Porsche’s Sleek Chargers Will Power up EVs in Just 15 Minutes

https://www.wired.com/story/porsche-taycan-fast-chargers-electric-pit-stops


Until now, if you wanted a fun, stylish, luxurious, long-range electric car, you had to buy a Tesla. Elon Musk’s automaker was the first to produce battery-powered vehicles that could stay on the road for hundreds of miles without stopping to recharge. Drivers finally had good reason to take their electrics far beyond their daily trundlings between work, home, and the grocery store—but the infrastructure to keep them charged up didn’t exist. So Tesla built them an international network of Superchargers—stations where they could stop for a spell and plug in, reaching an 80 percent charge in a little more than half an hour.

As Porsche prepares to launch its fully electric car, the Taycan sedan (née the Mission E concept), it faces a different problem: How to stand out in a field full of cool, capable EVs from the likes of Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar Land Rover, BMW, Audi, and others, along with old dog Tesla. Porsche’s solution, though, looks a lot like Tesla’s. Unable to offer a rousing engine note or beautifully precise gearbox, the automaker this week unveiled the “electric pit stop”—a setup that can add 250 miles worth of charge to a battery in just 15 minutes.

In keeping with its Teutonic taste for beautiful but functional design, Porsche split the charging stations in parts. Customers will interact with a slender, black and white, cranelike mast that offers up the cable and a 10-inch touchscreen. Behind the scenes, up to 300 feet away, it’s all about big white boxes holding all the gubbins. A FlexBox measures about 4 feet on each side and comes in different varieties, hiding the transformer and power electronics, for example, or a version with cooling fins and loud fans keeps things at the correct temperature.

Porsche split its charging stations into modular parts. The only bit customers will interact with is a cranelike mast that offers up the cable and a 10-inch touchscreen.

Porsche

A third type of box contains a big battery (either 70 or 160 kWh), which the system can use to charge cars extra quickly, even when the connection to the grid isn’t powerful enough. The battery does need to recharge between fast-charging sessions though, so it’s best suited for locations where demand isn’t too high and it wouldn’t make economic sense to upgrade the main supply.

Porsche says it plans to equip its nearly 200 US dealers with the setup, which will at least serve the more wealthy areas where their buyers live and drive. No word yet on how much plugging in might cost, but it’s free to power up at the one station Porsche has at its engineering center in Germany.

Most automakers dislike the idea of building out their own networks, but the alternative isn’t too appealing. Today, drivers of non-Tesla EVs often end up with accounts with various charging companies like EVgo and Chargepoint—and a pile of RFID cards in their glove box. The fastest (non-Tesla) chargers are typically 50 kW (compared to 120 for Tesla and 300 for Porsche), which can add around 150 miles of range in about an hour.

EVgo strategy chief Jonathan Levy says the company will soon offer 80- and even 150-kW chargers but adds that that drivers shouldn’t put too much stock in those numbers. “Lots of consumers are not aware that the vehicle is the limiting factor,” he says. Fifty kW has been plenty for the cars on the market until now. But with the new cars coming, things are getting interesting. (EVgo is also looking at battery storage systems like Porsche’s, which can help balance demand on the grid and avoid fees that electricity providers charge for heavy duty consumers.)

Chargepoint is slowly building up to chargers that can deliver up to 400 kW, at which point topping up a battery would take about as long as filling a large gas tank and buying a cup of coffee. “It’s becoming more and more important as car batteries are getting bigger, and people want these as their primary vehicles,” says Simon Lonsdale, the company’s chief strategy officer. At those sorts of levels, the cables have to be liquid cooled to keep them at a safe temperature for human hands.

All of which is to say, Porsche’s move isn’t revolutionary. It may not stand out as special by the time the Taycan hits the market. As these systems proliferate and batteries keep getting better, quick charging times will become a given—just like quick 0-to-60 mph times. But for now, at least, electric driving is a newfangled thing. Any move that makes it seem easier and more attractive—even luxurious—should help Porsche stand out.


