An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Today, Tesla released (PDF) its Q3 2023 financial results and as expected, there was an update about Cybertruck in there. In the quarterly presentation, Tesla mentioned that "pilot production" of the Cybertruck has begun: "At Gigafactory Texas, we began pilot production of the Cybertruck, which remains on track for initial deliveries this year." While that doesn't include any new information, in the photo section of the presentation, Tesla added a comment confirming that "deliveries will begin in November 2023."

The previous official comment from CEO Elon Musk was that Tesla was aiming for the end of Q3, which ended last month. Interestingly, Tesla also updated its "installed annual vehicle capacity" and added capacity for the Cybertruck for the first time. Surprisingly, Tesla already claims a capacity of "over 125,000 Cybertrucks" at Gigafactory Texas. In a company post on X, Tesla specifies that its first Cybertruck deliveries are scheduled for November 30th at Giga Texas.

These are the highlights of Tesla's Q3 shareholder update, as mentioned in the company's X post: "Cybertruck production remains on track for later this year, with first deliveries scheduled for November 30th at Giga Texas.

Production of our higher density 4680 cell is progressing as planned & we continue building capacity for cathode production & lithium refining in the US.

In Europe, Model Y remains the best-selling vehicle of any kind (based on latest available data as of August) Thank you to our European owners!

We have more than doubled the size of our AI training compute, accommodating for both our growing data set & Optimus, which is currently being trained for simple tasks through AI rather than hardcoded software, while its hardware continues to improve.

All Hertz rentals in the US & Canada now allow Tesla app access, enabling renters to use keyless lock/unlock via phone key, remotely precondition the cabin & more.

In addition, we redesigned the in-app service experience for owners, making scheduling & tracking service appointments & loaner access much simpler."

Energy deployments increased 90% YoY to 4GWh -- our highest quarterly deployment ever!

Amazon announced today that it plans to expand its Prime Air drone delivery program to Italy and United Kingdom, as well as one more yet-to-be-named U.S. city. "The new Prime Air locations will be announced in the coming months, with an anticipated launch date of late 2024," reports The Verge. From the report: Another step by Amazon today suggests it's ready to make drones a more serious part of its actual delivery network. The company said it plans to add Prime Air delivery to its existing fulfillment network -- specifically by adding delivery drones to some of its same-delivery sites. Prime Air drones currently only operate out of the two standalone sites in Texas and California, so expanding drones to other sites means a wider delivery range and closer integration with Amazon's delivery network.

Amazon also gave us a sneak peek of its new Prime Air delivery drone that it claims flies twice as far as its current model. Even more critically, the drones will be able to operate in light rain and what Amazon calls more "diverse weather." The company released photos of the MK30 drone today, which it said will replace its existing delivery drones by late 2024.

The MK30 is also smaller and quieter than the existing Prime Air model, Amazon claims. The new drone can deliver objects of up to five pounds, with a typical delivery time of "one hour or less." The new drone includes a "sense and avoid" feature that can help it avoid pets, people, and property. The new design will hopefully result in smoother flights. "Not only will this help boost the economy, offering consumers even more choice while helping keep the environment clean with zero emission technology, but it will also build our understanding how to best use the new technology safely and securely," said UK's Aviation Minister Baroness Vere in a statement in Amazon's announcement.

General Motors said it will delay production of electric pickups trucks at its plant in Michigan by another year as the No. 1 U.S. automaker grapples with flattening demand for electric vehicles. Reuters reports: The move is the latest sign that electric vehicle production and demand may not be as strong as forecast. GM had been set to begin production of the electric Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra in late 2024 at the suburban Detroit plant. The company said the plan now is to start it in late 2025.

GM said the change was being made "to better manage capital investment while aligning with evolving EV demand" but said the move does not impact its battery plant plans. GM said in July battery production at the Ultium joint venture plant Ohio has been hampered because "our automation equipment supplier is struggling with delivery issues."

The automaker in July reiterated a previous target of building 400,000 EVs from 2022 through the first half of 2024, and projected EV revenue of $50 billion in 2025. GM has said it is targeting production of roughly 100,000 EVs in the second half of 2023. Reuters reported in July that the U.S. electric vehicle market is growing, but not quickly enough to prevent unsold EVs from stacking up at some automakers' dealerships.

