In 2008 California's voters approved the first bonds for a $33 billion San Francisco-to-Los Angeles bullet train.

14 years later, the New York Times is now calling the project "a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become... too big to fail...." Political compromises, the records show, produced difficult and costly routes through the state's farm belt. They routed the train across a geologically complex mountain pass in the Bay Area. And they dictated that construction would begin in the center of the state, in the agricultural heartland, not at either of the urban ends where tens of millions of potential riders live. The pros and cons of these routing choices have been debated for years. Only now, though, is it becoming apparent how costly the political choices have been. Collectively, they turned a project that might have been built more quickly and cheaply into a behemoth so expensive that, without a major new source of funding, there is little chance it can ever reach its original goal of connecting California's two biggest metropolitan areas in two hours and 40 minutes....

Fourteen years later, construction is now underway on part of a 171-mile "starter" line connecting a few cities in the middle of California, which has been promised for 2030. But few expect it to make that goal. Meanwhile, costs have continued to escalate. When the California High-Speed Rail Authority issued its new 2022 draft business plan in February, it estimated an ultimate cost as high as $105 billion. Less than three months later, the "final plan" raised the estimate to $113 billion. The rail authority said it has accelerated the pace of construction on the starter system, but at the current spending rate of $1.8 million a day, according to projections widely used by engineers and project managers, the train could not be completed in this century....

As of now, there is no identified source of funding for the $100 billion it will take to extend the rail project from the Central Valley to its original goals, Los Angeles and San Francisco, in part because lawmakers, no longer convinced of the bullet train's viability, have pushed to divert additional funding to regional rail projects....

The Times's review, though, revealed that political deals created serious obstacles in the project from the beginning. Speaking candidly on the subject for the first time, some of the high-speed rail authority's past leaders say the project may never work.

Tesla's long-delayed semi-truck has started production, and the company will begin making deliveries as soon as December 1st, Elon Musk has announced on Twitter. Engadget reports: The first batch of Semis will be delivered to Pepsi, which ordered 100 vehicles from the company back in December 2017. As TechCrunch notes, other big companies had also ordered trucks from the automaker, including Walmart and UPS. And in May this year, the automaker opened reservations to more customers for a deposit of $20,000. A Semi costs between $150,000 and $180,000, depending on the range, and it could go as far as 500 miles on a single charge. The Tesla Semi was unveiled back in 2017, with production expected to start by 2019. "While that obviously didn't happen, Musk told employees in an email back in early 2020 that the vehicle was already in limited production and that it was 'time to go all out and bring the Tesla Semi to volume production,'" notes Engadget.

Deliveries were delayed yet again to 2021 and then to 2022 due to the global supply chain shortages affecting the tech and auto industries.

One piece of news from Tesla's AI Day presentation on Friday that was overshadowed by the company's humanoid "Optimus" robot and Dojo supercomputer was the improvements to Tesla's Full Self Driving software. According to Autopilot director Ashok Elluswamy, "there are now 160,000 customers running the beta software, compared to 2,000 from this time last year," reports The Verge. From the report: In total, Tesla says there have been 35 software releases of FSD. In a Q&A at the end of the presentation, Musk made another prediction -- he's made a few before -- that the technology would be ready for a worldwide rollout by the end of this year but acknowledged the regulatory and testing hurdles that remained before that happens. Afterward, Tesla's tech lead for Autopilot motion planning, Paril Jain, showed how FSD has improved in specific interactions and can make "human-like" decisions. For example, when a Tesla makes a left turn into an intersection, it can choose a trajectory that doesn't make close calls with obstacles like people crossing the street.

It's known that every Tesla can provide datasets to build the models that FSD uses, and according to Tesla's engineering manager Phil Duan, now Tesla will start building and processing detailed 3D structures from that data. They said the cars are also improving decision-making in different environmental situations, like night, fog, and rain. Tesla trains the company's AI software on its supercomputer, then feeds the results to customers' vehicles via over-the-air software updates. To do this, it processes video feeds from Tesla's fleet of over 1 million camera-equipped vehicles on the road today and has a simulator built in Unreal Engine that is used to improve Autopilot.