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September 20, 2018 at 06:06AM

Why the SpaceX Lunar Tourists Won’t Walk on the Moon

https://www.space.com/41873-spacex-tourist-walk-on-moon.html



So far in human history, 12 people — all men, all NASA astronauts — have walked on the moon. Twelve more people — again, all men and all NASA astronauts — have gone around it without ever setting foot on the surface. That second number may be set to climb, though, now that Elon Musk has promised to send Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and six to eight artists into orbit around our celestial neighbor aboard the SpaceX Big Falcon Rocket (BFR). (Musk previously promised to put a tourist around the moon by the end of 2018. This time, he said the ride will happen in 2023.)


Maezawa will pay for the pleasure cruise, with what is presumably a hefty chunk of even his multibillion-dollar fortune. But whatever sum he’s paying (it has not been disclosed), it will buy him and his posse a rare view of the moon, but no landing or excursions onto the lunar surface.


That’s because, as challenging as safely launching humans into lunar orbit is, it’s essentially a matter of designing a crew vehicle that can keep people alive for the voyage and a descent back into Earth’s atmosphere and building a rocket big enough to push it where Maezawa wants to go. [The BFR in Images: SpaceX’s Giant Spaceship for Mars & Beyond]


Landing on the moon is a lot more complicated.


Why can’t SpaceX just land its crew vehicle on the moon?


If you watched the Apollo landings on TV in the late 1960s and early ’70s (or one of the movies made about them later), you saw that the Command Module — the ship that carried astronauts to and from lunar orbit — never actually landed on the moon.


Instead, each successful landing required two astronauts to clamber into the Lunar Module (LM) — a sort of lightweight, spacefaring dinghy — and ride it down to the lunar surface while a third astronaut waited in the module overhead. After each moonwalk, the astronauts would hop back into the LM and blast themselves back into space, where their third companion would pick them up for the ride back to Earth.


That wasn’t always the plan, though. In the earliest days of the Apollo project, NASA engineers seriously considered trying to land the whole Command Module on the moon. But they soon realized that a Command Module capable of landing on the moon, blasting back off into space, propelling itself back to Earth and surviving re-entry would have to be impractically gargantuan, even by Apollo mission standards.


SpaceX’s BFR is set to be more powerful than the Apollo missions’ Saturn V rocket, but not by much. The company released a promotional video in early 2018 showing a simulated BFR crew vehicle landing on the moon like this, but released no technical information suggesting that it’s actually overcome the technical challenges involved.


NASA, of course, gave up on the project of overcoming those challenges in the 1960s. Thus, the idea of a disposable, ultralight lander for moonwalks was born.


Why can’t SpaceX build its own lunar lander?


Actually, in theory, there’s no obvious, overwhelming reason SpaceX couldn’t do this. The company has, after all, managed plenty of tricky Earth landings that NASA couldn’t have dreamed of in the 1960s. And Musk has claimed — whether sensibly or otherwise — that his company will one day land people on Mars. 


But the reality is that, if history is any guide, designing and building a lunar lander is an entirely separate project that represents a good chunk of the cost of building a rocket that can get to the moon in the first place.


Between 1963 and 1973, NASA’s Lunar Module program cost $2.24 billion, compared with the Command Module’s $3.73 billion and the Saturn V’s $6.42 billion. Adjusted for inflation, the lander cost about $17 billion in 2018 dollars. Its design, as lead engineer Thomas Kelly recounted in a 2012 book about the effort, was a matter of endless downsizing to make the module lightweight enough for the journey.


The original design for the lander, Kelly wrote, involved a seated cockpit with wide, glass viewing windows, so the astronauts could watch their descent to the lunar surface in all its panoramic glory. By the time they had the thing stripped down for its first uncrewed flight aboard Apollo 5 in January 1968, it included just a single, little, triangular window and clip-in cable hoists, in place of seats, to keep the astronauts standing. By the time NASA conducted a crewed test with a lunar module in low Earth orbit aboard Apollo 9 in 1969, the astronauts had named it “Spider,” thanks to its alien, many-legged appearance.


