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The shocking truth behind China’s EV dominance and America’s uphill battle

https://www.autoblog.com/news/the-shocking-truth-behind-chinas-ev-dominance

The race is over and we have lost. As far as lithium-ion battery technology goes, the Chinese have won. They set their sights on a product that they could excel at and now they own it.

CATL Qilin Li-ion battery with 620-mile (1,000 km) range

CATL

China decided on this course very early

China has pursued a position of supremacy in the lithium-ion battery space since 2001, when the country made it a cornerstone of its Five Year Plan. After “inviting” their many joint venture partners into China and learning how to properly manufacture vehicles, there was a realization that they would not be able to out-innovate the Americans and Europeans when it came to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.

CATL battery factory, Guiyang, China

CATL

This led to major government support for the development of an EV battery industry starting in 2009. This was something that the “foreigners” were not pursuing. From 2009 to 2023, the Chinese government poured a substantial $230 billion into both batteries and EVs. This took the form of inexpensive land, tax breaks, and other incentives. Top Chinese battery producers like CATL, BYD, CALB, and Gotion have reaped the benefits and dominate the battery market, in China and elsewhere.

Changan Lumin with CALB battery

CALB

Total control of the supply chain

In addition to the manufacturing of EV batteries, China has gained control of the entire EV battery supply chain. This includes materials found on its home turf as well as supplies on other continents.

Related: The 1970-72 Porsche 914/6 was the father of the Boxster and Cayman

Here’s one example: Partially or completely Chinese-owned firms will produce over 90% of Africa’s entire lithium supply for the next ten years! To make things worse, China’s EV battery production capacity already exceeds world demand by around 400%.

CATL battery factory, Liyang, China

CATL

Is it any wonder Chinese EVs are so inexpensive?

This helps to explain how the Chinese can price their EVs so low – all of the materials going into the battery have been subsidized by their government. This gives them a pricing advantage, which when combined with the industry’s overcapacity, now has them shipping their EVs all over the world to various export markets. 

BMW Li-ion battery plant, Woodruff, South Carolina, USA

BMW

Is there anything we can do to stop this?

While it’s pretty much game over as far as liquid electrolyte lithium-ion batteries go, we should not give up. We should be building our own lithium-ion battery plants and supply chains so that we can provide our EV industry with a stable source of batteries that cannot be cut off for political reasons. 

The Inflation Reduction Act has already spurred a massive investment in American-based lithium-ion battery plants, making that goal a reality. Regardless, we should realize that lithium-ion batteries are reaching their performance limits and it’s time to go beyond them.

Related: Surprising military tech that revolutionized your car

Moving forward, the real action is at the next level of EV battery development. And that’s solid-state batteries, for which we have not yet ceded development to the Chinese. It’s the best way to preserve our auto industry for the future.

QuantumScape solid-state battery prototype

QuantumScape

Solid-state batteries will solve many of our EV problems

The next generation of solid-state EV batteries are the answer to many troubling issues we must live with in today’s electric vehicles. These solid-state batteries will charge faster, have more energy density and thus be lighter, and will be much safer than today’s lithium-ion cells, eliminating the possibility of thermal runaway. Even better, solid-state batteries need no graphite, which China has near-total control of.

Just imagine an EV with 1,000 miles of range, a five-minute charging time, normal weight, and low fire hazard. That would solve most of our EV adoption problems right there!

QuantumScape solid-state battery lab

QuantumScape

We need to get on the solid-state bandwagon now, while there’s still time

In order to reap a commercial advantage from the development of solid-state EV batteries, we must provide more funding for R&D, accelerate the commercialization of products that come out of the lab, and provide a protected environment (such as military-related projects) in which these batteries can be made ready for mass production as soon as possible.

The next race for solid-state batteries is on and we are not the only ones running in it. In addition to a Chinese-sponsored consortium including battery maker CATL and automaker BYD, Japan’s Toyota, Nissan, and Honda, and Korea’s Samsung are also hotly pursuing solid-state batteries. The big challenges facing all solid-state battery developers are making them at large scale while bringing the cost down.

Related: Hertz hosting a fire sale on Tesla rental fleet

Here in the U.S., the largest firm involved in solid-state batteries is QuantumScape, who already has a deal with the Volkswagen Group. But there’s not much time – Samsung is planning for 2027 production, while Toyota and Nissan are shooting for 2028. Honda is building a solid-state battery demonstration production line, with production planned sometime during the final half of the decade.

