It’s for showing off the engineering. Lots of robotics competitions focus on different things (throwing balls, kicking soccer balls, moving fast), but BattleBots is definitely the one I’d be most worried about advancing a dangerous line of killer tech.

A humanoid bipedal foot race shows off balance, speed, power efficiency, and things like that.

GAC Aion prices the Aion RT Super at 88,800 yuan (around €11,050), but excludes the battery from the base cost. Instead, the company requires customers to lease the swappable battery as a subscription, lowering the upfront price while adding ongoing monthly costs. The battery cannot be purchased separately for this model.

Oh I don’t like that subscription model one bit. What assurance does an owner have that their subscription price won’t change over the life of their vehicle?

Sweet corn is primarily harvested at a young stage, so it’s not just the variety of corn, but also the choices of how and when to harvest and process.

A lot of the edible varieties are different cultivars, generally categorized as flint corn or flour corn. Flint corns can be processed into grits and coarser cornmeal, while flour corns can be processed into corn starch and corn flour.

Field corn/dent corn is the majority of what American farmers grow, and is generally not intended for direct human consumption, unless heavily processed into bourbon and corn oil and corn syrup.

Even the stuff that is processed into ethanol (for whiskey to drink or for fuel or other industrial use) is still converted into animal feed and corn oil after the fermentable carbohydrates are extracted.

That’s true, although a fuel tank is also really simple to build while a rechargeable battery and related charging controllers/equipment get pretty complicated to manufacture. Some of the complexity gets pushed elsewhere.

Also the price difference thing is more or less gone now.

It’s just always been hard to compare like for like, because pure EVs compete on different features than similarly priced ICE vehicles. Is a Tesla Model 3 more like a $30,000 Toyota Camry or more like a $60,000 BMW 3 series? Which is the nearest ICE competitor to the Rivian R1S?

In the past 5 years we’ve seen a lot of new models released by different manufacturers, we’re also seeing more directly comparable models.

One interesting thing is that Toyota is soon releasing EV versions of vehicles they also offer as ICE vehicles. Sometime in the next month or so, the Lexus ES will be offered as either a pure EV or a hybrid, and the EV will actually be cheaper. And there’s an EV Highlander coming later this year, with a price comparable to the hybrid Grand Highlanders.

And obviously my comment is very much U.S.-centered because that’s the market I know, but most of the ICE manufacturers rely on global manufacturing and supply chains so that we can try to see patterns and trends more broadly. European brands like VW, BMW, Volvo, Mercedes, etc., have also been pushing electrified models that sit somewhere in the long spectrum between cheap economy cars and expensive luxury/sport cars.

ICE engines are cool because of how complex they had to become in order to become even as remotely as reliable as Electric Engines are fundmanetally.

I remember in the 90’s when a lot of carmakers were developing variable valve timing where the valve timing would adjust based on RPM, using the different parts of the camshaft for each cylinder’s timing, so that it could maximize performance/efficiency for a wider range of RPMs without trying a one size fits all approach for the whole range. And each carmaker used a slightly different approach, trying to do something to squeeze out just a little bit more performance out of the same size engine.

Or consider the nature of the transmissions, and the rise of the automatic transmission, which allowed carmakers to start going into 6-10 gears (or the continuously variable transmission) because shifting gears could be abstracted away from the driver’s perspective.

The history of a lot of the other engineered functions (getting power from the engine to 2 or 4 of the wheels while allowing different rotational rates, getting fuel into the cylinder, cooling and lubricating the engine, getting the fuel/air mixture right, etc.) shows that it’s so many different things to worry about just to make the car go, reliably and safely.

BMW even partnered with acclaimed composer Hans Zimmer to make custom sounds on certain of their more expensive EVs.

I wonder if there’s hysteresis where the slope of the curve depends on the prior charge history.

Like, if you charge from 1% to 100%, does the 20-80% part of the curve look different than if you discharged down to just 20 and started charging to 80 from there?

There are processes for turning biological feedstocks (algae, bio alcohols, or waste from farming or cooking or food processing or even clearing brush or treating wastewater) into combustible kerosene. But those feedstocks are basically highly limited.

There are also processes for turning carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide into synthetic hydrocarbons, without biological feedstocks. These processes are more energy intensive, and hard to scale, but it’s an area of active research.

Basically none of the tech is ready yet. But there are a few different promising pipelines worth exploring.

Exactly.

The whole reason why lithium is such a good material for cathodes in car batteries is because of its very low mass per cation. So for a Lithium Iron Phosphate battery, the the cathode material is LiFePO4, where the Lithium itself is only 4.4% of the overall mass of the cathode.

So it’s important to remember that although the lithium constitutes a small amount of the total mass of a battery, that swings both ways so that not much is actually needed to build the next battery out of recycled materials.

Your solar power storage expert is named Sun? Sounds lot like sun.

Maybe that’s why she became a solar power storage expert!