Due to an air traffic control mistake in February, a FedEx cargo plane flew within 100 feet of a Southwest Airlines flight in February. The New York Times reports that the flight's 128 passengers "were unaware that they had nearly died." In a year filled with close calls involving US airlines, this was the one that most unnerved federal aviation officials: A disaster had barely been averted, and multiple layers of the vaunted US air-safety system had failed... But the errors by the controller — who has continued to direct some plane traffic in Austin, Texas — were far from the whole story, according to 10 current and former controllers there, as well as internal Federal Aviation Administration documents reviewed by the Times. Austin-Bergstrom, like the vast majority of US airports, lacks technology that allows controllers to track planes on the ground and that warns of imminent collisions. The result is that on foggy days, controllers can't always see what is happening on runways and taxiways. Some have even resorted to using a public flight-tracking website in lieu of radar.

In addition, for years Austin has had a shortage of experienced controllers, even as traffic at the airport has surged to record levels. Nearly three-quarters of shifts have been understaffed. Managers and rank-and-file controllers have repeatedly warned that staffing levels pose a public danger. The controller on that February morning was working an overtime shift. In June, Stephen B. Martin, then Austin's top manager, and a local union representative wrote a memo pleading for more controllers. "Drastic steps are needed to allow the facility to adequately staff for existing traffic," they wrote to FAA and union officials.

Austin is a microcosm of a systemic crisis. The safety net that underpins air travel in America is fraying, exposing passengers to potential tragedies like the episode in February.
And yet the chair of America's National Transportation Safety Board calls the February incident "just one of seven serious close calls and near misses involving commercial airlines that we have initiated investigations on this year."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

"Australian design student Alexander Burton has developed a prototype kit for cheaply converting petrol or diesel cars to hybrid electric," reports Dezeen magazine, "winning the country's national James Dyson Award in the process." Titled REVR (Rapid Electric Vehicle Retrofits), the kit is meant to provide a cheaper, easier alternative to current electric car conversion services, which Burton estimates cost AU$50,000 (£26,400) on average and so are often reserved for valuable, classic vehicles.

Usually, the process would involve removing the internal combustion engine and all its associated hardware, like the gearbox and hydraulic brakes, to replace them with batteries and electric motors. With REVR, those components are left untouched. Instead, a flat, compact, power-dense axial flux motor would be mounted between the car's rear wheels and disc brakes, and a battery and controller system placed in the spare wheel well or boot. Some additional off-the-shelf systems — brake and steering boosters, as well as e-heating and air conditioning — would also be added under the hood. By taking this approach, Burton believes he'll be able to offer the product for around AU$5,000 (£2,640) and make it compatible with virtually any car...

With REVR, people should be able to get several more years of life out of their existing cars. The kit would transform the vehicle into a hybrid rather than a fully electric vehicle, with a small battery giving the car 100 kilometres of electric range before the driver has to switch to the internal combustion engine... Borrowing a trick from existing hybrid vehicles, the kit uses a sensor to detect the position of the accelerator pedal to control both acceleration and braking. That means no changes have to be made to the car's hydraulic braking system, which Burton says "you don't want to have to interrupt".
Thanks to Slashdot reader FrankOVD for sharing the news.

China aims to grow the country's computing power by more than a third in less than three years, a move set to benefit local suppliers and boost technology self-reliance as US sanctions pressure domestic industry. From a report: The world's second-largest economy is targeting more than 300 exaflops of computing capacity across its tech sector by 2025 from 220 this year, according to a joint statement from several agencies including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The goal marks Beijing's latest attempt to construct digital infrastructure to spur a sluggish economy. China also plans to build an additional 20 smart computing centers in two years. Bigger optical networks and more advanced data storage will be installed in the years until 2025, the regulators said. The additional computational power will support manufacturing, education, finance, transportation, healthcare and energy, they added.