During Toyota's annual dealer meeting in Las Vegas last week, which was called "Playing to Win," CEO Akio Toyoda explained why the company isn't all-in on electric vehicles. CNBC reports: Toyoda last week simply stated what he would like his legacy to be: "I love cars." Despite criticism from some investors and environmental groups, Toyoda this past week doubled down on his strategy to continue investing in a range of electrified vehicles as opposed to competitors such as Volkswagen and General Motors, which have said they are going all-in on all-electric vehicles. The plans could arguably cement Toyoda's "I love cars" legacy or tarnish it, depending on how quickly drivers adopt electric vehicles. "For me, playing to win also means doing things differently. Doing things that others may question, but that we believe will put us in the winner's circle the longest," he said [...]. Toyoda, who described Toyota as a large department store, said the company's goal "remains the same, pleasing the widest possible range of customers with the widest possible range of powertrains." Those powertrains will include hybrids and plug-in hybrids like the Prius, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles like the Mirai and 15 all-electric battery models by 2025.

Toyoda reiterated that he does not believe all-electric vehicles will be adopted as quickly as policy regulators and competitors think, due to a variety of reasons. He cited lack of infrastructure, pricing and how customers' choices vary region to region as examples of possible roadblocks. He believes it will be "difficult" to fulfill recent regulations that call for banning traditional vehicles with internal combustion engines by 2035, like California and New York have said they will adopt. "Just like the free autonomous cars that we are all supposed to be driving by now, EVs are just going to take longer to become mainstream than media would like us to believe," Toyoda said in a recording of the remarks to dealers shown to reporters. "In the meantime, you have many options for customers." Toyoda also believes there will be "tremendous shortages" of lithium and battery grade nickel in the next five to 10 years, leading to production and supply chain problems.

Toyota's goal is carbon neutrality by 2050, and not just through all-electric vehicles. Some have questioned the environmental impact of EVs when factoring in raw material mining and overall vehicle production. Since the Prius launched in 1997, Toyota says it has sold more than 20 million electrified vehicles worldwide. The company says those sales have avoided 160 million tons of CO2 emissions, which is the equivalent to the impact of 5.5 million all-electric battery vehicles. "Toyota can produce eight 40-mile plug-in hybrids for every one 320-mile battery electric vehicle and save up to eight times the carbon emitted into the atmosphere," according to prepared remarks for Toyoda provided to media. Toyoda also said the company has no plans to overhaul its franchised dealership network as it invests in electrified vehicles, like some competitors have announced.

"I know you are anxious about the future. I know you are worried about how this business will change. While I can't predict the future, I can promise you this: You, me, us, this business, this franchised model is not going anywhere. It's staying just as it is," he told dealers to resounding applause.

After years of lobbying the state to increase regulations on autonomous vehicles, San Francisco officials are taking their case to the feds. San Francisco Examiner reports: The directors of The City's two main transportation agencies outlined their concerns about Cruise's driverless cars in a letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regarding Cruise's application to deploy a custom-built autonomous vehicle. In it, San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Authority Director Jeffrey Tumlin and San Francisco County Transportation Authority Director Tilly Chang provide a comprehensive overview of disruptive and unsafe incidents that they say Cruise cars precipitated. The letter, sent on Sept. 21, comes as Cruise's driverless cars continue to stop in the middle of San Francisco's streets for extended periods of time, often in groups, blocking traffic until they can be remotely restarted or manually retrieved by Cruise staff. Over the past week, there were at least four such incidents, including one that delayed a couple of KRON4 reporters.

