An electric 18-wheel all-terrain vehicle (ATV) that can glide over rocks and tree trunks is being developed in Finland.
Helsinki-based ’18 Wheels’ recently unveiled their prototype based on a unique patented suspension in which each wheel has a suspension system that provides a special trajectory of movement and is equipped with an independent electric motor inside.
The result is a much smoother ride over all types of rough terrain that a traditional four-wheel ATV would struggle with.
“Our all-terrain vehicle is able to overcome large obstacles at high speed. I mean rocks up to 35 centimeters (14 inches) high, fallen trees, kerbs and even stairs. Our all-terrain vehicle can drive over stairs. I dare say no other vehicle on this planet can do that,” said inventor and founder of 18 Wheels, Eldar Aliev.
He explained that the lighter the wheel is, the less energy it will receive when it hits an obstacle, and so the less energy it will give back to the car body and the less impact the driver will feel. Aliev claims his team has reduced the unsprung weight by a factor of 10, so the impact when hitting an obstacle is 10 times lower than a traditional heavier vehicle.
And, unlike normal ATVs, which are notorious for churning up the ground they drive over, the unique suspension and weight distribution make the 18-wheeler much less destructive.
“Our all-terrain vehicle puts very low pressure on the ground, so it does not damage the soil, grass and lawn,” Aliev said.
The company is now seeking investment while they put the finishing touches to a new pre-production prototype, which they expect to unveil in late 2023.
Rob Cumming in his Aerocar flying car airplane. CBS via Getty Images
The FAA just approved the first electric flying car, the Alef Model A, for test flights.
The first flying car, a Model T with wings attached, was created 106 years ago.
In 1930, the first flying car was featured in a movie, kicking off a long line of flying cars appearing on screen.
Earlier this month, Alef Automotive, a California-based automotive and aviation company, received a special airworthiness certificate from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration for their flying car.
The certificate permits Alef to conduct experimental flight tests on their new fully electric flying car, dubbed the “Model A.” This marks the first time the FAA has ever granted legal permission to test-run a flying electric vehicle like the Model A. When built, the Model A will be able to maneuver on roads and in the air and perform vertical takeoff maneuvers from a complete stop.
The possibility of a flying car being available for an estimated $300,000 is exciting, but humans and engineers have been fascinated with the idea of flying cars for over 100 years. Why are we only getting flying cars now?
The first “modern car,” made by Carl Benz, was invented in 1885, and the first widely accessible car, the Model T Ford, hit the market in 1908. Only nine years after the invention of the Model T, Glenn Curtiss took aim at one of the first attempts at a flying car.
With the potential of flying cars around the corner, here’s a look through the history of our obsession with making cars fly and the ups and downs that have come with it.
Chariots depicted an early fascination with flying vehicles.
Juno and Iris in a chariot pulled by peacocks in the sky surrounded by angels. Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Ancient stories and depictions of gods in ancient Mesopotamia or Greece frequently had them flying around in chariots.
In the 16th-century text “The Man in the Moone,” Francis Goodwin imagined that humans might journey to the moon on a chariot pulled by geese.
Early depictions of a flying car even looked somewhat like a chariot, like this ad card from 1890.
A futuristic ad card depicting a flying car from the Au Bon Marche company. Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images
Besides ancient references to flying chariots and postcards, the first modern reference to a flying car in the news was in The New York Times in 1894.
An image of Maxim’s flying machine with a 104-foot wingspan and weighing 8,000 pounds. SSPL/Getty Images
The New York Times article was titled “Maxim’s Flying Car,” referring to Hiram Stevens Maxim, the inventor behind the first machine gun. In this instance, the term “car” most likely referenced a carriage.
According to the article, Maxim and his team flew 500 feet at a rate of “something like 45 miles per hour.” The description of the machine is what separates it from an actual car; it was “100 feet wide with four side sails and, when seen in the air, will give the impression of an enormous bird.”
More closely resembling an early attempt at a plane than an actual flying car, the headline pointed to the mythology of the flying car.
Widely considered to be the first attempt at creating a flying car, the Curtiss Autoplane was invented in 1917 by Glenn Curtiss, 9 years after the invention of the Model T Ford.
The aviator Glenn Curtiss poses with full equipment before take off. Louis Van Oeyen/Western Reserve Historical Society/Getty Images
The automobile as we know it had just been invented in 1908, and the Wright brothers had made their first successful flight not too long before that, in 1903. Glenn Curtiss, the man behind the V8 engine and a major contributor to aeronautic engineering, figured: Why not put the two together?
In 1917, in front of a crowd at the Pan American Aeronautical Exposition of 1917, Curtiss attempted to take off in his flying car, according to a NASA paper on flying cars. The car performed more of a hop than it did take flight, and with no financial backers for the project, Curtiss never pursued the idea further.
