In response to someone who requested a Tesla pickup truck, Musk said, “I promise that we will make a pickup truck right after Model Y. Have had the core design/engineering elements in my mind for almost 5 years. Am dying to build it.”

In terms of size, Musk said it would be comparable to Ford’s F-150 total size, but “maybe slightly bigger to account for a really game-changing (I think) feature I’d like to add.”

This isn’t too surprising given that Musk said earlier this year Tesla planned to show off an electric pickup sometime within the next couple of years. Then, at Tesla’s big semi-truck unveiling in November, Musk revealed an image of an electric pickup truck, which was based on the architecture of the semi-truck. And in Musk’s “Master Plan, Part Deux” in 2016, he described Tesla’s plans to create “a new kind of pickup truck.”

The only hint we have around timing is that Tesla would start making the pickup truck right after Model Y, which Tesla has yet to unveil. The Model Y is a crossover/small SUV vehicle that is reportedly in the more advanced stages of development. Tesla expects to launch the Model Y by 2020.

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Source: TechCrunch

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Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s first electric semi-truck on Thursday evening at an event in Los Angeles that also included the surprise reveal of a new Tesla sports car.

The new Roadster, which has the same name as the first electric vehicle produced by Tesla from 2008 to 2012, emerged from the back of one of the trucks at the end of a presentation that focused largely on the economic and performance needs of truck drivers.

“The point of doing this is just to give a hardcore smackdown to gasoline cars,” Musk said. “Driving a gasoline sports car is going to feel like a steam engine with a side of quiche.”

While the sports car provided a jolt of excitement for Tesla enthusiasts, much of the event focused on pitching the truck to truck drivers – customers with very different concerns than the average Tesla owner.

In typical Musk style, the CEO had hyped the truck on Twitter throughout the week. On Sunday, he promised that it “will blow your mind clear out of your skull and into an alternate dimension”, while on Wednesday he teased that the truck “can transform into a robot, fight aliens and make one hell of a latte”.

There was no espresso machine to be seen, but Musk did promise a laundry list of features that he claimed would ensure the overall cost of ownership will be 20% less per mile compared with diesel trucks. Among them: faster acceleration, better uphill performance, a 500-mile (805km) range at maximum weight at highway speed, and “thermonuclear explosion-proof glass” in the windshield.

Safety features include enhanced autopilot, lane-keeping technology, and a design that makes jackknifing “impossible”, Musk said.

The company plans to build a network of “Megachargers” (as opposed to the “Superchargers” used by other Tesla vehicles) that can produce a 400-mile charge in 30 minutes.

Musk claimed it would be “economic suicide” to continue using diesel trucks, saying the Tesla version, if driven in convoy, would be cheaper than shipping goods by rail.

The CEO’s promises for the new Roadster were no less ambitious. Musk said the car’s acceleration from 0 to 60 mph and 0 to 100 mph, as well as its quarter-mile speed, were all “world records” for production cars.

He said production on the trucks would begin in 2019 and the sports cars would be available in 2020.

Despite the confidence exuded by Musk, questions will undoubtedly arise about the company’s capacity to manufacture the new vehicles.

Tesla debuted its first mass-market sedan, the Model 3, to much fanfare in July, when the waitlist for the vehicle already numbered more than 500,000. Since then, production has not gone smoothly.

In the third quarter of 2017, the company produced just 260 Model 3s – well below the 1,500 it had promised in August. Tesla blamed “production bottlenecks” for the delays. The Wall Street Journal reported that as recently as September, the cars were still being built by hand, rather than on an automated assembly line.

Some workers at the company’s Fremont, California factory are attempting to unionise with the United Auto Workers in a campaign that chiefly cites the factory’s above-average injury rates. The company has also been hit with a number of complaints and lawsuits by employees and contractors alleging gender and racial discrimination.

On Tuesday, the company hit back at media coverage of the complaints, and argued that the attorney representing some plaintiffs has a record of “extorting money for meritless claims”.

“At Tesla, we would rather pay 10 times the settlement demand in legal fees and fight to the ends of the earth than give in to extortion and allow this abuse of the legal system,” the company said in a blog post.

Competition in the electric truck market has been heating up. In September, Daimler AG announced the delivery of its first electric trucks to the United Parcel Service (UPS). Other companies working on electric trucks include Volkswagen, Cummins and Nikola.

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Source: Guardian UK

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The system has been trained to recognise the smell of explosives and could be used to replace traditional airport security, he said.

Eventually the modem-sized device – dubbed Koniku Kore – could provide the brain for future robots.

Experts said that making such systems mass-market was challenging.

All of the big tech firms, from Google to Microsoft, are rushing to create artificial intelligence modelled on the human brain.

While computers are better than humans at complex mathematical equations, there are many cognitive functions where the brain is much better: training a computer to recognise smells would require colossal amounts of computational power and energy, for example.

Mr Agabi is attempting to reverse-engineer biology, which already accomplishes this function with a fraction of the power it would take a silicon-based processor. “Biology is technology. Bio is tech,” he says. “Our deep learning networks are all copying the brain.”

He launched his start-up Koniku over a year ago, has raised $1m (£800,000) in funding and claims it is already making profits of $10m in deals with the security industry.