The City's letter to NHTSA provides specific data on these incidents. Between May 29 and Sept. 5 of this year, 28 incidents of stopped Cruise cars blocking traffic were reported to 911. The City identified an additional 20 such incidents reported on social media over that time period, which does not include the events of the past week. The City estimates that these figures represent "a fraction of actual travel lane road failures," since most of these events take place late at night, when Cruise offers its driverless ride-hailing service, and when few other people are on the streets. In light of these concerns, The City requests several new regulations on autonomous vehicles from NHTSA.

San Francisco's letter is in response to a petition by General Motors, Cruise's parent company, to manufacture and commercially deploy a custom-built autonomous vehicle called the Cruise Origin. It would be roughly the size of an SUV, but with no obvious front and back and no driver's seat or steering wheel. In their letter on behalf of the entire city government, Tumlin and Chang stress that they "neither support nor oppose the Petition, but document safety hazards and street capacity issues raised by the operation of the Cruise AV on San Francisco streets." They go on to call for several specific regulations they would like to see imposed on Cruise and Ford's Argo AI, another company seeking to build and deploy a fully autonomous vehicle. Those recommendations include stringent data reporting requirements and incident reports, limiting the geographic area and the number of vehicles that can be deployed in San Francisco, and enabling first responders to manually turn off the vehicles. "Safety is the guiding principle of everything we do," Cruise said in a statement regarding these incidents. "That means if our cars encounter a situation where they aren't able to safely proceed they turn on their hazard lights and we either get them operating again or pick them up as quickly as possible. This could be because of a mechanical issue like a flat tire, a road condition, or a technical problem. We're working to minimize how often this happens, and apologize to any other impacted drivers."

All new vehicles purchased in New York will need to be zero-emission models beginning in 2035, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) announced on Thursday. From a report: "We're really putting our foot down on the accelerator and revving up our efforts to make sure we have this transition -- not someday in the future, but on a specific date, a specific year -- by the year 2035," Hochul said at a press conference in White Plains, N.Y. After careening into the Chester-Maple Parking Lot in a white Chevy Bolt, Hochul announced a series of new electric vehicle (EV) initiatives for the state, beginning with the zero-emission requirement for 2035. To reach this target, she said that 35 percent of new cars will need to be zero-emission by 2026 and 68 percent by 2030.

All new school buses purchased will have to be zero-emission by 2027, with the entire fleet meeting these standards by 2035, according to the governor. "We actually have benchmarks to achieve, to show we're on the path to get there," Hochul said, stressing that the changes would not occur suddenly. New York is following in the footsteps of California in mandating zero-emissions vehicles by the year 2035. "We had to wait for California to take a step because there's some federal requirements that California had to go first -- that's the only time we're letting them go first," the governor said.

A prototype all-electric passenger plane took off for the first time yesterday in a test flight that marks a significant milestone for carbon pollution-free aviation. The Verge reports: The nine-passenger commuter aircraft called Alice took off at 7:10AM yesterday from Washington state's Grant County International Airport. Alice is ahead of much of the pack when it comes to all-electric aircraft under development. It could become the "first all-new, all-electric commercial airplane" if the Federal Aviation Administration certifies it to carry passengers, The Seattle Times reports.

Alice's maker, Washington state-based company Eviation, is targeting commuter and cargo flights between 150 and 250 miles. That's like flying from New York City to Boston or from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Yesterday's test flight lasted just eight minutes, though, with the aircraft reaching an altitude of 3,500 feet. The purpose of the flight was to gather data to improve the design of the plane, which still has a long way to go before it can take off with passengers on board. Alice will eventually come in three configurations: a nine-passenger commuter plane, a six-passenger luxury plane, and an e-cargo version. The limited size has to do with battery capacity.

The U.S. Transportation Department on Tuesday said it approved electric vehicle charging station plans for all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico covering roughly 75,000 miles of highways. CNBC reports: Earlier this year, the Biden administration allocated $5 billion to states to fund EV chargers over five years along interstate highways as part of the bipartisan infrastructure package. Under the plan, entitled the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, states provided their EV infrastructure deployment proposals to the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. States are now approved to construct a network of EV charging stations along designated alternative fuel corridors on the national highway system and have access to more than $1.5 billion to help build the chargers.

