Saturday, May 22nd, 2021

Time	Event
12:50a	World's First EV-Charging Highway Trial to Start In Italy Israeli company ElectReon Wireless is building a kilometer-long stretch of electric vehicle-charging highway between Milan and Brescia in Italy. It's the first trial of its kind involving a highway and will help determine if the technology is ready for widespread adoption. Innovation Origins reports: In a nutshell, Electreon is building the infrastructure by installing copper coils under the asphalt. Energy is transferred directly and wirelessly to the vehicle's batteries while driving by means of magnetic induction. The system includes a control unit located on the side of the lane of the electrified road. A receiver is installed in the chassis of each electric vehicle that is participating in the trial. ElectReon is working with more than ten Italian partners to carry out the test. The most important of these is Brebemi, who operate the toll road. The goal of the pilot is to see how the technology will fare on toll roads. Brebemi is footing the bill for the pilot project while ElectReon will supply the wireless electric road system. "Dynamic Wireless Power Transfer," as the technology is called, will be tested on different types of electric vehicles in both stationary and dynamic environments. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
3:30a	Seagate's New Mach.2 Is the World's Fastest Conventional Hard Drive An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Seagate has been working on dual-actuator hard drives -- drives with two independently controlled sets of read/write heads -- for several years. Its first production dual-actuator drive, the Mach.2, is now "available to select customers," meaning that enterprises can buy it directly from Seagate, but end-users are out of luck for now. Seagate lists the sustained, sequential transfer rate of the Mach.2 as up to 524MBps -- easily double that of a fast "normal" rust disk and edging into SATA SSD territory. The performance gains extend into random I/O territory as well, with 304 IOPS read / 384 IOPS write and only 4.16 ms average latency. (Normal hard drives tend to be 100/150 IOPS and about the same average latency.) The added performance requires additional power; Mach.2 drives are rated for 7.2 W idle, while Seagate's standard Ironwolf line is rated at 5 W idle. It gets more difficult to compare loaded power consumption because Seagate specs the Mach.2 differently than the Ironwolf. The Mach.2's power consumption is explicitly rated for several random I/O scenarios, while the Ironwolf line is rated for an unhelpful "average operating power," which isn't defined in the data sheet. Still, if we assume -- probably not unreasonably -- a similar expansion of power consumption while under load, the Mach.2 represents an excellent choice for power efficiency since it offers roughly 200% of the performance of competing traditional drives at roughly 144% of the power budget. Particularly power-conscious users can also use Seagate's PowerBalance mode -- although that feature decreases sequential performance by 50% and random performance by 10%. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
8:34p	California Will Require Uber, Lyft Drivers To Transition To Electric Cars Slashdot reader PolygamousRanchKid quotes The Hill: California is requiring ride-sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft to transition from gasoline to electric vehicles (EVs) in their networks by the end of this decade. The state's clean-air regulator on Thursday unanimously approved the Clean Miles Standard mandating that EVs account for 90 percent of ride-hailing vehicle miles traveled in California by 2030. The ride-share companies will have to begin the electrification of their fleets in 2023. The move by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) is part of California's effort to phase out gas-powered vehicles and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and become carbon neutral by 2045. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) last year signed an executive order requiring all new cars and passenger trucks sold in the state of nearly 40 million residents be zero-emission by 2035. "The transportation sector is responsible for nearly half of California's greenhouse gas emissions, the vast majority of which come from light-duty vehicles," CARB Chair Liane M. Randolph said in a statement... Both Uber and Lyft have already committed to converting their fleets entirely to EVs by 2030 and have made efforts to help drivers make the shift. The companies have said, however, California needs to spend more money to help drivers afford the zero emissions vehicles, according to Reuters. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)

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