software systems such as those used by many medium-to-large construction contractors. Prior to the standard, end users had few options for integrating this data into their reporting systems in a mixed-fleet environment consisting of multiple brands of machines and a mix of telematics-equipped machines and legacy machines (those without telematics devices where operating data is still reported manually via pen and paper). One option available to machine owners was to visit multiple websites to manually retrieve data from each manufacturer's telematics interface and then manually enter it into their fleet management program's database. This option was cumbersome and labor-intensive.[11]
A second option was for the end user to develop an API (Application Programming Interface), or program, to integrate the data from each telematics provider into their database. This option was quite costly as each telematics provider had different procedures for accessing and retrieving the data and the data format varied from provider to provider. This option automated the process, but because each provider required a unique, custom API to retrieve and parse the data, it was an expensive option. In addition, another API had to be developed any time another brand of machine or telematics device was added to the fleet.[11]
A third option for mixed-fleet integration was to replace the various factory-installed telematics devices with devices from a third party telematics provider. Although this solved the problem of having multiple data providers requiring unique integration methods, this was by far the most expensive option. In addition to the expense, many third-party devices available for construction equipment are unable to access data directly from the machine's electronic control modules (ECMs), or computers, and are more limited than the device installed by the OEM (Cat, Volvo, Deere, Komatsu, etc.) in the data they are able to provide. In some cases, these devices are limited to location and engine runtime, although they are increasingly able to accommodate a number of add-on sensors to provide additional data.[11]
The AEMP Telematics Data Standard provides a fourth option. By concentrating on the key data elements that drive the majority of fleet management reports (hours, miles, location, fuel consumption), making those data elements available in a standardized xml format, and standardizing the means by which the document is retrieved, the standard enables the end user to use one API to retrieve data from any participating telematics provider (as opposed to the unique API for each provider that was required previously), greatly reducing integration development costs.[10]
The current draft version of the AEMP Telematics Data Standard is now called the AEM/AEMP Draft Telematics API Standard, which expands the original standard Version 1.2 to include 19 data fields (with fault code capability). This new draft standard is a collaborative effort of AEMP and the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM), working on behalf of their members and the industry. This Draft API replaces the current version 1.2 and does not currently cover some types of equipment, e.g., agriculture equipment, cranes, mobile elevating work platforms, air compressors, and other niche products.
In addition to the new data fields, the AEM/AEMP Draft Telematics API Standard changes how data is accessed in an effort to make it easier to consume and integrate with other systems and processes. It includes standardized communication protocols for the ability to transfer telematics information in mixed-equipment fleets to end user business enterprise systems, enabling the end user to employ their own business software to collect and then analyze asset data from mixed-equipment fleets without the need to work across multiple telematics provider applications.
To achieve a globally recognized standard for conformity worldwide, the AEM/AEMP Draft Telematics API Standard will be submitted for acceptance by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Final language is dependent upon completion of the ISO acceptance process.
Satellite navigation
Satellite navigation in the context of vehicle telematics is the technology of using a GPS and electronic mapping tool to enable a driver to locate a position, plan a route, and navigate a journey.[12]
Mobile data
Mobile data is the use of wireless data communications using radio waves to send and receive real-time computer data to, from, and between devices used by field-based personnel. These devices can be fitted solely for use while in the vehicle (Fixed Data Terminal) or for use in and out of the vehicle (Mobile Data Terminal). See mobile Internet.
The common methods for mobile data communication for telematics were based on private vendors' RF communication infrastructure. During the early 2000s, manufacturers of mobile data terminals/AVL devices moved to try cellular data communication to offer cheaper ways to transmit telematics information and wider range based on cellular provider coverage. Since then, as a result of cellular providers offering low GPRS (2.5G) and later UMTS (3G) rates, mobile data is almost totally offered to telematics customers via cellular communication.
Wireless vehicle safety communications
Wireless vehicle safety communications telematics aid in car safety and road safety. It is an electronic subsystem in a vehicle used for exchanging safety information about road hazards and the locations and speeds of vehicles over short-range radio links. This may involve temporary ad hoc wireless local area networks.
Wireless units are often installed in vehicles and fixed locations, such as near traffic signals and emergency call boxes along the road. Sensors in vehicles and at fixed locations, as well as in possible connections to wider networks, provide information displayed to drivers. The range of the radio links can be extended by forwarding messages along multi-hop paths. Even without fixed units, information about fixed hazards can be maintained by moving vehicles by passing it backwards. It also seems possible for traffic lights, which one can expect to become smarter, to use this information to reduce the chance of collisions.
In the future, it may connect directly to the adaptive cruise control or other vehicle control aids. Cars and trucks with the wireless system connected to their brakes may move in convoys to save fuel and space on the roads. When a column member slows down, those behind it will automatically slow also. Certain scenarios may required less engineering effort, such as when a radio beacon is connected to a brake light.
In fall 2008, network ideas were tested in Europe, where radio frequency bandwidth had been allocated. The 30 MHz allocated is at 5.9 GHz, and unallocated bandwidth at 5.4 GHz may also be used. The standard is IEEE 802.11p, a low-latency form of the Wi-Fi local area network standard. Similar efforts are underway in Japan and the USA.[13]
Emergency warning system for vehicles
Telematics technologies are self-orientating open network architecture structures of variable programmable intelligent beacons developed for application in the development of intelligent vehicles with the intent to accord (blend or mesh) warning information with surrounding vehicles in the vicinity of travel, intra-vehicle, and infrastructure. Emergency warning systems for vehicle telematics are developed particularly for international harmonization and standardization of vehicle-to-vehicle, infrastructure-to-vehicle, and vehicle-to-infrastructure real-time Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC) systems.
Telematics most commonly relate to computerized systems that update information at the same rate they receive data, enabling them to direct or control a process such as an instantaneous autonomous warning notification in a remote machine or group of machines. In the use of telematics relating to intelligent vehicle technologies, instantaneous direction travel cognizance of a vehicle may be transmitted in real-time to surrounding vehicles traveling in the local area of vehicles equipped (with EWSV) to receive said warning signals of danger.
Intelligent vehicle technologies
Telematics comprise electronic, electromechanical, and electromagnetic devices—usually silicon micro-machined components operating in conjunction with computer-controlled devices and radio transceivers to provide precision repeatability functions (such as in robotics artificial intelligence systems) emergency warning validation performance reconstruction.
Intelligent vehicle technologies commonly apply to car safety systems and self-contained autonomous electromechanical sensors generating warnings that can be transmitted within a specified targeted area of interest, i.e. within 100 meters of the emergency warning system for the vehicle's transceiver. In ground applications, intelligent vehicle technologies are utilized for safety and commercial communications between vehicles or between a vehicle and a sensor along the road.
On November 3, 2009, the most advanced Intelligent Vehicle concept car was demonstrated in New York City when a 2010 Toyota Prius became the first LTE connected car. The demonstration was provided by the NG Connect project, a collaboration of automotive telematic technologies designed to exploit in-car 4G wireless network connectivity.[14]
Carsharing
Telematics technology has enabled the emergence of carsharing services such as Local Motion, Uber, Lyft, Car2Go, Zipcar worldwide, or City Car Club in the UK. Telematics-enabled computers allow organizers to track members' usage and bill them on a pay-as-you-drive basis. Some systems show users where to find an idle vehicle.[15] Car Clubs such as Australia's Charter Drive use telematics to monitor and report on vehicle use within predefined geofence areas to demonstrate the reach of their transit media car club fleet.
Auto insurance/Usage-based insurance (UBI)
See also: Auto insurance risk selection
The general idea of telematics auto insurance is that a driver's behavior is monitored directly while the person drives and this information is transmitted to an insurance company. The insurance company then assesses the risk of that driver having an accident and charges insurance premiums accordingly. A driver who drives less responsibly will be charged a higher premium than a driver who drives smoothly and with less calculated risk of claim propensity. Other benefits can be delivered to end users with Telematics2.0-based telematics as customer engagement can be enhanced with direct customer interaction.
Telematics auto insurance was independently invented and patented[16] by a major U.S. auto insurance company, Progressive Auto Insurance U.S. patent 5,797,134, and a Spanish independent inventor, Salvador Minguijon Perez (European Patent EP0700009B1). The Perez patents cover monitoring the car's engine control computer to determine distance driven, speed, time of day, braking force, etc. Progressive is currently developing the Perez technology in the U.S. and European auto insurer Norwich Union is developing the Progressive technology for Europe. Both patents have since been overturned in courts due to prior work in the commercial insurance sectors.[17]
Trials conducted by Norwich Union in 2005 found that young drivers (18- to 23-year-olds) signing up for telematics auto insurance have had a 20% lower accident rate than average.[18]
In 2007, theoretical economic research on the social welfare effects of Progressive's telematics technology business process patents questioned whether the business process patents are pareto efficient for society. Preliminary results suggested that it was not, but more work is needed.[19][20] In April 2014, Progressive patents were overturned by the U.S. legal system on the grounds of "lack of originality."
The smartphone as the in-vehicle device for insurance telematics has been discussed in great detail[21] and the instruments are available for the design of smartphone-driven insurance telematics.
Telematics education
Engineering Degree programs
Federico Santa María Technical University (UTFSM) in Chile has a Telematics Engineering program which is a six-year full-time program of study (12 academic semesters). The final degree in Telematics Engineering has the title of Ingeniería Civil Telemática (with the suffix of Civil).[22]
Pontifical Catholic University Mother and Teacher (PUCMM) in the Dominican Republic has a Telematics Engineering program which is a four-year full-time program of study (12 academic four-month periods). The final degree in Telematics Engineering has the title of Ingeniería Telemática.[23]
University Bachelor programs
Harokopio University of Athens has a four-year full-time program of study. The department goal is the development and advancement of computer science, primarily in the field of network information systems and relative e-services. For this purpose, attention is focused in the fields of telematics (teleinformatics) which are relative to network and internet technologies, e-business, e-government, e-health, advanced transport telematics, etc.[24]
TH Wildau in Wildau, Germany has provided a three-year full-time telematics Bachelor study program since 1999.[25]
TU Graz in Graz, Austria offers a three-year Bachelor in telematics (now called "Information and Computer Engineering").[26]
Singapore Institute of Technology offers a three-year Bachelor in Telematics.
National Open and Distance Learning University of Mexico* (UNADM) offers a four-year degree in Telematics delivered online.[27]
University Masters programs
Several universities provide two-year Telematics Master of Science programs:
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway[28]
University of Twente (UT), The Netherlands[29]
University Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M), Spain[30]
Harokopio University Athens[31]
TH Wildau in Wildau, Germany[32]
TU Graz in Graz, Austria (now called "Information and Computer Engineering")[33]
European Automotive Digital Innovation Studio (EADIS)
In 2007, a project entitled the European Automotive Digital Innovation Studio (EADIS) was awarded 400,000 Euros from the European commission under its Leonardo da Vinci program. EADIS used a virtual work environment called the Digital Innovation Studio to train and develop professional designers in the automotive industry in the impact and application of vehicle telematics so they could integrate new technologies into future products within the automotive industry. Funding ended in 2013.[34]
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>>> Rail Vision's Main Line System Successfully Secures Approval and Certifications and for EU Railway Standards
GlobalNewswire
Rail Vision Ltd.
January 22, 2024
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rail-visions-main-line-system-123300830.html
Compliance and homologation sets the stage for accelerated adoption of Rail Vision's Main Line system across the vast EU market
Ra’anana, Israel, Jan. 22, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rail Vision Ltd. (Nasdaq: RVSN) (the “Company”), a technology company at the forefront of revolutionizing railway safety and the data-related market, today announced that its Main Line system has successfully obtained formal certifications for critical European Union (EU) railway standards, an important achievement that underscores the Company's dedication to quality, safety, and innovation in the railway technology market.
With its extensive railway network and robust demand, the EU offers vast opportunities for railway technologies and represents the largest absolute market for rail products and services globally, according to UNIFE World Rail Market. The global digital railway market size is expected to surpass $100 billion by 2027, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 9.7%.
"Achieving compliance with these EU standards marks a major milestone for Rail Vision and positions us ahead of the competition in the Railway technology market," said Noam Shloper, Head of Quality and Reliability at Rail Vision. "Our team is driven by a commitment to support product quality and safety above all else, and we're pleased to complete this important milestone that sets the stage for accelerated adoption of our Main Line system across the vast EU market."
Rail Vision's Main Line system is now certified in compliance with EN 50155, which sets the benchmark for hardware equipment in railway applications, ensuring the robustness and reliability of rolling stock components. This compliance demonstrates Rail Vision's system's ability to withstand the rigorous physical demands of railway operations. Additionally, the system meets the requirements of EN 50126, focusing on the specification and demonstration of Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, and Safety (RAMS). This standard is crucial in the railway industry, as it guarantees that the system can be relied upon for consistent performance and safety. Furthermore, Rail Vision’s system aligns with EN 50657 standards related to software on board rolling stock. This compliance ensures that the software integrated into the Company's Main Line system meets the highest levels of safety and functionality, crucial for the smooth operation of modern trains. The Main Line system also adheres to EN 45545 standards related to fire protection on railway vehicles.
About Rail Vision Ltd.
Rail Vision is a technology company that is seeking to revolutionize railway safety and the data-related market. The Company has developed cutting-edge, artificial intelligence based, industry-leading technology specifically designed for railways. The Company has developed its railway detection and systems to save lives, increase efficiency, and dramatically reduce expenses for the railway operators. Rail Vision believes that its technology will significantly increase railway safety around the world, while creating significant benefits and adding value to everyone who relies on the train ecosystem: from passengers using trains for transportation to companies that use railways to deliver goods and services. In addition, the company believes that its technology has the potential to advance the revolutionary concept of autonomous trains into a practical reality.
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Rail Vision - >>> A Leading US-Based Rail & Leasing Services Company Orders Rail Vision Switch Yard Systems Valued at Up to $5 Million
GlobeNewswire
Rail Vision Ltd.
January 17, 2024
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/leading-us-based-rail-leasing-121800152.html
Ra’anana, Israel , Jan. 17, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rail Vision Ltd. (the “Company”) (Nasdaq: RVSN), a technology company seeking to revolutionize the railway safety market, announced today that a leading US-based rail and leasing services company signed a supply contract with Rail Vision valued at up to $5,000,000 (USD) for the purchase of Rail Vision’s AI-based Switch Yard Systems.
"The signing of the contract with this customer is a significant milestone for Rail Vision, marking our entrance into the US market and reflecting our commitment to enabling the rail industry with cutting-edge AI-based technology," said Rail Vision CEO Shahar Hania. "Our Switch Yard System is designed to significantly improve safety and efficiency in rail yards. We are proud that our new customer, a prominent player in the rail services sector in North America, has recognized the value of our solution. This new partnership is a testament to the innovation and effectiveness of Rail Vision's technology, and we look forward to working closely with this customer to help them enhance operations and contribute to a safer, more efficient rail industry."
Rail Vision’s unique Switch Yard System enables railway operators to streamline and enhance the safety of their industrial switching operations. Combining advanced vision sensors with artificial intelligence and deep learning technologies, the system automatically detects and classifies objects within a range of up to 200 meters, in diverse weather and light conditions. With its one-of-a-kind Pathfinder technology, the Switch Yard System can detect switch states to support the execution of coupling from a remote position. In addition, it enables the monitoring of operational dead zones to facilitate secure wagon coupling and sends real-time visual and acoustic alerts to remote operators and drivers, ensuring a safe and secure environment.
The first phase of the contract is valued at $1,000,000 (USD). Follow-on orders for additional Switch Yard Systems, valued at up to $4,000,000, are subject to customer approval. The contract also includes specific purchase quotas that, if met, provide the customer with exclusivity in the North American industrial railyards switching segment.
About Rail Vision Ltd.
Rail Vision is a technology company that is seeking to revolutionize railway safety and the data-related market. The Company has developed cutting-edge, artificial intelligence based, industry-leading technology specifically designed for railways. The Company has developed its railway detection and systems to save lives, increase efficiency, and dramatically reduce expenses for the railway operators. Rail Vision believes that its technology will significantly increase railway safety around the world, while creating significant benefits and adding value to everyone who relies on the train ecosystem: from passengers using trains for transportation to companies that use railways to deliver goods and services. In addition, the company believes that its technology has the potential to advance the revolutionary concept of autonomous trains into a practical reality.
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>>> Electric cars suffer ‘unsustainable’ depreciation in secondhand market
The Telegraph
by James Titcomb
January 18, 202
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/electric-cars-lose-half-value-060000890.html
Electric cars lose as much as half of their value after just three years on the road, new figures show, as the rate of depreciation far outstrips petrol equivalents.
Research from Auto Trader said there were “unsustainable levels of depreciation” in the electric car market, with used prices of battery-powered vehicles dropping by 23pc in the last year alone.
The online vehicle marketplace said a motorist buying a £50,000 electric car could expect to lose £24,000 in value over three years, while a similarly priced petrol car could lose £17,000.
The value of used electric cars has dropped dramatically in the last 12 months after Covid-related supply shortages eased and as rising electricity prices hit demand.
This coincided with petrol prices falling to a two-year low.
Auto Trader’s latest report warned that “residual values of electric cars remain unsustainably low”.
It said that the price of used electric cars could come under further pressure this year as thousands of motorists return vehicles acquired on three-year leases and as manufacturers cut the price of new vehicles.
“With over 800,000 new electric cars registered between 2020 and 2023, supply returning to the used car market will only increase in 2024, and if demand does not keep up, electric cars could depreciate even further, undermining both consumer and retailer confidence,” it said.
Manufacturers are now applying record discounts to new electric vehicles in a bid to boost stuttering demand.
Auto Trader said car makers were slashing thousands of pounds off prices, with average discounts of 10.6pc offered in December. This compares to discounts of 4.8pc a year earlier.
It predicted that a wave of Chinese entrants would further push down the cost of electric cars.
Sales of new battery-powered vehicles in Britain rose by 18pc last year but accounted for just 16.5pc of all new cars sold - a slight decline from 2022.
