The Michigan factory will be the first of its kind to build vehicles capable of Level 4 autonomy.
Over a month after launching the first-ever commercial autonomous ride-hailing service, Alphabet’s self-driving vehicle company, Waymo, said this week that it is planning o build a new manufacturing plant. The company said in a blog post that the facility will be located in Michigan and that it will be the first of its kind to build vehicles of Level 4 autonomy, in which the vehicle drives itself, but only with limits on where. It seems Waymo hopes the new facility should help the company build its lead in this growing industry. This will be the world’s first factory 100%-dedicated to the mass production of L4 autonomous vehicles,” said from the company.
David Beckham celebrates a year of his Inter Miami side getting place in MLS by showing glimpses of the football complex he wants to build in Miami and targets ‘the world’s best players’.
David Beckham just boosted the excitement around his highly anticipated Inter Miami MLS side by sharing a video detailing their progress over the last 12 months.
Elon Musk shares some surprising details about the materials used to create the massive new rocket.
SpaceX managed the record-breaking
21 launches in 2018, but it has also currently been working on some bigger
plans for the future. In the early morning of Christmas Eve, Musk released on
Twitter a photo of prototype of his spacecraft, now known as Starship, and previously as Big Falcon Rocket. This is the ship that SpaceX
plans to use to send people to the moon, to Mars and on other super-fast
international flights to space.
SpaceX has said the spacecraft, being
built at the SpaceX test facility in Texas, will be bigger and considerably
more powerful than the Saturn V that took Apollo astronauts to the moon. The
nose cone is multiple stories tall. Musk tweeted that the massive rocket
prototype has a stainless steel skin and its steel will perform better than
lighter weight carbon fiber material at high temperatures.
Finland’s state-owned ferry operator
Finferries and engineering giant Rolls-Royce have demonstrated the first fully
autonomous ferry in the world. The operation was conducted in the Turku archipelago
between Parainen and Nauvo, in Finland. The return journey was carried out over
remote control.
The
53.8m double-ended car ferry, named Falco, includes several Rolls-Royce Ship
Intelligence technologies to navigate autonomously.
The ferry is equipped with a range
of advanced sensors. They are used to build a detailed picture of Falco’s
surroundings in real-time.
BMWs bursting into flames
made headlines in South Korea earlier this year. The local media reported more
than 40 cases in 2018 and some parking lots refused to accept BMW cars over
fears of fire.
South Korea said Monday,
December 24, it will fine German automaker BMW $10 million and file a criminal
complaint with state prosecutors over allegedly dragging its feet in recalling vehicles
with faulty engines after dozens of engine fires.
The auto giant apologized
and recalled 172,000 vehicles of 65 different models in July and October with a
faulty exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) cooler, which the company blamed for the
fires.
In August, a recall of 480,000 vehicles with the same EGR
cooler issue for Europe and some Asian countries, including South Korea, was
announced — including South Korea — of 480,000 cars affected by the same
problem. The recall was expanded to more than one million additional diesel
cars two months later.
After a five-month review, South Korea’s
Transport Ministry concluded that the German automaker deliberately tried to cover
up technical issues and was slow to recall the cars. The ministry found the
fires to be caused by faulty valves in the exhaust gas recirculation coolers (EGR).
Combined with carbon and oil sediment the leaks could cause fires when the
vehicle was driven at high speeds for long periods of time, but the carmaker
said the problem would be solved by the exchange of faulty hardware.
Six out of 10 imported vehicles are from Germany in South Korea. BMW sold nearly 39,000 cars in the first six months of 2018, according to the Korea Automobile Importers and Distributors Association.
A single Falcon 9 rocket is about to fly for the third time.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch Spaceflight’s SSO-A rideshare mission from Southern California at 1:31 p.m. EST. The launch was delayed from November 28 due to strong high-altitude winds.
On Monday, SpaceX will launch 64 small satellites at once from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California using a Falcon 9 rocket that the company has already flown twice before. It is a groundbreaking launch for SpaceX in numerous ways. Not only this is the first time the company will fly a rocket for a third time, but this will be the largest number of spacecraft that has ever taken off on a single flight. More »
The Japanese automaker has teamed up with the Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald to create the ‘perfect’ ad, which it is billing as the first commercial scripted by artificial intelligence.
The 60-second spot is entitled Driven by Intuition and directed by Macdonald, working from a script that was developed by IBM’s Watson AI system. Macdonald’s credits include The Last King of Scotland and the Whitney Houston biopic Whitney. The storyline itself along with the script was created using AI along with technical partner Visual Voice, IBM and Lexus’s creative agency The&Partnership. The agencies collaborated with the IBM Watson team to use AI to analyze 15 years’ worth of footage, text and audio for car and luxury brand campaigns that have won Cannes Lions awards for creativity, as well as a range of other external data. More »
The German automaker is considering a second manufacturing plant in U.S. that could produce engines and transmissions, BMW Group Chairman and CEO Harald Krueger said to reporters Tuesday in Los Angeles ahead of the Los Angeles Auto Show. According to a company spokesman, the Munich-based BMW Group is considering building an engine plant in the U.S. to supply its vehicles made in the U.S. and Mexico. More »
Tesla Model Y prototype has been approved by Elon Musk, and its production will start in 2020.
Elon Musk had approved the production of a prototype of the Model Y and the company is targeting 2020, Tesla CEO said during the automaker’s third-quarter earnings call a few days ago. The CEO only said they had made significant progress on the Model Y and didn’t give any further details. Musk has previously teased a March 2019 reveal of the SUV. More »
Google’s Waymo gets permission for human-free driving tests in the Golden State.
Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet, has won approval from California to begin the first tests of fully driverless cars without human safety drivers at the wheel as a backup on state roads. The company is the first to receive a driverless permit in the Golden State. The company has been granted the permission amid an increase in skepticism about the real-world readiness of self-driving technology.
Waymo’s permit includes day and night testing on city streets, rural roads, and highways with speed limits of up to 65 mph. The company claims its vehicles can safely handle fog and light rain, and testing in those conditions is included in the permit. Waymo plans to gradually begin driverless testing on public roads in a limited territory and, over time, gradually expand the area. More »