In 1930, the flying car made one of its first appearances in popular culture in the movie, “Just Imagine.”
Maureen O’Sullivan says goodbye to John Garrick in a scene from the film “Just Imagine.” Fox/Getty Images
“Just Imagine” has scenes with people flying around in machines that look more like planes than cars but can perform vertical take-offs and landings. In the movie, the aircraft moves through the air in straight lines, like cars in the sky.
The film takes place in a futuristic society where food has become pills, names have become numbers, and the government decides who people can or cannot marry. The technologically-advanced vision in “Just Imagine” took place in 1980, which might explain why flying car depictions and attempts started becoming more prolific.
H.G. Wells’ 1936 movie, “Things To Come,” has a brief scene with a helicopter/car hybrid.
A “Things To Come” lobby card showing a scene from the movie with a flying automobile. LMPC via Getty Images
The idea behind the vehicle seems a little absurd, especially since it looks more like a futuristic helicopter than it resembles a car.
H.G. Wells’ flying car becomes more believable when compared to modern examples of attempts at flying cars.
The prototype Aska A5 flying car is displayed at CES 2023 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. David Becker/Getty Images
The Aska A5 flying car prototype has rotary blades that fold in and out from the top, can fly 250 miles, and is an electric vehicle. According to Military and Aerospace Electronics, the car has also earned FAA airworthiness certification to begin testing phases.
Looking at H.G. Wells’ idea of a flying car and what we have started to achieve, it appears that Wells wasn’t too far off base.
Before we got to modern flying cars, movies and TV shows kept imagining cars in the sky.
Nancy Olson and Fred Mac Murray in “The Absent Minded Professor.” RDB/ullstein bild via Getty Images
The 60s saw a boom of flying cars in pop culture, starting with Disney’s “The Absent-Minded Professor.”
“The Absent-Minded Professor” was a departure from the science fiction movies of the early 20th century in its fantastical, rather than practical, approach to the flying car.
The flying car in “The Absent-Minded Professor” is achieved through an anti-gravity substance called flubber, created by the professor himself, which allows the car to fly without any changes to the frame or additions of rotors or wings.
Another famous example is “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” a musical that revolves around a flying car.
A poster for the children’s musical film “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” Movie Poster Image Art/Getty Images.
Of course, one of the most famous examples of flying cars is in “The Jetsons.”
The Jetson family wave as they fly past buildings in space in their spaceship in a still from the animated television series, “The Jetsons.” Warner Bros./Courtesy of Getty Images
“The Jetsons” premiered in September 1962 and only lasted one season (though it would return for two additional seasons in the 1980s), but its impact persists today. The cartoon depicted an idealized version of the future that was “a distillation of every Space Age promise Americans could muster,” according to Smithsonian Magazine.
James Bond even had a flying car in “The Man With the Golden Gun.”
Jacqui Smith looks at the Flying Car model for the new James Bond film “The Man With The Golden Gun.” Arthur Sidey/Mirrorpix/Getty Images
The design for the Bond car was not too far off from a real flying car prototype from 20 years earlier in 1947 — the Convair Car model 118.
A flying Model 118 ConVairCar during a test flight in California in 1947. FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The previous Convair Model 116 managed 66 successful flight tests, according to Complex. They improved the design for the Model 118, but it only had one test flight.
The test flight lasted an hour, but had to make an emergency landing because of low fuel. The pilot had to make an emergency landing that destroyed the car, damaged the wings, and injured the pilot, according to Popular Mechanics.
But not all attempts at flying cars were so lucky.
The AVE Mizar taking flight on an airport runway. Bettmann/Getty Images
In 1971, Henry Smolinski and Harold Blake died when their flying car prototype crashed and exploded.
The two engineers from California were taking their car on a test flight when black smoke began emanating from it. The car crashed, and the two died as a result.
These real-life failures didn’t stop Hollywood from imagining flying cars. This time, they were more than just cars with wings attached.
A ‘Spinner’ flying car takes off in a scene from Ridley Scott’s futuristic thriller ‘Blade Runner’ Warner Bros./Archive Photos/Getty Images
1982’s “Blade Runner,” takes place in Los Angeles in 2019. In this universe, flying cars are as abundant as normal cars.
In reality, flying cars didn’t make it to the skies of Los Angeles in 2019. The movie “Just Imagine” believed we’d soar around in our flying cars or personal planes by the 1980s. Though there were multiple attempts to make it happen, none ended up taking off.
In addition to flying, the Delorean, from the 1985 classic “Back to the Future,” could also travel through time.