New electric cars are still more than a third more expensive than their petrol or diesel equivalents.
However, from this month, electric cars will need to account for 22pc of every manufacturer’s sales, which analysts expect to lead to heavy price cuts to encourage consumers.
Campaigners have said motorists will continue to find electric cars too expensive without government subsidies, which ended in 2022, or other incentives such as cuts to VAT.
Auto Trader said demand for used electric cars had picked up as prices fell, suggesting that the vehicles will prove popular once they are no longer more expensive than petrol rivals.
It said that used electric cars on its site tended to sell up to five days faster than petrol ones.
This month, the Chinese manufacturer BYD surpassed Tesla as the world’s best-selling electric car maker. The company’s cheapest electric vehicle retails for £25,000 in the UK, roughly double what it costs in China, which Auto Trader said gave it room to further cut prices in Britain.
It predicted that one in six electric cars sold in Britain will be made by Chinese companies by 2030.
Ian Plummer, Auto Trader’s commercial director, said motorists had been “confused” by Rishi Sunak’s decision to push back a ban on petrol and diesel car sales from 2030 to 2035.
He said that discounts applied to new electric cars meant most motorists would not bear the full cost of the depreciation in their value.
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>>> Electric buses pulled from London streets after double-decker bursts into flames
The fire happened in Wimbledon during rush hour, but no injuries were reported
1-13-24
By Brie Stimson
FOX Business
https://www.foxbusiness.com/fox-news-world/electric-buses-pulled-london-streets-double-decker-bursts-flames-video
An electric double-decker bus caught fire in southwest London on Thursday, prompting the city’s transportation agency to remove a fleet from service as a precaution while the incident is investigated, according to reports.
Passengers on the bus in Wimbledon during rush hour had to be evacuated, but no injuries were reported, according to BBC News. Video of the incident show flames and smoke engulfing an apparent rear section of the bus.
"Safety is our top priority and we are working with the operator, London General, and the bus manufacturer, Switch, to investigate what happened," Transport for London’s head of business development Tom Cunnington said in a statement, the BBC reported.
Cunnington added that London’s buses are safe to use (lol), according to the Guardian.
"Other buses in the fleet remain in service and TfL and bus operators will not hesitate to take further action if required to ensure the network remains safe," he said.
Go-Ahead London told the BBC it has "withdrawn the vehicle type in question."
Fox News Digital has reached out to Transport for London for comment.
On Friday, a hybrid double-decker bus caught fire in an unrelated incident in North Woolwich in east London.
"London's bus network remains safe to use and we have no reason to suspect that this fire on a hybrid bus was linked to an earlier incident on an electric bus in Wimbledon," Cunnington added.
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Schaeffler - >>> Toyota’s Rival In Solid-State EV Development Is A Supplier: Schaeffler
Schaeffler and Honda are already close partners. Wouldn’t all-solid-state make a nifty battery pack for a new Acura NSX?
AutoWeek
by Todd Lassa
DEC 21, 2023
https://www.autoweek.com/news/a46192062/solid-state-ev-battery-development-toyota-schaeffler/
At the upcoming CES 2024, supplier Schaeffler Americas will display a “next-generation” all-solid-state EV battery.
Solid-state advantages include 40% better energy density than existing battery technologies, as well as much longer range, and no need for rare materials like cobalt to be mined in China or The Congo.
A Schaeffler executive says the supplier already has a customer for its solid-state technology, but he declined to name the automaker.
A well-established supplier, little known to most enthusiasts, is in the running to become a pioneer in solid-state battery EV technology. Schaeffler Group, founded in Germany in 1946, is known to the auto industry—which constitutes 60% of its business—primarily for bearings.
It returns to CES in January after a four-year absence to show a new electric beam axle for pickup trucks and a new rear-steering system. The company wants 45% of its manufacturing output in 2030 to be products that did not exist in 2020.
But the prototype Schaeffler Americas will show at CES 2024 that caught our attention is what its chief technology officer, Jeff Hemphill, described as a “next-generation” all-solid-state EV battery.
The OEM that appears to be the most active in solid-state development is Toyota, the hybrid pioneer considered behind the competition in battery-electric vehicles. But others are working on solid-state batteries as well, including Honda, Nissan, Ford, BMW, Volkswagen, and Mercedes-Benz.
For more detail on the Tier 1 supplier’s solid-state work, we spoke with Rashid Farahati, director of engineering for Schaeffler Americas. Schaeffler’s solid-state battery at CES is made with prototype parts encased in a pack built by another company that specializes in making small samples on the lab scale. It’s installed in a show vehicle, Farahati said.
“We have manufacturing skill and we have (parts) coating skill,” Farahati said, so the company will not even dabble in lithium-ion. “Solid-state, electrolyte, is best for Schaeffler.”
At the outset, solid-state will pencil out for expensive, high-end sports cars and luxury cars.
Despite speculation that Honda, a close partner of Schaeffler, will have a mainstream model solid-state EV on the market next year, Farahati says Schaeffler’s solid-state battery won’t be production ready until late in this decade.
Solid-state advantages include 40% better energy density than existing battery technologies, as well as much longer range, no need for rare materials like cobalt to be mined in China or The Congo, and no necessary flammable liquids inside.
So why even consider an EV with a lithium-ion battery pack? Won’t solid-state kill off that technology? Cost, it turns out, is not an advantage for solid-state.
“For now, we’re not talking about cost,” Farahati says. “I believe solid-state is not replacing lithium-ion anytime soon.”
The market is “very complicated,” he adds. For several years at the outset, solid-state will pencil out for expensive, high-end sports cars and luxury cars. Give it several years—well into the ‘30s at least—after Schaeffler’s production release before solid-state can find its way into “affordable” electric vehicles.
Farahati allowed that Schaeffler already has a customer for its solid-state technology, but he declined to name the automaker.
But wouldn’t a new, all-solid-state electric Acura NSX be nifty?
At the Monterey Car Week last August, The Drive quoted Honda executives who said the company would launch an EV in 2024 with a solid-state battery that would weigh half as much as a similar-size lithium-ion battery.
This autumn, family-controlled Schaeffler acquired the drive-technology company Vitesco Technologies, a Continental AG spinoff, for $3.8 billion, according to US News & World Report. Together, they plan to open a manufacturing plant in Ohio.
Meanwhile in Columbus, Honda and Schaeffler will partner with Ohio State University and the Institute for Materials and Manufacturing Research to repurpose a 25,000-square-foot facility into a $22 million battery cell lab and research center, scheduled to open in April 2025.
It will be able to build a full solid-state battery cell in small, prototype numbers, Farahati said.
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QuantumScape - >>> Forget Tesla: 1 EV Stock That Could Make You Rich
by Daniel Miller
The Motley Fool
December 23, 2023
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/forget-tesla-1-ev-stock-113500008.html
Investors often dream about finding the next game-changing company. Of course, finding a game-changing company set to revolutionize an industry is far easier said than done. Remember back when Tesla changed the game by essentially introducing a sports car that was battery electric powered? And Tesla did so at a time ditching fossil fuels seemed daunting -- and that's putting it lightly. Those high-flying and wild days might be behind Tesla, although its story has plenty of room to run yet, but one company might be about to enter game-changing territory.
"If QuantumScape can get this technology into mass production, it holds the potential to transform the industry," said Stan Whittingham, co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery and winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in chemistry, in a QuantumScape press release.
QuantumScape's (NYSE: QS) battery technology could be groundbreaking. At a time when electric vehicles (EVs) are positioning themselves for mass adoption, the company could be a lucrative long-term investment. Move over Tesla; QuantumScape could be the next stock to make investors rich.
QuantumScape who?
Starting with some basic background on a company you may not have heard of, QuantumScape has over 12 years of research and development investment in its battery technologies. It employs a world-class battery development team comprising over 800 employees and owns over 300 patents and patent applications.
QuantumScape has also caught the eye of major global automakers during its journey. It has contracts with six automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), including Volkswagen, a key partner and investor, and two other top 10 OEMs, two established global luxury OEMs, and a pure-play EV company.
Encouraging results
To simplify a somewhat complicated story, QuantumScape's battery technology improves the process by simplifying the cell design. It eliminates the need for graphite, silicon, or lithium foil, enabling the battery to increase energy density and improve range while boasting 15-minute fast charging.
More specifically, QuantumScape's batteries could recharge from zero to 80% of capacity in about half the time most lithium-ion EV batteries require. An EV using QuantumScape's batteries could extend its range by roughly 80% with similar weight. Essentially, the potential groundbreaking battery technology could improve on nearly every aspect of the status quo.
At the end of 2022, QuantumScape shipped its first A0 prototype cells to potential customers for a proof-of-concept. Its top-performing AO prototype cell in one potential customer's battery testing labs achieved over 1,000 full-cycle equivalents with over 95% discharge energy retention. While management reiterated this was a cherry-picked high-end result and that there's much work to do regarding reliability, it's an extraordinary result and well above its commercial target of 800 cycles and 80% energy retention.
High upside
Huge, obvious risks come with investing in a preproduction company. The blunt truth is that no company has done what QuantumScape is trying to achieve, and the company, despite its recent encouraging test results, could ultimately fail to produce its technology entirely or as reliably as required to transform the industry.
However, QuantumScape has spent much of 2023 attempting to move from prototype to product, and the company has a cash runway that extends into 2026, with the ability to potentially raise more funds if necessary.
If QuantumScape does accomplish its targets and reaches production with a next-generation EV battery, its opportunity is massive. Consider that battery electric vehicles (BEV) only recently hit about 10% of the global light-vehicle market, and management believes the opportunity could potentially be hundreds of billions of dollars annually for decades.
Time to buy?
For all of its massive upside, there are the aforementioned risks investors take when investing in a preproduction company. QuantumScape is still a few years away from mass-producing its batteries, and the process of going from a successful prototype to a mass-production battery has been slow -- a speed Wall Street isn't fond of.
QuantumScape isn't an investment for everyone; it's not for the risk-averse or faint of heart. But a small position in QuantumScape has incredible upside after shedding nearly 70% of its value since its initial public offering. If the company gets to mass production and carves out its slice of a massive target-market pie, it could easily drive not only global electric vehicles but also your entire portfolio.
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>>> Toyota Lays Out Its EV Battery Road Map, Including a Solid-State Battery (Eventually)
Toyota has been very late to the EV party, but now the automaker is unmistakably looking to dominate.
Car and Driver Magazine
BY MIKE DUFF
NOV 26, 2023
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a45942785/toyota-future-ev-battery-plans/
The Japanese brand was late to the EV party but plans a dramatic expansion in models and innovative battery technology; it's planning to sell 3.5 million EVs annually across 30 different Toyota and Lexus model lines by 2030.
Long-range battery packs will provide up to 500 miles of range by 2026 and 620 miles by 2027.
Toyota is aiming to introduce solid-state batteries in 2027, which will be capable of ultra-fast 10 minute recharge times from 10 to 80 percent state of charge.
Toyota recently announced it had passed the benchmark of having built more than 300 million cars since the company was founded 88 years ago. But despite having pioneered hybrid powertrains, the company's high-level skepticism towards EVs means that very few of those cars have been fully electric; the Toyota bZ4X and Lexus RZ450e have only gone on sale in the last year. It is one of the last major automakers to enter the EV space.
But following the arrival of new CEO Koji Sato, Toyota has dramatically increased its commitment to electrics, with the aim being to catch rivals with a wave of new models and innovative battery technology.
One of the first new EVs will be a three-row SUV (pictured above) that is set to be produced at Toyota's Georgetown, Kentucky, plant from 2025, and which will be aimed at the same part of the market as the Kia EV9. Toyota says this new model will use batteries produced in its own factory in Liberty, North Carolina, a plant that already employs 2000 people but is set to increase to 5000.
By 2030 Toyota says it will be able to make 30 GWh of batteries in North Carolina each year, enough for 375,000 80.0-kWh packs, but with production split across 10 different lines to produce different-sized packs for EV and plug-in-hybrid models. There will be four other lines making straight hybrid packs, and we can safely bet that the vast majority of Toyota production, and possibly all of it, will be hybridized by then.
Toyota says it is committed to making 3.5 million EVs annually by 2030, with 30 different models across Toyota and Lexus brands. It is clear a significant number of those will be produced in the States.
Toyota's battery technology is also going to develop quickly, with more details shared during a recent visit C/D made to Toyota's Shimoyama engineering center in Japan. The first evolution will be the one promised by the Toyota FT-Se and Lexus LF-ZC concepts that were shown at this year's Tokyo auto show: an ultra-compact high-performance next-generation lithium-ion battery that will be able to sit under the floors of coupes and sedans without adding excessive height. In their lowest configuration, Toyota engineers say that the battery pack will be just 3.9 inches tall, something made possible in part by side-mounted rather than top-mounted terminals.
Fast-Charging, 400-Mile Batteries . . .
This performance pack will first be used in 2026, with Toyota saying it will be 20 percent cheaper to produce than the bZ4X's pack, but also that it will allow a 10 to 80 percent fast-charge time of around 20 minutes. (The engineers we spoke to also suggested it will have a 900-volt architecture.) In its largest configuration, and in the most efficient vehicle, this performance pack will give over 400 miles of EPA range. (All range figures in the above image are quoted assuming the more generous WLTP standard, but EPA range figures are typically about 15 percent lower, so we've adjusted Toyota's claims downward accordingly to make them comparable to those of other EVs sold in the U.S.)
. . . and Cheaper, Space-Efficient Batteries
A cheaper next-generation pack will follow shortly afterward that's intended for lower-cost models and using lithium-iron-phosphate battery (LFP) chemistry as well as an innovative bipolar internal design. While a conventional monopolar battery uses separate cathode and anode elements, bipolar combines cathode and anode on a specially designed current collector, making it more space-efficient and allowing greater energy density. Toyota says this first bipolar pack will be 40 percent cheaper than the bX4X's battery and have around a 30-minute fast-charge speed, providing about 315 miles of range in its biggest configuration.
A high-performance bipolar pack will follow in 2027, switching back to lithium-ion chemistry and a high nickel cathode, with this being the one that Toyota says will ultimately deliver on its claim of a 520-mile driving range. It will also be 10 percent cheaper than the performance battery and will have a 20-minute 10-to-80-percent recharge time under the best possible conditions.
The Eagerly Awaited Solid-State Battery (in 2027)
Beyond that, Toyota confirms plans to introduce solid-state batteries as soon as 2027, although we note that the date has already slipped from the 2025 that was being quoted last year. Solid-state batteries use solid rather than liquid electrolytes, allowing for a greater tolerance of high voltages and temperatures and improving energy density and reducing weight. The challenges are complexity, cost, and the difficulty in delivering long-term durability. Toyota says its first-gen solid-state packs are targeting about 520 miles of range, with a 10-minute 10-to-80 charge capability, but also says that subsequent evolution will likely move peak range up to 630 miles. That figure that would surely be enough to persuade even the most determined EV doubter that long journeys can be accomplished electrically.
Should Toyota deliver on all these claims—and it is not a brand given to overpromising—then it will be going from the back of the pack on electrification right to the cutting edge. We certainly can’t fault the company for any lack of ambition, with the stated aim to be producing 3.5 million EVs annually across 30 different Toyota and Lexus model lines by 2030.
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>>> Hyperloop One to Shut Down After Failing to Reinvent Transit
Bloomberg
by Sarah McBride
December 21, 2023
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hyperloop-one-shut-down-failing-191602007.html
(Bloomberg) -- Hyperloop One, the futuristic transportation company building tube-encased lines to zip passengers and freight from city to city at airplane-like speeds, is shutting down, according to people familiar with the situation.
Once a high-profile startup, Hyperloop One raised more than $450 million since its founding in 2014, according to PitchBook. It built a small test track near Las Vegas to develop its transportation technology, and for a time took the name Virgin Hyperloop One after Richard Branson’s Virgin invested. Virgin removed its branding after the startup decided last year to focus on cargo rather than people.
Now, the company has laid off most of its employees, and is trying to sell its remaining assets, including the test track and machinery, according to one of the people, who asked to remain anonymous discussing private information. In early 2022, the company employed more than 200 people. The business has also closed its Los Angeles office. The remaining workers, tasked with overseeing the asset sale, were told their employment will end on Dec. 31.
DP World, the Dubai-based conglomerate, has backed Hyperloop One since 2016 and owns a majority stake. The startup’s remaining intellectual property will be transferred to DP World, a person familiar with the situation said.
Through a spokesman, DP World declined to comment. Raja Narayanan, Hyperloop One’s acting chief executive officer, also didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Hyperloop One, formally known as Hyperloop Technologies, merged with a shell company this April, according to a document reviewed by Bloomberg. At that time, the value of shares in most classes was written down to zero cents, and the shareholders of the shell company became the only owners of Hyperloop One. At an all-hands meeting, employees were told that DP World orchestrated the transaction, according to one of the people.
The company had captured the public’s imagination since its founding in 2014, a year after Elon Musk released a white paper outlining a vision for hyperloop technology. The concept was a tantalizing promise of a new kind of transportation technology — and an end to traffic.
But the nascent industry stumbled, and Hyperloop One never won a contract to build a working hyperloop. The company also attracted plenty of attention for the wrong reasons. Co-founder Brogan BamBrogan once arrived at work to find a noose on his chair. And another co-founder, the venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar, stepped aside after Bloomberg reported on sexual harassment allegations against him, which he denied. A one-time director, Ziyavudin Magomedov, was arrested in Moscow on charges of fraud and embezzlement unrelated to Hyperloop One. At the time, Magomedov’s lawyer said he was appealing the arrest.
Although no large-scale hyperloop has been built after years of effort, the concept continues to enchant entrepreneurs. Several hyperloop companies are at various stages of building protoypes, including Hardt Hyperloop, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies Inc. and Swisspod Technologies.
Musk has promoted the field as well, creating a series of competitions for student-designed hyperloops and building a now-demolished test track. He also started Boring Co., a tunneling business that has pursued related technology.