Context in the article but not the headline: this is for the month of March 2026. March tends to be a low demand month for electrical power because the heating and cooling demands tend to be low at that time of year.

A cool milestone, but we still have a ways to go before we can make this true for an entire calendar year.

Also, I’d push back against the subtext that work experience gives skills. Plenty of people work a job for 10 years without having the adjacent job skills to be able to progress in that career or jump to another.

Critical thinking skills are the most important thing, and it’s possible to get a 4-year degree without actually picking them up or strengthening your skill sets in that area. But it’s also possible to work for 5 years without developing critical thinking skills, either.

In the end, no matter what you do with your time, only a small percentage of your effort is going into improving yourself. The people at work are trying to get stuff done for their employer, and the people at school are trying to get through the curriculum. It’s possible to do the work while the employer/school or even yourself cheats you out of the real long term benefits of actually learning during that time frame.

Honda and Toyota both slow played full electrification, emphasizing non-plug-in vehicles even as plug in models started moving real volumes.

But Toyota was at least putting a real push in increasing their hybrid lineup, and lining up increasing amounts of electric drivetrains (batteries, motors, regenerative braking chargers, etc.) in their supply chain.

In 2025, Honda sold 1.4 million vehicles in North America, 430,000 of which were electrified vehicles (50,000 of those being the GM-manufactured Prologue and ZDX), mostly non-plug-in hybrids. Honda has refused to bring a plug-in hybrid to market. Looking at the actual manufacturing, Honda has only partially electrified something like 25% of their vehicles.

Meanwhile, Toyota moved 2.5 million vehicles, 47% of which were electrified. About 50,000 of them were plug-in hybrids and 22,000 were full electric. That’s not a lot, but at least they developed their own EVs, have a supply chain for literally millions of (small) batteries and regenerative chargers and electric motors in finished cars.

When it comes time to really put out EVs, Toyota is in a much better position to survive the transition than Honda is.

Today’s new cars are tomorrow’s used cars. What happens in the new car market now will directly affect what is available on the used car market 5, 10, 15 years from now.

I wonder how much energy is in a liter of sunshine.

Photovoltaic panels capture energy from the photons that hit it, at a finite speed of light.

At Earth’s distance from the sun, solar radiation is about 1450 W/m^2 . Each watt is 1 joule/second. And a liter, which is 1000 cubic centimeters, would basically represent a volume that is the 0.1cm of space above a 1 square meter panel (100 cm x 100 cm x 0.1 cm = 1000 cubic centimeters).

So how much energy hits a 1 square meter panel in the time it takes for light to travel 0.1 cm? Light travels at 3.0 x 10^8 m/s, or 3.0 x 10^10 cm/s, so we’re talking about the light that hits a panel over the course of about 3.3 x 10^-12 s. At 1450 joules per second, times 3.3 x 10^-12 s, we get 4.83 x 10^-9 joules.

4.8 nanojoules in a liter of sunshine. That’s way less than a liter of gasoline/petrol!

Then again, using a solar panel you’re able to capture a column of light 3.0 x 10^8 meters tall using that 1 square meter panel. So you’re catching 3.0 x 10^11 liters per second worth of sunlight, which makes the relative low energy per liter still add up to a lot.

Gasoline needs a precise air/fuel ratio to ignite

Yes, and it forms fumes in those ratios as soon as it spills. A puddle of gasoline is flammable. And once it ignites, it creates a runaway condition where the heat output of the reaction ignites the fuel around it, too.

If you have fast charging, why do you need a big battery?

Road trips. Being able to drive 4-5 hours between stops is better than being able to drive 2-3 hours, even if you don’t have to stop for all that long. Small fuel tanks are annoying in gasoline powered vehicles, even if a fill up can be less than 3 minutes.

Isn’t that also true of literal gasoline?

A 15-gallon tank of gasoline has about 1800 megajoules or 500 kWh stored, ready to combust when mixed with oxygen and heat.

You crash test the actual modules and make sure it doesn’t short when encountering highway crash forces, same as you do for gasoline tanks.

1100kW means 18.3 kWh/minute, which for a 3 mi/kWh car is 55 miles (almost 90km) added to a car’s range in just one minute of charging. For a 4 mi/kWh car, that’s about 73 miles (almost 120 km) in a minute. That’s wild.

A gasoline pump delivers about 10 gallons per minute, so for a 25 mpg car, a gasoline pump gets about 250 miles (400 km) per minute, so there’s still a gap. But the gap is shrinking.

they could have bought a <$25k used EV last year and saved $4k with the EV tax rebate.

The people who were in the market for a car last year are by and large not the same people who are in the market today.

Plus let’s not forget, the actual EVs on the used market 12 months ago were different than today’s. Someone looking to buy a 3-year-old car today has to look for something originally sold in 2023, whereas 12 months ago they were looking at 2022 vehicles, with fewer models available and significantly fewer vehicles actually manufactured and sold.