Kim Malcolm talks with Steve Marshall about Bellevue’s plan to implement electric, self-driving van pools and shuttles. Marshall is transportation technology partnership manager for the city of Bellevue. He says self-driving vehicles could be cruising Bellevue’s roads later this year.
The city of Bellevue is in discussions to test self-driving van pools to bring commuters into the city and self-driving shuttles to ferry them around downtown. They’ve brought in transportation guru Steve Marshall to investigate the possibilities, lead those discussions, and if it makes sense, create partnerships to make it happen.
The future of transportation will be in Seattle. That’s a proclamation Washington Gov. Jay Inslee made at an event Wednesday evening celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Alliance of Angels investment group. Speaking to leaders from the technology, political, business, and other industries, Inslee predicted that Seattle will be home to the first electric ferries in America and a hub for autonomous vehicle development. “We are going to be the future of the electrification of the transportation system and the autonomous vehicle center of the U.S.,” Inslee said. The state, which has the country’s largest ferry system, set aside $600,000 in its 2018 state transportation budget that will go toward researching how to convert ferries from diesel to hybrid electric …
For years, BNSF trains have safely traversed the bridge over Lake Pend Oreille, efficiently shuttling goods and commodities to foreign and domestic markets. Now, in an effort to further expedite shipping and modernize rail in the Pacific Northwest, BNSF is proposing a multi-million dollar upgrade in the form of a second parallel bridge that will allow rail traffic to move even safer in both directions simultaneously. The new bridge will reduce the times trains have to wait for other trains to cross the bridge. The backups created by waiting trains can sometimes extend for many miles. The second rail bridge will reduce delays in the city, improve air quality and reduce noise by cutting idle times while the trains are …
Imagine being able to charge your electric car in minutes rather than hours, or your smartphone in seconds. That’s the enticing prospect being touted by researchers who reckon they’ve discovered a new material that could boost the performance of a carbon-based supercapacitor – sometimes called an ultracapacitor – a type of energy storage device that can be charged very quickly and offload its power very quickly, too.
If you’re thinking that conventional tires aren’t quite up to snuff for the greenest possible electric vehicle driving experience, run right out and buy yourself a cigar. Some of the world’s most forward-thinking automotive engineers have been tackling the problem, and engineers at Goodyear have come up with a solution: moss.
Cars with plugs may be the cleaner and greener future, but at the moment, they make up only about 1 percent of global sales approaching 100 million vehicles a year. That means that automakers continue to work ceaselessly on more efficient gasoline engines and lighter vehicles to put them in. Last week, Toyota summarized its plans in that arena and revealed some of the future powertrains we’ll see in Toyota and Lexus vehicles over the next several years.