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Electric vehicles --> I would never buy one until the battery technology improves A LOT (see video below). I would forget about EVs for now, unless you enjoy getting incinerated in a car fire, or having your house incinerated. The new solid state batteries can fix the fire / explosion problem, but not sure when or if these will be widely adopted -
>>> A solid-state battery has higher energy density than a Li-ion battery that uses liquid electrolyte solution. It doesn’t have a risk of explosion or fire, so there is no need to have components for safety, thus saving more space. Then we have more space to put more active materials which increase battery capacity in the battery. A solid-state battery can increase energy density per unit area since only a small number of batteries are needed. For that reason, a solid-state battery is perfect to make an EV battery system of module and pack, which needs high capacity.
https://www.samsungsdi.com/column/technology/detail/56462.html?listType=gallery#:~:text=A%20solid%2Dstate%20battery%20has,safety%2C%20thus%20saving%20more%20space.
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>>> Green Stock Selloff Deepens as Tesla Sentiment Sours
Bloomberg
by Greg Ritchie and Saijel Kishan
November 27, 2023
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/green-stock-selloff-deepens-tesla-010001246.html
(Bloomberg) -- The selloff that’s ripped through green stocks looks set to continue into 2024, bringing a fourth consecutive year of losses, according to Bloomberg’s latest Markets Live Pulse survey.
The negative sentiment appears poised to engulf a wider array of green asset classes, with Tesla Inc. seen at risk of losing its place among the 10 biggest stocks in the S&P 500. Almost two-thirds of the 620 MLIV Pulse respondents said they plan to stay away from the electric-vehicle sector, and 57% expect the iShares Global Clean Energy exchange-traded fund — which is down about 30% this year — to extend its slide in 2024.
The gloomy outlook comes as green investors navigate the shock of a post-pandemic world shaped by much higher interest rates. And, there’s also the persistent political backlash in many US states, as well as an evolving regulatory backdrop that has the potential to expose greenwashing and further hurt valuations.
Chat Reynders, who’s been a sustainable investor for three decades, calls the downturn in green assets a “watershed moment” for the industry. The hype that had surrounded going green to help address climate change has led some investors to take their eye off traditional financial metrics such as supply, demand and balance sheets, he said.
“We’ll look back and say this was an era of extraordinary speculation,” said Reynders, who helps oversee about $3.5 billion as co-founder of Reynders, McVeigh Capital Management in Boston. “Whether there was a meme stock or a green stock, everyone was marketing and selling extremely hard.”
Though MLIV Pulse respondents are broadly united in their bleak view of green stocks in the near term, the picture is different when the time horizon is extended. Most respondents expect they’ll need to shield portfolios from climate risk in the coming years.
Garvin Jabusch of Green Alpha Advisors in Louisville, Colorado, said the current selloff represents “a temporary pivot of capital away from renewables.” Brent Newcomb, president of Ecofin, which manages about $2 billion out of London and Kansas City, said he sees the market downturn as a buying opportunity and he’s adding to his positions in utility stocks.
And Bill Green of Climate Adaptive Infrastructure from Mill Valley, California, said it’s “a red herring” to look at the value of publicly traded solar or wind stocks and conclude that the energy transition has stalled.
“Public markets are notoriously fickle and have, in our view, overreacted to rising interest rates and supply chain challenges,” he said.
In the MLIV Pulse survey, 38% of respondents said miners of critical minerals ranked as the best investment option among climate-related offerings. But timing the upturn is proving hard.
Investors targeting environmental, social and governance goals had hoped this year would produce a rally thanks to historic levels of support in the form of packages such as the US Inflation Reduction Act. Instead, decades-high inflation and soaring interest rates ended up hammering a lot of traditional ESG stocks, with wind and solar standing out as some of the biggest losers.
A lot of clean energy companies are capital intensive, which makes them more vulnerable to higher borrowing costs than oil and gas companies with well-established rigs and platforms. To make matters worse, wind and solar producers have been hit by project delays exacerbated by supply-chain bottlenecks, derailing plans and increasing costs.
The next green asset class expected to see a decline is EVs, as battery-powered cars remain too costly for many households struggling with the long-term fallout of inflation. Tesla shares soared almost 140% this year through a July peak, but have since dropped about 20%.
Two years ago, Tesla was valued at $1.2 trillion, briefly making it the fifth-largest company on the S&P 500. Its market value has since fallen below $800 billion, ranking it the eighth largest in the benchmark index. Almost 50% of MLIV Pulse respondents expect it to drop out of the top 10 next year. Tesla investors are also figuring out how to respond to a chief executive who regularly shocks markets with highly controversial social media outbursts.
Yet the pace of climate change is forcing an inevitable pivot toward greener technologies, necessitating more investment.
“Next year is an important one for the implementation and renewal of decarbonization targets, as Paris Accord decarbonization efforts require additional, front-loaded, net investments,” according to Barclays Plc analysts led by Maggie O’Neal. “With 2023 appearing likely to be the warmest year on record, and 2024 potentially being similarly hot, adaptation and decarbonization will remain in focus.”
Against that backdrop, two-thirds of MLIV Pulse respondents expect climate change to affect portfolio values over the next three years. That echoes previous, similar surveys, with a Bloomberg Intelligence poll published earlier this month finding that 89% of investors acknowledge that ESG metrics are here to stay. And a poll of mostly US-based Bloomberg terminal users released in August found that about two-thirds said ESG is too important to ignore, even though they dislike the label.
O’Neal at Barclays also notes that the political backdrop remains key.
“Half of the world’s population will vote in elections in 2024,” she said. “As public policy drives many of the factors making ESG material to investors today, the outcomes of these elections matter.”
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>>> The world’s first certified passenger-carrying air taxi takes flight
Is this the future of urban transportation?
Fox News
By Kurt Knutsson
October 28, 2023
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/worlds-first-certified-passenger-carrying-air-taxi-takes-flight
Imagine flying over the city in a pilotless, electric-powered aircraft that can take you from point A to point B in minutes without a pilot onboard. Sounds like science fiction, right? Well, not anymore.
China-based Ehang has become the world’s first company to receive airworthiness certification for its fully autonomous, passenger-carrying air taxis.
What are electric air taxis?
Ehang’s EH216-S air taxis are electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft that can carry up to two passengers or 600 pounds of cargo. They are powered by 16 electric rotors and can fly at speeds of up to 80 mph and distances of up to 18 miles.
How do electric air taxis operate without pilots?
The air taxis are controlled by a centralized command and control center that monitors the flight status, routes and weather conditions.
Passengers can simply select their destination on a touchscreen inside the cabin and enjoy the ride without worrying about piloting the aircraft.
The air taxis do not require traditional infrastructure such as airports or runways. They can take off and land vertically from any flat surface, such as a rooftop, parking lot, or park.
The air taxis use electric power to reduce environmental harm caused by emissions. They can be fully charged in two hours and have low noise levels.
The EH216-S vehicles have multiple redundancies in their systems, such as backup batteries, rotors, and communication links.
They also have emergency landing systems and parachutes in case of any malfunction.
How did these China-based electric air taxis get the approval to fly?
Since 2014, over 40,000 test flights have been conducted in various locations around the world. In January 2021, Ehang applied for a type certificate from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), which is the official recognition of the airworthiness of an aircraft.
The CAAC evaluated Ehang’s air taxis for over 500 parameters, such as structural strength, software simulation, flight performance and electromagnetic compatibility. The process took more than 1,000 days and involved extensive laboratory, ground and flight tests.
On October 15, 2023, Ehang announced that it had received certification from the CAAC, making it the first company in the world to obtain such a certification for passenger-carrying eVTOL aircraft. This means that Ehang can now start commercial operations of its air taxis in China. As Ehang’s founder-chair and CEO Huazhi Hu said, "Embracing the certification as our springboard, we will launch commercial operations of the EH216-S air taxis, prioritizing safety above all."
What are the potential applications of electric air taxis?
Ehang's air taxis have a wide range of potential applications for urban air mobility (UAM), which uses aerial vehicles to provide transportation services in urban areas.
They can help you avoid traffic jams and save time on your commute. They can also take you to places that are hard to reach by car or public transportation. Whether you need to go to a business meeting, a tourist attraction or a hospital, Ehang's air taxis can get you there quickly and conveniently. Ehang's air taxis can also offer you a new perspective of the city with views of the skyline, landmarks and nature, all from above.
Beyond just transporting people, these aircraft can be used for delivering goods, such as packages, medical supplies or food. They can also be used for emergency situations, such as natural disasters or accidents. In those situations where time is of the essence, these vehicles could transport much-needed medical personnel or equipment to the scene quickly and safely.
What are the challenges for pilotless air taxis?
Ehang’s air taxis are a groundbreaking innovation that could revolutionize the future of transportation. However, they also face some challenges in terms of regulation, technology, market demand and social acceptance.
Ehang’s air taxis need to comply with the laws and regulations of different countries and regions where they might operate. They also need to coordinate with other aircraft that use the same airspace. Ehang has been working closely with regulators to establish standards and policies for UAM.
One big hurdle is working to gain social acceptance and trust from the public. The manufacturer needs to educate and inform us about the benefits and risks of UAM. It also needs to address the potential issues and concerns of noise, privacy and environmental impact. For its part, Ehang has been conducting public demonstrations and campaigns to raise awareness and confidence in UAM.
Kurt's key takeaways
Ehang’s air taxis are a pioneering achievement that could transform how we travel in cities across this country. By receiving the first industry approval for fully autonomous, passenger-carrying air taxis, Ehang has opened up new possibilities and opportunities for UAM. But with all new technology comes challenges, and those are what Ehang needs to tackle to be successful moving forward.
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>>> Joby Delivers First eVTOL Aircraft to Edwards Air Force Base Ahead of Schedule
Business Wire
September 25, 2023
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/joby-delivers-first-evtol-aircraft-120000560.html
Joby Aircraft Becomes First Electric Air Taxi Delivered to the U.S. Air Force
Believed to be the First Electric Air Taxi Delivered in the U.S.
Aircraft will be Used to Demonstrate Logistics Missions on Base, Flown by U.S. Air Force Pilots
Delivery is Part of Joby’s $131 Million Contract with the DOD
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. & EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif., September 25, 2023--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Joby Aviation, Inc. (NYSE:JOBY), a company developing electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for commercial passenger service, today announced it has delivered its first aircraft to Edwards Air Force Base approximately six months ahead of the expected 2024 delivery date. On-base operations with Joby aircraft will be used to demonstrate a range of logistics missions, including cargo and passenger transportation, and will be operated by both Joby and U.S. Air Force personnel. In partnership with the U.S. Air Force, NASA will also use the aircraft for research focused on how these aircraft could fit into the national airspace, benefiting the entire air taxi industry.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230925596439/en/
Joby’s aircraft, which has already begun flying at Edwards AFB, is the first electric air taxi to be stationed on a U.S. military base and is believed to be the first delivery of an electric air taxi in the U.S., as part of Joby’s $131 million AFWERX Agility Prime contract with the U.S. Air Force. Joby’s current and previously completed work with the Department of Defense represents a total potential contract value of $163 million, the largest in the industry.
The Agility Prime contract includes the provisioning of up to nine aircraft to the U.S. Air Force and other federal agencies, reinforcing the U.S. government’s continued leadership in developing and adopting eVTOL technology, and ushering in a new era of electric aviation. A second aircraft is planned to be delivered to Edwards in early 2024.
The aircraft, which was the first built on Joby’s Pilot Production Line in Marina, CA, will be stationed at Edwards Air Force Base for at least the next year, with charging and ground support equipment provided on-base by Joby in a facility purpose-built by the Air Force for joint flight test operations. The U.S. Air Force and Joby will conduct joint flight testing and operations to demonstrate the aircraft’s capabilities in realistic mission settings. On-base operations will also include the training of Air Force pilots and aircraft maintenance crews, which will provide the DOD with valuable insight into the performance of eVTOL aircraft and will give Joby on-the-ground operational and training experience as the company prepares for the launch of commercial passenger service in 2025.
"We’re proud to join the ranks of revolutionary aircraft that first demonstrated their capabilities at Edwards Air Force Base, including the first American jet fighter, the first supersonic aircraft, and many others that have pushed the boundaries of aviation technology," said JoeBen Bevirt, Founder and CEO of Joby.
"The longstanding support of the DOD and NASA has been critical to the rapid development of electric aviation and eVTOL aircraft, and demonstrates how successful public-private partnerships can bring new technology to life at speed. Their work will have profound implications for continued American leadership in both commercial and defense aerospace technology," he added.
Joby’s partnership with the DOD dates back to its 2016 engagement with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), which granted the company early funding as well as access to test ranges and expertise that have aided its aircraft development program.
"Agility Prime’s stated objective in 2020 was to work towards an operational capability for transformative vertical lift in the DoD by 2023. The arrival of Joby’s aircraft at Edwards AFB is an important step towards achieving this objective," said Col Elliott Leigh, AFWERX director and Chief Commercialization Officer for the Department of the Air Force.
"The delivery of this first eVTOL aircraft is the start of a new chapter in Edwards’ rich aerospace history," notes Maj Phillip Woodhull, director, Emerging Technologies Integrated Test Force. "This partners private industry with the 412th Test Wing’s world-renowned test management execution. We are excited to agilely test, experiment with, and evaluate this new technology for potential future national defense applications."
In partnership with the U.S. Air Force’s AFWERX program, NASA will also be supporting this testing at Edwards Air Force Base with NASA’s pilots, researchers, and equipment as part of their commitment to advancing the Advanced Air Mobility industry as a whole, for the benefit of all. NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center is located on Edwards Air Force Base, and has a long history of supporting important technological milestones in aviation and space – supersonic and hypersonic flight, digital fly-by-wire control systems, and the space shuttles.
"NASA’s participation in the Joby and AFWERX project will provide our researchers with hands-on experience with a representative eVTOL vehicle, concentrated on how these types of aircraft could fit into the national airspace for everyday use, that will inform NASA’s effort in supporting the entire eVTOL industry," said NASA research pilot Wayne Ringelberg. "The research will include a focus on handling qualities evaluation tools, autonomy, and airspace integration, which is all needed research to push the industry forward."
Over the past year, the U.S. Air Force and Marines have made multiple visits to Joby’s manufacturing and flight test facilities in Marina, CA. Four U.S. Air Force pilots completed full remotely-piloted transition flights of the Joby aircraft in April, and two groups of Marines visited in May to conduct mission analysis regarding potential logistics and medical applications of the aircraft.
With a range of up to 100 miles plus energy reserves and a top speed of 200 mph, the Joby aircraft is capable of transporting a pilot and four passengers quickly and quietly with zero operating emissions.
The delivery will be celebrated at an event held this morning at 10:00am PT at Edwards Air Force Base. The event can be watched live via this link:
>>> Battery Boom: $154B invested, 166K jobs planned in US as EV rollout intensifies
Spending from the IRA, Bipartisan Infrastructure Act has fueled EV investments
Yahoo Finance
by Pras Subramanian
September 6, 2023
New data shows the massive impact the electric vehicle buildout is already making on manufacturing and infrastructure spending in America — so far a big win for the Biden administration.
Catalyzed by legislation like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), data from the BlueGreen Alliance Foundation — a progressive nonprofit organization that promotes clean energy investment and solutions to environmental issues — found that EV investment in factories and battery facilities totaled $154 billion since 2010, across 319 facilities. That will add up to 188,000 new jobs when all spending is complete.
The vast majority of this spending came after 2021, when the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act was signed, and in 2022 and 2023 following passage of the IRA. Of the $154 billion of spending announced, $124 billion has come since the start of 2021.
“The EV transition is impacting every aspect of the economy, including the manufacturing of EVs and the EV supply chain,” Tom Taylor, Atlas Public Policy senior policy analyst, said in a statement. Atlas Public Policy co-sponsored the data initiative, dubbed the EV Jobs Hub, with the BlueGreen Alliance Foundation. “The [data] seeks to cut through the noise from large announcements and organize it in a more digestible way,” Taylor said.
Drilling deeper into the data, the organization finds that South Korean electronics and battery giant LG plans to spend the most here in the US ($17.2B), followed by Tesla (TSLA) ($15.7B), GM (GM) ($15.5B), Ford (F) ($11.9B), and SK Innovation ($10.3B), another South Korean company focused on batteries. In terms of industry, battery manufacturing counts for 65% of all spending, the study finds.
The data isn't all rosy, however, as on the labor front the companies that spend the most don’t always hire the most. As seen in EV battery and powertrain manufacturing, fewer workers are needed to do the job. This has led to deep concern on the part of the United Auto Workers (UAW) — currently negotiating with the Big Three (Ford, GM, and Stellantis) on a new labor deal — with job protection in the form of higher wages and ending of tiered employment on the top of the union’s wish list as the EV transition rolls out across North America.
“The UAW supports and is ready for the transition to a clean auto industry. But the EV transition must be a just transition that ensures auto workers have a place in the new economy,” UAW president Shawn Fain said in a statement in late August.
Of the companies hiring the most in the EV space since 2010, Tesla leads the pack with 28,500 announced hires, followed by Ford (13,800), Rivian (RIVN) (13,700), LG (11,300), and Hyundai (11,100). Only Ford and LG (at joint GM/LG Ultium battery plants) use unionized labor.
Indeed, of the facilities built since 2010, only 25% are represented by unionized labor, which is a concern for the White House and Democratic legislators.
The stakes couldn’t be higher for the automakers as well as politicians looking to tout the EV buildout. GM’s head of manufacturing said in a video statement on Tuesday that UAW demands would threaten the automaker’s “manufacturing momentum.” It would also threaten one of the bigger manufacturing wins the US has seen in the last 50 years.