QuantumScape solid-state battery lab

QuantumScape

Final thoughts

It’s now or never. The Chinese have eaten our lunch where lithium-ion batteries are concerned, but we still have a chance to grab the lead in the solid-state battery race. The clock is ticking…

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November 23, 2024 at 03:54PM

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The Race to Create the Perfect EV Tire

https://www.wired.com/story/the-race-to-create-the-perfect-ev-tire/

In 1845, somewhere between inventing a system for detonating explosives by electricity and the refillable fountain pen, Robert Thomson, a Scottish engineer and entrepreneur, patented the first pneumatic tire—a then wondrous, now everyday item that has been gradually evolving ever since.

Now, in the era of electric vehicles, they are more in focus then ever before. On the one hand, while passenger safety remains a priority, the right tires can have a significant effect on efficiency—and thereby the range of your EV—but on the other they’re also a source of noise and pollution.

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Since the traditional global tire market is worth well over $200 billion, and 2.5 billion tires are sold a year worldwide, manufacturers are rubbing their hands at the coming death of pure combustion cars, and gearing up for a battle to fashion the ideal balance of eco credentials, performance, and efficiency that will create the perfect EV tire. Whoever wins will secure quite the prize.

Rolling Resistance or Longevity?

Range optimization has been the primary concern so far. According to Michelin, the efficiency difference between good and bad tires can be as much as 7 percent. Better tires reduce rolling resistance, meaning a car will coast further before coming to a stop. It will therefore need less energy to travel the same distance. A 7 percent increase in efficiency will give an EV that much more range—so, if it could go 300 miles with a poor tire, it will travel 321 miles with a good one.

“There are several tire components that can influence rolling resistance,” says Thomas Wanka, principal technology development engineer at Continental, a company that has been exploring EV tire design through its association with electric motorsport series Extreme E. “These include the rubber compound and the tread.”

Manufacturers are experimenting with nanomaterials in their tires, such as nanocarbon and nanosilica, to improve performance, traction, and durability. There is also research into bio-based alternative compounds such as guayule and dandelion rubber.

You can reduce rolling resistance by reducing tread depth, but this also means the tire won’t last so long and produces increased noise. Continental, however, thinks it has the answer. “We have developed special soft rubber compounds that allow us to reduce rolling resistance and noise at the same time without sacrificing mileage,” says Wanka.

via Wired Top Stories https://www.wired.com

November 15, 2024 at 06:34AM

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The Norwegian Company Blamed for California’s Hydrogen Car Woes

https://www.wired.com/story/the-norwegian-company-blamed-for-californias-hydrogen-car-woes/

A California court has advanced a civil fraud case against a Norwegian company at the center of the state’s failure to build workable hydrogen fueling infrastructure, which has already left thousands of car owners in the lurch.

A case involving allegations of fraud against Oslo-based Nel ASA is moving toward a trial in October 2026 after a California judge left intact the core claims brought by a major player in the rollout of hydrogen infrastructure in the state, Iwatani Corporation of America, a subsidiary of one of Japan’s largest industrial gas companies.

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The allegations center on a lesser-known aspect of the blundered roll-out: Iwatani is claiming that Nel duped it into buying faulty hydrogen fueling stations. And the case has provided a window into the extent to which these same stations were provided to and promoted by major players like Toyota and Shell—stations that have since been abandoned or shut down.

The judge’s ruling last month leaves Nel and its top executives—including current and former CEOs Robert Borin and Håkon Volldal—in the crosshairs. Iwatani’s central claim is that Nel, under pressure to sell a money-losing product, knowingly induced Iwatani into purchasing untested hydrogen fueling stations with false assurances of the technology’s real-world readiness.

Nel denies the allegations, and has put forward procedural arguments to get the case thrown out, saying that California does not have jurisdiction over the company or its executives.

In separate rulings, Judge James Selna of the Central District of California sided with Iwatani on the core claims, while dismissing several others, finding that California does in fact have jurisdiction and that the allegations go beyond a simple breach of contract and into the realm of fraud in selling the equipment, known as H2Stations.

The judge ruled that there was “active concealment,” citing examples including that Nel did not disclose the fact it that it had never built a working model of the H2Station nor sufficiently tested it in real-world conditions, and had no actual data to support their H2Stations’ performance claims.