Universal Studios
The 1997 film “Fifth Element” also depicted a society rife with flying cars.
Fifth Element
So if we’ve been imagining flying cars for over 100 years, why are we still stuck commuting on the ground?
A plane is re-fueled mid-flight as it tries to break the flying endurance record Bettman/Getty Images
The simple answer is that cars and planes are made for fundamentally different purposes.
A woman sitting in a convertible car as an airplane flies overhead circa 1950. FPG/Getty Images
In an interview with The New York Times, John Brown, the chief editor of Roadable Times, said through all the different iterations of flying cars, “none have been practical.”
“Cars have an aerodynamic that makes them hug the ground, whereas an aircraft is designed to do just the opposite,” Brown told The Times, “and cars need even weight distribution on all four wheels, while an aircraft has 90 percent of its weight on the back wheels.”
In addition to that, it’s hard to figure out insurance and licensing around flying cars. Some of them require pilot licenses, like Klein Visions Air car, and others only require a driver’s license.
Pal-V Liberty on display at Brussels Expo Sjoerd van der Wal/Getty Images
The Pal-V, a flying car from the Netherlands, requires a pilot’s license to operate and has components that fold in or pop up to make it flight-ready in 10 minutes.
The car-helicopter hybrid will cost $400,000, according to the BBC.
With the potential arrival of the Alef Model A, we’ve gotten one step closer to the future we’ve been dreaming of for over 100 years.
Alef in transition flight. Alef Aeronautics
The Alef Model A will cost $300,000, but the company hopes to bring the cost-per-vehicle down to $35,000 by 2035, Insider reported.
The design of the car is a departure from traditional models of flying cars, but Alef cites “Back to the Future” as the inspiration behind the design of the car.
AI systems are increasingly everywhere and are becoming more powerful almost by the day. But even as they become ever more ubiquitous and do more, how can we know if a machine is truly “intelligent”? For decades the Turing test defined this question. First proposed in 1950 by the computer scientist Alan Turing, it tried to make sense of a then emerging field and never lost its pull as a way of judging AI.
Turing argued that if AI could convincingly replicate language, communicating so effectively that a human couldn’t tell it was a machine, the AI could be considered intelligent. To take part, human judges sit in front of a computer, tap out a text-based conversation, and guess at who (or what) is on the other side. Simple to envisage and surprisingly hard to pull off, the Turing test became an ingrained feature of AI. Everyone knew what it was; everyone knew what they were working toward. And while cutting-edge AI researchers moved on, it remained a potent statement of what AI was about—a rallying call for new researchers.
But there’s now a problem: the Turing test has almost been passed—it arguably already has been. The latest generation of large language models, systems that generate text with a coherence that just a few years ago would have seemed magical, are on the cusp of acing it.
So where does that leave AI? And more important, where does it leave us?
The truth is, I think we’re in a moment of genuine confusion (or, perhaps more charitably, debate) about what’s really happening. Even as the Turing test falls, it doesn’t leave us much clearer on where we are with AI, on what it can actually achieve. It doesn’t tell us what impact these systems will have on society or help us understand how that will play out.
We need something better. Something adapted to this new phase of AI. So in my forthcoming book The Coming Wave, I propose the Modern Turing Test—one equal to the coming AIs. What an AI can say or generate is one thing. But what it can achieve in the world, what kinds of concrete actions it can take—that is quite another. In my test, we don’t want to know whether the machine is intelligent as such; we want to know if it is capable of making a meaningful impact in the world. We want to know what it can do.
Mustafa Suleyman
Put simply, to pass the Modern Turing Test, an AI would have to successfully act on this instruction: “Go make $1 million on a retail web platform in a few months with just a $100,000 investment.” To do so, it would need to go far beyond outlining a strategy and drafting some copy, as current systems like GPT-4 are so good at doing. It would need to research and design products, interface with manufacturers and logistics hubs, negotiate contracts, create and operate marketing campaigns. It would need, in short, to tie together a series of complex real-world goals with minimal oversight. You would still need a human to approve various points, open a bank account, actually sign on the dotted line. But the work would all be done by an AI.
Something like this could be as little as two years away. Many of the ingredients are in place. Image and text generation are, of course, already well advanced. Services like AutoGPT can iterate and link together various tasks carried out by the current generation of LLMs. Frameworks like LangChain, which lets developers make apps using LLMs, are helping make these systems capable of doing things. Although the transformer architecture behind LLMs has garnered huge amounts of attention, the growing capabilities of reinforcement-learning agents should not be forgotten. Putting the two together is now a major focus. APIs that would enable these systems to connect with the wider internet and banking and manufacturing systems are similarly an object of development.
