Picture the commute of the future: You live in Palo Alto, Calif., but work 350 miles away in Los Angeles. After your morning latte, you click on a smartphone app to summon your digital chauffeur. An autonomous car shows up at your front door three minutes later to drive you to a Hyperloop station in downtown Mountain View, where a pod… Read More
Tag: elon musk
The renegade whose dream started the latest space race
Elon Musk’s company SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin have grabbed the headlines in the space race, both of them building rockets and spacecraft. But there is fascinating backstory on how this race and the private space industry came into existence. It is the tale of a renegade entrepreneur, Peter Diamandis, who founded the XPRIZE… Read More
Apple, Google Go Home
For some marketers the operative mantra is go big or go home. It looks like Apple and Google are both taking a harder look at the automotive industry and have decided to go home.
The media is rife with reports of Apple hemorrhaging automotive engineers while senior executives on Google’s automated driving team have been skipping… Read More
Car Sharing Contradictions
- Automotive News tells us that GM’s Julia Steyn, head of Maven, is thrilled with the early performance of this captive car sharing initiative, in comments yesterday in Traverse City, Mich.
- Tesla Motor’s Elon Musk anticipates limitless demand resulting from car sharing and automated driving, speaking on the company’s Q2 earnings
Why Elon Musk’s crazy plans for Tesla aren’t crazy
Elon Musk recently laid out a “master plan” for where his company, Tesla Motors, is heading. The vision is undoubtedly ambitious: four new kinds of Tesla vehicles, solar initiatives, autonomous driving technologies and a ride-sharing program.… Read More
NTSB Entry Raises the Stakes of Tesla Probe
The National Transportation Safety Board’s entry into the investigation of the first fatal crash of a Tesla Model S is a monumental turning point in the autonomous driving movement. While long-time observers of the NTSB note that it only gets involved in investigations where broader implications exist, the agency’s interest… Read More
The amazing artificial intelligence we were promised is coming, finally
We have been hearing predictions for decades of a takeover of the world by artificial intelligence. In 1957, Herbert A. Simon predicted that within 10 years a digital computer would be the world’s chess champion. That didn’t happen until 1996. And despite Marvin Minsky’s 1970 prediction that “in from three to eight years we will… Read More
Democracy is a great thing, except in the workplace
“The Soviet Union I left behind was a dictatorship but the workplace was a democracy; America may be free but the workplace is a dictatorship” said Len Erlikh after I hired him at First Boston (now Credit Suisse First Boston) in 1986. Being of the Jewish faith, he had fled the U.S.S.R.’s religious persecution.
Erlikh’s words have … Read More
Is GaN Disruptive? Revisiting the Criteria
In March 2010 Efficient Power Conversion (EPC) proudly launched our GaN technology at the CIPS conference in Nuremberg, Germany. Parts and development kits were readily available off-the shelf and therefore designers could immediately get started with a new state-of-the-art semiconductor technology.
… Read More
Future Connected Cars 2016
There are times when a speaker for a large corporation clearly breaks from the cold corporate talking points and suggests something that you just know his managers will consider cringe-worthy. Haden Kirkpatrick, described on the event agenda of the Future Connected Car event in Santa Clara as “director of strategy and … Read More