After the lawsuit was filed in January, Nel abandoned the seven Iwatani hydrogen fueling stations and executed a corporate spinout of its fueling division—which Iwatani claims is a means of shielding those assets from a potential court judgment.

via Wired Top Stories https://www.wired.com

November 19, 2024 at 07:07AM

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How the largest gathering of US police chiefs is talking about AI

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/11/19/1106979/how-the-largest-gathering-of-us-police-chiefs-is-talking-about-ai/

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here.

It can be tricky for reporters to get past certain doors, and the door to the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference is one that’s almost perpetually shut to the media. Thus, I was pleasantly surprised when I was able to attend for a day in Boston last month. 

It bills itself as the largest gathering of police chiefs in the United States, where leaders from many of the country’s 18,000 police departments and even some from abroad convene for product demos, discussions, parties, and awards. 

I went along to see how artificial intelligence was being discussed, and the message to police chiefs seemed crystal clear: If your department is slow to adopt AI, fix that now. The future of policing will rely on it in all its forms.

In the event’s expo hall, the vendors (of which there were more than 600) offered a glimpse into the ballooning industry of police-tech suppliers. Some had little to do with AI—booths showcased body armor, rifles, and prototypes of police-branded Cybertrucks, and others displayed new types of gloves promising to protect officers from needles during searches. But one needed only to look to where the largest crowds gathered to understand that AI was the major draw. 

The hype focused on three uses of AI in policing. The flashiest was virtual reality, exemplified by the booth from V-Armed, which sells VR systems for officer training. On the expo floor, V-Armed built an arena complete with VR goggles, cameras, and sensors, not unlike the one the company recently installed at the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department. Attendees could don goggles and go through training exercises on responding to active shooter situations. Many competitors of V-Armed were also at the expo, selling systems they said were cheaper, more effective, or simpler to maintain. 

The pitch on VR training is that in the long run, it can be cheaper and more engaging to use than training with actors or in a classroom. “If you’re enjoying what you’re doing, you’re more focused and you remember more than when looking at a PDF and nodding your head,” V-Armed CEO Ezra Kraus told me. 

The effectiveness of VR training systems has yet to be fully studied, and they can’t completely replicate the nuanced interactions police have in the real world. AI is not yet great at the soft skills required for interactions with the public. At a different company’s booth, I tried out a VR system focused on deescalation training, in which officers were tasked with calming down an AI character in distress. It suffered from lag and was generally quite awkward—the character’s answers felt overly scripted and programmatic. 

The second focus was on the changing way police departments are collecting and interpreting data. Rather than buying a gunshot detection tool from one company and a license plate reader or drone from another, police departments are increasingly using expanding suites of sensors, cameras, and so on from a handful of leading companies that promise to integrate the data collected and make it useful. 

Police chiefs attended classes on how to build these systems, like one taught by Microsoft and the NYPD about the Domain Awareness System, a web of license plate readers, cameras, and other data sources used to track and monitor crime in New York City. Crowds gathered at massive, high-tech booths from Axon and Flock, both sponsors of the conference. Flock sells a suite of cameras, license plate readers, and drones, offering AI to analyze the data coming in and trigger alerts. These sorts of tools have come in for heavy criticism from civil liberties groups, which see them as an assault on privacy that does little to help the public. 

Finally, as in other industries, AI is also coming for the drudgery of administrative tasks and reporting. Many companies at the expo, including Axon, offer generative AI products to help police officers write their reports. Axon’s offering, called Draft One, ingests footage from body cameras, transcribes it, and creates a first draft of a report for officers. 

“We’ve got this thing on an officer’s body, and it’s recording all sorts of great stuff about the incident,” Bryan Wheeler, a senior vice president at Axon, told me at the expo. “Can we use it to give the officer a head start?”

On the surface, it’s a writing task well suited for AI, which can quickly summarize information and write in a formulaic way. It could also save lots of time officers currently spend on writing reports. But given that AI is prone to “hallucination,” there’s an unavoidable truth: Even if officers are the final authors of their reports, departments adopting these sorts of tools risk injecting errors into some of the most critical documents in the justice system. 

“Police reports are sometimes the only memorialized account of an incident,” wrote Andrew Ferguson, a professor of law at American University, in July in the first law review article about the serious challenges posed by police reports written with AI. “Because criminal cases can take months or years to get to trial, the accuracy of these reports are critically important.” Whether certain details were included or left out can affect the outcomes of everything from bail amounts to verdicts. 

By showing an officer a generated version of a police report, the tools also expose officers to details from their body camera recordings before they complete their report, a document intended to capture the officer’s memory of the incident. That poses a problem. 