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EVTOL Taxi service companies - ACHR, JOBY -
>>> Archer Aviation Inc. (ACHR), an urban air mobility company, engages in designs, develops, manufactures, and operates electric vertical takeoff and landing aircrafts to carry passengers. The company was formerly known as Atlas Crest Investment Corp. and changed its name to Archer Aviation Inc. Archer Aviation Inc. was incorporated in 2018 and is headquartered in San Jose, California. <<<
>>> Joby Aviation, Inc. (JOBY), a vertically integrated air mobility company, engages in building an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft optimized to deliver air transportation as a service. The company intends to build an aerial ridesharing service, as well as developing an application-based platform that will enable consumers to book rides. Joby Aviation, Inc. was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in Santa Cruz, California.
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https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ACHR/profile?p=ACHR
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>>> Iteris, Inc. (ITI) provides intelligent transportation systems technology solutions in North America, Europe, South America, and Asia. The company offers smart mobility infrastructure solutions include traveler information systems, transportation performance measurement software, traffic analytics software, transportation operations software, transportation-related data sets, advanced sensing devices, managed services, traffic engineering services, and mobility consulting services. Its products include ClearGuide, ClearRoute, Commercial Vehicle Operations, BlueArgus, TrafficCarma, Vantage Apex, Vantage Fusion, Vantage Next, VantagePegasus, VantageRadius, Vantage Vector, Velocity, SmartCycle, SmartCycle Bike Indicator, SmartSpan, VersiCam, PedTrax, and P-Series products.
The company sells original equipment manufacturer products for the traffic intersection markets, such as traffic signal controllers and traffic signal equipment cabinets. In addition, it offers traffic management centers design, staffing, and operations services; traffic engineering and mobility consulting services include planning, design, development, and implementation of software and hardware-based ITS systems that integrate sensors, video surveillance, computers, and advanced communications equipment; distributes real-time information about traffic conditions; and surface transportation infrastructure systems implementation, and operation and management.
Further, the company provides travel demand forecasting and systems engineering, and identify mitigation measures to reduce traffic congestion; ClearMobility platform; and ClearMobility Cloud that enables mobility data management engine, application programming interface framework, and microservices ecosystem. It serves public transportation agencies, municipalities, commercial entities, government agencies, and other transportation infrastructure providers. Iteris, Inc. was founded in 1969 and is headquartered in Austin, Texas.
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>>> Seba says EV longevity and autonomy will cause global new car sales to plunge 75%
The Driven
MAY 10, 2023
by DANIEL BLEAKLEY
https://thedriven.io/2023/05/10/seba-says-ev-longevity-and-autonomy-will-cause-global-new-car-sales-to-plunge-75/
The market share of electric vehicles will hit 50 per cent in China this year, and global new car sales could plunge by 75 per cent by 2030: These are just two of the many fascinating new forecasts by technology researcher and futurist Tony Seba in an interview in the latest episode of The Driven podcast.
Seba, cofounder of RethinkX, is known globally for his research on technology “S-curves” which illustrate how throughout history, technology uptake seems slow to begin with, but then accelerates dramatically.
Seba’s work at RethinkX and in the public arena focuses on technology disruption and technology convergence that leads to “phase changes” in the world’s energy, transport, information and food systems.
In 2014, Seba predicted that battery costs would drop from around $500 per kWh to just $100 per kWh by 2023. A prediction that has been proven to be scarily accurate. He was also one of the first to predict the sheer scale of the solar revolution.
What’s happening in China and how does it compare to other regions?
Seba recently returned from the Shanghai auto show and The Driven asked him how the Shanghai show compared to the LA auto show in December last year.
On the LA auto show Seba said: “Frankly it was pathetic. There were a handful of electric vehicles. Most of them are expensive. Many of them were not even for sale. I just came back from Shanghai. And what I saw was amazing. I mean, just the sheer quality for the cost of the EVs that Chinese automakers are producing is just stunning.
“And also there are so many automakers in China that are achieving scale. This year EVs may well achieve 40 to 50%.
“What you’re gonna see over the next few years is most foreign automakers being pushed out, not Tesla, but most other automakers pushed out of the Chinese markets just because of economic reasons, just because they don’t have products at the right cost and capability for the Chinese markets.”
Technology convergences enabling the EV revolution
The Driven asked Seba what are the main technology convergences that are driving the electric vehicle transformation.
“If you look at three technologies or sets of technologies. One is autonomous, two is electric and three is on-demand transportation,” he said.
“So we’re seeing the on-demand transportation now, Uber, Didi, Lyft and so on, it’s been happening for more Then 10 years.
“In parallel to that, we’re seeing the electric vehicle disruption.”
Seba says that most analysts and policymakers see the EV disruption as a “clean caterpillar” rather than a new butterfly. It’s seen as a “one is to one” transition where every ICE vehicle is simply replaced with an EV.
Seba says this isn’t how disruption happens.
“The day that we get level four, autonomous technology ready and approved by regulators, when that converges with on-demand, and electric transportation we will get what we call transportation as a service (TAAS).”
“Some call it Robo taxi. Essentially, when that happens the cost per mile of transportation is going to drop by anywhere from 10 to 20 times.”
“So even if gasoline automakers gave away their cars, that’s still gonna be a lot more expensive than the cost of transport as a service.”
“So for most people who can barely pay their bills, it won’t make any sense to own a car,” said Seba.
“Do I spend $50,000 over the next five years to own a car? Or do I pay $100 a month for a subscription to transportation as a service?”
Global annual auto sales to drop by 75% by 2030
Seba says that electric vehicles will do around 500,000 miles (800,000 km) compared to ICE vehicles that get around 140,000 miles (225,000 km) over their lifetime.
This means that EVs will last 4-5 times longer meaning the global car market will likely drop by 75% because people won’t need to replace cars as often.
“People are going to be buying vehicles a lot less often. So with that, essentially cut the global vehicle market by a factor of four or five.”
“And soon enough you’re gonna see million mile EVs. And what that means is that over 10 years you’re going to need just one EV for 10 petrol cars,”
“Either way, it’s pretty much over for internal combustion engine.”
Moving transport energy from centralised oil to decentralised renewables
The world’s entire transport energy system is currently highly centralised with just a handful of multinational oil companies controlling the global transport energy supply chain. The convergence of renewable energy with electric vehicles will have a decentralising effect.
The Driven asked Seba what effect he thinks this “phase shift” will have on global geopolitics.
“Well, everything is going to change,”
“It’s gonna happen the exact opposite that we saw in the early 20th century.
“In the 20th century we saw increased centralisation. So the car essentially meant that we needed petroleum which is only available in a few places around the world. The car itself needed scale economies, oil, coal, gas, industrial everything. They were all based on scarce resources that are not available everywhere,”
“So everything in the 20th century changed. War changed, geopolitics changed because of the car.
“What we’re going to see starting around the 2030s is the total opposite.
“The five foundational sectors of the economy [energy, transport, food, information and materials] are going to be based on super abundant, really low cost, localised distributed production,” said Seba.
“In energy production we’re going to see essentially solar wind and batteries. Again solar wind and battery disruption is not going to be a clean version of today’s system. It’s not a cleaner caterpillar, it’s going to be dramatically different. It’s going to be super local and it’s going to have massively different properties.”
“All of these technologies are based on the idea that we’re going to have global design and development and local production. Each one of these sectors essentially is trending to a near zero cost distributed localised negative carbon production system.”
“All of them are going through phase change disruptions and transformation, at the same time, in the 2020s. And this is why we are seeing the in 2020s such dysfunction. Such instability around the world.”
You can listen to the full interview with Tony Seba on the latest episode of The Driven Podcast
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>>> How 3D printing could revolutionize auto manufacturing
Marketplace
by Kai Ryssdal and Maria Hollenhorst
Mar 27, 2023
https://www.marketplace.org/2023/03/27/how-3d-printing-could-revolutionize-auto-manufacturing/
In an industrial office park south of Los Angeles, an American automaker is churning out sports cars in an attempt to transform manufacturing as we know it.
“It’s literally like saying in the typewriter era, ‘I’m about to create a desktop system,’” said Kevin Czinger, founder and CEO of Czinger Vehicles and Divergent Technologies.
Czinger’s system is making cars and car parts. They’re designed using artificial intelligence, constructed with specialized 3D printers and assembled by a team of robots.
“What I’m trying to do is create a machine that takes manufacturing, which is still stuck in 100-year-old-plus technologies, into the digital age,” Czinger told Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal on a tour of his companies’ production facility in Torrance, California. “3D printing is one piece of an overall system.”
The Divergent Blade, which was designed by Czinger, made headlines for featuring a fully 3D-printed body and chassis when it was unveiled in 2015. Customer deliveries for Czinger’s latest offering, the 21C, are scheduled for later this year.
The 21C has a $2 million base price, and as Czinger was quick to point out, set records at both WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca and the Circuit of the Americas in 2021.
“What it showed is with these tools, a small American team of inventors and designers could, within a two-year period of time, create a car that outperforms every existing car company’s vehicle,” he said.
But the 21C is only one step in Czinger’s ambitious plan to digitize manufacturing.
“If you wanted to leap ahead 20 years, you know what you want to have?” he asked Ryssdal rhetorically. “You want to have a globe filled with localized manufacturing where there’s no barrier to entry to people that want to create useful products.”
The term “localized manufacturing” is a key component of Czinger’s thesis. While colossal factories like the Ford Motor Co.’s River Rouge complex in Michigan or Foxconn’s compound in China known as “iPhone City” rely on economies of scale to cover their startup costs, Czinger argues that flexible manufacturing facilities that can adapt to changing demand and design specifications are the way of the future.
“You don’t have to have hundreds of printing presses printing different books,” said Czinger, returning to his desktop computer system analogy. “You can send data and it prints the Bible, you send data and it prints the ‘Brothers Karamazov’ … that’s the fundamental difference.”
That flexibility, he said, can help localized factories remain permanent fixtures of their communities.
As an example, he showed Ryssdal a hexagonal-shaped assembly system at the center of the production facility.
“This has assembled a sports car, luxury SUV parts, other brands’ sports car and a drone for General Atomics back-to-back-to-back with zero switchover time,” he said. “And if you changed all of those designs and rolled them back in, it would immediately start to assemble them again.”
“Let me ask you the labor force question,” said Ryssdal, mentioning Czinger’s older brothers, who worked as car dealership mechanics in Cleaveland while he was coming of age. “Could they get a job here working for their little brother?”
“Absolutely,” Czinger responded. “When people asked me the question, ‘Will this wipe out auto factory jobs?’ which is the question you’re really asking, [I say,] ‘If you go to a modern auto factory, you see half-mile-long lines where … there are no workers.’” At today’s factories, robots doing specialized tasks, like welding one piece of sheet metal to another, have already taken the place of many workers.
Czinger insists that the majority of jobs that do still exist in modern auto factories — general assembly jobs — would not be impacted by the type of transformation he envisions.
“We replace the cost and expense of building those leviathan factories, with all of their capital risk … with something that’s much more flexible,” he said. “So it actually makes any automotive factory in the West stronger and more competitive, without taking away any general assembly jobs.”
This system is still relatively new. Czinger’s companies are in the midst of building 80 Czinger 21Cs, while making parts for other brands such as Aston Martin and continuing to refine their technology.
As they ramp up production, Czinger said financing remains one of his biggest headaches. “Our financial system and venture capital are designed to finance quick cash-generation software applications,” he said. “I’m doing something that literally required hundreds of fundamental inventions just to make it work.”
As the credit markets tighten in the wider economy, Czinger said he’s grateful for a recent investment from Hexagon AB, a Swedish company.
“That gives us a very good-feeling capital buffer, knock on wood, some years out,” he said.
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>>> The First ‘Flying Car’ Was Just Approved by the FAA
Robb Report
by Rachel Cormack
June 29, 2023
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/bonkers-flying-car-just-got-163000542.html
Alef’s bonkers flying car has been officially cleared for takeoff.
The retro-futuristic hybrid, which can be driven on the road like a regular car or flown like a VTOL aircraft, was awarded a Special Airworthiness Certification from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that enables it to hit the skies under experimental status. The California company says it is the first time a vehicle of this nature has received government certification.
“We’re excited to receive this certification from the FAA,” Alef CEO Jim Dukhovny said in a statement. “It allows us to move closer to bringing people an environmentally friendly and faster commute, saving individuals and companies hours each week.”
Alef Aeronautics Model A
The Model A sports gull-wing doors and covered wheel wells.
Of course, there are a few caveats. First, the FAA told Flying that it issued the certificate for a precursor to the production model (the Armada Model Zero, not the Model A). That means the Model A, which is currently on pre-sale, will also need to be cleared to fly by the FAA. It will also need to meet the safety standards of the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
It’s also worthwhile pointing out that approval only allows the aircraft to be used for experimental purposes, such as exhibition, research, and development. It’s not like the average Joe can jump in the car for a test drive; it will be at least a couple of years before that happens. The company will have to wait for the FAA to certify eVTOLs for commercial use before it can sell, fly, or drive the Model A.
Alef Aeronautics Model A
The Model A’s cockpit tilts 90 degrees and the perforated chassis becomes the wings.
The FAA has also awarded approvals to at least two similar models, including Terrafugia’s Transition and Samson Sky’s Switchblade. Neither design is fully electric like the Model A, though. The two fixed-wing crafts can only come and go from airports, too, whereas the Model A can execute vertical takeoff and landings in a variety of locations. On top of that, the fully electric aircraft will have a range of approximately 200 miles on the road and 110 miles in the air. It will have a top speed of about 35 mph and will be able to seat two passengers.
Alef says it has received “strong pre-orders” from individuals and companies for the $300,000 Model A. The company expects the first deliveries will happen in the fourth quarter of 2025.
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>>> Threatened by shortages, electric car makers race for supplies of lithium for batteries
AP
by JOE McDONALD
June 27, 2023
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/threatened-shortages-electric-car-makers-035822815.html
BEIJING (AP) — Threatened by possible shortages of lithium for electric car batteries, automakers are racing to lock in supplies of the once-obscure “white gold” in a politically and environmentally fraught competition from China to Nevada to Chile.
General Motors Co. and the parent company of China’s BYD Auto Ltd. went straight to the source and bought stakes in lithium miners, a rare step in an industry that relies on outside vendors for copper and other raw materials. Others are investing in lithium refining or ventures to recycle the silvery-white metal from used batteries.
A shortfall in lithium supplies would be an obstacle for government and industry plans to ramp up sales to tens of millions of electric vehicles a year. It is fueling political conflict over resources and complaints about the environmental cost of extracting them.
"We already have that risk” of not being able to get enough, said GM's chief financial officer, Paul A. Jacobson, at a Deutsche Bank conference in mid-June.
“We’ve got to have partnerships with people that can get us the lithium in the form that we need," Jacobson said.
Ford Motor Co. has signed contracts stretching up to 11 years into the future with lithium suppliers on two continents. Volkswagen AG and Honda Motor Co. are trying to reduce their need for freshly mined ore by forming recycling ventures.
Global lithium output is on track to triple this decade, but sales of electric SUVs, sports cars and sedans that rose 55% last year threaten to outrun that. Each battery requires about eight kilograms (17 pounds) of lithium, plus cobalt, nickel and other metals.
“There will be a shortage of EV battery supplies,” said Joshua Cobb, senior auto analyst for BMI.
Adding to uncertainty, lithium has emerged as another conflict in strained U.S.-Chinese relations.
Beijing, Washington and other governments see metal supplies for electric vehicles as a strategic issue and are tightening controls on access. Canada ordered three Chinese companies last year to sell lithium mining assets on security grounds.
Other governments including Indonesia, Chile and Zimbabwe are trying to maximize their return on deposits of lithium, cobalt and nickel by requiring miners to invest in refining and processing before they can export.
GM is buying direct access to lithium by investing $650 million in the Canadian developer of a Nevada mine that is the biggest U.S. source. In return, GM says it will get enough for 1 million vehicles a year.
Conservationists and American Indians are asking a federal court to block development of the Nevada mine, which the Biden administration has embraced as part of its clean energy agenda. Opponents say it might poison water supplies and soil and pollute nesting grounds for birds.
“Securing metals must not come at a sacrifice to the environment,” said a U.S. group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a report last year.
BYD Auto’s parent company, battery maker BYD Co., has announced more than $5 billion in investments in lithium mining and refining over the past 18 months.
Most are in China, but BYD also is promising to spend $290 million on a processing facility in Chile, one of the biggest lithium producers. In exchange, BYD is allowed to buy lithium from Chilean miners at a discount.
At home, BYD announced last year it would invest 28.5 billion yuan ($4.2 billion) in a venture to produce 100,000 tons of lithium carbonate a year in the eastern city of Yichun.
Another Chinese automaker, NIO Inc., bought 12% of Australian lithium miner Greenwing Resources Ltd. last year for 12 million Australian dollars ($8.1 million).
Despite rising output, the industry may face shortages of lithium and cobalt as early as 2025 if enough isn’t invested in production, according to Leonardo Paoli and Timur Gul of the International Energy Agency.
“Supply side bottlenecks are becoming a real challenge," said Paoli and Gul in a report last year.
Automakers might be putting in their own money to reassure “notoriously risk-averse” miners, according to Alastair Bedwell of GlobalData. He said miners are reluctant to “go all out” on lithium until they are sure the industry won't switch to batteries made with other metals.
Even if they do, developing lithium sources is a yearslong process.
Mines that came online in 2010-19 took on average more than 16 years from discovery to the start of production, according to Paoli and Gul of the IEA.
“These long lead times raise questions about the ability of supply to ramp up,” they wrote.
Investment by automakers might “help to remove some of their partners’ risk and ultimately create more production,” Bedwell said in an email.
Worldwide lithium resources are estimated at 80 million tons by the U.S. Geological Survey.
Bolivia’s are the biggest at 21 millions tons, followed by Australia with 17 million and Chile with 9 million. China has 4.5 million tons of known reserves and the United States has 1 million.
Forecasts of annual global production range as high as 1.5 million tons by 2030. But demand, if EV sales keep rising at double-digit annual rates, is forecast to increase to up to 3 million tons.