Technical challenges include advancing what AI developers call hierarchical planning: stitching multiple goals, subgoals, and capabilities into a seamless process toward a singular end; and then augmenting this capability with a reliable memory; drawing on accurate and up-to-date databases of, say, components or logistics. In short, we are not there yet, and there are sure to be difficulties at every stage, but much of this is already underway.
Even then, actually building and releasing such a system raises substantial safety issues. The security and ethical dilemmas are legion and urgent; having AI agents complete tasks out in the wild is fraught with problems. It’s why I think there needs to be a conversation—and, likely, a pause—before anyone actually makes something like this live. Nonetheless, for better or worse, truly capable models are on the horizon, and this is exactly why we need a simple test.
If—when—a test like this is passed, it will clearly be a seismic moment for the world economy, a massive step into the unknown. The truth is that for a vast range of tasks in business today, all you need is access to a computer. Most of global GDP is mediated in some way through screen-based interfaces, usable by an AI.
Once something like this is achieved, it will add up to a highly capable AI plugged into a company or organization and all its local history and needs. This AI will be able to lobby, sell, manufacture, hire, plan—everything that a company can do—with only a small team of human managers to oversee, double-check, implement. Such a development will be a clear indicator that vast portions of business activity will be amenable to semi-autonomous AIs. At that point AI isn’t just a helpful tool for productive workers, a glorified word processor or game player; it is itself a productive worker of unprecedented scope. This is the point at which AI passes from being useful but optional to being the center of the world economy. Here is where the risks of automation and job displacement really start to be felt.
The implications are far broader than the financial repercussions. Passing our new test will mean AIs can not just redesign business strategies but help win elections, run infrastructure, directly achieve aims of any kind for any person or organization. They will do our day-to-day tasks—arranging birthday parties, answering our email, managing our diary—but will also be able to take enemy territory, degrade rivals, hack and assume control of their core systems. From the trivial and quotidian to the wildly ambitious, the cute to the terrifying, AI will be capable of making things happen with minimal oversight. Just as smartphones became ubiquitous, eventually nearly everyone will have access to systems like these. Almost all goals will become more achievable, with chaotic and unpredictable effects. Both the challenge and the promise of AI will be raised to a new level.
I call systems like this “artificial capable intelligence,” or ACI. Over recent months, as AI has exploded in the public consciousness, most of the debate has been sucked toward one of two poles. On the one hand, there’s the basic machine learning—AI as it already exists, on your phone, in your car, in ChatGPT. On the other, there’s the still-speculative artificial general intelligence (AGI) or even “superintelligence” of some kind, a putative existential threat to humanity due to arrive at some hazy point in the future.
These two, AI and AGI, utterly dominate the discussion. But making sense of AI means we urgently need to consider something in between; something coming in a near-to-medium time frame whose abilities have an immense, tangible impact on the world. This is where a modern Turing test and the concept of ACI come in.
Focusing on either of the others while missing ACI is as myopic as it is dangerous. The Modern Turing Test will act as a warning that we are in a new phase for AI. Long after Turing first thought speech was the best test of an AI, and long before we get to an AGI, we will need better categories for understanding a new era of technology. In the era of ACI, little will remain unchanged. We should start preparing now.
BIO: Mustafa Suleyman is the co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI and a venture partner at Greylock, a venture capital firm. Before that, he co-founded DeepMind, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies, and was vice president of AI product management and AI policy at Google. He is the author of The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma publishing on 5th September and available for pre-order now.
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3D printing presents a fantastic tool for making speakers. If you’ve looked at how modern speakers are made you’ll find that there is all kinds of complex internal geometry that can lead to better sound. As DIY Perks points out, this makes 3D printing the best tool for the job. Unfortunately, the material of plastic isn’t the best.
In this video, DIY Perks breaks down the science behind speaker boxes, why they’re shaped so oddly, and how to overcome these issues to make them sound good. It isn’t as simple as just printing a box, as you might imagine.
One part I really found interesting was how he actually uses the 3D printers to create cavities that he fills with a special plaster mixture to reduce vibration. Using 3D printing as a tool in the process, and not the final ultimate solution for everything seems to be a very smart move, as his results show.
Tired of being stuck at home, Google’s Bard AI chatbot is finally leaving its parent’s basement and going abroad on a worldwide backpacking adventure. The AI system is now fully and officially available in several long-sought countries, including most of the European Union. To get access to some of those wary nations, Bard needed a lot more than a passport. Regulators said Google will need to supply them regular privacy reports and make more promises to keep users’ data safe.
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On Thursday, Google announced that Bard had learned to sing in many more languages than before. The 43 new languages available in the latest update include the likes of Arabic, Danish, French, German, Hindi, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, and many more of the world’s most-spoken dialects. The update should be live to all parts of the world, and now users in Brazil and all across the European Union should also have access to the chatbot. Google had previously delayed launch of its chatbot in the EU over privacy issues.