In downtown San Francisco two vehicles were stopped at a red light on Monday night, reports the Washington Post — a regular car and a Cruise robotaxi. Both vehicles advanced when the light turned green, according to witness accounts and video recorded by the Cruise vehicle's internal cameras and reviewed by The Post. As the cars moved forward, the pedestrian entered the traffic lanes in front of them, according to the video, and was struck by the regular car. The video shows the victim rolling onto that vehicle's windshield and then being flung into the path of the driverless car, which stopped once it collided with the woman. According to Cruise spokesperson Hannah Lindow, the autonomous vehicle "braked aggressively to minimize the impact" but was unable to stop before rolling over the woman and coming to a halt. Photos published by the San Francisco Chronicle show the woman's leg sticking out from underneath the car's left rear wheel.
"According to Cruise, police had directed the company to keep the vehicle stationary, apparently with the pedestrian stuck beneath it," reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

Also from the San Francisco Chronicle: Austin Tutone, a bicycle delivery person, saw the woman trapped underneath the Cruise car and tried to reassure her as they waited for first-responders. "I told her, 'The ambulance is coming' and that she'd be okay. She was just screaming." He shared a photo of the aftermath with The Chronicle that appears to show the car tire on the woman's leg. San Francisco firefighters arrived and used the jaws of life to lift the car off the woman. She was transported to San Francisco General Hospital with "multiple traumatic injuries," said SFFD Capt. Justin Schorr. The victim was in critical condition as of late Tuesday afternoon, according to the hospital.

It appears that once the Cruise car sensed something underneath its rear axle, it came to a halt and turned on its hazard lights, Schorr said. Firefighters obstructed the sensors of the driverless car to alert the Cruise control center. He said representatives from Cruise responded to firefighters and "immediately disabled the car remotely." More from the San Francisco Chronicle: "When it comes to someone pinned beneath a vehicle, the most effective way to unpin them is to lift the vehicle," Sgt. Kathryn Winters, a spokesperson for the department, said in an interview. Were a driver to move a vehicle with a person lying there, "you run the risk of causing more injury." Once the person is freed, the car must stay in place as police gather evidence including "the location of the vehicle and/or vehicles before, during and after the collision," said Officer Eve Laokwansathitaya, another spokesperson.
The human driver who struck the pedestrian immediately fled the scene, and has not yet been identified.

The Treasury Department released new guidance Friday outlining how car dealers can give customers instant access to the electric vehicle rebate starting in January 2024. It's the latest move by the Biden administration to bring down the cost of EVs in the hopes that more people will buy them. From a report: The new guidance lays out how dealers can effectively reduce the price of an EV by as much as $7,500 at the point of purchase rather than the customer having to wait until they file their taxes to claim the credit. The administration hopes that by applying the credit immediately, more people will be convinced to consider an EV for their next purchase, which will help toward achieving the goal of making EVs 50 percent of new car sales by 2030.

Hyundai and Kia said on Thursday that they will adopt Tesla's electric vehicle charging technology in the United States. Reuters reports: Joining their global peers, including Ford Motor, General Motors and Nissan in adopting Tesla's North American Charging Standard (NACS), Hyundai's and Kia's moves take the Elon Musk-led company's superchargers closer to becoming the industry standard at the expense of the rival Combined Charging System (CCS). Hyundai and Kia's new EVs will come with a NACS port, starting in the fourth quarter of 2024 in the United States, the companies said.

However, in Canada, Hyundai EVs equipped with the NACS port would be available in the first half of 2025, while Kia's EVs with the technology by the end of 2024. The move gives Hyundai and Kia EVs with NACS ports access to more than 12,000 Tesla Superchargers across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, the companies said. The South Korean automakers also said that they would offer adapters to owners of existing and future Hyundai and Kia EVs with the current CCS giving them access to Tesla's Supercharging Network in the first quarter of 2025.

Long-time Slashdot reader RockDoctor writes: Regardless of their other potential benefits, modern cars, and modern electric cars in particular, involve complex networks of computer code, hardware, and servo systems cooperating (?) to deliver services to the user, like acceleration, steering and braking. Slashdot nerderati know better than most that such complex networks can never show unexpected, non-designed behavior, due to the infallibility of hardware, program coders and system designers... Yeah. Right. "I'll have some of what he's been smoking!" That's Musk-grade optimism.

On Sunday evening, a middle-aged driver in a "brand new" vehicle found it would not decelerate below 30mph (50kmph). He retained steering control, and avoided crashing until police vehicles "boxed in" his vehicle and helped him exit into a police van (most have sliding side doors) from the moving vehicle. The police then "carried out a controlled halt" on the unmanned vehicle, stopping it from driving away with the van's brakes until a roadside assistance technician arrived 3 hours later and managed to shut it down. "[W]hen the [technician] got to me [...] later, he plugged in the car to do a diagnostic check and there was pages of faults," said the "kidnapped" driver from Glasgow. "He said he had never seen anything like it and decided he was not willing to turn the engine on to see what was wrong."