Sales of battery-powered and gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles took off in 2021, more than doubling over the previous year to 6.8 million, according to EV Volumes, a research firm. Last year's sales rose to 10.5 million.
China accounted for 60% of last year's sales, two-thirds of production and three-quarters of battery manufacturing.
Ford plans to sell 2 million EVs a year by 2026. GM, with 2022 sales of 3.6 million cars, has plans for 30 electric models and North American production capacity of 1 million two years from now in 2025.
Toyota Motor Co.’s annual target is 3.5 million by 2030. VW, which sold 4.6 million cars worldwide last year, is aiming for 70% of sales in Europe and 50% in China and the United States to be electric by 2030.
President Joe Biden last year announced an official goal for half of all new cars sold in the United State to be electric or other zero-emissions technology by 2030.
As sales rise, so does government unease, especially in Washington and Beijing, about access to lithium and other minerals and the potential for strategic competition.
Volkswagen’s battery unit, PowerCo, signed an agreement with Canada last August to develop suppliers of “critical raw materials” including lithium, cobalt and nickel.
The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, in a statement welcomed cooperation with “close friends” on “raw material security.”
Last year, Canada imposed limits on foreign involvement in production of lithium and other “critical minerals” for batteries and other high-tech products.
China’s government has accused the United States, Canada, Japan and other governments of misusing phony security concerns to hurt Chinese competitors in electric cars, smartphones, clean energy and other emerging technologies.
Other governments welcome Chinese investment.
China’s biggest lithium producer, Ganfeng Lithium Co., bought Argentina’s Lithea Inc. last year for $962 million. In 2021, Ganfeng bought Mexico’s Bacanora Lithium for $391 million. It is developing a project in the northern region of Sonora with planned annual output of 35,000 tons.
China's Tianqi Lithium Inc. owns 23.8% of Chile's dominant producer, Sociedad Quimicay Minera, or SQM.
About two-thirds of the world’s lithium comes from mines. That involves crushing rock and using acids to extract metals. It leaves toxic heaps of chemical-laced tailings.
The rest is extracted from salt lakes or from salt flats called salars in Chile and Bolivia. That can require vast evaporation ponds.
The industry is working on technology to extract lithium from hot springs, lakes and clay deposits with less environmental impact.
VW has a five-year supply contract with Vulcan Energy Resources Ltd., which plans to produce lithium hydroxide from geothermal brine in Germany’s Rhine Valley.
Vulcan says its process uses no fossil fuels. That is a response to complaints EVs do little to reduce overall carbon emissions because energy for their manufacturing and charging usually comes from coal, gas and oil.
As they ramp up supplies, automakers face another bottleneck: Lack of refining capacity to purify raw lithium into battery material.
Tesla Inc. broke ground in Texas last month for a lithium refinery that CEO Elon Musk should produce enough for 1 million vehicles per year by 2025.
“The choke point is much more on refining capacity than it is on mining,” said Musk in an April conference call with reporters.
Other manufacturers including BMW AG, which aims to make at least half its sales fully electric by 2030, are buying stakes in lithium refiners.
As for GM, “I don’t know” whether it will build its own refinery, Jacobson said.
“Where I can help fund some expansion in exchange for guaranteed supply, that’s a good thing,” he said. “We should be open to doing that.”
Smaller brands without their own lithium supply might be squeezed, according to Bedwell. He said they might be forced to pay more, which might threaten the existence of some.
“Certainly, mass-market players who don’t get their lithium strategy right will be at a disadvantage,” said Bedwell.
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>>> US unprepared in electric car fight against China, says Ford boss
The Telegraph
Howard Mustoe
June 19, 2023
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-unprepared-electric-car-fight-105515836.html
The US is unprepared in the battle to compete with China on electric cars, the boss of Ford has warned.
Bill Ford, chairman, said the Chinese electric car market had developed at a rapid pace and that the company was now taking “an all hands on deck” approach to prepare for a flood of foreign imports.
Mr Ford, who is the great grandson of the company’s founder Henry Ford, said: “They’re [China] not here but they’ll come here, we think, at some point, we need to be ready, and we’re getting ready.
“They developed very quickly, and they developed them in large scale. And now they’re exporting them.”
China is poised to overtake Germany as the biggest car exporter in the world with overseas shipments of cars made in China tripling since 2020 to reach more than 2.5 million last year.
Ford is investing $3.5bn (£2.7bn) in building a gigafactory battery plant in Michigan in a deal with Chinese firm CATL.
However, the deal is under scrutiny from Senator Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who says it risks making the US more reliant on China.
In common with the UK and European nations, the US is braced for an influx of Chinese-made cars.
Chinese-made electric cars are already available in the UK, made under the MG brand owned by SAIC. Another major Chinese manufacturer with an interest in exports is Geely, which owns Volvo, Lotus and has a stake in Aston Martin.
MGs have gained in popularity in part because they are cheaper than other EVs made by the likes of Tesla, and the firm has said it plans an expansion in sales in the UK. For instance, the MG ZS starts at £30,500, while the Tesla Model 3 starts at £38,800.
Chinese brands including BYD; Funky Cat, which is owned by the giant Great Wall Motor; and Chery; are all planning to bring their vehicles to the UK.
China has cheap labour, cheap raw materials such as steel and a vast headstart when it comes to building battery plants, with more than 100 built and 200 on the way, while Europe and the US each have fewer than a dozen.
As the biggest car market in the world, it is looking to export and capitalise on this advantage.
Their plans in the UK may be foiled if public charging is not expanded quickly and cheaply enough to tempt car buyers who don’t have access to home charging, however. Cars which cost more than their petrol equivalents combined with expensive electricity offer a poor deal.
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>>> Mobileye Global Inc. (MBLY) engages in the development and deployment of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving technologies and solutions worldwide. The company offers Driver Assist, which comprise ADAS and autonomous vehicle solutions that covers safety features, such as real-time detection of road users, geometry, semantics, and markings to provide safety alerts and emergency interventions; Cloud-Enhanced Driver Assist, a solution for drivers with interpretations of a scene in real-time; Mobileye SuperVision Lite, a navigation and assisted driving solution; and Mobileye SuperVision, an operational point-to-point assisted driving navigation solution on various road types and includes cloud-based enhancements, such as road experience management. It also provides Mobileye Chauffeur, a generation solution; and Mobileye Drive, a self-driving system comprising of radar and lidar subsystems. The company was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Jerusalem, Israel. Mobileye Global Inc. operates as a subsidiary of Intel Overseas Funding Corporation.
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>>> Toyota unveils sweeping plans for new battery tech, EV innovation
Reuters
By Daniel Leussink
June 13, 2023
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota-market-next-gen-battery-evs-2026-built-by-new-ev-unit-2023-06-13/
TOKYO, June 13 (Reuters) - Toyota (7203.T) will introduce high-performance, solid-state batteries and other technologies to improve the driving range and cut costs of future electric vehicles (EVs), the automaker said on Tuesday, a strategic pivot that sent its shares higher.
The Japanese giant's technology roadmap, covering aspects as varied as next-generation battery development and a radical redesign of factories, amounted to the automaker's fullest disclosure of its plan to compete in the fast-growing market for EVs where it has lagged rivals led by Tesla (TSLA.O).
The plan comes a day before an annual shareholders meeting where governance and strategy - including a slow pivot to battery EVs under former CEO Akio Toyoda - will be scrutinised.
Shares of the world's best-selling automaker jumped 5% on the day to 2,173 yen, the highest since August.
Toyota said it aims to launch next-generation lithium-ion batteries from 2026 offering longer ranges and quicker charging.
It also trumpeted a "technological breakthrough" that addresses durability problems in solid-state batteries and said it is developing means to mass produce those batteries, targeting commercialisation over 2027-2028.
Solid-state batteries can hold more energy than current liquid electrolyte batteries. Automakers and analysts expect them to speed transition to EVs by addressing a major consumer concern: range.
Still, such batteries are expensive and likely to remain so for years. Toyota will hedge with better-performing lithium iron phosphate batteries, a cheaper alternative to lithium-ion batteries that have spurred EV adoption in China, the world's largest vehicle market.
At the high end of the market, Toyota said it would produce an EV with a more efficient lithium-ion battery offering a range of 1,000 km (621 miles). By comparison, the long-range version of the lithium-ion-powered Tesla Model Y, the world's best-selling EV, can drive for about 530 km based on U.S. standards.
An EV powered by a solid-state battery would have a range of 1,200 km and charging time of just 10 minutes, Toyota said. By comparison, the Tesla Supercharger network - the largest of its kind - offers the equivalent of 321 km of charge in 15 minutes.
Toyota did not detail expected costs or required investment for the plans.
Engineers at the automaker have been considering a reboot of its EV strategy since last year to better compete.
The roadmap detailed on Tuesday showed that under new CEO Koji Sato, Toyota has adopted much of the revamp that engineers and planners have been developing as options for months.
That includes use of electric-axle and other technology from suppliers such as Aisin (7259.T) and Denso (6902.T).
"What we want to achieve is to change the future with BEVs," Takero Kato, president of new Toyota EV unit BEV Factory, said in a video posted on the automaker's YouTube channel on Tuesday.
NEW ASSEMBLY TECHNOLOGY
Toyota said it was developing a dedicated EV platform to reduce the cost of new models and a heavily automated assembly line that would do away with the conveyor belt system that has defined auto production since Henry Ford over 100 years ago.
In Toyota's "self-propelling" assembly line, cars under production would drive themselves through the process.
It also said it would use Giga casting to cut production costs, adopting an innovation pioneered by Tesla using massive, aluminium casting machines to reduce vehicle complexity.
Koji Endo, senior analyst at SBI Securities, said he was surprised by Toyota's move to counter Tesla's lead in production efficiency. "I'm not sure yet Toyota can push back in a counter offensive, but it's getting ready to try," he said.
Toyota's BEV Factory, established in May, aims to produce about 1.7 million vehicles by 2030, Kato said - about half of the 3.5 million EVs Toyota aims to sell annually by that year.
In April, the automaker sold 8,584 EVs worldwide, including under its Lexus brand, accounting for more than 1% of its global sales in a single month for the first time.
Toyota sold almost 10.5 million vehicles in 2022, and has a market value of about $254 billion. By contrast, Tesla sold one-eighth as many vehicles yet is valued at around $791 billion, a premium reflecting investor belief in Tesla's growth potential.
Toyota has long said it wants to offer consumers a choice of new-energy vehicles, including petrol-electric hybrids and hydrogen fuel cells as well as battery EVs, as part of the industry's transition from petrol-powered vehicles.
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>>> Targeting Toyota for Its Electric-Vehicle Heresy
Public pensions and proxy advisers try to punish the company using corporate governance as a pretext.
Wall Street Journal
By The Editorial Board
June 4, 2023
https://www.wsj.com/articles/targeting-toyota-for-its-electric-vehicle-heresy-akio-toyoda-hybrids-ev-climate-change-b5f67d6c?mod=hp_opin_pos_1
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172054855
It wasn’t long ago that Toyota’s hybrid vehicles were all the rage with the climate-change left. Now progressive investors and government pension funds are targeting the Prius manufacturer in a proxy campaign because it has questioned the climate lobby’s electric-vehicle orthodoxy.
Toyota discloses its CO2 emissions and has pledged to make all its vehicles carbon neutral by 2050. This should please the climate crowd. Yet progressive investors are seeking to oust Chairman Akio Toyoda and are pushing a resolution at its June 14 shareholder meeting to make the world’s largest auto maker disclose its climate-related lobbying.
News reports say the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (Calpers) and New York City’s public-worker pension funds have voted against Mr. Toyoda’s re-election, and the proxy advisory firm Glass Lewis has recommended that shareholders do so as well. They say Mr. Toyoda deserves the boot because Toyota’s board isn’t sufficiently independent of management.
But Toyota’s corporate governance model is old news. The sudden concern suggests it is merely a pretext for punishing Mr. Toyoda for the heresy of doubting the West’s hell-bent EV transition. He made news in December when he claimed that a “silent majority” in the auto industry “is wondering whether EVs are really OK to have as a single option. But they think it’s the trend so they can’t speak out loudly.”
He also emphasized that battery-powered EVs “are not the only way to achieve the world’s carbon neutrality goals.” Toyota is promoting its hybrids and plug-in hybrids as alternatives to battery-powered EVs. Plug-in hybrids contain an internal combustion engine that can kick in when the battery runs low, which alleviates range anxiety. They are also cheaper than EVs.
A Toyota memo to auto dealers in April explained the challenges to full electrification. For instance, “most public chargers can take anywhere from 8-30 hours to charge. To meet the federal [zero-emissions vehicle] sales targets, 1.2M public chargers are needed by 2030. That amounts to approximately 400 new chargers per day.” The U.S. isn’t close to meeting that goal.
Toyota also noted that “more than 300 new lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite mines are needed to meet the expected battery demand by 2035,” and they could take decades to develop. “The amount of raw materials in one long-range battery electric vehicle could instead be used to make 6 plug-in hybrid electric vehicles or 90 hybrid electric vehicles.”
And here’s an even more striking statistic: “The overall carbon reduction of those 90 hybrids over their lifetimes is 37 times as much as a single battery electric vehicle.” These inconvenient truths undermine the climate religion and government mandates.
Speaking of which, progressives have attacked Toyota for lobbying against aggressive EV mandates. Toyota backed the Trump Administration’s lawsuit against California’s stringent emissions rules. It also pressed West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin to oppose a $4,500 tax credit bonus for union-made EVs. Toyota isn’t unionized and has a large plant in West Virginia.
The shareholder campaign against Toyota shows how public pension funds and the proxy advisory duopooly of Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) work in concert to exploit corporate governance to push progressive political goals. ISS, Calpers and New York city’s pension funds have all backed the shareholder resolution calling on Toyota to disclose its climate-related lobbying.
Mr. Toyoda deserves support for speaking the truth about EVs, and it’s a shame he’s the only auto leader with the courage to do it.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/targeting-toyota-for-its-electric-vehicle-heresy-akio-toyoda-hybrids-ev-climate-change-b5f67d6c?mod=hp_opin_pos_1
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>>> Here's the biggest hurdle facing America's EV revolution
Washington Post
by Shannon Osaka
April 13, 2023
https://www.yahoo.com/news/heres-biggest-hurdle-facing-americas-115727655.html
The Biden administration just unveiled some of the most aggressive auto climate rules in the world - the latest step for an administration that has gone all-in on EVs. But America's EV transition could soon stumble: not because of high car costs or a lack of automaker support, but thanks to the country's broken and dysfunctional public charging system.
Most electric vehicle drivers charge their vehicles at home. But as Americans buy EVs - to the tune of 7 percent of all new vehicle registrations in January - more and more people are finding that the public charging system is unreliable, inconvenient and simply confusing.
"I've seen people wait because there are only four chargers and two of them are out of service," said Bill Ferro, the founder of EVSession, a software firm that tracks charger reliability. "Everything that I've seen shows that it's driving away current and potential EV owners."
Drivers might show up at a DC-fast charging station - which can fill a vehicle's battery by 80 percent in about 20 minutes - to find that most of the chargers are broken. Or one might work, but only if the driver installs a particular app on their phone, creates an account, and loads money onto it.
Last year, in a preprint study conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the nonprofit Cool the Earth, researchers tested every single fast charging station in the San Francisco Bay Area. They found that more than a quarter of the 657 charging points didn't function during a 2-minute charging test. Sometimes the charging cable couldn't reach the vehicle's charging port; other times the payment system wouldn't work; sometimes the charger's screen was broken or the network was down.
Some of the chargers had the option to pay by 1-800 number - but Carleen Cullen, the executive director of Cool the Earth and one of the authors of the study, said that's not a good solution. "If we want mass market adoption, people are going to want to pay and move along and charge their vehicles," she said.
Another survey, from the group J.D. Power and Associates, found that one in five EV owners who had recently visited a station where unable to charge - largely due to a system malfunction.
Tesla's proprietary charging network usually gets the highest ratings from users. But the vast majority of stations are only open to Tesla drivers. The company has agreed to open a small fraction of its stations to non-Tesla drivers by 2024, beginning now with a few select locations around the country.
Ferro, who drives an electric vehicle himself, frequently has to take road trips of around 300 miles. He ended up buying a Tesla Model 3 largely to make use of the reliable charging network. "On any other network, I wouldn't have trusted it," he explained.
But there's more to the problem than that. The decentralized nature of American charging is also confusing early adopters and turning off potential EV drivers. Public charging is currently managed by a hodgepodge of private companies, utilities, government spending, and automakers. There are private companies - like Electrify America, EVgo, or ChargePoint - which each have their own machines and ways of paying for charging. (A typical EV driver may have as many as eight phone apps and several RFID cards to manage all the possible chargers on the road.)
Then there are automakers, like Tesla or Rivian, that establish their own networks tailor-made for those who buy their products. Utilities are also trying to get into the game, building up their own fast-charging networks in states like Minnesota. The result is a mess for drivers who simply want to plug in - and a logistical nightmare for regulators.
"There are so many different players in this, and they all need to be singing the same song," said Cullen.
There have been attempts to regulate chargers' "uptime," or the amount of time that they are functioning properly. The Biden administration has established rules for the $5 billion in funding for public chargers in the infrastructure bill, ordering that they have at least a 97 percent uptime and are accessible via a single payment method. But the federal rules also allow networks to self-report how often their chargers work - a decision that Ferro finds troubling. "It's letting the fox in the henhouse," he said.
And that's only for the chargers that will receive federal funding; the vast majority of stations will not.
Unless the United States sorts out its public charging infrastructure, it's hard to imagine EV sales growing as quickly as the Biden administration wants. The strictest version of the rules the Environmental Protection Agency proposed Wednesday would require a whopping two-thirds of all new passenger vehicle sales to be electric by 2032.
New federal subsidies, offered under the Inflation Reduction Act, are making electric vehicles more accessible to Americans. More EV drivers means more pressure on the existing malfunctioning stations, as well as more drivers who live in apartments or don't have easy access to home charging.