It's unclear how many charging stations the funds will support, and states have not yet shared specific charger locations. Transportation Department officials have said that states should install stations every 50 miles and ensure each station is located within one mile of an interstate highway. "We have approved plans for all 50 States, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia to help ensure that Americans in every part of the country -- from the largest cities to the most rural communities -- can be positioned to unlock the savings and benefits of electric vehicles," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Hill: Passenger rail service Amtrak is aiming to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045 to reduce its impact on the environment. Amtrak on Thursday announced efforts to hit that mark will involve reducing the use of diesel fuel and phasing in renewable fuels in its network over the next decades. The rail service said it plans to reach 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2030 by investing in new fuel-cell, hydrogen and battery technologies.

Funds from President Biden's bipartisan infrastructure law will be used to help Amtrak develop a more sustainable fleet, expand service and revamp part of the rail's aging infrastructure. The legislation includes $66 billion in rail funding, the largest federal investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak. Amtrak executives said setting clear goals to reduce emissions is particularly important for attracting "a new generation of travelers who are conscious of their environmental impact."

Amtrak last year announced a $7.3 billion investment to procure 83 new trains that will operate mostly along the Northeast Corridor, which include some of the first hybrid-electric powered trains. The trains will start replacing older trains, some of which are nearly 50 years old, in 2024. The transportation sector generates the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., making up 27 percent of total emissions in 2020. Rail makes up just 2 percent of transportation emissions, while cars and trucks make up more than 80 percent.

Kia is planning to manufacture its electric vehicles in the US, according to South Korean media sources Maeil Business and SBS (via The EV Officials). The Verge reports: The automaker currently builds its flagship electric car and North American sales hit, the Kia EV6, in South Korea at its Hwasung plant. But now, Kia will shift some of its EV assembly to the US by 2024, according to the report. Manufacturing EVs in the US would allow Kia to qualify for new incentives that were included in the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, which requires automakers to build EVs in North America to qualify.

Kia and its parent company, Hyundai, had threatened legal action against the US over what they see as a "discriminatory" policy. Other provisions will exclude automakers from incentives if they use Chinese-sourced minerals and battery components, which could effectively cut off almost every domestic EV manufacturer once the law goes into effect. Hyundai and Kia combined currently hold the second-highest market share for electric vehicles in the US, a position that could be at risk if customers can't take advantage of the new federal incentives (and man, are EVs getting expensive).

The vast majority of electric vehicle owners charge their cars at home in the evening or overnight. We're doing it wrong, according to a new Stanford study. From the report: In March, the research team published a paper on a model they created for charging demand that can be applied to an array of populations and other factors. In the new study, published Sept. 22 in Nature Energy, they applied their model to the whole of the Western United States and examined the stress the region's electric grid will come under by 2035 from growing EV ownership. In a little over a decade, they found, rapid EV growth alone could increase peak electricity demand by up to 25%, assuming a continued dominance of residential, nighttime charging. To limit the high costs of all that new capacity for generating and storing electricity, the researchers say, drivers should move to daytime charging at work or public charging stations, which would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This finding has policy and investment implications for the region and its utilities, especially since California moved in late August to ban sales of gasoline-powered cars and light trucks starting in 2035. [...]

Current time-of-use rates encourage consumers to switch electricity use to nighttime whenever possible, like running the dishwasher and charging EVs. This rate structure reflects the time before significant solar and wind power supplies when demand threatened to exceed supply during the day, especially late afternoons in the summer. Today, California has excess electricity during late mornings and early afternoons, thanks mainly to its solar capacity. If most EVs were to charge during these times, then the cheap power would be used instead of wasted. Alternatively, if most EVs continue to charge at night, then the state will need to build more generators -- likely powered by natural gas -- or expensive energy storage on a large scale. Electricity going first to a huge battery and then to an EV battery loses power from the extra stop. At the local level, if a third of homes in a neighborhood have EVs and most of the owners continue to set charging to start at 11 p.m. or whenever electricity rates drop, the local grid could become unstable.

Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. The research team compared several scenarios of charging infrastructure availability, along with several different residential time-of-use rates and commercial demand charges. Some rate changes made the situation at the grid level worse, while others improved it. Nevertheless, a scenario of having charging infrastructure that encourages more daytime charging and less home charging provided the biggest benefits, the study found. "The findings from this paper have two profound implications: the first is that the price signals are not aligned with what would be best for the grid -- and for ratepayers. The second is that it calls for considering investments in a charging infrastructure for where people work," said Ines Azevedo, one of the co-senior authors of the study.

"We need to move quickly toward decarbonizing the transportation sector, which accounts for the bulk of emissions in California," Azevedo continued. "This work provides insight on how to get there. Let's ensure that we pursue policies and investment strategies that allow us to do so in a way that is sustainable."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years, people in cars stuck behind blue delivery trucks in traffic have echoed media reports criticizing Amazon for clogging American roadways. It's well-known that the Amazon drivers steering these fleets of trucks and vans don't actually work for Amazon but are hired by companies contracted by Amazon, and Amazon has repeatedly denied liability for any dangerous driving reported, though. Because Amazon has contracts with more than 50,000 firms, just how dangerous Amazon's contracted drivers really are remains a question that is hard to track. However, The Information reported last year that horrific car crashes are part and parcel of Amazon's culture of convenience. And then more recently, The Wall Street Journal provided another window into how deadly America's favorite speedy delivery service can be. Since 2015, WSJ reported this week, "Trucking companies hauling freight for Amazon have been involved in crashes that killed more than 75 people."

To arrive at this number, WSJ partnered with Jason Miller -- a Michigan State University professor who researches transportation safety -- to analyze various sources of government data from "3,512 trucking companies that were inspected by authorities three or more times while hauling trailers for Amazon since February 2020." The resulting report, WSJ said, "for the first time showed how the safety performance of Amazon's trucking contractors compared with their peers." And their results didn't appear good for Amazon. For example, a review of Department of Transportation data on unsafe driving scores of more than 1,300 Amazon trucking contractors from February 2020 to early August 2022 found that contractors who worked the most with Amazon were "more than twice as likely as all other similar companies to receive bad unsafe driving scores." WSJ also found evidence of dozens of companies that Amazon contracted that had "conditional" ratings, which is like DOT putting them on probation -- a black mark that typically alienates most firms from contracting them. One Illinois-based company contracted by Amazon "scored worse than the level DOT officials consider problematic" every month of WSJ's review period. "First and foremost, the insinuation that Amazon puts more value on meeting deadlines than on human lives is categorically false," said Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel. "Any accident involving one of our partners or community members is a tragedy, and we always work with our contractors to prevent accidents or learn from them, so they don't happen again."

The safety director of Amazon's freight unit, Steve DasGupta, noted that Amazon contractors had "a rate of fatalities per vehicle mile about 7 percent lower than the industry average in 2020." The company also told said it has "suspended all contractors involved in car crashes described in WSJ's report, suspended or terminated 80 percent of contracts where WSJ found unsafe driving scores, and made changes to its screening process," reports Ars.

A person may take knowing the local time for granted, but an official review revealed that there is no single, accurate map showing the nation's time zones and local observance of Daylight Saving Time. CNN reports: Federal transportation officials are now at work creating an accurate map of the nation's time zones, according to a report by the inspector general for the Department of Transportation. The issue came up, the inspector general's office said, after the US Senate passed legislation this year to end the biannual time turn by making Daylight Saving Time permanent.