By inference, the vehicle did not have a mechanical brake ("hand brake": English; "parking brake": American), which should have been able to keep the vehicle halted regardless of the motor's actions (even if a "clutch" did get burned out). From the only time I've been inside an electric car, I can't say if that is normal; it's certainly something I'll look for if I ever rent another. Had the failure happened at 10 a.m. in the morning, not 10 p.m. in the evening, the body count could have been ... substantial.

A dumb question, stemming from my only use of an electric car: do they have a weight sensor under the driver's seat that locks-out the main motor unless there is (say) 30kg in the driver's seat? Most have some such sensors -- they trigger the "seatbelt not fastened" alarm or silence it for empty seats -- but whether they can override the drive system ... ?

This week the UK's conservative Daily Telegraph newspaper published an interesting perspective from their world economy editor.

"Saudi and OPEC officials self-evidently do not believe their own claim that world oil demand will keep growing briskly for another generation as if electric vehicles had never been invented, and there was no such thing as the Paris Accord." OPEC had to slash output last October in order to shore up prices. It had to cut again in April. The Saudis then stunned traders with a unilateral cut of one million barrels a day (b/d) in June. All told, the OPEC-Russia cartel has had to take 2m b/d of production off the table at a high point in the economic cycle, after China's post-Covid reopening and at a time when the US economy has been running hot with a fiscal expansion roughly equal to Roosevelt's world war budget.

That 2m b/d figure happens to be more or less the amount of crude currently being displaced by EV sales worldwide, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Yet the mood was all defiance and plucky insouciance at the 24th World Petroleum Congress in Calgary this month... This skips over the awkward detail that EVs are already on track to reach 60pc of total car sales in the world's biggest car market within two years (not a misprint). The cartel is being hit from two sides. Petrol and diesel cars are becoming more efficient, gradually displacing 1.4bn vintage models disappearing into the scrap yard. BP says that alone will cut up to a tenth global oil demand by 2040. With a lag, EVs are now starting to take a material bite, with an S-curve trajectory likely to go parabolic this decade.

China's EVs sales hit 38pc this summer, even though subsidies have mostly been scrapped. This is far ahead of schedule under Beijing's New Energy Vehicle Industry Development Plan. China's Chebai think tank says the emerging consensus is that EV sales will hit 17m or 60pc of total Chinese share by 2025, rising to 90pc by 2030, assuming that the grid can keep up... Vietnam is a few years behind but with similar ambitions. Its EV start-up, VinFast Auto, became the world's third most valuable carmaker after it launched on Nasdaq last month, briefly worth as much as the German car industry before the share price came back down to earth...

OPEC's central premise has long been that the rise of a billion-strong middle class in emerging Asia will more than offset declining oil use in the OECD bloc. That notion is 'withering under scrutiny'... The International Energy Agency (IEA) says global oil demand will peak at 105.5m b/d in 2028 and then flatten for a few years before going into decline... The IEA pulls its punches. The Rocky Mountain Institute argues in its latest report — End of the ICE Age — that half of global car sales could be EVs by 2026, reaching 86pc later this decade.
The article closes by citing "the breathtaking pace of global electrification. The decline of oil in car and bus transport may be closer than almost anybody imagined. OPEC as we know it may be on the cusp of a death spiral."

Aaron Gordon writes via Motherboard: Kia and Hyundai say it is not their fault that their cars are being stolen in an unprecedented theft surge made possible by the vehicles lacking a basic anti-theft technology virtually every other car has, according to a recent court filing. Instead, the companies point the finger at social media companies, such as TikTok and Instagram, where instructions on how to steal the cars have been widely shared and thieves show off their stolen cars.

