Posts Tagged: concept

The Mercedes-Benz Concept CLA Class mixes big range and big style

What you're looking at is a concept car, but it's also so much more. This is the car that could change everything you've come to expect about acceptable range from an electric car, not to mention raise the bar for visual style and aggression along the way. This is the Mercedes-Benz Concept CLA Class.

The Concept CLA inherits a lot of learnings from the extremely slippery Vision EQXX, but it's a car that’s a lot more ready for production, and should be a lot more affordable. The current CLA is one of the most affordable Mercedes-Benz cars you can buy in the US, and with any luck this future one won’t break the bank, either.

That’s despite a range that should surpass 400 miles on a charge, plus a wholly new software architecture ready to deliver level-three advanced, hands-off driver assistance. It’s an exciting combination of form and technology, and hopefully close to something we’ll see in dealerships soon. Watch the video below for the full story.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-mercedes-benz-concept-cla-class-mixes-big-range-and-big-style-130222801.html?src=rss
Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics

Electric airplane towing concept could mean longer zero-emission flights

Magpie Aviation announced a novel new approach to electric airplanes on Monday. Today’s battery technology (including CATL’s new, more efficient one) severely limits the practicality of zero-emission aircraft, leaving clean-energy innovators with two incomplete options: flying a plane full of batteries or one full of people — but not both. So the California-based startup wants to tie them together, extending the rear plane’s range by hundreds of miles.

Towing planes isn’t a new concept, with military use going back to World War II when aerial tows would pull smaller aircraft carrying troops and supplies. But applying it to the world of green transportation is new. Magpie Aviation’s concept uses one or more electric aircraft to act as a tractor plane towing a passenger (or cargo) aircraft using a long cable. The towed plane would have enough battery power for takeoff, landing and flying to alternate airports but not enough to fly the full distance on its own, as reported byAeroTime.

The lead plane would take on the bulk of the traction, and when its battery is depleted, it could hand off towing duties to another electric towing aircraft to extend the rear plane’s range. Magpie CEO Damon Vander Lind summarized toAviation Week, “You get towed until you’ve depleted down to your reserve in the lead aircraft, and then you swap in another tow aircraft.” Although it’s still a regional solution impractical for cross-country or international flights, Vander Lind says it could allow for a trip from San Francisco to Seattle — far beyond the sub-regional distances battery-powered passenger flights can travel on their own.

Magpie says it’s conducted successful small-scale tests using a synthetic fiber rope around 330 ft. long; the company envisions a later commercial version to use nearly mile-long cables. The startup plans to scale up its testing gradually and believes it could be implemented commercially by 2030. It expects advances in battery tech to allow it to tow single-aisle airliners eventually. Magpie suggests that the concept, mainly targeting electric planes, could also work with hybrid, hydrogen and standard aircraft in low-power modes. Additionally, the company says it’s working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) with an eye toward certification.

“It sounds kind of crazy, but we kept coming back to it because we couldn’t find any reason why we couldn’t do it,” said Vander Lind. “While our modeling shows that there is an advantage to doing a custom tow aircraft like this, we get a big advantage because the more expensive and critical passenger- and cargo-carrying ‘main aircraft’ has similar requirements to today’s aircraft and so adapts well to existing in-operation and already-in-development platforms. Remember that if we want to hit a zero-carbon 2050 goal, an airliner has a 30-year life, so we’re already at the point where airlines have to think hard about the operating life of the assets that they are buying today.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/electric-airplane-towing-concept-could-mean-longer-zero-emission-flights-205023296.html?src=rss
Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics

The Morning After: Dell’s modular laptop concept can be dismantled in seconds

With no cables or screws, Dell’s latest Concept Luna device is pretty compelling. It’s a laptop you can take apart in around 30 seconds, using just a push-pin tool. And we’re talking about replacing the entire keyboard, processor or display because it’s entirely modular.

Dell
Dell

When it's all put together, the new Concept Luna looks like a typical Dell laptop (more a Latitude than a slim XPS, to be clear). The new Luna laptop also has room for a CPU fan, to house more powerful processors. Once you’ve replaced a part, it does take longer to boot up, as it, sensibly, has to run through multiple tests to ensure each part works like it should.

We’ve seen modular tech for PCs and even smartphones come and go, but can Dell make this stick? The ability to replace components on, say, an army of enterprise laptops for a company could create huge savings for both the environment and the corporate bottom line.

– Mat Smith

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Twitter suspends journalists who cover the social network and Elon Musk

Musk insinuated they were suspended due to Twitter's new doxxing rules.

Twitter suspended several journalists from various publications last night. One thing they seem to have in common was covering the social network and Elon Musk, who once described himself as a "free speech absolutist," and recent stories about the Twitter account @Elonjet, which tracked Elon Musk’s private jet, using publicly available information.