That lander design carried just two astronauts at a time to the moon, though later models did manage larger cargo loads. A SpaceX lander would presumably have to safely ferry its entire paying passenger complement to the lunar surface, in at least marginally more comfort and safety than NASA’s cable hoists and stripped-down navigational and docking systems offered.


And that gets to the biggest obstacle preventing SpaceX from giving its passengers a real lunar excursion.


In the end, the problem is the people


If SpaceX’s goal were to explore the moon, which at least nominally was NASA’s goal in the ’60s and ’70s, then the company might have more options. Highly trained, expert astronauts can ferry themselves around in limited craft that require everyone on board to contribute to the project of landing, exploring, launching and docking — all while peering through a tiny, triangular window to find their way.


But no matter how much training SpaceX’s passengers receive before their trip, they won’t be there as space pilots, nor experts in the operation of spacesuits or other technical procedures involved in the landing. That means that if SpaceX were to attempt to put people on the moon, they would essentially be dead weight, along for the ride and taking up space while expert astronauts and automated systems handled the many technical challenges.


That means that a theoretical SpaceX tourist lander would have to carry far more bodies, likely in more comfort and safety, than one carrying a NASA-style pared-down crew of experts and equipment there for scientific research. So, instead, the tourists will at best be left up in space, where they can enjoy looking down at the moon but won’t have much to do in the way of groundbreaking exploration.


Originally published on Live Science.

via Space.com https://www.space.com

September 19, 2018 at 11:31AM

Fly Me to the Moon: Japanese Billionaire to Achieve ‘Lifelong Dream’ on SpaceX Lunar Trip

https://www.space.com/41894-japanese-billionaire-moon-trip-lifelong-dream.html



HAWTHORNE, California — Yusaku Maezawa has always been fascinated with the moon.


A 42-year-old Japanese billionaire entrepreneur with a passion for collecting art, Maezawa wondered what masterpieces could have been created if only his favorite artists had had the opportunity to fly to the moon. Then he realized he had the ability to find out.


Maezawa is paying an undisclosed but substantial amount of money for SpaceX to fly him and six to eight artists of his choosing on a trip around the moon and back. The unprecedented mission is planned to launch on SpaceX’s yet to be built BFR (or “Big Falcon Rocket“) in 2023. [The BFR in Images: SpaceX’s Giant Spaceship for Mars & Beyond]


“Ever since I was a kid, I have loved the moon. Just staring at the moon filled my imagination,” said Maezawa during a press conference at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California on Monday (Sep. 17). “That is why I could not pass up this opportunity to see the moon up close.”


At the same time, he did not to keep the experience to himself.


“That would be a little lonely. I don’t like being alone,” said Maezawa. “So I wanted to share this experience with as many people as possible. That is why I choose to go to the moon, I choose to go to the moon… with artists!”

SpaceX’s first private passenger for the BFR (“Big Falcon Rocket”), Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, is underwriting a 2023 flight to the moon and back.

Credit: collectSPACE.com


Space for art… and artists


Maezawa, who runs his own fashion line and whose net worth has been reported to be upwards of $3 billion, said he sees art as a way to change the world.


“I thought long and hard about how valuable it would be to the first private passenger to go to the moon. At the same time, I thought about how I could give art to the world and how this could contribute to world peace. This is my lifelong dream,” he explained.


Maezawa first approached SpaceX to fly him to the moon using the company’s Falcon Heavy rocket and Dragon spacecraft, a mission that at one time had been targeted for launch later this year until SpaceX decided to pursue development of the BFR instead.


“With Falcon Heavy and Dragon, we would have had — especially for a trip around the moon — only room for two people,” said Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO and chief technology officer. “It is like the size of an SUV inside [Dragon]. If you have a five day journey in an SUV, you’re going to be jam packed.”


On the other hand, the BFR is enormous, said Musk. With a 30-foot (9-meter) diameter, the BFS (“Big Falcon Spaceship”) has enough room to accommodate 100 people, though for this first mission, Musk suggested a smaller crew.