The lawyers representing the two corporations -- which are owned by the same parent company -- are not subtle about this argument. The filing (PDF) -- in which the company is arguing a roughly $200 million class-action settlement ought to be approved by the court -- includes an entire section heading titled "Social Media and Intervening Third-Party Criminals Caused An Unprecedented Increase In Thefts." The lawyers argue in that section that because Kia and Hyundai vehicles have "not been the subject of significant theft" before the Kia Boys social media trend, social media and the people who steal the cars -- and not the car companies -- are to blame for the thefts. This argument is summarized in the section titled "Social Media Incited Unprecedented Rise In Thefts." The filing broadly reflects both the public communications strategy Kia and Hyundai have used throughout this crisis and some of the national news headlines that have covered the story,

"Nissan will make the switch to full electric by 2030 in Europe. We believe it is the right thing to do for our business, our customers and for the planet," said Nissan's chief executive Makoto Uchida. The announcement comes despite the UK postponing its 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars to 2035. The BBC reports: In an interview with the BBC, Mr Uchida said the company was aiming to bring down the cost of electric vehicles for customers, so that they were no more expensive than petrol and diesel cars. "It may take a bit of time, but we are looking at the next few years," he said. "We are looking at it from the point of view of the technology, from the point of view of cooperating with suppliers, and of course working with the government on how we can deliver that kind of cost competitiveness to the consumer," Mr Uchida added. Will that price parity happen by 2030? "That's what we're aiming for," confirmed Mr Uchida.

Mr Uchida also said that the company was fast-tracking a different kind of battery technology, known as all-solid-state batteries (ASSB), which are lighter, cheaper, and quicker to charge. "We are going to have a pilot plant for ASSB in Japan from next year, and we want to ensure they can be mass produced by 2028," he said. "There are a lot of challenges with this, but we do have a solution, and we are on track [to meet that target]", he added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: The Lockheed Martin X-59 is probably the strangest airplane ever designed. Its razor-sharp nose takes half of the airplane's length; there's no cockpit in sight; the wings are tiny compared to the entire fuselage; and its oversized tail engine looks like a weird hump about to fall off. Of course, there's a method to this madness. The design is the secret sauce that has produced a true unicorn: a supersonic jet that doesn't boom the hell out of people and buildings on the ground. [...] The X-59, developed alongside NASA, is designed as an experimental jet that NASA will use to test just how big of a boom people on the ground are willing to accept from a supersonic aircraft. According to Dave Richardson, the program director for X-59 at Lockheed Martin, with this new design, people shouldn't expect much of a boom at all.

The X-59's "quiet" supersonic boom isn't made possible by expensive magical materials or exotic engines, Richardson explains. "There is no radical technology in the airplane itself. It really is just the shape of the aircraft." And if the shape looks more like an anime alien spaceship than an actual vehicle created by human beings, that's because it was dreamed up in another dimension -- by computers and humans -- through special software created by the Bethesda, Maryland, company's engineers. [...] Richardson and his team learned a few important lessons about designing for supersonic boom. First, the heavy, bulky parts of the plane needed to be as far back as possible. "We really put nothing out in the front, but we want to have that long, fine ratio," he says. This resulted in an extremely fine nose and body, with no surface interruptions that can produce noise when the plane breaks the sound barrier. "You want to be able to stretch out and manage the different shocks across the length of the airplane," he adds.

They also learned that anything that causes discontinuity in the airplane's shape -- for instance a windshield or canopy -- can add to the boom effect. This led them to get rid of the windshield altogether. Instead, the X-59 uses an external vision system, which is the only advanced technology in the plane, according to Richardson. The pilot navigates using a camera, viewing the outside through a large display. This system had to undergo rigorous certification by the Federal Aviation Administration for use in the national airspace. [...] The X-59 has been designed to manage and distribute shockwaves differently from the very start while also flying at slower speeds than the Concorde (the Concorde's cruising speed was 1,350 mph, while the X-59 will cruise at around 925 mph). "I think most people look at the airplane and they say, 'Wait, something's wrong,'" Richardson says. "[They think] it's too long. The landing gear is too far in the back. And why is the nose so long?" The inaugural flight is scheduled for early 2024, notes Fast Company. "If they achieve their objectives, there's no reason why aircraft manufacturers can't take the concepts they discovered and turn them into commercial airliners, Richardson says."

"Someday, people might be able to look up and see an alien shape in the sky, with the X-59's design transcending experimental nature and ushering in a new era for high-speed travel across the globe."

