Michael Faraday discovered solid electrolytes in the 1830s, and the solid-state battery has promised to be the Next Big Electrical Thing almost ever since.
The idea frequently makes news that I resist reporting because, to borrow a baseball metaphor, these battery “batters” too often start their home run trot before realizing it’s just a fly ball to the warning track. But noted scientist Paul Albertus says that 10-year-old Stanford University battery startup QuantumScape appears to have hit a “homerun in terms of their solid-state battery performance data.”
Here’s the deal with solid-state: These batteries have long promised to solve the thorniest issues preventing widespread battery-electric vehicle adoption while providing better performance on many metrics.
Liquid or gel electrolytes in today’s batteries are flammable and can freeze, so they require costly, heavy warming, cooling, and safety monitoring systems. Graphite-based anode materials engineered to capture the lithium ions during charging are bulky and heavy, and side reactions [...]
In a historic move no doubt influenced by PETA lobbyists and mounting pressure from both the Elks Lodge and Caribou Labor Union, manufacturing mogul and holiday god-emperor Santa Claus (née Saint Nicholas) is apparently retiring his traditional reindeer-flown sleigh for something a bit more terrestrial. Nothing is written in the snow yet, but Bentley’s latest bespoke commission appears to be right in line with Father Christmas’ well-known aesthetic sensibilities.
Chalk it up to too much eggnog or finally getting a smooch under the mistletoe from the Spirit of Ecstasy, but the Crewe-based automaker is uncharacteristically forthcoming about the identity of this mystery buyer. In a release full of cheer, Bentley all but confirms Kris Kringle as the force behind this commission; as the extent of Santa’s corporate holdings aside from his North Pole–based for-charity manufacturing empire and tax haven are unclear, we’re not sure how he managed to afford a one-off Bentley commission. We expect [...]
Today, we bring you a break from Christmas carols and fashionably ugly sweaters for a decidedly non-holiday-related bit of absurdity: A short movie about aliens abducting the new-for-1987 Chevrolet Corsica and the hapless family within. Go on, run through this two-and-a-half minutes of total weirdness, and if by the end you don’t hate us for making you sit through it, we’ll explain, or at least expound.
This oddball film was, apparently, an introduction for Chevrolet dealers to their new front-wheel-drive family sedan, the Corsica. If you can’t bear to watch, it shows a family driving down a dark road when their Corsica quits—something that wouldn’t strike the owner of any GM product from the mid-1980s as terribly unusual. But no, this wasn’t a failure due to “decontented” engineering or a pissed-off line worker who discarded his foil chewing gum wrapper by hiding it under the distributor cap. No, this new Corsica is being abducted [...]
Can you believe it’s been a decade since the Pagani Zonda Tricolore dropped our collective jaws? Neither can we. That special-edition Zonda was built to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Frecce Tricolori, the aerobatic demonstration arm of the Italian Air Force. Now, 10 years later, Pagani is back with the Huayra Tricolore, which pays tribute to the 60th anniversary of the Frecce Tricolori.
Just like the Zonda before it, only three examples of the Huayra Tricolore will be built, and each is going for $6.75 million a pop. For a little context, the Zonda Tricolore sold for “just” $1.47 million when it was new, a comparative bargain. The Huayra has been changed extensively for the Tricolore special edition, though. The body is a blue carbon-fiber weave with blue accents for the headlights, blue detailing on the wheels, and the red, white, and green tricolore stripes flowing down the sides of the car.
Pagani also [...]
When you look at a machine like this and find out it’s the result of a risky, hare-brained business decision, you know you’re hanging with passionate car guys. That’s the ethos that drives Michael Hunt and Lee Clayton, the owners of TredWear. Their business revolves around permanent tire graphics that can be applied to any tire to dress them up. The best way in the automotive world to display your product is to build cool cars that embody the spirit of what you’re selling, so that’s what they’ve been doing, and as it turns out, this hare-brained idea is actually pretty business savvy.
Related: Like junkyards finds? Check out Roadkill’s Junkyard Gold on the MotorTrend App, where host Steve Magnante travels to junkyards across the country to unearth hidden gems and talk about their history. Sign up today for a free trial!
TredWear’s last creation, the “Tarantula,” was featured in the July 2018 issue of [...]
