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Mercedes unveils world's first completely electric semi truck
European car companies are starting to invest more heavily in green vehicles. Audi unveiled three more electric cars on Monday and Porsche added 400 jobs to how many it estimates it will create to make its electric Model E come to life. Today, Daimler revealed its milestone that wasn't in the consumer space: The first non-fossil-fuel big rig, the Mercedes-Benz Urban eTruck.
Sweden debuts the world's first 'electric highway'
Fossil fuels are bad for the planet, and freight haulage is one of the more carbon-intensive activities that operate today. That's why Siemens and Scania have teamed up to trial what's being called the world's first "electric highway." Much like an electrified railroad, the 1.2 mile stretch has a series of wires hanging overhead that a pantograph-equipped truck can connect to. Then, the vehicle can deactivate its fuel-burning engine and coast along on that delicious, dirt-cheap electricity, switching back when the wires stop.
Nikola Motor Company wants to be the Tesla of trucking
A new entrant to the electric vehicle industry called Nikola Motor Company is unabashedly riding the wave of the future in Tesla's wake. Although the company may have copped their name from Elon Musk's inspiration, Nikola is taking a slightly different course with their two planned electric vehicles: a 2,000-horsepower semi-truck and a four-seater, open-frame 4x4.
Formula E is getting electric trucks from the creator of Roborace
Electric truck firm Charge will supply Formula E with several electric trucks, it revealed at last weekend's race in Paris. The trucks will help shuttle equipment around the track. Interestingly, the CEO of Charge is also the CEO of Roborace, a forthcoming driverless racing series. (Curiously enough, Denis Sverdlov is also the CEO behind YotaPhone -- but back to the trucks.) According to The Verge report, investment firm Kinetik has pumped $500 million dollars into Charge -- a firm also run by Sverdlov. While the trucks use some fuel to extend how far they can run on a single charge, the EVs will help to keep with the spirit behind the scenes of the electric-powered races.
Platoons of autonomous trucks took a road trip across Europe
Six vehicle manufacturers just proved that self-driving trucks are perfectly capable of driving across a whole continent. These companies, including Volvo and Daimler, participated in the European Truck Platooning challenge organized by the Dutch government. "Truck platooning" is the term used when a fleet of autonomous trucks closely follow one another on the road. Since the rigs behind the first ride in its slipstream, they tend to use less fuel and emit less carbon dioxide.
Samsung's Safety Truck concept starts testing in Argentina
If you've ever driven behind a slow semi-truck on a tight, two-lane road, you'd get the appeal of Samsung's Safety Truck. It's equipped with a camera up front, which sends a live feed to four weatherproof video monitors on the back. That lets you see what's ahead of the truck so you can plan when to safely pass it. It'll also give you a heads up on potential obstacles that could make a truck brake suddenly. Samsung unveiled the Safety Truck as a concept last year, but today it announced that it's testing it in Argentina, which sees plenty of accidents every year involving cars trying to pass trucks.
Watch a 4-year-old drive a dump truck by remote control
To prove the toughness of its latest FMX truck, Volvo turned it into an RC racer and handed the "keys" to the luckiest 4-year-old ever. The results were what you'd expect: Pure chaos. To be fair, young Sophie probably guided the vehicle better than we would have at that age (or even now). However, steering a multi-ton rig from afar ain't easy, so she managed to hit obstacles, roll the vehicle into a pit and (safely) crash through a house. At the end of her trip, the vehicle emerged relatively unscathed and was still driveable.
Daimler tests a self-driving, mass-produced truck on real roads
Daimler's dreams of self-driving big rig trucks just took one step closer to reality. The automaker has conducted the first-ever test of its semi-autonomous Highway Pilot system in a production truck on a public road, driving an augmented Mercedes-Benz Actros down Germany's Autobahn 8. While the vehicle needed a crew to keep watch, it could steer itself down the highway using a combination of radar, a stereo camera array and off-the-shelf systems like adaptive cruise control. The dry run shows that the technology can work on just about any vehicle in the real world, not just one-off concepts.
The first self-driving big rig licensed to operate in the US
A Daimler-built autonomous truck can now legally operate on the highways of Nevada. Gov. Brian Sandoval has officially granted the "Freightliner Inspiration Truck" a license for road use in the state, making it the first of its kind to navigate public roads in the US. The Inspiration's "Highway Pilot system" is loaded with cameras, radars, other sensors and computer hardware like most autonomous vehicles. However, it's not completely self-driving -- it still needs a human driver behind the wheel.