Investigators found no single map accurately showing the boundaries nationwide and said several sources of time information on the DOT website contained errors, such as inaccurately noting the time practices in some localities. For example, one map incorrectly identifies a deviation in Nevada: "Elko County, NV is shown as the location that changed time zones rather than the correct location, the city of West Wendover."

"The official boundaries are narratively described [in federal regulations] with various types of coordinates and geographic features such as lines of longitude, State or county lines, and rivers," the report stated. The inspector general report said the Transportation Department is responsible for keeping the clock because of the importance of time to travel. It said the original five time zones have expanded to nine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Nvidia is gearing up to deliver Drive Thor, its next-generation automotive-grade chip that the company claims will be able to unify a wide range of in-car technology from automated driving features and driver monitoring systems to streaming Netflix in the back for the kiddos. Thor, which goes into production in 2025, is notable not just because it's a step up from Nvidia's Drive Orin chip. It's also taking Drive Atlan's spot in the lineup. Nvidia is scrapping the Drive Atlan system on chip ahead of schedule for Thor, founder and CEO Jensen Huang said Tuesday at the company's GTC event. Ever in a race to develop bigger and badder chips, Nvidia is opting for Thor, which, at 2,000 teraflops of performance, will deliver twice the compute and throughput, according to the company.

"If we look at a car today, advanced driver assistance systems, parking, driver monitoring, camera mirrors, digital instrument cluster and infotainment are all different computers distributed throughout the vehicle," said Nvidia's vice president of automotive, Danny Shapiro, at a press briefing Monday. "In 2025, these functions will no longer be separate computers. Rather, Drive Thor will enable manufacturers to efficiently consolidate these functions into a single system, reducing overall system cost." One chip to rule them all. One chip to help automakers build software-defined autonomous vehicles. One chip to continuously upgrade over-the-air. Further reading: Nvidia Announces Next-Gen RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 GPUs

Sebastian Thrun, the CEO of Kitty Hawk, informed employees on Wednesday the company was laying them off, according to a news report. The company also posted the news on its LinkedIn page. From the report: Sources inside the company told Insider that Kitty Hawk had recently wound down work on its most recent flying-car project, Heaviside, and reverted to research-and-development mode with Google co-founder Larry Page more closely involved with the work. However, it appears the company couldn't see a way forward. Laid-off staff have been given four months of severance pay, an employee said. Thrun, a self-driving car pioneer and a Google veteran, founded Kitty Hawk in 2010, and Page financially propped it up. Insiders said Page remained the sole bankroller of Kitty Hawk throughout its lifetime. He became increasingly hands-off over the years, though he would involve himself in newer projects as they sprung up, including an internal initiative to make flying cars run more quietly. The company produced several prototype models of its flying cars, including Flyer, which the company shuttered in 2020. Heaviside, its most recent model, was designed to be quieter for flying in densely populated environments. In 2019 the company also spun up Wisk, a joint venture between Kitty Hawk and Boeing, which will continue.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) yesterday recommended that all new vehicles be equipped with alcohol detection systems that can stop people from driving while drunk. The NTSB can't issue such a regulation on its own but urged the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to do so. The NTSB said it "is recommending measures leveraging new in-vehicle technologies that can limit or prohibit impaired drivers from operating their vehicles as well as technologies to prevent speeding." If adopted, this would require "passive vehicle-integrated alcohol impairment detection systems, advanced driver monitoring systems or a combination of the two that would be capable of preventing or limiting vehicle operation if it detects driver impairment by alcohol," the NTSB said. The agency urged the NHTSA to "require all new vehicles to be equipped with such systems."

Under a US law enacted last year, the NHTSA is already required to examine whether it can issue this type of rule. While drunk driving is a longstanding problem that has caused many deaths, the NTSB said its recommendation was spurred by its investigation into one crash that killed nine people -- including seven children -- in January 2021 on State Route 33 near Avenal, California. On that two-lane highway with a speed limit of 55 mph, an SUV driver leaving a New Year's Day gathering "was driving at a speed between 88 and 98 mph," the NTSB report said. [...]

