A Concise Overview of Recent Advances in Vehicle Technologies
2016 was a big year for electric and driverless cars. Get a quick review with relevant videos on some of the events of interest in the field during the past year.
Jo Stichbury, Grakn Labs.
Editor's note: Originally posted as part of Grakn's Advent at Grakn Labs series. #GraknLovesTech
Today we are featuring the year’s best vehicle technology innovation and news.
2016 has been a big year for electric and driverless cars, none more so than for Tesla, which announced the much-anticipated Model 3 at the end of March. The Model 3 Unveil Event went down a storm with Tesla aficionados, and led to a flurry (over 400,000 at the time of writing) of pre-orders for the car.
Driverless cars have been in the news daily, as the key players in the automotive industry go head to head with tech industry leaders, such as Google. We have to admit getting a bit teary over the Google video that shows Steve, a blind man, trying out the Google car.
The “whoah!” video of the year was possibly this futuristic straddling bus, tested (at very low speeds) in China. The computer simulation at the end of the video looks incredible, and we’re hoping to see more real footage in 2017.
At rather higher speeds, Hyperloop 1 was in and out of the news this year, for all kinds of reasons (LINK). The first test in May this year was…anti-climatic viewing. It was presumably notched up as successful, because later in 2016 came the news of its possible use as a futuristic transport system, to take passengers from Dubai to Abu Dhabi in 12 minutes (normally a two-hour drive).
Transportation companies like Uber and Didi Chuxing have hardly been out of the news this year. One of our favourite videos of the year is Travis Kalanick (CEO of Uber) speaking about uberPOOL, the company’s carpooling service, which in its first eight months took 7.9 million miles off the roads and 1,400 metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the air in Los Angeles. All this and less traffic congestion: what’s not to like?!
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Jo Stichbury is a Technical Author at Grakn Labs. Former Head of Technical Publications / Communications at Nokia and Symbian. PhD from the University of Cambridge. Interests include data science & machine learning, cats, cakes, driverless cars & Manchester City.
GRAKN.AI is an open source distributed knowledge graph platform to power the next generation of intelligent applications. Using the power of machine reasoning, we provided a platform to help manage and make sense of highly interconnected big data. Grakn performs machine reasoning through Graql, a graph query language capable of reasoning and graph analytics.
Original. Reposted with permission.
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