Google widely released Bard back in March, and since then the company has promised more updates over time as it has tried to close the gap between itself and competitors OpenAI and Microsoft. Google has its ongoing beta test for an AI-enabled Google Search to compete with Microsoft’s ChatGPT-enabled Bing search. ChatGPT can also handle dozens of languages, though the company has not made an official statement on the number of supported dialects.
In addition to expanded access, Bard is gaining new features that let people pin and rename conversations listed to the left of the Bard page, hear an audio version of responses, and users now have the ability to share links to Bard outputs. Google is also finally letting users access the Google Lens-like feature to share images with Bard, The chatbot can describe the images and even create a caption for the pictures. That feature is currently only available in English, though Google promised it should be available in more languages, eventually.
Google Bard product director Jack Krawczyk told the WSJ the team needed to have real humans sit down and try and prod the AI into giving them harmful responses in each of the proposed languages.
What this doesn’t mention is the inherent problem with modern AI chatbots and their training data already making them very western centric. The AI is already capable of understanding languages simply because it exists in their training data. A lot of media hubbub focused on Bard supposedly learning Bengali even though Google claimed it hadn’t trained it to do so, but experts said Bengali and other overlapping languages already existed in its training data. The training data for the language model GPT-3 included hundreds of gigabytes of data from the web, most of it from English language Wikipedia, books, and another western centric, oft-used dataset called Common Crawl. According to papers documenting that large repository, more than 50% of the data was hosted in the U.S.
This will inevitably lead to a western bias in the AI’s output, no matter what language it’s currently using. Google is going to train the AI based on user inputs, but it will take quite a lot of data provided willingly and freely by users to close that cultural divide.
There are some who use their YouTube success to fund excessive lifestyles of debauchery, coveted cardboard, and opulent mansions. However, there are others who try to do something interesting. That’s undeniably the case for educational YouTube channel Wendover, which last year launched Jet Lag: The Game—a globe-spanning series of challenge-based board games, where the board is the planet, and the pieces are the players. As their sixth season draws to a close, we take a look at why this is something you’ll want to watch.
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OK, so, everyone’s heard of The Amazing Race. It’s that long-running CBS show that isn’t Survivor, the one where teams of two “race around the world,” flying from country to country to complete challenges, attempting to be first to arrive on the mat and be greeted by the ever-grimacing Phil Keoghan. Except, if you’ve watched it, you’ll know that if there’s one thing it isn’t, it’s a real, ongoing race. The show is so astonishingly artificially rubber-banded, and the challenges so carefully produced, that the artifice often obscures the view. It’s tremendous fun, of course! But it’s very, very television.
Step in, Jet Lag: The Game. Created by the minds behind Wendover’s Half As Interesting channel—Wendover creator Sam Denby and writers Ben Doyle and Adam Chase—it began with the ambitious goal of playing Connect 4 across the United States of America, claiming states as counters. But perhaps more importantly than the geographic scale of this ambition, they also approached it as a board game design challenge, with all the intricate detail and balance this involves.
Since that initial game of Connect 4, they’ve circumnavigated the globe, played tag across Europe, and are just finishing airing an epic game of capture the flag over the whole of Japan. And with each season, they’ve further refined the many elements that make this show so compulsively watchable. Oh, and Ben getting drunk.
Jet Lag: The Game
Connect 4 with the United States as the grid
Connect 4 Across America worked right away. The concept was reasonably simple. In a barely post-covid-restrictions America, Sam, Ben, Adam and guest Brian McManus from Real Engineering needed to fly to U.S. states (well, the 22 West of Mississippi) and complete challenges. By completing a challenge, the state became theirs, played like a counter on a Connect 4 board. The goal was to claim four in a row, or of course to block the opponent team’s attempts to do so. And the means was public or commercial transport of any type, including a lot of flying.
This immediate success was definitely helped by what had essentially been a pilot season, called Crime Spree. Not officially a Jet Lag season, this Nebula series had Sam attempting to break as many obscure laws across American states as he could, while pursued by Ben and Adam simply guessing where he might be and trying to fly there to find him. It was fun, but deeply janky, and due to illness, didn’t even properly conclude. But they clearly learned a lot.
With the game designed by its players, and so many lessons learned, Connect 4 was a whole other vibe. While filmed on phones by the players themselves, it immediately looked great, boosted by fantastic post-production efforts, from superb on-screen graphics to excellent editing. It felt like TV, but with the hands-on sensibilities of YouTube.
