Technology Innovation Today

Last week, tech wonderboy Elon Musk released his much-awaited Master Plan, Part Deux, a wildly ambitious blueprint to change American mobility as we know it: autonomous buses that might appear on-demand, and new electric big-rigs, pick-ups and SUVs. Oh, and sharing. Lots of sharing. Anyone will be able to use the Tesla app to add their self-driving Tesla to the wider Tesla fleet, Musk says. It will allow cash-poor wannabe Tesla owners the chance to take one for a spin while its real owner is, say, disrupting the Silicon Valley…

The NASA spacecraft Dawn has spent more than seven years traveling across the solar system to intercept the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. Now in orbit around Ceres, the probe has returned the first images and data from these distant objects. But inside Dawn itself is another first – the spacecraft is the first exploratory space mission to use an electrically-powered ion engine rather than conventional rockets. Such ion engines will propel the next generation of spacecraft. Inside an Ion Engine Ion engines use electric power to create charged…

Daimler Trucks has shifted gears in its ongoing effort to develop autonomous vehicles. By fitting its Highway Pilot self-driving system to a Mercedes-Benz Actros truck and steering it down a stretch of Autobahn 8 near Stuttgart, the company has marked the first time an autonomous production semi has been tested out on public roads. Much like the posited advantages of self-driving cars, Daimler says improvements in driver safety are a compelling reason to pursue the technology in the road freight sector. By allowing autonomous systems to shoulder some of the burden…

Sometimes being the best isn’t enough. You have to keep pushing, and trying to beat yourself. It’s a mindset that works for Olympic athletes, gearing up for Rio, and also for a small Maryland company that modifies Corvettes. Genovation takes the iconic muscle cars, rips out the drivetrain, and replaces it with twin electric motors, and 44kWh of batteries down the old transmission tunnel, and where the fuel tanks used to be. The team was puttering about with its Genovation GXE in February, when it set the speed record for…