Section 24220 of the Bipartisan Infrastructure LawSection 30111 of Title 49 in US law, it can delay issuing a rule for three years and submit annual reports to Congress describing the reasons for not issuing the rule. Each annual report would also have to contain an update on "the deployment of advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology in vehicles." In writing the law, Congress noted that "in 2019, there were 10,142 alcohol-impaired driving fatalities in the United States involving drivers with a blood alcohol concentration level of .08 or higher, and 68 percent of the crashes that resulted in those fatalities involved a driver with a blood alcohol concentration level of .15 or higher." Congress also cited a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety estimating that "advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology can prevent more than 9,400 alcohol-impaired driving fatalities annually."

Descending up to 40 meters beneath the Baltic Sea, the world's longest immersed tunnel will link Denmark and Germany, slashing journey times between the two countries when it opens in 2029. CNN Travel reports: After more than a decade of planning, construction started on the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel in 2020 and in the months since a temporary harbor has been completed on the Danish side. It will host the factory that will soon build the 89 massive concrete sections that will make up the tunnel. "The expectation is that the first production line will be ready around the end of the year, or beginning of next year," said Henrik Vincentsen, CEO of Femern A/S, the state-owned Danish company in charge of the project. "By the beginning of 2024 we have to be ready to immerse the first tunnel element."

The tunnel, which will be 18 kilometers (11.1 miles) long, is one of Europe's largest infrastructure projects, with a construction budget of over 7 billion euros ($7.1 billion). [...] It will be built across the Fehmarn Belt, a strait between the German island of Fehmarn and the Danish island of Lolland, and is designed as an alternative to the current ferry service from Rodby and Puttgarden, which carries millions of passengers every year. Where the crossing now takes 45 minutes by ferry, it will take just seven minutes by train and 10 minutes by car. The tunnel, whose official name is Fehmarnbelt Fixed Link, will also be the longest combined road and rail tunnel anywhere in the world. It will comprise two double-lane motorways -- separated by a service passageway -- and two electrified rail tracks. "Today, if you were to take a train trip from Copenhagen to Hamburg, it would take you around four and a half hours," says Jens Ole Kaslund, technical director at Femern A/S, the state-owned Danish company in charge of the project. "When the tunnel will be completed, the same journey will take two and a half hours."

"Today a lot of people fly between the two cities, but in the future it will be better to just take the train," he adds. The same trip by car will be around an hour faster than today, taking into account time saved by not lining up for the ferry.

Uber said on Monday a hacker affiliated with the Lapsus$ hacking group was responsible for a cyber attack that forced the ride-hailing company to shut several internal communications temporarily last week. From a report: Uber said the attacker had not accessed any user accounts and the databases that store sensitive user information such as credit card numbers, bank account or trip details. "The attacker accessed several internal systems, and our investigation has focused on determining whether there was any material impact," Uber said, adding that investigation was still ongoing. The company said it was in close coordination with the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice on the matter. Friday's cybersecurity incident had brought down Uber's internal communication system for a while and employees were restricted to use Salesforce-owned office messaging app Slack. Uber said the attacker logged in to a contractor's Uber account after they accepted a two-factor login approval request following multiple requests, giving the hacker access to several employee accounts and tools such as G-Suite and Slack.

"Transportation is going to electrify much faster than people realize," says Rick Luebbe, chief executive officer of Group14 Technologies.

So this weekend the Seattle Times paid a visit to their small manufacturing plant in rural Western Washington working on becoming one of the companies supplying a crucial component: Inside this building, carbon is infused with a silicon gas to produce a black powdery substance that high-profile investors hope will be a key component of the next generation of electric car batteries enabling them to travel farther between plug-ins, recharge faster and cost less. "It's transformational," said Rick Luebbe, chief executive officer of Group14 Technologies, which opened the Maltby plant in 2021 and has raised $441 million in funding. The company employs nearly 100 people, and the industrial workplace north of Woodinville has the excitement of a startup company. A research laboratory is under construction in one corner of the building as production is underway elsewhere.