Each pair of players had a starting budget of $5,000, from which they needed to pay for their transport, food, and hotels. After that, the rules were that they had to inform the other team (by text) as soon as they had successfully claimed a state, and only then would the opponents know where the other team currently was.
Jet Lag: The Game
The combination of the logistics (the subject that Wendover’s channels have always focused on) and the personalities makes it all immediately enjoyable. Ben and Adam immediately showed an incredible partnership energy, the two of them so outlandishly nerdy, while enormously witty, and in another life they’d clearly have become writers for late-night TV. Ben has the vibe of the lovely best friend in a romantic comedy, while Adam is destined to play a young Richard Kind in the biography of the actor’s life. Meanwhile, Sam and Brian were far more serious, and somewhat antagonistic. Sam is the person who completed a bungee jump for the first time, and responded to it by being glad about how efficient it had been. These two opposite approaches gave the show all the drama and fun it required, allowing viewers to side with the pairing that matched their own personality.
The challenges were fairly simple, but offered entertaining viewing. “Catch three different local bugs,” for instance. Or, “Bowl a strike.” Incredibly tame-seeming, compared to the complexity or silliness of challenges in the show’s more recent runs, but enough to delay them in their attempts to claim a state. Oh, and there was also—in the very first episode (above)—“Get one team member intoxicated.”
Getting drunk on YouTube is hardly an original idea, but the magic here was that Ben, the player who did the challenge, barely drank at the time. His tolerance was low, and his drunkenness was bizarrely endearing. It would become A Thing, a highlight of each following season.
Circumnavigation as a board game
By the second season, their ambitions grew enormously. Perhaps, it could be argued, a little too fast. Race to Circumnavigate the Globe in 100 Hours, while definitely worth a watch, is definitely the weakest of their adventures. As cumbersome as its own title (how was it not called “Around The World In 4.1666667 Days”?), the series failed to properly define its terms, explain its boundaries, and in the end proved to be much more of a straight travelogue than an exciting race.
Yet, it’s still a great watch, purely thanks to the personalities at play. Sam’s rigorous seriousness, and his clear nerdlove of transport, contrasts so splendidly with Adam and Ben’s comedy double-act. This time Sam was joined by RealLifeLore’s Joseph Pisenti, who usefully poked at Sam’s severity. But let’s skip ahead to the real meat…
Because then comes Tag Across Europe, and this is where the show really finds its stride. Simplifying things somewhat by not having a guest, the core three set out for a 72-hour game of tag, where each of them is trying to reach a different distant point around the continent. Whoever is “it” runs on their own, trying to make ground toward their finishing goal, while the other two pair up to chase them. And this time, the players are wearing trackers so the chasers can see exactly where they are.
Beginning in Charleville-Mézières, France, and because of “no tag-backs,” Ben begins as the first runner by charging toward the train station to get to Lille using his 45 minute head start. Ben has figured out that it’s the longest distance he can gain from the soonest train, that the others can’t immediately follow. We then cut back to Sam and Brian perfectly describing which train he’ll choose to catch and at what time, and how they’ll respond to this by heading straight to Brussels to cut him off later.
That’s the key here. They’re so damned smart. This has been shown off in previous seasons, but it really shines here. As much as the board games they’re playing may be of their own creation, they’re never not playing chess.
Jet Lag: The Game
But as much as the dynamics between the personalities contribute to our viewing enjoyment, there’s another element that elevates Jet Lag: The Game, and it’s here that the series distinguishes itself so distinctly from that most obvious comparison, The Amazing Race. It’s game design.
In Tag Across Europe, there’s a lot of up-front design to see. Players are able to travel based on a complicated system of coins. It costs 25 coins to travel for 1 minute on high-speed rail, but only 10 coins for the same on low-speed rail. A minute on a bike or scooter will only cost a single coin, but the same time on a plane is 100. Coins are gained through completing challenges, which of course delay a runner, but can’t be avoided if they need to travel. And it can all be augmented with Powerups, expensive options that have big effects, like 1,500 coins to turn your tracker off for 10 minutes, or 250 coins to double the value (and veto penalty) of your next challenge.
All of these cards and counters provide the very board-game approach, and each is partly based on the lessons learned from previous seasons, but it’s a lot deeper than that, because the contestants have theory-tested every season multiple times before they even head out.
Simulation ahead of stimulation
The three behind the show craft each game via meticulous simulation. Based on maps, guesses and instinct, they’ll play through their design over and over, working out timings, refining rules, and balancing, balancing, balancing. It’s here that the team implements their own rubber-banding, that essential part of good TV that prevents teams from running away with an insurmountable lead early in the game.