While early adopters and EV enthusiasts might be happy to build in multiple contingency plans, mainstream EV adoption is going to require a more streamlined system. U.S. public charging also lags far behind other countries: According to S&P Global, China has 1.2 million charging points, Europe has 400,000 - and the United States only has 140,000.
"We're not yet to the mass market phase," said Ferro. "And if the infrastructure isn't there, it will put a damper on everybody's plans."
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>>> California’s plan to phase out diesel trucks gets EPA approval
AMNY
by Sophie Austin
Associated Press
4-1-23
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/california-s-plan-to-phase-out-diesel-trucks-gets-epa-approval/ar-AA19lX8c?OCID=ansmsnnews11
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The Biden administration cleared the way Friday for California’s plan to phase out a wide range of diesel-powered trucks, part of the state’s efforts to drastically cut planet-warming emissions and improve air quality in heavy-traffic areas like ports along the coast.
The decision by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency allows California — which has some of the nation’s worst air pollution — to require truck manufacturers to sell an increasing number of zero-emission trucks over the next couple of decades. The rule applies to a wide range of trucks including box trucks, semitrailers and even large passenger pick-ups.
“Under the Clean Air Act, California has longstanding authority to address pollution from cars and trucks. Today’s announcement allows the state to take additional steps in reducing their transportation emissions through these new regulatory actions,” said EPA Administrator Michael Regan, in a statement.
Gov. Gavin Newsom applauded the state’s role as a leader for setting ambitious vehicle emission standards.
“We’re leading the charge to get dirty trucks and buses – the most polluting vehicles – off our streets, and other states and countries are lining up to follow our lead,” the Democrat said in a statement.
The EPA typically sets standards for tailpipe emissions from passenger cars, trucks and other vehicles, but California has historically been granted waivers to impose its own, stricter standards. Other states can then follow suit, and eight other states plan to adopt California’s truck standards, Newsom’s office said. In a letter last year, attorneys general from 15 states, Washington, D.C., and New York City urged the EPA to approve the California truck standards.
The transportation sector accounts for nearly 40% of California’s greenhouse gas emissions. Newsom has already moved to ban the sale of new cars that run entirely on gasoline by 2035. The EPA has not acted on those rules.
The new truck standards are aimed at companies that make trucks and those that own large quantities of them. Companies owning 50 or more trucks will have to report information to the state about how they use these trucks to ship goods and provide shuttle services. Manufacturers will have to sell a higher percentage of zero-emission vehicles starting in 2024. Depending on the class of truck, zero-emission ones will have to make up 40% to 75% of sales by 2035.
California has a long legacy of adopting stricter tailpipe emission standards, even before the federal Clean Air Act was signed into law, said Paul Cort, a lawyer with environmental nonprofit Earthjustice.
“We have a vehicle problem,” Cort said. “We’re addicted to our cars and trucks, and that’s a big cause of the air pollution that we’re fighting.”
But Wayne Winegarden, a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, said it’s too soon to adopt the California standards.
“The charging infrastructure is certainly not there,” he said about powering stations for electric vehicles. “And on top of the charging infrastructure, we have the grid issues.”
While California was hit this winter by atmospheric rivers that soaked much of the state, it has for years suffered from drought conditions, and in September, a brutal heat wave that put its electricity grid to the test.
The announcement came as advocates are pushing for more ambitious tailpipe emissions standards in other states and at the national level.
“We don’t just fight for California, we fight for all of the communities,” said Jan Victor Andasan, an activist with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice. The group advocates for better air quality in and around Los Angeles, the nation’s second-most populous city that is known for its dense traffic and intense smog.
Andasan and other environmental activists from across the country who are a part of the Moving Forward Network, a 50-member group based at Occidental College in Los Angeles, met with EPA officials recently to discuss national regulations to limit emissions from trucks and other vehicles.
But some in the trucking industry are concerned about how costly and burdensome the transition will be for truck drivers and companies.
“The state and federal regulators collaborating on this unrealistic patchwork of regulations have no grasp on the real costs of designing, building, manufacturing and operating the trucks that deliver their groceries, clothes and goods,” said Chris Spear, president of the American Trucking Association, in a statement.
“They will certainly feel the pain when these fanciful projections lead to catastrophic disruptions well beyond California’s borders,” he added.
Federal pollution standards for heavy trucks are also getting tougher. The EPA released rules that will cut nitrogen oxide pollution, which contributes to the formation of smog, by more than 80% in 2027. The agency will propose greenhouse gas emissions limits this year.
The agency expects the new standards and government investment will lead to zero-emissions electric and hydrogen fuel cell trucks carrying most of the nation’s freight.
California activists Andasan and Brenda Huerta Soto, an organizer with the People’s Collective for Environmental Justice, are troubled by the impact of pollution from trucks and other vehicles on communities with a large population of residents of color that live near busy ports in Los Angeles, Oakland and other cities as well as warehouse-dense inland areas.
Huerta Soto works in Southern California’s Inland Empire, where a high concentration of trucks pass through to transport goods. On top of truck pollution, the many cars, trucks and trains that travel through the area burden residents with noises, odors and pollutants these vehicles emit, she said.
“We have the technology, and we have the money” to move toward zero-emission vehicles, she said.
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>>> 'War of the states': EV, chip makers lavished with subsidies
Yahoo Finance
by MARC LEVY
April 1, 2023
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/war-states-ev-chip-makers-130040413.html
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — States are doling out more cash than ever to lure multibillion-dollar microchip, electric vehicle and battery factories, inspiring ever-more competition as they dig deeper into their pockets to attract big employers and capitalize on a wave of huge new projects.
Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas have made billion-dollar pledges for a microchip or EV plant, with more state-subsidized plant announcements by profitable automakers and semiconductor giants surely to come.
States have long competed for big employers. But now they are floating more billion-dollar offers and offering record-high subsidies, lavishing companies with grants and low-interest loans, municipal road improvements, and breaks on taxes, real estate, power and water.
“We’re in the second war of the states,” said John Boyd, a principal at the Florida-based Boyd Company, which advises on site selections. “That’s how competitive economic development is between the states in 2023.”
The projects come at a transformative time for the industries, with automakers investing heavily in electrification and chipmakers expanding production in the U.S. following pandemic-related supply chain disruptions that raised economic and national security concerns.
One of the driving forces behind them are federal subsidies signed into law last summer that are meant to encourage companies to produce electric vehicles, EV batteries, and computer chips domestically. Another is that states are flush with cash thanks to inflation-juiced tax collections and federal pandemic relief subsidies.
The number of big projects and the size of state subsidy packages are extraordinary, said Nathan Jensen, a University of Texas professor who researches government economic development strategies.
“It is kind of a Wild West moment,” Jensen said. “It’s wild money and every state seems to be in on it.”
Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that tracks and is critical of corporate subsidies, said 2022 set a record for the number of billion-dollar-plus incentive deals. At least eight were finalized, though that figure might be higher since such deals can be cloaked in secrecy and take time to come to light.
Eighteen of last year's 23 known “megadeals," in which state and local incentive packages to private companies exceeded $50 million in value, were for semiconductor and EV plants, according to the group's data.
More than $20 billion in public money was committed to subsidizing those known megadeals, according to Good Jobs First data. That total eclipsed the previous record of $17.7 billion that was committed to subsidizing such deals in 2013.
Many of the companies drawing the biggest subsidy offers — such as Intel, Hyundai, Panasonic, Micron, Toyota, Ford and General Motors — are profitable and operate around the globe. Some lesser-known names in the nascent EV field are getting big offers too, such as Rivian, Volkswagen-backed Scout Motors and Vietnamese automaker VinFast.
The subsidy offers are generally embraced by politicians from both major parties and the business elite, who point to promises of hundreds or thousands of jobs, massive investments in construction and equipment, and what they contend are immeasurable trickle-down benefits.
Still, academics who study such subsidies find them to be a waste of money and rarely decisive in a company's choice of location.
In a 2021 paper arguing that subsidies are driven by politicians for their own benefit, researchers from The Citadel, the College of Charleston and the University of Louisville-Lafayette wrote that studies conclude “they do little, if anything, to promote meaningful improvements in economic outcomes.”
The mounting cost of competing for the projects hasn't dissuaded states from trying. On the contrary, they're clambering to outdo each other.
Michigan was stung by hometown Ford's $11.4 billion commitment in 2021 to build electric vehicle and battery plants in Tennessee and Kentucky. It responded by pledging more than $2.5 billion for electric-vehicle projects by Ford and GM and plants by makers of EV batteries and battery components.
Pennsylvania has yet to lure a microchip or EV factory, and the state's business elite are sounding the alarm after watching neighboring Ohio land a $20 billion Intel plant.
In his first budget speech to lawmakers, newly inaugurated Gov. Josh Shapiro said Pennsylvania needs to “get in the game" and warned that it would take money.
Jabbing a finger in the air, he brought the room to a standing ovation, saying: ”It’s time to compete again here in Pennsylvania!”
Oregon lawmakers hoping to attract a major semiconductor plant are advancing legislation that would marshal $200 million in subsidies and loosen decades-old protections against urban sprawl.
The aim is to procure huge plots of land with ready-made utilities. That has elicited protests from conservationists who say the state mishandled developable land and agricultural groups that warned of the permanent destruction of high-quality farmland.
Dick Sheehy, a retired site selection consultant who traveled the world to inspect possible locations for semiconductor makers, told a panel of Oregon lawmakers in January that states are tipping the scales over better-qualified competitors by offering larger incentive packages.
“The money the state is putting up is so large that certain companies can’t afford not to look at it,” Sheehy said.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott promised to win passage of “economic development tools” during the current legislative session, saying the state lost out on a massive Micron semiconductor plant because it couldn't match the $5.5 billion in tax credits offered by New York.
"The CEO of Micron was basically begging me because he really wanted to do business in Texas. He knew Texas was a better place. He said, 'Please could you come up with some more?'" Abbott told a Greater Arlington Chamber of Commerce crowd in February. "We gave every penny that we could give.”
Asked about Abbott's assertions, Micron declined to address Abbott's description of the phone call with CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, but it called New York the most competitive state and listed reasons why it is the “ideal home” for its plant.
Those included a compelling case made by top officials — including Gov. Kathy Hochul and U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer — plus an attractive local workforce, local research and development partners, and a good quality of life for employees.
In Oklahoma, frustration among lawmakers has been bubbling over since the state lost out on a string of projects: first a Tesla plant to Texas, then a Panasonic EV battery plant to Kansas and, just days ago, a Volkswagen EV battery plant to Canada.
That latest loss led state Senate President Pro Tempore Greg Treat to create a committee to figure out what went wrong in Oklahoma's bidding for a “megaproject.”
Business-friendly Oklahoma shouldn't keep losing out to other states, Treat said.
“You never know if you’re being used so they can go to that other state so they can say, ‘Hey, Oklahoma is willing to do this,’" Treat said in an interview. “And they intend on going to that state the whole time.”
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>>> Biden Administration Initiates $2.4B Funding Program For Expansion Of EV Charging Stations
Benzinga
by Anan Ashraf
3-15-23
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/biden-administration-initiates-24b-funding-program-for-expansion-of-ev-charging-stations/ar-AA18Fn5i
The Joe Biden administration has started accepting applications for $2.5 billion in grants over five years to fund public charging electric vehicle sites across the country.
What Happened: The Charging and Fueling Infrastructure, or CFI, Discretionary Grant Program will provide $2.5 billion over five years to applicants, including cities, counties, local governments and Tribes.
The Department of Transportation said in a statement that the move is a step towards achieving President Biden's objectives of building a national network of 500,000 public electric vehicle charging stations and cutting down national greenhouse gas emissions by 50-52% before 2030.
The CFI program is divided into two distinct grant funding categories — community and corridor.
While the community program funds EV chargers along public roads and other publicly accessible locations, the corridor category will fund towards chargers and other fueling stations along highways.
Why It’s Important: Leading automakers such as Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA), Ford Motors Co. (NYSE:F) and General Motors Co. (NYSE:GM) have ventured into EV charging expansion across the United States.
Tesla has committed to making at least 7,500 chargers available for all EVs by the end of 2024.
General Motors, in partnership with FLO, has announced a collaborative effort with dealers to install as many as 40,000 public Level 2 electric vehicle chargers in local communities by 2026, according to a statement.
Ford has committed to installing at least one public-facing DC Fast charger with two ports at 1,920 dealerships by January 2024.
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>>> Charlie Munger says BYD was his best investment at Berkshire Hathaway—it’s ‘almost ridiculous’ how much it’s beating Elon Musk’s Tesla
Fortune
by Nicholas Gordon
February 16, 2023
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/charlie-munger-says-byd-best-094339069.html
Charlie Munger, the right-hand man of Warren Buffett, still thinks his 2008 decision to get Berkshire Hathaway to invest in budding Chinese carmaker BYD—now the world’s top-selling EV brand—was one of the best decisions he’s ever made.
“I have never helped do anything at Berkshire that was as good as BYD,” Munger said Wednesday during the annual meeting at the Daily Journal Corp., where Munger serves as a director.
Munger praised BYD’s dominance of China’s electric vehicle market. “BYD is so much ahead of Tesla in China,” he said. “It’s almost ridiculous.”
China’s middle-income consumers are flocking to BYD models selling between $14,500 and $29,000, instead of more expensive offerings from competitors like Tesla and Xpeng.
BYD delivered 1.86 million cars in 2022, three times what it sold in 2021, and enough to make it the world’s top-selling electric-car maker (although its sales include both hybrids and fully-electric vehicles). Tesla delivered 1.3 million cars globally in 2022.
Munger pointed out that BYD had increased the price of some of its more popular models, while Tesla had to offer discounts for its cars. Expiring consumer subsidies for electric vehicles may be pushing car companies to slash prices to keep customers.
BYD recently estimated that it would make between $2.2 billion and $2.4 billion in net profit for 2022, which would represent an almost 1,200% increase from its net profit for 2021. BYD also plans to expand in Japan and Europe.
“It’s incredible what’s happened,” Munger said. “Nobody had ever heard of [BYD] a few years ago.”
When did Berkshire Hathaway invest in BYD?
Berkshire Hathaway purchased 225 million shares in BYD in 2008 for $230 million. Munger was key to Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway’s investment in BYD, calling Wang Chuanfu, the company’s CEO, a “combination of Thomas Edison and Jack Welch” in a 2009 interview with Fortune.
The value of Berkshire Hathaway’s stake in BYD has boomed since that investment. At the company’s peak share price last June, Berkshire Hathaway’s stake was worth $9.5 billion. (Shares in BYD have fallen about 30% since then.)
Munger downplayed his involvement in BYD’s success on Wednesday. “We tried to talk [Wang] out of doing what worked so well, which shows that there’s some accident in life,” he said.
Berkshire Hathaway has trimmed its BYD stake since last summer, dropping from 20.47% in early August down to 11.87% now, following an additional share sale reported last week. The sales have netted Berkshire Hathaway around $2.6 billion, according to calculations by the South China Morning Post.
Experts see Berkshire Hathaway’s selling of BYD shares as in line with Warren Buffett’s philosophy of value investing, or buying undervalued shares and holding them until the market values them properly.
Munger echoed that sentiment on Wednesday. “At the current price of BYD stock, a little BYD is worth more than the entire Mercedes corporation,” he said. BYD has a market cap of $107 billion, while Mercedes Benz currently has a market cap of $83.8 billion. “It’s not a cheap stock,” he said.
At current prices, Berkshire Hathaway’s remaining stake in BYD is worth around $3.9 billion.
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>>> Berkshire Hathaway sells $138.9 million of shares in China's BYD
Investing.com
Feb 09, 2023
https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/berkshire-hathaway-sells-1389-million-of-shares-in-chinas-byd-2999084?dicbo=v2-0gmswjb
HONG KONG (Reuters) - Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company owned by Warren Buffett, has sold 4.235 million Hong Kong-listed shares of electric vehicle maker BYD for HK$1.09 billion ($139 million), a stock exchange filing showed.
The sale on February 3 lowered Berkshire's holdings in BYD's issued H-shares to 11.87% from 12.26%, the filing to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Thursday showed.
($1 = 7.8497 Hong Kong dollars)
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Rail Vision - >>> Israel Railways Purchases 10 AI-Driven Rail Vision Main Line Systems for $1.4M
Rail Vision Ltd.
GlobeNewswire
February 6, 2023
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/israel-railways-purchases-10-ai-130000273.html
Rail Vision’s cutting-edge, A.I.-based obstacle detection technology is ushering in a new era of train safety
Ra’anana, Israel, Feb. 06, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rail Vision Ltd. (the “Company”) (Nasdaq: RVSN), a technology company that is seeking to revolutionize railway safety and the data-related market, announced today that Israel Railways Ltd., Israel’s state-owned principal railway company, signed an agreement to purchase 10 Rail Vision Main Line Systems and related services for $1.4 million. Rail Vision’s Main Line System is a cutting-edge, artificial intelligence (A.I.) based, industry-leading technology for detection and identification of objects and obstacles near, between, or on the railway.
“After more than a year of evaluating a variety of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), Israel Railways chose Rail Vision’s Main Line System as the solution for its fleet, marking the first major commercial deployment of AI-based vision technology for main line rail industry operations,” commented Rail Vision CEO Shahar Hania. “Our Main Line System outperformed in all aspects of testing during the proof-of-concept with Israel Railways. We believe this is a strong validation of our solution and bodes extremely well for other pilot programs underway, such as our long-term pilot in Australia with Rio Tinto, a leading global mining group, as well as other opportunities around the globe.
“Using advanced, long-range A.I. detection systems, our game-changing technology provides unparalleled obstacle identification on and near tracks, making it an ideal solution for major rail operators like Israel Railways, and a key driver behind strategic partnerships, such as our relationship with Knorr-Bremse, the global leader in braking systems for the rail industry that has invested $24 million into Rail Vision since our inception,” continued Hania.