Koniku Kore is an amalgam of living neurons and silicon, with olfactory capabilities — basically sensors that can detect and recognise smells.

“You can give the neurons instructions about what to do – in our case we tell it to provide a receptor that can detect explosives.”

He envisages a future where such devices can be discreetly used at various points in airports, eliminating the need for queues to get through airport security.

As well as being used for bomb detection, the device could be used to detect illness by sensing markers of a disease in the air molecules that a patient gives off.

The prototype device shown off at TED – the pictures of which cannot yet be publicly revealed – has partially solved one of the biggest challenges of harnessing biological systems – keeping the neurons alive, said Mr Agabi.

In a video, he showed the device being taken out of the lab.

“This device can live on a desk and we can keep them alive for a couple of months,” he told the BBC.

Ultimately though he has much bigger ambitions.

“We think that the processing power that is going to run the robots of the future will be synthetic biology-based and we are laying the foundations for that today.”

The fusion of biology and technology gained headlines recently when Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and Space X, announced his latest venture – Neuralink – which aims to fuse the human brain with AI, using neural lace.

Advances in neuroscience, bioengineering and computer science means that much more is known about how the human brain works than ever before.

This is fuelling the development of neuro-technology – devices that aim to mould the brain into computers.

Much of the current work is aimed at improving brain function, particularly for those with brain-related injuries or diseases.

Prof John Donoghue, who heads up the Wyss Centre for bio and neuro-engineering in Geneva, has been at the forefront of work attempting to allow people with paralysis to move limbs using their brain waves.

He believes the field is at a “tipping point” where biological and digital systems will come together.

The idea being pursued by Mr Agabi is interesting, he said.

“Digital computers are fast and reliable but dumb, whereas neurons are slow but smart,” he said.

“But they are not so good in a little dish and the big problem will be keeping them alive and happy. That is going to be a big challenge,” he added.

“Will we have a dish of neurons computing on our desk? I don’t know.”

But he added that scientists in Geneva were already able to “keep neurons in a dish and communicate with them for a year”, adding that such systems were an “exciting tool to study brain circuitry”.

Other scientists are developing silicon chips which mimic the way that neurons work and could ultimately prove more stable, he said.

But Mr Agabi is not convinced such systems will win out over his.

“The idea of mimicking silicon is very hard and we don’t think it can be scaled,” he told the BBC.

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Source: BBC

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The first 30 customers – most of them employees of the company – received their cars on Friday.

Chief executive Elon Musk said the Model 3 was the “best car for its cost, either electric or gasoline”.

Prices start at $35,000 (£26,650), which the firm hopes will bring mass market interest.

The price is still higher than that of rival electric car the Nissan Leaf, which starts at $30,680, or the hybrid Chevrolet Volt, which goes for $34,095.

Past Tesla models, the “S” and “X”, had a starting price of $80,000, putting them beyond the means of many.

The company aims to produce 5,000 units of the Model 3 a week in 2017, and 10,000 a week by 2018. Buyers ordering now are being told to expect delivery late next year.

More than half a million customers have already placed deposits.

If Tesla can successfully produce and sell that many cars a year, it will outperform BMW, Mercedes, and Lexus in the US.

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Source: BBC

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Mr Trump’s move has been met with dismay from other world leaders signed up to the accord – but much of the outcry can be heard on the west coast of his own country.

The chief executives of Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook have all criticised the president’s decision.

Elon Musk, who had been a member of Mr Trump’s business panel, announced he would leave the post.

“Am departing presidential councils,” he tweeted. “Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”

Many firms, including IBM and Amazon, said they would continue to try to meet the goals of the climate deal.

“IBM supported – and still supports – US participation in the Paris Agreement,” the technology company said in a statement.

Microsoft remained “committed” to doing its part for the agreement, its president and chief legal officer Brad Smith said.

Many tech firms have faced scrutiny from environmentalists, thanks to the huge energy demands of their data centres.

US data centres consumed roughly as much energy as six-and-a-half million US homes, according to one report – 70 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity.

Tech firms have consequently invested heavily in making their operations greener.

Google, for example, says it is on track to hit its own goal of offsetting 100% of its data centres’ energy use against renewable power.

And Apple has said that 96% of its energy comes from renewable sources – the company is now pushing its suppliers to follow its example.

“A lot of these firms have already invested in renewables and [leaving the Paris deal] counters what they’re currently invested in,” explains analyst Matthew Ball at Canalys.

The implication is that, should it becomes less cost-effective to rely largely on renewables, then that investment could soon look like a mistake.

But there’s another downside for the tech giants.

“It kind of gives a sign that the US is not going to be at the forefront of the technology innovation that’s going to be required to meet the agreement’s goals,” says Mr Ball.

“It gives the edge to the European and Chinese firms.”

Getting a slice of the renewable energy market has certainly been an objective for many of America’s tech firms.

Tesla, for instance, recently announced a new product – solar panels for your roofthat look uncannily like ordinary tiles.

All renewable energy resources combined account for nearly 10% of the US’s demand – but certain resources within that, including solar, have been growing rapidly according to the US Energy Information Administration.

Solar energy actually employs more US workers than Apple, Google and Facebook together, so it is perhaps unsurprising that the tech firms have expressed an interest in remaining part of the “renewable revolution”.

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Source: BBC

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