Volkswagen says it was hit by a major IT outage on Wednesday, halting production at the company's namesake brand in Germany. Reuters reports: Volkswagen said that the whole group, which includes the Porsche AG and Audi brands, was affected. Volkswagen said there had been an unspecified "IT malfunction of network components" at the carmaker's site in Wolfsburg, its global headquarters.

"The fault has been present since 12:30 p.m. (CET) and is currently being analysed. There are implications for vehicle-producing plants," the group said. "According to current analyses, an external attack is unlikely to be the cause of the system malfunction," Volkswagen said, adding that efforts to fix the problem were of the highest priority and well under way.

Delta Air Lines earlier this month revamped its SkyMiles program to prioritize dollars spent over miles flown for status. This shift positions SkyMiles more as a program for high spenders than frequent flyers, causing dissatisfaction among many, including industry insiders.

Historically, airline regulations, controlled by the government, ensured fair pricing until deregulation in 1978. This deregulation spurred airlines to introduce competitive strategies, transforming frequent-flyer programs into intricate points systems. These programs now, a piece in The Atlantic argues, closely resemble financial systems, with airlines minting and selling points for profit. From the report: Here's how the system works now: Airlines create points out of nothing and sell them for real money to banks with co-branded credit cards. The banks award points to cardholders for spending, and both the banks and credit-card companies make money off the swipe fees from the use of the card. Cardholders can redeem points for flights, as well as other goods and services sold through the airlines' proprietary e-commerce portals.

For the airlines, this is a great deal. They incur no costs from points until they are redeemed -- or ever, if the points are forgotten. This setup has made loyalty programs highly lucrative. Consumers now charge nearly 1 percent of U.S. GDP to Delta's American Express credit cards alone. A 2020 analysis by the Financial Times found that Wall Street lenders valued the major airlines' mileage programs more highly than the airlines themselves. United's MileagePlus program, for example, was valued at $22 billion, while the company's market cap at the time was only $10.6 billion.

Is this a good deal for the American consumer? That's a trickier question. Paying for a flight or a hotel room with points may feel like a free bonus, but because credit-card-swipe fees increase prices across the economy -- Visa or Mastercard takes a cut of every sale -- redeeming points is more like getting a little kickback. Certainly the system is bad for Americans who don't have points-earning cards. They pay higher prices on ordinary goods and services but don't get the points, effectively subsidizing the perks of card users, who tend to be wealthier already.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Ford Motor Company on Monday halted construction of a $3.5 billion electric vehicle battery plant project in the Marshall area amid months of battles with local residents, Republicans in Congress over its use of Chinese technology and an auto industry strike in its second week. "We're pausing work, and we're going to limit spending on construction at Marshall until we're confident about our ability to competitively run the plant," Ford spokesman T.R. Reid told The Detroit News on Monday. Reid said a "number of considerations" were at play in the company's business decision, but wouldn't say whether the United Auto Workers' ongoing strike of Ford and its crosstown rivals was a factor. "We haven't made a final decision about the investment there," Reid said of the Marshall site. The pause in construction is effective Monday, Reid said.

The Dearborn-based automaker announced on Feb. 13 that it planned to invest about $3.5 billion in an electric vehicle battery plant park in Marshall. As part of the deal, Ford secured about $210 million in direct tax incentives plus a 15-year property tax abatement worth about $775 million over the life of the tax break. There was also roughly $750 million set aside for site prep at the location, with a $299 million earmark allocated for the Marshall Area Economic Development Alliance and a $330 million earmark pushed toward the Michigan Department of Transportation budget for expanding roadways and freeway connections for the presumed Ford plant's truck traffic. Another $120 million was routed to MAEDA earlier this month through the SOAR fund. [...] The 2.5-million-square-foot battery park was to be run by a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ford called "Blue Oval Battery Park Michigan." The plant would employ 2,500 people with pay ranging from $20 to $50 an hour.

At 11 a.m. Friday in Orlando Florida, a train completed its 240-mile journey from Miami, inaugurating a new line from Brightline that reaches speeds of up to 125 miles per hour and reduces the journey to just under three hours. "This is going to revolutionize transportation not just in the country and the state of Florida but right here in Central Florida and really just make our backyard bigger," Brightline's director of public affairs Katie Mitzner told a local news station.