Israel Railways operates approximately 700 trains daily, traveling along 1,138 kilometers of track, connecting major metropolitan areas in Israel, as well as cities, towns, and rural villages throughout the country.
“We currently have few main line and switch yard pilot programs underway globally,” continued Hania. “The conversion of pilot programs into commercial contracts is expected to accelerate and drive sales growth momentum in the quarters ahead.”
About Rail Vision’s AI-based Main Line System
Rail Vision’s Main Line System is an AI-driven obstacle detection technology designed to revolutionize train safety. With its extended visual range of up to 1.2mi / 2km, Rail Vision's Main Line System combines sensitive imaging sensors with A.I. and deep learning technologies to detect and classify obstacles on and near the tracks, such as humans, animals, vehicles, signals, and infrastructure components, quickly and accurately. The system then generates real-time visual and acoustic alerts for the train's command-and-control center, helping to prevent collisions, reduce downtime and delays, increase safety, and improve traffic volume. Rail Vision’s advanced image processing capabilities also allow for image-based navigation, predictive maintenance, and GIS mapping.
About Rail Vision Ltd.
Rail Vision is a technology company that is seeking to revolutionize railway safety and the data-related market. The Company has developed cutting-edge, artificial intelligence based, industry-leading technology specifically designed for railways. The Company has developed its railway detection and systems to save lives, increase efficiency, and dramatically reduce expenses for the railway operators. Rail Vision believes that its technology will significantly increase railway safety around the world, while creating significant benefits and adding value to everyone who relies on the train ecosystem: from passengers using trains for transportation to companies that use railways to deliver goods and services. In addition, the company believes that its technology has the potential to advance the revolutionary concept of autonomous trains into a practical reality. For more information please visit https://www.railvision.io/
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>>> ON Semiconductor Corporation (ON) provides intelligent sensing and power solutions worldwide. Its intelligent power technologies enable the electrification of the automotive industry that allows for lighter and longer-range electric vehicles, empowers fast-charging systems, and propels sustainable energy for the solar strings, industrial power, and storage systems. The company operates through three segments the Power Solutions Group, the Advanced Solutions Group, and the Intelligent Sensing Group segments. It offers analog, discrete, module, and integrated semiconductor products that perform multiple application functions, including power switching and conversion, signal conditioning, circuit protection, signal amplification, and voltage regulation functions. The company also designs and develops analog, mixed-signal, advanced logic, application specific standard product and ASICs, radio frequency, and integrated power solutions for end-users in end-markets, as well as provides foundry and design services for government customers. In addition, it develops complementary metal oxide semiconductor image sensors, image signal processors, and single photon detectors, including silicon photomultipliers and single photon avalanche diode arrays, as well as actuator drivers for autofocus and image stabilization for a broad base of end-users in various end-markets. ON Semiconductor Corporation was incorporated in 1992 and is headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona.
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>>> Even After $100 Billion, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere
They were supposed to be the future. But prominent detractors—including Anthony Levandowski, who pioneered the industry—are getting louder as the losses get bigger.
Bloomberg
By Max Chafkin
October 6, 2022
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-10-06/even-after-100-billion-self-driving-cars-are-going-nowhere?utm_campaign=bw&utm_medium=distro&utm_source=yahooUS
The first car woke Jennifer King at 2 a.m. with a loud, high-pitched hum. “It sounded like a hovercraft,” she says, and that wasn’t the weird part. King lives on a dead-end street at the edge of the Presidio, a 1,500-acre park in San Francisco where through traffic isn’t a thing. Outside she saw a white Jaguar SUV backing out of her driveway. It had what looked like a giant fan on its roof—a laser sensor—and bore the logo of Google’s driverless car division, Waymo.
She was observing what looked like a glitch in the self-driving software: The car seemed to be using her property to execute a three-point turn. This would’ve been no biggie, she says, if it had happened once. But dozens of Google cars began doing the exact thing, many times, every single day.
King complained to Google that the cars were driving her nuts, but the K-turns kept coming. Sometimes a few of the SUVs would show up at the same time and form a little line, like an army of zombie driver’s-ed students. The whole thing went on for weeks until last October, when King called the local CBS affiliate and a news crew broadcast the scene. “It is kind of funny when you watch it,” the report began. “And the neighbors are certainly noticing.” Soon after, King’s driveway was hers again.
Waymo disputes that its tech failed and said in a statement that its vehicles had been “obeying the same road rules that any car is required to follow.” The company, like its peers in Silicon Valley and Detroit, has characterized incidents like this as isolated, potholes on the road to a steering-wheel-free future. Over the course of more than a decade, flashy demos from companies including Google, GM, Ford, Tesla, and Zoox have promised cars capable of piloting themselves through chaotic urban landscapes, on highways, and in extreme weather without any human input or oversight. The companies have suggested they’re on the verge of eliminating road fatalities, rush-hour traffic, and parking lots, and of upending the $2 trillion global automotive industry.
It all sounds great until you encounter an actual robo-taxi in the wild. Which is rare: Six years after companies started offering rides in what they’ve called autonomous cars and almost 20 years after the first self-driving demos, there are vanishingly few such vehicles on the road. And they tend to be confined to a handful of places in the Sun Belt, because they still can’t handle weather patterns trickier than Partly Cloudy. State-of-the-art robot cars also struggle with construction, animals, traffic cones, crossing guards, and what the industry calls “unprotected left turns,” which most of us would call “left turns.”
The industry says its Derek Zoolander problem applies only to lefts that require navigating oncoming traffic. (Great.) It’s devoted enormous resources to figuring out left turns, but the work continues. Earlier this year, Cruise LLC—majority-owned by General Motors Co.—recalled all of its self-driving vehicles after one car’s inability to turn left contributed to a crash in San Francisco that injured two people. Aaron McLear, a Cruise spokesman, says the recall “does not impact or change our current on-road operations.” Cruise is planning to expand to Austin and Phoenix this year. “We’ve moved the timeline to the left for what might be the first time in AV history,” McLear says.
Cruise didn’t release the video of that accident, but there’s an entire social media genre featuring self-driving cars that become hopelessly confused. When the results are less serious, they can be funny as hell. In one example, a Waymo car gets so flummoxed by a traffic cone that it drives away from the technician sent out to rescue it. In another, an entire fleet of modified Chevrolet Bolts show up at an intersection and simply stop, blocking traffic with a whiff of Maximum Overdrive. In a third, a Tesla drives, at very slow speed, straight into the tail of a private jet.
This, it seems, is the best the field can do after investors have bet something like $100 billion, according to a McKinsey & Co. report. While the industry’s biggest names continue to project optimism, the emerging consensus is that the world of robo-taxis isn’t just around the next unprotected left—that we might have to wait decades longer, or an eternity.
“It’s a scam,” says George Hotz, whose company Comma.ai Inc. makes a driver-assistance system similar to Tesla Inc.’s Autopilot. “These companies have squandered tens of billions of dollars.” In 2018 analysts put the market value of Waymo LLC, then a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., at $175 billion. Its most recent funding round gave the company an estimated valuation of $30 billion, roughly the same as Cruise. Aurora Innovation Inc., a startup co-founded by Chris Urmson, Google’s former autonomous-vehicle chief, has lost more than 85% since last year and is now worth less than $3 billion. This September a leaked memo from Urmson summed up Aurora’s cash-flow struggles and suggested it might have to sell out to a larger company. Many of the industry’s most promising efforts have met the same fate in recent years, including Drive.ai, Voyage, Zoox, and Uber’s self-driving division. “Long term, I think we will have autonomous vehicles that you and I can buy,” says Mike Ramsey, an analyst at market researcher Gartner Inc. “But we’re going to be old.”
Our driverless future is starting to look so distant that even some of its most fervent believers have turned apostate. Chief among them is Anthony Levandowski, the engineer who more or less created the model for self-driving research and was, for more than a decade, the field’s biggest star. Now he’s running a startup that’s developing autonomous trucks for industrial sites, and he says that for the foreseeable future, that’s about as much complexity as any driverless vehicle will be able to handle. “You’d be hard-pressed to find another industry that’s invested so many dollars in R&D and that has delivered so little,” Levandowski says in an interview. “Forget about profits—what’s the combined revenue of all the robo-taxi, robo-truck, robo-whatever companies? Is it a million dollars? Maybe. I think it’s more like zero.”
In some ways, Levandowski is about as biased a party as anyone could be. His ride on top of the driverless wave ended in ignominy, after he moved from Google to Uber Technologies Inc. and his old bosses sued the crap out of his new ones for, they said, taking proprietary research along with him. The multibillion-dollar lawsuit and federal criminal case got Levandowski fired, forced him into bankruptcy, and ended with his conviction for stealing trade secrets. He only avoided prison thanks to a presidential pardon from Donald Trump.
On the other hand, Levandowski is also acknowledged, even by his detractors, as a pioneer in the industry and the person most responsible for turning driverless cars from a science project into something approaching a business. Eighteen years ago he wowed the Pentagon with a kinda-sorta-driverless motorcycle. That project turned into Google’s driverless Prius, which pushed dozens of others to start self-driving car programs. In 2017, Levandowski founded a religion called the Way of the Future, centered on the idea that AI was becoming downright godlike.
What shattered his faith? He says that in the years after his defenestration from Uber, he began to compare the industry’s wild claims to what seemed like an obvious lack of progress with no obvious path forward. “It wasn’t a business, it was a hobby,” he says. Levandowski maintains that somebody, eventually, will figure out how to reliably get robots to turn left, and all the rest of it. “We’re going to get there at some point. But we have such a long way to go.”
For the companies that invested billions in the driverless future that was supposed to be around the next corner, “We’ll get there when we get there” isn’t an acceptable answer. The industry that grew up around Levandowski’s ideas can’t just reverse course like all those Google cars outside Jennifer King’s bedroom. And the companies that bet it all on those ideas might very well be stuck in a dead end.
All self-driving car demos are more or less the same. You ride in the back seat and watch the steering wheel move on its own while a screen shows you what the computer is “seeing.” On the display, little red or green boxes hover perfectly over every car, bike, jaywalker, stoplight, etc. you pass. All this input feels subliminal when you’re driving your own car, but on a readout that looks like a mix between the POVs of the Terminator and the Predator, it’s overwhelming. It makes driving feel a lot more dangerous, like something that might well be better left to machines. The car companies know this, which is why they do it. Amping up the baseline tension of a drive makes their software’s screw-ups seem like less of an outlier, and the successes all the more remarkable.
One of the industry’s favorite maxims is that humans are terrible drivers. This may seem intuitive to anyone who’s taken the Cross Bronx Expressway home during rush hour, but it’s not even close to true. Throw a top-of-the-line robot at any difficult driving task, and you’ll be lucky if the robot lasts a few seconds before crapping out.
“Humans are really, really good drivers—absurdly good,” Hotz says. Traffic deaths are rare, amounting to one person for every 100 million miles or so driven in the US, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Even that number makes people seem less capable than they actually are. Fatal accidents are largely caused by reckless behavior—speeding, drunks, texters, and people who fall asleep at the wheel. As a group, school bus drivers are involved in one fatal crash roughly every 500 million miles. Although most of the accidents reported by self-driving cars have been minor, the data suggest that autonomous cars have been involved in accidents more frequently than human-driven ones, with rear-end collisions being especially common. “The problem is that there isn’t any test to know if a driverless car is safe to operate,” says Ramsey, the Gartner analyst. “It’s mostly just anecdotal.”
Waymo, the market leader, said last year that it had driven more than 20 million miles over about a decade. That means its cars would have to drive an additional 25 times their total before we’d be able to say, with even a vague sense of certainty, that they cause fewer deaths than bus drivers. The comparison is likely skewed further because the company has done much of its testing in sunny California and Arizona.
“You think the computer can see everything and can understand what’s going to happen next. But computers are still really dumb”
For now, here’s what we know: Computers can run calculations a lot faster than we can, but they still have no idea how to process many common roadway variables. People driving down a city street with a few pigeons pecking away near the median know (a) that the pigeons will fly away as the car approaches and (b) that drivers behind them also know the pigeons will scatter. Drivers know, without having to think about it, that slamming the brakes wouldn’t just be unnecessary—it would be dangerous. So they maintain their speed.
What the smartest self-driving car “sees,” on the other hand, is a small obstacle. It doesn’t know where the obstacle came from or where it may go, only that the car is supposed to safely avoid obstacles, so it might respond by hitting the brakes. The best-case scenario is a small traffic jam, but braking suddenly could cause the next car coming down the road to rear-end it. Computers deal with their shortcomings through repetition, meaning that if you showed the same pigeon scenario to a self-driving car enough times, it might figure out how to handle it reliably. But it would likely have no idea how to deal with slightly different pigeons flying a slightly different way.
The industry uses the phrase “deep learning” to describe this process, but that makes it sound more sophisticated than it is. “What deep learning is doing is something similar to memorization,” says Gary Marcus, a New York University psychology professor who studies artificial intelligence and the limits of self-driving vehicles. “It only works if the situations are sufficiently akin.”
And the range of these “edge cases,” as AI experts call them, is virtually infinite. Think: cars cutting across three lanes of traffic without signaling, or bicyclists doing the same, or a deer ambling alongside the shoulder, or a low-flying plane, or an eagle, or a drone. Even relatively easy driving problems turn out to contain an untold number of variations depending on weather, road conditions, and human behavior. “You think roads are pretty similar from one place to the next,” Marcus says. “But the world is a complicated place. Every unprotected left is a little different.”
Self-driving companies have fallen back on shortcuts. In lieu of putting more cars on the road for longer, they run simulations inside giant data centers, add those “drives” to their total mile counts, and use them to make claims about safety. Simulations might help with some well-defined scenarios such as left turns, but they can’t manufacture edge cases. In the meantime the companies are relying on pesky humans for help navigating higher-order problems. All use remote operators to help vehicles that run into trouble, as well as safety drivers—“autonomous specialists,” Waymo calls them—who ride inside some cars to take over if there’s a problem.
To Levandowski, who rigged up his first self-driving vehicle in 2004, the most advanced driverless-car companies are all still running what amount to very sophisticated demos. And demos, as he well knows, are misleading by design. “It’s an illusion,” he says: For every successful demo, there might be dozens of failed ones. And whereas you only need to see a person behind the wheel for a few minutes to judge if they can drive or not, computers don’t work that way. If a self-driving car successfully navigates a route, there’s no guarantee it can do so the 20th time, or even the second.
In 2008, Levandowski kludged together his first self-driving Prius, which conducted what the industry widely recognizes as the first successful test of an autonomous vehicle on public streets. (The event was recorded for posterity on a Discovery Channel show called Prototype This!) Levandowski was aware of how controlled the environment was: The car was given an extremely wide berth as it made its way from downtown San Francisco across the Bay Bridge and onto Treasure Island, because there was a 16-vehicle motorcade protecting it from other cars and vice versa. The car did scrape a wall on its way off the bridge, yet he says he couldn’t help but feel amazed that it had all basically worked. “You saw that, and you were like, ‘OK, it’s a demo and there are a lot of things to work on,’?” he recalls. “But, like, we were almost there. We just needed to make it a little better.”
For most of the years since he built his first “Pribot,” Levandowski says, it’s felt as though he and his competitors were 90% of the way to full-blown robot cars. Executives he later worked with at Google and Uber were all too happy to insist that the science was already there, that his prototypes could already handle any challenge, that all that was left was “going commercial.” They threw around wild claims that investors, including the Tesla bull Cathie Wood, built into models to calculate that the industry would be worth trillions.
Once again, this was a bit of self-hypnosis, Levandowski says. The demos with the sci-fi computer vision led him and his colleagues to believe they and their computers were thinking more similarly than they really were. “You see these amazing representations of the 3D world, and you think the computer can see everything and can understand what’s going to happen next,” he says. “But computers are still really dumb.”
In the view of Levandowski and many of the brightest minds in AI, the underlying technology isn’t just a few years’ worth of refinements away from a resolution. Autonomous driving, they say, needs a fundamental breakthrough that allows computers to quickly use humanlike intuition rather than learning solely by rote. That is to say, Google engineers might spend the rest of their lives puttering around San Francisco and Phoenix without showing that their technology is safer than driving the old-fashioned way.
In some ways the self-driving future seemed closest and most assured in 2017, after Levandowski went to Uber and Google sued them. Google accused Levandowski of taking a work laptop home, downloading its contents, and using that information to jump-start his work at Uber. (Although he doesn’t deny the laptop part, he’s long disputed that its contents found their way into anything Uber built.) The lawsuit was destabilizing but also validating in a way. Google’s $1.8 billion claim for damages suggested it had done the math based on just how imminent the fortunes to be made from driverless technology were. “People were playing for this trillion-dollar prize of automating all transportation,” Levandowski says. “And if you think it’s really just a year away, you take the gloves off.”
Uber had promised to defend Levandowski if he was sued, but it fired him in May 2017, and he faced an arbitration claim in which Google sought to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars. During the 2018 trial, with Google struggling to prove Uber had used its trade secrets, the company settled with Uber. It got about $250 million in Uber stock, a fraction of what it had initially sought, plus a promise that the ride-hailing company wouldn’t use Google’s driverless technology.
The fallout continued for Levandowski in 2019, when federal prosecutors announced that a grand jury had indicted him on 33 counts of trade secrets theft. Soon after, the deal his new company, Pronto.ai, had been negotiating with a truck manufacturer—to try out Pronto’s more modest driver-assist feature for trucks—fell apart. “It turns out a federal indictment does cramp your style,” he says. An arbitration panel also ordered him to pay Google $179 million. He stepped down as Pronto’s chief executive officer, turned the company over to its chief safety officer, Robbie Miller, and declared bankruptcy. As part of a deal with prosecutors, in exchange for the dismissal of the other 32 counts, Levandowski pleaded guilty to one and was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison in August 2020. Because of the pandemic, the sentence was delayed long enough that he never served a day before his pardon, which came on the last day of the Trump presidency.