In The Amazing Race, this is achieved by the most brute-force means imaginable. Challenges teams have to complete will only open up at certain times of day, for instance, meaning a three-hour lead is entirely wiped out by having to wait for a Chinese temple to open at 8am, by which point every other team has rolled up too. Or there are fixed flights they’re allowed to book on, again buffering all the teams back to regimented slots.
However, in Jet Lag, everything is far more subtle, and ultimately, far more fair. While the players have certainly encountered situations where locations for challenges are closed by the time they reach them, they generally plan to prevent this from happening, and have back-up challenges available. As a last resort, they also have veto rules in place, meaning teams can opt out of a challenge for a time penalty, and of course a lack of coins or cash earned.
Instead, the rubber-banding is pre-built into the game design itself. Take, for example, what I’d argue is the best season so far, the horribly named We Turned New Zealand Into A Real-Life Board Game. Here, Ben and Adam raced against Sam and Tibees’ Toby Hendy, to travel from the northern tip of New Zealand down to its southernmost point. Using hired cars instead of public transport (causing some amount of controversy among its more, er, dedicated viewers), each pair could pick different pre-defined routes, based on their length and the nature of the gating challenges along their way.
There were shorter routes, but featuring more complicated or even luck-based challenges, or longer roads that had far more perfunctory goals to achieve. Through simulation, they had worked out many route options that would allow a team to catch up, but with higher risk, and incentives for teams in the lead to take slower roads for an easier life. Then, there were the many extra elements in place to further scupper a team, like the excellent Curses.
Curses were drawn at random from a Curse deck, at a high cost of tokens earned from challenges, with the gamble that some were a lot more effective than others. One team being forced to listen to Tom Lehrer’s “The Element Song” on loop for two hours might have been a form of torture, but it didn’t slow them down. Not being able to say words that use the letter “e” without incurring a five-minute time penalty, however, proved enormously problematic.
Jet Lag: The Game
The current series—We Played A 96 Hour Game Of Capture The Flag Across Japan—sees Ben and Adam square up against Sam and Scotty Allen from Strange Parts, and as you might have gathered from the grimly YouTube title, they’re…well, you already know. It’s back to public transport, although this time entirely restricted to rail travel, in a game that takes place on an ever-expanding board of larger and larger sections of Japan. And while the addition of Toby Hendy gave the previous season a much-needed different temperament (and, it must be said, the first and only time a woman has been involved), it’s fair to say they’ve never got the game design as perfect as this.
What now appears to be a core element of the games remains in place: travel is paid for by an in-game currency, which is earned by completing challenges. But this is a whole different approach, with the two teams trying to get to specific vending machines in the country to get a specific item, and then return it to their own defined territory without being “tagged” (clearly filmed) by the opposing players. This time, there’s lots of splitting up, as well as the introduction of game pieces called Towers, that impose bizarre and infuriating restrictions over a certain radius around them. You can only walk sideways, for instance, or you have to be holding a slice of pizza. The latter sounds silly, until you realize it means getting off a train at the first opportunity to try to find some, while someone else is pursuing you to reset your flag.
Colonialist routes
I’ve done my best to be pretty vague in much of my description here, because everything’s a spoiler in a show like this. But if you’ve ever been of a mind that YouTube is just filled with yobbish rich kids or trashy low-quality bitching to camera, then Jet Lag is essential. It demonstrates the incredible power of what can be done by a bunch of 20-somethings, without a production company and network behind them. While its five-to-seven episode runs wouldn’t work for network TV, everything else about the show easily would. It just…doesn’t need to.
It’s also worth noting something else the show impressively avoids: cultural insensitivity. The Amazing Race is astoundingly garish in this regard, the way each country it visits is reduced to stereotypes through the challenges arranged and the locations in which they take place. Jet Lag mostly avoids this, by its challenges’ tendency toward the general, rather than specifics of any particular country. When designing challenges that could potentially be completed in any given nation, they’re far more likely to lean on the ubiquity of McDonald’s than patronizing some country’s national dress or local tradition, as The Amazing Race so often relies upon.
Even in its most “touristy” season, the New Zealand race, the spots they choose are as obscure as a clock museum or a refuse site nicknamed Mt. Cleese. Concerned by not wanting to annoy or patronize Maori culture, one stop required the players to simply “admire” the Tāne Mahuta tree for a set amount of time, their motivation always being not wanting to be “annoying YouTubers” at any point. Plus, it’s always a lot more entertaining to watch Adam and Ben failing to remember the words to “The Okaihau Express” while standing in a deserted railway tunnel than it is to watch white Americans trying to learn some local dance between commercials for washing powder.
The latest series in Japan, that draws to an end on YouTube next week (and already finished for Nebula subscribers), has spectacularly avoided all that grim fetishizing of Japanese culture that’s all too often the focal point of any travel show that visits the country. It’s just four guys trying to use a notoriously complex train network to play a game, while getting in no one else’s way or spoiling no one else’s day, on the planet on which they live.