“We said maybe it is wise to have about a dozen people, or thereabouts, on the first trip into deep space,” recalled Musk. “[Maezawa] very graciously offered to provide those seats to artists and cultural influencers.”


Maezawa does not know yet the artists he will invite, but each will be asked to create something when they return to Earth “to inspire the dreamer within all of us.”


“If possible, I would like to invite the top artists that represent our planet from various fields including painters, sculptors, photographers, musicians, film directors, fashion designers and architects,” he said. “Luckily, we still have some time before 2023, so I hope to work very closely with the SpaceX team and reach out to each artist personally.”


Maezawa is hopeful the artists will want to fly to the moon with him.


“By the way, if you should hear from me, please say ‘yes’ and accept my invitation. Please don’t say no.”

Artist’s rendering of a violinist performing in weightlessness on board SpaceX’s BFS while on a journey the moon.

Credit: SpaceX


Underwriting a spacefaring civilization


In addition to inspiring new works of art, Maezawa’s “#dearMoon” mission will also provide SpaceX the funding it needs to further develop and build the BFR.


First introduced in 2016 as a solution for how to send humans to settle Mars, the BFR has undergone a series of design changes as SpaceX has sought to address the challenges associated with building a rocket capable of flying almost anywhere in the solar system. The latest version, revealed on Monday, incorporates actuated flaps or wings to control the vehicle as it flies through a wide range of atmospheric densities and velocities.


“The way it operates is more like a skydiver than an aircraft,” said Musk. “Almost the entire time when it is reentering, it’s just trying to brake. It is just trying to stop.”


To date, SpaceX has completed the first cylinder section of the BFR prototype’s main body and has test fired the Raptor engine that will power its launch. But there is a long way to go before a BFR will be ready to fly anyone to the moon and that work requires funding.


“Funding BFR is definitely a key question,” said Musk. “We have got launching of satellites, we have got servicing the space station … and next year we will start transporting astronauts to and from the station. We have got the Starlink global broadband that we are developing, which will be a useful source of revenue. And then private customers, or any customers for BFR, [who] are incredibly helpful in funding development of the rocket.”


Maezawa is now the first of those private customers.


“[Maezawa] is paying a lot of money — we’re not disclosing the amount, but he is paying a lot of money — that will help with the development of the ship and booster,” Musk said, “and ultimately, this BFR system is intended to carry anyone to orbit, to the moon and to Mars. So he is ultimately helping pay for the average citizen to travel to other planets. It is a great thing.”


Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2018 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.

via Space.com https://www.space.com

September 20, 2018 at 01:38PM

The government just made it easier for oil companies to leak methane on public land

https://www.popsci.com/methane-blm-trump?dom=rss-default&src=syn


California and New Mexico have sued over the Trump administration’s latest rollback of climate change protections to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The challenge came hours after the Bureau of Land Management, an agency within the U.S. Department of Interior, finalized a rule Tuesday letting companies off the hook for reducing air pollution from methane gas released during oil and natural gas production on federal lands.

The final rule is just one of three “common-sense standards” set by the Obama administration on the oil and gas industry that the Trump administration is trying to discard, says David McCabe, an atmospheric scientist with the Clean Air Task Force. In addition to changing how the Bureau of Land Management rule regulates new and existing oil and gas operations on federal and tribal lands, the administration is focused on easing Environmental Protection Agency regulations of new oil and gas sites, as well as existing sites in areas with air pollution violating national standards.

Methane, the main component in natural gas, is a greenhouse gas 28 to 36 times more potent than carbon dioxide per ton over a 100 year period and 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the shorter term. Methane is also a public health hazard: it reacts with nitrogen oxides under sunlight to form ozone, better known as smog, which exacerbates asthma and other respiratory diseases and makes it more difficult for people to breathe.

The Bureau of Land Management’s mission is “to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of America’s public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations,” according to the Bureau’s website.

Oil and gas produced on public land made up about nine percent of domestic natural gas production and five percent of U.S. oil production in 2017, according to the Bureau of Land Management. Methane escapes from leaky infrastructure or emitted as a waste product.