According to a White House press release at the time, the pardon’s advocates included Trump megadonor Peter Thiel and a half-dozen Thiel allies, including Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey. Levandowski says that he and Thiel have some mutual friends who spoke up for him but that they never talked until after the pardon was announced. He says he doesn’t know why Thiel took up his cause, but Thiel’s antipathy for Google is legendary, and pardoning Levandowski would’ve been an opportunity to stick a thumb in the company’s eye. Earlier this year, Levandowski reached a settlement with Uber and Google over the $179 million judgment that will allow him to emerge from bankruptcy.
The idea that the secret to self-driving was hidden on Levandowski’s laptop has come to seem less credible over time. A year after Uber fired him, one of its self-driving cars killed a pedestrian in Phoenix. (The safety driver was charged with negligent homicide and has pleaded not guilty; Uber suspended testing its cars on public roads and added additional safety measures before resuming testing. The company was never charged.) Uber sold its self-driving unit to Aurora, the now-struggling upstart, in 2020, when times were better. In September, Waymo claimed, based on the results of a simulation, that its vehicles are safer in some circumstances than humans. Back in the real world, the safety figures are much less conclusive, and Waymo is basically where it was five years ago. (Waymo disputes this.)
Levandowski says his skepticism of the industry started around 2018. It was a little more than a year after Elon Musk unveiled a demo of a Tesla driving itself to the tune of Paint It Black. Levandowski checked the official road-test data that Tesla submitted to California regulators. The figures showed that, in that time, the number of autonomous miles Tesla had driven on public roads in the state totaled—wait for it—zero. (Tesla hasn’t reported any autonomous miles traveled in California since 2019. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Although Levandowski says he admires Tesla, is impressed by its driver-assistance technology, and believes it may one day produce a truly self-driving car, he says the lack of progress by Musk and his peers forced him to question the point of his own years in the field. “Why are we driving around, testing technology and creating additional risks, without actually delivering anything of value?” he asks.
While Tesla has argued that its current system represents a working prototype, Musk has continued to blur the lines between demos and reality. On Sept. 30 he unveiled what looked like a barely functional robot, promising it would unleash “a fundamental transformation of civilization as we know it.” Six years after it began selling “full self-driving” capabilities, Tesla has yet to deliver a driverless car. Levandowski, for his part, has been spending time in gravel pits.
For more than 100 years, mining companies have been blasting rocks out of the hills near Santa Rosa, Calif., and crushing them into gravel bound for driveways, roads, and drains. Levandowski sometimes refers to Mark West Quarry, where Pronto has been operating its driverless trucks since last December, as a “sandbox,” and it’s easy to see why. The dusty mine features life-size versions of the Tonka toys you’d find in a child’s playroom. Yellow excavators knock enormous boulders down from a terraced cliffside into the mining pit, where front-end loaders pick up the stones and place them in 50-ton dump trucks to be carried to the crusher. “An 8-year-old boy’s dream,” Levandowski says as the boulders rattle through the crusher, which spits the smaller pieces out onto piles.
The mine work started as a sort of backup plan—a way to bring in revenue while Pronto got trucking companies comfortable with using its driver-assistance technology in their long-haul semis. Now, Levandowski says, construction sites are Plan A. Pronto took the same basic system it had used on the semis and built it into a self-driving dump truck, adding cameras, radar, and an onboard computer. Because connectivity is spotty at mine sites, the company created its own networking technology, which it spun off as a separate company, Pollen Mobile LLC. “With mining we’re doing driverless, but controlling the environment,” says Pronto Chief Technology Officer Cat Culkin. BoDean Co., the company that owns Mark West Quarry, is one of a half-dozen clients that pay installation fees to retrofit dump trucks with sensors, plus hourly fees for use. Neither Levandowski nor BoDean will say how much Pronto charges or how much it’s taking in.
Here’s his new vision of the self-driving future: For nine-ish hours each day, two modified Bell articulated end-dumps take turns driving the 200 yards from the pit to the crusher. The road is rutted, steep, narrow, requiring the trucks to nearly scrape the cliff wall as they rattle down the roller-coaster-like grade. But it’s the same exact trip every time, with no edge cases—no rush hour, no school crossings, no daredevil scooter drivers—and instead of executing an awkward multipoint turn before dumping their loads, the robot trucks back up the hill in reverse, speeding each truck’s reloading. Anthony Boyle, BoDean’s director of production, says the Pronto trucks save four to five hours of labor a day, freeing up drivers to take over loaders and excavators. Otherwise, he says, nothing has changed. “It’s just yellow equipment doing its thing, and you stay out of its way.”
Levandowski recognizes that making rock quarries a little more efficient is a bit of a comedown from his dreams of giant fleets of robotic cars. His company plans to start selling its software for long-haul trucks in 2023. And hopefully, in a few decades, all his old boasts will come true: driverless cities with cushy commutes, zero road fatalities, and totally safe road naps. But for now: “I want to do something that’s real, even if that means scaling back the grandiose visions.”
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BYD - >>> Warren Buffett Cuts Stake in China’s BYD, Spurring Bets More May Come
Bloomberg
by Katrina Nicholas and Ishika Mookerjee
August 30, 2022
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-cuts-stake-china-101042396.html
(Bloomberg) -- Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. trimmed its stake in BYD Co., just over a month after speculation the legendary US investor was preparing to shed his entire position in the Chinese carmaker sent its stock plummeting.
Berkshire cut its holding in BYD’s Hong Kong-listed shares to 19.92% from 20.04% on Aug. 24, according to an exchange filing Tuesday. That equated to around 1.33 million securities at an average HK$277.10 ($35.30) apiece, valued at about $47 million.
Theories about Buffett’s plans have swirled since a 20.49% stake -- identical to the size of Berkshire’s last reported BYD position in Hong Kong as of December -- entered the Central Clearing and Settlement System last month. The move triggered the biggest slump in BYD stock in nearly two years.
A BYD spokesperson wasn’t immediately able to comment Tuesday, while representatives for Berkshire to date haven’t commented. The shares closed slightly lower at the end of Hong Kong trading.
This is “most likely profit taking,” said Kerry Goh, chief investment officer at Kamet Capital Partners Pte. in Singapore. “BYD has done very well for them especially in the last three years. It’s not their style to sell just because someone says China is uninvestable.”
Asked if Buffett could be gearing up to sell more of his BYD holding, Goh said it was hard to second guess the titan of investing.
When Buffett sold shares in another of his Chinese investments, PetroChina Co., he did it in stages. The 2007 sale was conducted through at least seven transactions over a period of about three months.
“This may shake the firm belief in BYD shares for a lot of institutional investors,” said Franklin Tang, an analyst at Excel Investment Hong Kong Ltd.
“While there are those that hold a bullish view based on fundamentals, with stock prices having been on a roll there’s bound to be plenty of speculators as well,” Tang said. “This will make the latter very skittish as their conviction was largely based in trusting the judgment of Buffett.”
BYD is one of China’s most-watched automakers. On Monday it reported net income for the six months through June at the top end of guidance as record output and sales shielded it from Covid-related production disruptions and supply-chain pain. BYD could deliver 1.5 million to 2 million vehicles this year as capacity expands to meet a backlog of orders, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Steve Man and Joanna Chen.
The Shenzhen-based automaker is also expanding overseas, announcing sales in seven new markets in recent months including Japan, Thailand and Germany.
Chief to BYD’s success is its vertical integration strategy, which involves not only manufacturing vehicles but producing semiconductors and batteries. It’s now the world’s third-largest producer of batteries for EVs, with 14% of the global market, behind Chinese rival Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. and South Korea’s LG Energy Solution Ltd.
And Buffett, a long-time backer of BYD, has certainly ridden the wave. Shares in BYD gained 31% last year and surged 423% in 2020.
Buffett’s investment in the automaker is worth north of $8 billion from around $230 million when he first invested in the company in 2008. The 92-year-old, the chairman and largest shareholder of Berkshire, has a net worth of about $100.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The BYD position that matched the size of Berkshire’s appeared in Hong Kong’s stock-market clearing system under a Citibank’s account. Since then, Citibank’s holding in BYD’s Hong Kong-listed stock has dropped by around 9 million shares, Hong Kong exchange data show.
Hong Kong regulations state that a shareholder who owns more than 5% of a listed company must notify the stock exchange within three business days of initiating a trade if that trade changes the percentage of the stake into the next whole number.
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>>> Linde Inaugurates World's First Hydrogen Refueling System for Passenger Trains
Accesswire
Linde plc
August 24, 2022
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/linde-inaugurates-worlds-first-hydrogen-085000823.html
WOKING, UK / ACCESSWIRE / August 24, 2022 / Linde (NYSE: LIN; FWB: LIN) today announced it has inaugurated the world's first hydrogen refueling system for passenger trains in Bremervörde, Germany.
Linde's hydrogen refueling system, which it built, owns and operates, will refuel 14 hydrogen-powered passenger trains, enabling each train to run for 1,000 km emission-free on a single refueling. It has a total capacity of around 1,600 kg of hydrogen per day, making it one of the largest hydrogen refueling systems ever built. Linde's future-ready hydrogen refueling system has been designed and constructed with the ability to integrate future on-site green hydrogen generation. The new hydrogen trains will replace existing diesel-powered trains.
"Linde is committed to making a significant contribution towards decarbonizing transport in Europe," said Veerle Slenders, President Region Europe West, Linde. "We are proud that Linde's innovative technology plays a key role in supporting this project and establishing a blueprint for cleaner public transport systems around the world."
"The world's first hydrogen train, the Coradia iLint, demonstrates a clear commitment to green mobility combined with the latest technology," said Müslüm Yakisan, President of Alstom in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. "We are very proud to see the first series operation in action together with our partners Linde, LNVG and evb."
Linde is a global leader in the production, processing, storage and distribution of hydrogen. It has the largest liquid hydrogen capacity and distribution system in the world. The company operates the world's first high-purity hydrogen storage cavern plus pipeline networks totaling approximately 1,000 kilometers globally, to reliably supply its customers. Linde is at the forefront in the transition to clean hydrogen and has installed over 200 hydrogen fueling stations and 80 hydrogen electrolysis plants worldwide. The company offers the latest hydrogen technologies through its world class engineering organization, key alliances and partnerships.
About Linde
Linde is a leading global industrial gases and engineering company with 2021 sales of $31 billion (€26 billion). We live our mission of making our world more productive every day by providing high-quality solutions, technologies and services which are making our customers more successful and helping to sustain and protect our planet.
The company serves a variety of end markets including chemicals & energy, food & beverage, electronics, healthcare, manufacturing, metals and mining. Linde's industrial gases are used in countless applications, from life-saving oxygen for hospitals to high-purity & specialty gases for electronics manufacturing, hydrogen for clean fuels and much more. Linde also delivers state-of-the-art gas processing solutions to support customer expansion, efficiency improvements and emissions reductions.
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>>> Warren Buffett supported driverless trucks. Now they are real.
Financial News Today
by Mario Ziegler
8-25-22
https://funancial.news/analysis-warren-buffett-supported-driverless-trucks-now-they-are-real/
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. didn’t get fame for investing in startups. The reputable investor has a tendency to buy time-tested businesses such as an oil company, a railroad or an insurer that bet on the stable and profitable growth of the US economy.
Buffett shied away from technology stocks for years before stepping down with Apple Inc., which was already as deeply woven into the fabric of the economy as Occidental Petroleum Corp, BNSF Railway Company or Geico. It was no surprise that Buffett avoided the SPAC and NFT craze. His longtime business partner, Charlie Munger, railed in February against “tragic excesses” in both venture capital and cryptocurrencies.
That’s why investors should especially note that Pilot Company, which operates Pilot and Flying J Travel Center and is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, on Tuesday agreed to pick up a stake in Kodiak Robotics Inc., a driverless truck startup. The pilot will get one of the Kodiaq’s five board seats. Although the investment amount and ownership percentage in Kodiaq were not disclosed, Pilot is now the largest strategic investor in the startup.
This investment is a significant recognition, through a pilot by Berkshire Hathaway, that driverless trucks are on the verge of becoming a reality. It can be hard and even scary to imagine that an 18-wheeled vehicle with no human occupants humming along the highway with passenger cars. It can happen faster than people think.
Kodiaq already operates trucks with a security driver on routes between six cities, including Dallas and Atlanta. In a few years, Kodiaq hopes to take that safety driver out of the cab and operate fully autonomous large cargo trucks. Several other startups are also chasing the driverless dream.
Embark Technology Inc., Aurora Innovation Inc., Tusimple Holdings Inc. And all others are testing autonomous truck technology on the highway. Aurora has said it expects to start operating without a driver early next year. Aurora and Embark went public through special purpose acquisition companies, while TuSimple made a traditional initial public offering. All three have performed disappointingly and are down over 75% since the first trade.
Kodiaq, which has investors including tiremaker Bridgestone Corp and BMW’s Venture Fund, is working with Pilot to build an autonomous truckport in Atlanta that will provide services such as refueling, inspection and maintenance for Kodiaq’s driverless trucks. The Pilot’s truck stop will also serve as a meeting point outside large urban areas where a driverless truck will drop off a trailer that will be picked up by the truck and accompanied by a driver to navigate city traffic.
Driverless truck companies all argue that their technology will make bigger rigs safer for American highways. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, this is a low bar considering that 159,000 people were injured in accidents of big trucks in 2019 and 5,600 people died in such accidents in 2021. The market is also needed. The American Trucking Association estimates that there are fewer than 80,000 truck drivers in the US, and the shortage is concentrated in long-distance trucking that keeps drivers away from their homes for days and even weeks. Those are the long haul low-hanging fruit for autonomous trucks to take on.
If one of Buffett’s companies is getting into this new technology, don’t be surprised that driverless trucks will also be a mainstay of the American economy in a decade or two.
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Name | Symbol | % Assets |
---|---|---|
Apple Inc | AAPL | 3.87% |
NVIDIA Corp | NVDA | 3.81% |
Samsung Electronics Co Ltd | 005930.KS | 3.33% |
Intel Corp | INTC | 3.23% |
Alphabet Inc A | GOOGL | 3.15% |
Microsoft Corp | MSFT | 3.07% |
Qualcomm Inc | QCOM | 3.02% |
Toyota Motor Corp | 7203 | 3.00% |
Cisco Systems Inc | CSCO | 2.25% |
Tesla Inc | TSLA | 2.21% |
Name | Symbol | % Assets |
---|---|---|
Tesla Inc | TSLA | 4.51% |
Intel Corp | INTC | 4.49% |
NVIDIA Corp | NVDA | 4.45% |
Airbus SE | AIR.PA | 4.40% |
Alphabet Inc A | GOOGL | 4.26% |
Baidu Inc ADR | BIDU | 4.20% |
Siemens AG | SIE.DE | 4.11% |
Honda Motor Co Ltd | 7267 | 4.03% |
Daimler AG | DAI.DE | 3.96% |
Toyota Motor Corp | 7203 | 3.76% |
Name | Symbol | % Assets |
---|---|---|
Tesla Inc | TSLA | 3.88% |
Advanced Micro Devices Inc | AMD | 3.83% |
NVIDIA Corp | NVDA | 3.70% |
General Motors Co | GM | 3.59% |
Texas Instruments Inc | TXN | 3.57% |
Analog Devices Inc | ADI | 3.54% |
Alphabet Inc A | GOOGL | 3.48% |
Daimler AG | DAI.DE | 3.46% |
Volkswagen AG Participating Preferred | VOW3.DE | 3.45% |
Bayerische Motoren Werke AG | BMW.DE | 3.44% |
Name | Symbol | % Assets |
---|---|---|
Tesla Inc | TSLA | 3.30% |
Skyworks Solutions Inc | SWKS | 3.25% |
Ansys Inc | ANSS | 3.09% |
NVIDIA Corp | NVDA | 3.07% |
ON Semiconductor Corp | ON | 3.07% |
Lear Corp | LEA | 3.02% |
Tianneng Power International Ltd | 00819 | 3.01% |
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd ADR | TSM.TW | 2.98% |
Autohome Inc ADR | ATHM | 2.94% |
Volvo AB B | VOLV B | 2.92% |
Name | Symbol | % Assets |
---|---|---|
Tesla Inc | TSLA | 6.00% |
Apple Inc | AAPL | 4.40% |
Intel Corp | INTC | 4.35% |
Samsung Electronics Co Ltd | 005930.KS | 4.34% |
NVIDIA Corp | NVDA | 4.30% |
Alphabet Inc A | GOOGL | 4.15% |
Qualcomm Inc | QCOM | 3.94% |
Toyota Motor Corp | 7203 | 3.81% |
Siemens AG | SIE.DE | 3.72% |
Schneider Electric SE | SU.PA | 3.64% |
Name | Symbol | % Assets |
---|---|---|
China Molybdenum Co Ltd Class H | 03993 | 4.04% |
Nanjing Hanrui Cobalt Co Ltd A | 300618 | 3.99% |
Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Co Ltd | 603799 | 3.78% |
Katanga Mining Ltd | KAT | 3.77% |
Sumitomo Metal Mining Co Ltd | 5713 | 3.76% |
Livent Corp | LTHM | 3.67% |
Glencore PLC | GLEN | 3.61% |
PT Vale Indonesia Tbk | INCO | 3.44% |
Tianqi Lithium Industries Inc | 002466 | 3.20% |
First Quantum Minerals Ltd | FM.TO | 3.12% |
Name | Symbol | % Assets |
---|---|---|
Albemarle Corp | ALB | 19.24% |
Sociedad Quimica Y Minera De Chile SA ADR | SQM | 13.12% |
Tesla Inc | TSLA | 6.79% |
Varta AG | VAR1.DE | 6.06% |
GS Yuasa Corp | 6674 | 5.31% |
Livent Corp | LTHM | 5.22% |
EnerSys | ENS | 4.90% |
Panasonic Corp | 6752 | 4.82% |
Simplo Technology Co Ltd | 6121.TW | 4.78% |
Samsung SDI Co Ltd | 006400.KS | 4.68% |
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