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Archive for the ‘transportation’ category: Page 580

Dec 24, 2015

This hoverboard costs $20,000 and can fly for six minutes

Posted by in categories: energy, space, transportation

2015 was literally and figuratively the year of the hoverboard. While everyone was talking about the self-balancing scooters, two companies showed off skateboard-shaped boards that actually hovered a few inches above the Earth: Lexus with the “Slide” board, and Arx Pax with its second generation Hendo Hoverboard. Now, just days before the new year, another company called ArcaSpace is taking a shot at making the mythical hoverboard.

ArcaSpace is primarily a private space company, and one of the original 26 teams that competed in the Ansari X Prize competition in 2004. (It also entered the Lunar X Prize competition, too, before pulling out in 2013.) But early this morning the company released a video that shows off the “ArcaBoard,” a fan-powered rectangle that can lift a person off the ground by almost a foot.

The ArcaBoard gets its power — 430 pounds of thrust, or 272 horsepower, according to the company — from 36 electric fans. The company also says its built in some self-balancing tech to make it fly smoothly. Beyond that, though, it doesn’t look like there’s much to the experience. Dumitru Propescu, ArcaSpace’s CEO, is seen riding it in the video, but it doesn’t look like he has much control over where it’s going. It’s actually pretty reminiscent of the Hendo Hoverboard videos — sure, it hovers, but you can’t really steer it enough to ever use it to get anywhere.

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Dec 24, 2015

The Car Tech That Could Make GPS Obsolete

Posted by in category: transportation

Segnet


Ever wonder how exactly cars are learning to drive themselves? Well, here’s how: http://voc.tv/1P6L9zh

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Dec 24, 2015

The Year In Car Tech

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

From autonomous cars to see-through semi trucks, car technology innovated at blazing speeds this year. http://voc.tv/1P6L9zh

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Dec 23, 2015

Faraday Future: What if?

Posted by in categories: futurism, transportation

What if there was an electric car that not only helped preserve the environment — it actually made us look forward to the daily commute? What if such a car could redefine our relationship with the automobile itself? Our new short film — ‘What if?’ — explores the cleaner, better world we’re building at Faraday Future, and the big questions that drive us. http://faradayfuture.com

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Dec 22, 2015

The Robot Cars Quietly Get Closer, The Noise They Make Will Change The World

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

With a reported tie-up between Google’s self-driving car efforts and the automaker Ford, the era of autonomous vehicles is getting closer. The impact is likely to shake up the balance of power in the global auto industry and among the technology elite. At stake is nothing less than trillions of dollars.

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Dec 21, 2015

Elon Musk Says Tesla Vehicles Will Drive Themselves in Two Years

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, robotics/AI, space travel, sustainability, transportation

Musk opens up about autonomous vehicles, self-driving car rules, and the competition.

In Elon Musk’s world, “easy” is used to describe problems many might consider impossible—or at least very difficult to solve. Producing a fully autonomous vehicle that can operate in any condition and on any road, for example, is easy-ish. And Tesla Motors TSLA 0.91%, the all-electric automaker that Musk heads, is two years away from achieving it.

“I think we have all the pieces, and it’s just about refining those pieces, putting them in place, and making sure they work across a huge number of environments—and then we’re done,” Musk told Fortune with assuredness during his commute to SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., where he is also CEO. “It’s a much easier problem than people think it is. But it’s not like George Hotz, a one-guy-and-three-months problem. You know, it’s more like, thousands of people for two years.”

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Dec 20, 2015

The 16 most bizarre vehicles we’ve seen this year

Posted by in category: transportation

Reinventing the wheel.

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Dec 19, 2015

**Future Is Near**

Posted by in categories: futurism, transportation

This Audi Parks Itself, and Comes When You Call!

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Dec 18, 2015

This is the flying car the FAA just approved for test flights in US airspace

Posted by in category: transportation

Finally, a flying car!

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Dec 17, 2015

Tesla throws shade at hacker who built a self-driving car

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

Samsung Pay lets users ditch the physical gift cards in favor of the digital version.

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