“The police certainly would never show video to a bystander eyewitness before they ask the eyewitness about what took place, as that would just be investigatory malpractice,” says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, who will soon publish work on the subject. 

A spokesperson for Axon says this concern “isn’t reflective of how the tool is intended to work,” and that Draft One has robust features to make sure officers read the reports closely, add their own information, and edit the reports for accuracy before submitting them.

My biggest takeaway from the conference was simply that the way US police are adopting AI is inherently chaotic. There is no one agency governing how they use the technology, and the roughly 18,000 police departments in the United States—the precise figure is not even known—have remarkably high levels of autonomy to decide which AI tools they’ll buy and deploy. The police-tech companies that serve them will build the tools police departments find attractive, and it’s unclear if anyone will draw proper boundaries for ethics, privacy, and accuracy. 

That will only be made more apparent in an upcoming Trump administration. In a policing agenda released last year during his campaign, Trump encouraged more aggressive tactics like “stop and frisk,” deeper cooperation with immigration agencies, and increased liability protection for officers accused of wrongdoing. The Biden administration is now reportedly attempting to lock in some of its proposed policing reforms before January. 

Without federal regulation on how police departments can and cannot use AI, the lines will be drawn by departments and police-tech companies themselves.

“Ultimately, these are for-profit companies, and their customers are law enforcement,” says Stanley. “They do what their customers want, in the absence of some very large countervailing threat to their business model.”

Now read the rest of The Algorithm

Deeper Learning

The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI

When generative AI tools landed on the scene, artists were immediately concerned, seeing them as a new kind of theft. Computer security researcher Ben Zhao jumped into action in response, and his lab at the University of Chicago started building tools like Nightshade and Glaze to help artists keep their work from being scraped up by AI models. My colleague Melissa Heikkilä spent time with Zhao and his team to look at the ongoing effort to make these tools strong enough to stop AI’s relentless hunger for more images, art, and data to train on.  

Why this matters: The current paradigm in AI is to build bigger and bigger models, and these require vast data sets to train on. Tech companies argue that anything on the public internet is fair game, while artists demand compensation or the right to refuse. Settling this fight in the courts or through regulation could take years, so tools like Nightshade and Glaze are what artists have for now. If the tools disrupt AI companies’ efforts to make better models, that could push them to the negotiating table to bargain over licensing and fair compensation. But it’s a big “if.” Read more from Melissa Heikkilä.

Bits and Bytes

Tech elites are lobbying Elon Musk for jobs in Trump’s administration

Elon Musk is the tech leader who most has Trump’s ear. As such, he’s reportedly the conduit through which AI and tech insiders are pushing to have an influence in the incoming administration. (The New York Times)

OpenAI is getting closer to launching an AI agent to automate your tasks

AI agents—models that can do tasks for you on your behalf—are all the rage. OpenAI is reportedly closer to releasing one, news that comes a few weeks after Anthropic announced its own. (Bloomberg)

How this grassroots effort could make AI voices more diverse

A massive volunteer-led effort to collect training data in more languages, from people of more ages and genders, could help make the next generation of voice AI more inclusive and less exploitative. (MIT Technology Review) 

Google DeepMind has a new way to look inside an AI’s “mind”

Autoencoders let us peer into the black box of artificial intelligence. They could help us create AI that is better understood and more easily controlled. (MIT Technology Review)

Musk has expanded his legal assault on OpenAI to target Microsoft

Musk has expanded his federal lawsuit against OpenAI, which alleges that the company has abandoned its nonprofit roots and obligations. He’s now going after Microsoft too, accusing it of antitrust violations in its work with OpenAI. (The Washington Post)

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November 19, 2024 at 04:08AM

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Meet dAIsy, the AI Grandma Who Scammers Wish They’d Never Called

https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2024/11/15/meet-daisy-the-ai-grandma-who-scammers-wish-theyd-never-called/

Daisy the AI Grandma

Meet dAIsy, the AI grandma who’s single-handedly turning the tables on scammers—and doing it with all the charm of a sweet old lady who’s just had her third cup of tea. Created by O2, Daisy isn’t here to knit sweaters or bake cookies. No, Daisy is here to talk. And talk. And talk some more. She’s the ultimate scammer repellant, armed with an endless supply of rambling nonsense and a voice so convincing you’d swear she’s about to ask you if you’re eating enough vegetables.