“A typical scenario is when you’re drilling an oil well and you’ve also got natural gas that comes up,” says Robin Cooley, a staff attorney at Earthjustice. When there isn’t a pipeline in place yet to collect the excess natural gas, the company will burn it (a process known as flaring) or vent it directly into the air. It’s “incredibly wasteful” since methane is a valuable natural resource that can be captured and sold, Cooley says.

Operators reported releasing 426 billion cubic feet of natural gas between 2009 and 2015, according to the Interior’s Office of Natural Resources.

In 2016, the Obama administration passed a waste prevention rule requiring oil and gas facilities that operate on federal lands to increase how much methane gas they salvage rather than burn or vent. The rule also required producers to inspect equipment for infrastructure leaks. The Bureau estimated the rule would cost the industry $100 to $280 million per year over 10 years, but reduce annual methane emissions by up to 180,000 tons, producing an overall benefit of about $50 to $200 million each year.

However, the Trump administration postponed compliance deadlines while the rule was being challenged in court by industry groups and several western states and while the Bureau worked to get rid of the rule.

The Bureau’s replacement, finalized this week, argued that waste prevention doesn’t “require an operator to lose money capturing and marketing uneconomic gas.” The Bureau also calculated that the costs to industry of reducing methane waste outweighed the benefits to society from mitigating climate change—if you look domestically rather than globally—and that cutting methane pollution for public health and environmental reasons exceeded the Bureau’s regulatory authority and overlapped with the EPA’s responsibility.

A week before, the EPA proposed a rule that would reduce how often oil and gas producers needed to inspect new well sites, from twice a year to once a year or once every two years. It would also give producers 60 days instead of 30 days to make repairs. The change would save industry up to $75 million a year, the EPA said, but release 380,000 tons of methane, 100,000 tons of volatile organic compounds, and 3,800 tons of hazardous air pollutants between 2019 and 2025.

“We’re at a time when the dangers of climate change are ever more clear,” Cooley says. “This administration is just being dangerous and irresponsible by rolling back climate change regulations.”

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September 20, 2018 at 02:49PM

Tesla Model 3 earns five-star NHTSA crash rating

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1379683


A video of a Tesla Model 3 crashing is rarely cause for celebration. But today it is, because the videos are of recent National Highway Traffic Safety Administration New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) safety tests, which the littlest Tesla just aced. Whether it was front impact, side impact, or rollover testing, the Model 3 performed to a tee, earning the full five stars on each test.

We probably should not act particularly shocked: both Tesla Model S and Model X also scored top marks in NCAP testing. What’s more, the very layout of battery EVs affords them inherent advantages.

For instance, a skateboard layout with a battery pack between the axles makes for a low center of gravity and polar moment of inertia. The safety structure of the battery pack adds extra stiffness to the vehicle. And compact electric motors mean there’s more room for impact protection for occupants, who also don’t have to be protected from bouncing off an engine.

Elon Musk was beaming about the test results on Twitter, telling the world that the “Model 3 has a shot at being [the] safest car ever tested.” Such good news must no doubt be welcome after what feels like a relentless string of negativity surrounding the automaker.

Listing image by NHTSA

via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com

September 20, 2018 at 02:16PM

First hydrogen-powered train hits the tracks in Germany

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1378045


  • A side view of the hydrogen-powered train. These two trains belong to a rail system that will serve 2 million passengers a year.

  • Seeing the train from head-on is best when the train has come to a complete stop.


    René Frampe, Alstrom

  • Reporters gathered to see what is likely the first such locomotive in the world.


    René Frampe, Alstrom


  • René Frampe

French train-building company Alstom built two hydrogen-powered trains and delivered them to Germany last weekend, where they’ll zoom along a 62-mile stretch of track that runs from the northern cities of Cuxhaven, Bremerhaven, Bremervörde, and Buxtehude. The new trains replace their diesel-powered counterparts and are the first of their kind, but they are likely not the last. Alstom is contracted to deliver 14 more hydrogen-powered trains, called Coradia iLint trains, before 2021.

via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com

September 20, 2018 at 05:35AM