Colorful, plus-sized display screens are proliferating in modern cars, turning them into rolling man caves: Driver instrument panels swiftly reconfigure to show maps or other data. Ferrari and Stellantis offer front shotgun passengers an interactive screen to futz with. BMW and other brands dangle lavish multimedia streaming systems for the back. Now Hyundai Mobis—the parts… Continue reading Q-Dot Display Ups the Screen Arms Race—on the Dashboard
Author: IEEE_Spectrum
The “Trolley Problem” Doesn’t Work for Self-Driving Cars
If you were the conductor of a trolley barreling toward two human beings, each one on either end of a fork in the track, could you choose which life to spare? This problem, one of the most famous thought experiments in all of philosophy, was proposed by British philosopher Phillipa Foot in 1967 as a… Continue reading The “Trolley Problem” Doesn’t Work for Self-Driving Cars
Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype
Cars catch fire. Electric vehicles are no exception. In the U.S., according to a 2023 study citing recent data from the National Transportation Safety Board and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, gasoline-powered, internal-combustion engine (ICE) cars were involved in about 1,530 fires per every 100,000 sold. On the other hand, pure electric vehicles (meaning those… Continue reading Extinguishing the EV Battery Fire Hype
Lucid Floats the Gravity: A Hail Mary in SUV Form
The Lucid Air breezed to a world record for EV driving range, but sales of the pricey sedan have failed to soar. The California-based Lucid Motors unveiled a hoped-for savior Thursday at AutoMobility LA: The Lucid Gravity, a handsomely wrought luxury SUV with seating for up to seven passengers, and a love letter to car… Continue reading Lucid Floats the Gravity: A Hail Mary in SUV Form
GM and Stellantis Back Rare-Earth-Free Permanent Magnet
For several years, the automobile industry has grappled with a straightforward question: Is it possible to produce a powerful, efficient, and mass-producible synchronous motor that contains no rare-earth elements at all? A newly announced partnership between General Motors and the startup magnet company Niron Magnetics suggests a resounding “yes.” That was how the media reported… Continue reading GM and Stellantis Back Rare-Earth-Free Permanent Magnet
MIT Professor’s IoT Sensors Make Roads Safer
Back in 2005, before smartphones were generally available, MIT Professor Hari Balakrishnan was so fed up with commuting delays in Boston that he built a mobile system to monitor road conditions. Hari Balakrishnan Employer MIT Title Professor Member grade Fellow Alma maters Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and the University of California, Berkeley He and… Continue reading MIT Professor’s IoT Sensors Make Roads Safer
Smart Emergency Responses to Severe Weather
Floods, landslides, and other disasters resulting from extreme weather are expected to bedevil cities more often due to climate change. These disasters can often disrupt traffic flows, slowing the deployment of emergency vehicles even as they try to respond to an overwhelming number of calls for aid. Now scientists have designed a way to calculate… Continue reading Smart Emergency Responses to Severe Weather
The 2025 Volvo EX30: Priced to Tempt Americans
For such a tiny and intensely powerful EV—an “espresso shot” of Volvo, according to its maker—the new EX30 carries big hopes but plenty of baggage. The EX30 brings the hallmarks of larger Volvos: squeaky-clean Scandinavian design, a canny blend of comfort and performance, and an obsessive focus on safety. But the EX30 is made in… Continue reading The 2025 Volvo EX30: Priced to Tempt Americans
Hoverboard Inventor Turns Heads With Two-Wheeled Car
When it comes to transportation, two wheels are better than one. That’s idea driving Shane, a two-wheeled vehicle that looks to reinvent one of the automotive industry’s most basic assumptions. Its inventor, Shane Chen, has made a career out of gravity-defying ideas—first with the Hoverboard (which, Chen notes, was widely copied) but also with the… Continue reading Hoverboard Inventor Turns Heads With Two-Wheeled Car
Could Direct Lithium Extraction Be a Game-Changer?
High in the Andes mountains where the borders of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile intersect, white expanses of salt stretch for hundreds of kilometers. Under these flats lie reservoirs of water that contain about three-quarters of the world’s lithium. For decades, producers have extracted that lithium by pumping the water up to the surface and letting… Continue reading Could Direct Lithium Extraction Be a Game-Changer?