Where they certainly do fall down is in their own diversity. It’s incredibly noticeable that five out of six seasons have featured four young white men, while the other managed to feature one young white woman. They’ve called themselves out on it, but—you know—that doesn’t do much. As much as they do a great job of avoiding behaving awkwardly in Japan, it remains awkward that the show features almost no one who’s Japanese.
It’s this latter aspect that is, perhaps, the game’s defining barrier. When they focus on areas like their home nation, Western Europe, or even New Zealand, they avoid the uncomfortable resonating tones of colonialism that would accompany their shining white faces if they tried to play across countries like India or Nigeria. Clearly this is a barrier that could be lifted by their having the nous to create teams with YouTubers who live in such countries, allowing somewhere like Pakistan, say, to be presented with the same back-alley nonchalance with which they approach the U.S. or France.
Jet Lag: The Game
What Jet Lag: The Game unambiguously achieves, however, is demonstrating what a small planet we’re on, and how extraordinarily accessible so much of it is. It’s hard not to view this with a soothsayer’s eye, wondering what our grandchildren might think of a time when kids were leaping on airplanes to traverse the globe for pure entertainment. But given the 10x carbon offsetting for all their travel, and the fact they’re actually traveling internationally for just a handful of days a year (perhaps a total of 10 or 15) compared to the average businessperson, it’s disingenuous to condemn this as unacceptably egregious. You can strongly disagree, and absolutely not like it, certainly, but I see it as eminently defensible. (And heck, if we compare it to The Amazing Race’s footprint, it’s a mouse’s paw.)
Instead, I see Jet Lag as a celebration of our planet, combined with a love for board game systems, grabbing what is possibly the only moment in all of human history when such a combination is possible. It’s also some incredibly smart people being entertainingly intelligent on camera. Heck, even when Ben’s drunk, he can complete a math minute without making any mistakes.
Last week’s government inflation data showed used car prices were falling and likely stabilizing to levels just above pre-pandemic pricing. It seems prices for used electric vehicles, however, are falling even faster.
According to auto research firm iSeeCars.com, used EV prices are collapsing more than those in the overall used car market. In the firm’s June 2023 report, the data shows that used EV prices have fallen by nearly 30% year over year, with price drops actually accelerating from 8.8% in January to 16.8% in March and to 29.5% in June. The firm analyzed transactions from over 1.8 million one- to five-year-old used cars from the June 2022 and 2023 time period to capture the results.
“A year ago, used EV prices were on the upswing, rising faster than the average used car,” said iSeeCars executive analyst Karl Brauer in the report. “Electric vehicle prices are now falling at nearly 10 times the rate of the average used vehicle, reflecting a clear shift in EV supply and demand.”
Meanwhile, the overall used car market is stabilizing according to iSeeCars.com, with overall prices down 3.6% year over year in June, following price drops of 2.9% in May and 3.6 % in April.
The biggest reason behind the fall in used EV prices? Tesla’s (TSLA) massive price cuts earlier this year put extreme downward pressure on the used EV market, which is dominated by Tesla EVs like the Model 3 and Model Y.
“With Tesla cutting prices on new models its used EV values have tumbled. And because Tesla makes up the bulk of the used EV market the dramatic drop in Tesla values has impacted the entire category,” Brauer said.
Other factors pushing prices lower on the second-hand EV market include fuel prices stabilizing this year (hurting demand for EVs), rising interest rates, and price-conscious shoppers looking for better vehicle deals regardless of powertrain, Brauer said.
Looking deeper into the data, the top 10 models with the steepest price drops included six hybrid and electric vehicles, with Tesla occupying three of the top five slots with the Model 3 (30.5% drop), Model X (21.3% drop), and Model S (19.0% drop).
Conversely, used cars with the biggest overall price increases were traditional gas-powered cars led by the Mercedes-Benz SL convertibles, Fiat 500X crossover, Chevrolet Suburban, and two Porsche sportscars — the 911 convertible and 718 Cayman coupe.
Looking across metropolitan markets in the US, the data showed that the Miami market saw the steepest used car price drops at 8.1% year over year in June, followed by New York (6.9%) and Jacksonville, Florida, at 6.8%. Only Dallas, Salt Lake City, and San Antonio saw used car price appreciation across the 50 metro areas covered by iSeeCars.
The bottom line for used EV car buyers could be this: If you want a cheap Tesla EV, now might be your best chance to buy one. And don’t shy away from going across state borders to Florida or New York to buy one.
Pras Subramanian is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter and on Instagram.