Ironically, within hours a different Brightline train had struck and killed a pedestrian. "Brightline trains have the highest death rate in the U.S.," reports one local news station, "fatally striking 98 people since Miami-West Palm operations began — about one death for every 32,000 miles its trains travel, according to an ongoing Associated Press analysis." A police spokesperson said the death appeared to be a suicide.

"None of the accidents have been determined to be Brightline's fault," writes The Points Guy, "and the company has spent millions of dollars on safety improvements at grade crossings. It also launched a public-relations push to encourage all residents along its corridor to commit to staying safe. However, it is a very real and ongoing element of this service in Florida. We hope these efforts will continue to further reduce these incidents in communities that see frequent Brightline trains coming through."

The Points Guy also shared photos in their blog post describing what it was like to take a ride on America's only privately owned and operated inter-city passenger railroad: When the train ultimately pulled out of the station, a surreal feeling washed over me. Those of us on the inaugural service were the first passengers to ride the rails along this stretch of Florida's east coast in more than 55 years. Florida East Coast Railway, which still owns the tracks and operates frequent freight trains along them, ceased passenger service on July 31, 1968... Each seat has multiple power outlets, and the Wi-Fi truly was high-speed based on my experience and the test I ran. I was even able to successfully join (and participate in) our morning editorial team call on Zoom...

The scenery along the route was simply spectacular... With no grade crossings and fencing on both sides, we reached 125 mph for the final stretch of the journey. The cars along the highway stood no chance of keeping up as we traversed the 30-plus miles in only 18 minutes as the tower at Orlando International Airport came into view... With plans to expand to Tampa and construction underway on its planned Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas route, we likely haven't heard the last from Brightline as it seeks to transform train service in the United States.
"I think what Brightline has done here has laid the blueprint for how speed rail can be built in America with private dollars versus government funding," investor Ryn Rosberg told a local news site. "It's much more efficient and it gets done a lot quicker."

"There have been colorful station openings, lawsuits, threats of lawsuits, threats of legislation and yes, fatal accidents," writes the Palm Beach Post, "but Brightline train passengers can now take the train from any of its five South Florida stations to visit the Disney World, Universal Studios or Sea World tourist attractions."

Long-time Slashdot reader 140Mandak262Jamuna shared this article from the Washington Post: There is a theoretical, magic tipping point for adoption of electric vehicles. Once somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of new car sales are all-electric, some researchers say, huge numbers of drivers will follow. They predict that electric car sales will then soar — to 25 percent, 50 percent and eventually to close to 80 percent of new sales. Early adopters who love shiny new technologies will be replaced by mainstream consumers just looking for a good deal. Last year, the United States finally passed that elusive mark — 5 percent of all new cars sold in the fourth quarter were fully electric. And earlier this year, all-electric vehicles made up about 7 percent of new car sales...

If the pattern holds, the United States should start to see rapid growth in the next few years. And automakers have gone all-in on the transition. As of early 2023, U.S.-based car companies have announced about $173 billion in spending to shift to electric vehicles. Volkswagen, Ford, BMW, General Motors, and many more car companies are all making electric cars. There are more than 40 all-electric models on offer in the United States.
The article points out that in Norway, more than 80% of cars purchased are now fully electric.

For comparision, in the first half of 2023 in California, about 25% of new-car purchases were electric vehicles.

In his first major public interview since the DMV cut their San Francisco fleet in half, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said "we cannot expect perfection" from the self-driving cars, and vaguely threatened to leave town if regulators curtail them any further. From a report: The self-driving robotaxis of GM subsidiary Cruise and Google-owned Waymo seemed like they were heading in a successful direction when they won approval from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) last month to run their self-driving robotaxis at all hours in SF without restrictions. But barely a week later, the California DMV demanded Cruise cut it SF fleet in half, following post-Outside Lands stalling incidents, a night of multiple accidents, and SF City Attorney David Chiu filing a motion to get the CPUC to reverse their decision.

Cruse CEO Kyle Vogt sat down for a (very friendly) 40-minute interview Wednesday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, which can be seen in its entirety above. And he seems to be going on offense against the regulatory pushback his company is getting from SF and California lawmakers. "It's kind of fun as a society to poke at the differences between AVs (autonomous vehicles) and humans, but if we're serious about safety in our cities, we should be rolling out the red carpet for AVs," Vogt said, according to the SF Standard.