Here’s how she operates: when a scammer calls, Daisy picks up with all the warmth of a loving grandma who just loves to chat. Got a question about her bank account? Oh, you’ll get an answer all right—after she tells you about her nephew’s wedding, her cat’s peculiar eating habits, and why they don’t make tea kettles like they used to. By the time she’s done, the scammer will have aged faster than their victim ever could.

And it works! O2 reports that Daisy has kept some scammers on the phone for an astonishing 40 minutes. That’s nearly an episode of Bake Off spent listening to her passion for knitting scarves for pigeons. One unlucky fraudster reportedly hung up after Daisy gave him some “personal” details—like a bank account number that spelled out “NO-MONEY-FOR-YOU.”

The genius behind Daisy is a custom-trained AI that’s programmed to generate lifelike responses in real time. She hears what the scammer says, cooks up a response with the cunning of a master troll, and speaks back in a voice that would convince anyone she’s about to invite them over for tea and biscuits. It’s like ChatGPT, but if ChatGPT had a fondness for tangents about gardening.

Murray Mackenzie, Director of Fraud at Virgin Media O2, describes Daisy as a scammer’s worst nightmare. “We’re essentially weaponizing British politeness,” he said, probably while sipping tea and feeling very pleased with himself. Daisy doesn’t just waste scammers’ time—she actively ruins their day. And for the millions of people constantly worried about falling victim to fraud, that’s a win.

If you’re in the UK and get a scammy call, you can report it to 7726 for free, and maybe Daisy will step in to “help.” Just picture the scammer furiously taking notes as Daisy prattles on about how she thinks her account number starts with a 4…or maybe it’s a 7…or was that her library card?

So, here’s to Daisy, the AI grandma we didn’t know we needed. Scammers beware: she’s got all day, a never-ending supply of nonsense, and absolutely no filter.

Click This Link for the Full Post > Meet dAIsy, the AI Grandma Who Scammers Wish They’d Never Called

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November 15, 2024 at 08:51AM

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China reveals reusable cargo shuttle design for Tiangong space station (video)

https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/china-reveals-reusable-cargo-shuttle-design-for-tiangong-space-station-video

China has unveiled the design of a new reusable shuttle to take cargo to and from the country’s space station.

The Haolong space shuttle is being developed by the Chengdu Aircraft Design and Research Institute under the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC). It is one of two winning projects stemming from a call for proposals from China’s human spaceflight agency, CMSA, to develop low-cost cargo spacecraft.

China currently uses its robotic Tianzhou spacecraft to send cargo to the Tiangong space station. But, taking a leaf out of NASA’s book to encourage commercial resupply options for the International Space Station, CMSA wanted new, low-cost ideas that can also return experiments and other cargo to Earth, unlike the Tianzhou, which burns up on reentry.

A still from an animation detailing the design of China’s planned Haolong cargo shuttle. (Image credit: CCTV+)

Haolong will launch atop of a rocket and land horizontally on Earth on a runway.  The space shuttle measures 32.8 feet (10 meters) long and 26.2 feet (8 m) wide, and weighs less than half of the Tianzhou capsule, which has a mass of up to 31,000 pounds (14,000 kilograms). The winged spacecraft is now in the engineering flight verification phase, meaning its design and systems are under review before being built. 

The shuttle’s engineers are already hailing the design. "The Haolong space cargo shuttle is a winged aircraft with an aerodynamic design featuring a large wingspan and a high lift-to-drag ratio," Fang Yuanpeng, chief designer of Haolong, told China Central Television (CCTV). "With a blunt-nosed fuselage and large, swept-back delta wings, it combines the characteristics of both spacecraft and aircraft, allowing it to be launched into orbit by a rocket and land on an airport runway like a plane," he added.

Haolong will dock with Tiangong, allowing astronauts to enter and exit to collect or stow cargo. After completing the cargo transport mission, Haolong will separate from the space station, autonomously deorbit and reenter the atmosphere, and land horizontally on the designated airport runway. 

"After inspection, maintenance and repair, it will be able to perform cargo transport missions again," said Fang.

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It is not the only reusable cargo shuttle in development. Private American firm Sierra Space is developing the long-delayed Dream Chaser to send cargo and astronauts to low Earth orbit.

China aims to operate Tiangong for at least a decade, and plans to expand the three-module, T-shaped orbital outpost to six modules. Haolong could play a part in keeping the space station supplied with food, experiments and other cargo.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

via Space https://www.space.com

November 12, 2024 at 10:12AM