Group14 is one of more than 20 companies launched in a global quest to improve the lithium-ion battery — mainstay of the fledgling electric car industry — by including more silicon.... Within the next decade, two companies plan to make Washington a hub of this emerging technology. Group14, which has drawn Porsche AG as a lead investor, and Sila, an Alameda, California, company that is partnering with Mercedes-Benz, both have announced plans to open large-scale plants east of the Cascades in Moses Lake....

The silicon technology also has applications for many other battery-powered products ranging from cellphones that can last longer between charges to drones and aircraft that could stay aloft for more hours of flight... Company officials at Group14 and Sila say they have developed silicon products that can be blended with graphite — or replace it entirely — without unduly compromising battery life.... "Generally, every customer we're working with is getting the cycling they need for commercial deployment," Luebbe said. Gene Berdichevsky, Sila's chief executive, said Sila's technology, also proprietary, "achieves and exceeds" automotive industry specification even when silicon entirely replaces graphite.

Some automotive companies are betting that silicon does have an important role to play in the next generation of batteries... Mercedes-Benz AG, which this year announced it's opening a new battery plant in Alabama, invested in Sila in 2019. Then, last May, the company announced it would use the Sila silicon technology for electric G-Class vehicles that will start production in the middle of this decade. Uwe Keller, directory of battery development at Mercedes-Benz AG, said his company is involved in extensive research with Sila's silicon product to determine how it best can be incorporated into a next generation of batteries.

But he expects Sila's technology will boost electric car battery range by 15 to 20%....

Berdichevsky, Sila's chief executive, who worked at Tesla in its early years and co-founded Sila in 2011, said his company plans to start producing silicon product from Moses Lake to send to Mercedes-Benz in the second half of 2024.

"Whirring as it powered up, a hoverbike lifted directly into the air in Michigan, video shows."

That's the lead from one news report about a big debut at a U.S. auto show in Detroit: a gasoline-and-electric powered hoverbike (using a Kawasaki motor) created by Japanese manufacturing company AERWINS Technologies. They've already started selling them in Japan, and they're now also hoping to sell a smaller version in America in 2023. The hoverbike flies for 40 minutes, Reuters reports, and can reach speeds of up to 62 miles per hour (100 kph). (They added that the bike drew "perhaps inevitable comparisons to the speeder bikes of Star Wars.")

From McClatchy news services: Video from WXYZ's Facebook shows the hoverbike's flight. The test rider checks the vehicle then signals with a fist pump. The engines power up, whirring louder and louder until the bike lifts off. The hoverbike flies back and forth, slightly faster as the ride goes on, then lands smoothly to the ground, video shows. "I feel like I'm literally 15 years old and I just got out of Star Wars," the test rider told Reuters. "It's awesome! Of course, you have a little apprehension, but I was just so amped. I literally had goosebumps and feel like a little kid...."

The price of a hoverbike? Only $777,000 according to current estimates, though the company hopes to get the cost down to about $50,000, The Detroit News reported.
The Detroit News adds this about the company's founder/CEO: As a boy, Shuhei Komatsu loved Star Wars movies, especially the lightning-fast land speeders. So when he grew up, he decided to make one of his own, he said.

"I wanted to make something from the movie real," Komatsu said. "It's a land speeder for the Dark Side...."

Komatsu said his company will make its public offering of stock on the NASDAQ exchange in November.... He said he's hoping the U.S. government classifies its XTURISMO as a non-aircraft.... He said he thinks consumers will buy the machine for recreation, and governments will buy it for law enforcement and for inspecting infrastructure. "I hope that in the future, people will use it for every day," he said.