Notable accounts include The Washington Post's Drew Harwell and CNN's Donie O'Sullivan, the latter whose last tweets included his interview with Jack Sweeney, the college student who ran the @ElonJet account. The New York Times' Ryan Mac lost access to his account after talking about Sweeney and Twitter's policy changes following @ElonJet's suspension.

Musk subsequently said on Twitter that accounts "engaged in doxxing receive a temporary 7 day suspension" as a response to his tweet insinuating the journalists were banned due to the website's new doxxing rules. Musk also entered a Twitter Space discussion and was immediately confronted by Harrell, who accused him of lying about posting links to his private information. Musk soon left the Space.

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'Death Stranding' will get a movie adaptation

It will feature new elements and characters.

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Kojima Productions

Kojima Productions is working with LA-based Hammerstone Studios to develop a movie adaptation of Death Stranding. The 2019 action game was already an incredibly cinematic experience, with lengthy cutscenes and dramatic expositions, which is probably partly why they aren't directly adapting its story into film. According to Variety, the movie will introduce new elements and characters into the Death Stranding world – perhaps teeing up some of the characters in the sequel?

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Everything NASA is taking to the moon before colonizing Mars

The Artemis missions will spend this decade setting up humanity's first extraterrestrial outpost.

“NASA is building a coalition of partnerships with industry, nations and academia that will help us get to the Moon quickly and sustainably, together,” then-NASA director Jim Bridenstine said in 2020. NASA can put people on the Moon – but it’s the whole keeping them there, alive, that’s the issue. The Moon is generally inhospitable to life, what with its weak gravity, massive temperature swings, razor-sharp, statically charged dust and general lack of liquid water and breathable atmosphere. The first colonists will need power, heat, atmosphere, potable water and more. Andrew Tarantola lays out what the Artemis missions aim to accomplish.

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Oppo reveals another short foldable smartphone

There's also a smaller Flip phone with a large cover screen.

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Oppo

Oppo's Find N2 shares a similar landscape screen design with its predecessor, yet it weighs as little as 233 grams. That's 42 grams lighter than before, around 30 grams less than the likes of Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 4. The Find N2 has a slightly larger 5.54-inch external display, and, while its 7.1-inch flexible screen has kept the same 9:8.4 "golden" aspect ratio (1,792 x 1,920), it apparently has a less visible crease and improved visibility.

As is often the case with Chinese phone companies, however, Western launches aren’t a definite. Both phones are available for pre-order in China today, ahead of the December 23rd launch for the Find N2 and the December 30th launch for the Find N2 Flip. Oppo reps also told Engadget the Flip will launch in international markets, but they are still evaluating whether to do the same with the bigger Find N2.

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Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics

Motorola’s rollable proof of concept gets shown off during Lenovo’s Tech World event

Lenovo is in the news today with its demonstration of a rollable phone during its Tech World 2022 event where the company shows off what it’s got in the works. Included in today’s demonstration is a Motorola phone with a rollable display which, unlike most other such concepts, extends its display vertically instead of horizontally. […]

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The OPPO X 2021 concept has a rollable OLED display and could launch next year

With the launch of its Galaxy Z Fold 2 in August, Samsung has pretty much tied up the foldable smartphone segment while you could go as far as saying that LG has cornered the swiveling dual-displayed smartphone niche with its Wing. Out to stake some fresh ground for itself is OPPO, who today revealed a […]

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Oppo’s X 2021 rollable concept phone expands in your hand

TCL and LG have been teasing the idea of an extendable display on smartphones for some time, and now, we finally get to see a working prototype courtesy of a third brand. Today’s Inno Day 2020 event unveiled the Oppo X 2021 concept smartphone, which…
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Renault’s Mégane eVision concept offers a look at its future EV lineup

Renault has unveiled the Mégane eVision, a key concept car that previews not just the future Megane hatchback, but its entire EV lineup and others in the Renault/Nissan/Mitsubishi alliance. The styling is based on the Renault Morphoz concept along wi…
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TCL goes nuts with concept devices, including a tri-folding and rollable phone

Folding phones are so last year. TCL is already cooking up phones based on where the industry is going to be in 2025, and they’ve debuted some concept devices that are, quite frankly, pretty insane. No, you probably won’t be able to buy one of these. But they’re still really neat devices, so just sit […]

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Vivo Apex 2020 is the next concept phone that ditches bezels and takes cameras to the next level

Concept phones aren’t quite as common as they used to be, but we’ve seen a few popping up again recently. OnePlus showed off their concept device with a “hidden” camera earlier this year, and Xiaomi’s Mi Mix Alpha certainly turned some heads. Vivo is the next to cook up a concept phone with the Vivo […]

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The OnePlus Concept One smartphone will hide all of its camera sensors

As OnePlus spins up the hype train leading up to the unveiling of a ‘concept’ smartphone at CES 2020 they are announcing many future-facing features including having all cameras hidden. OnePlus as a company is extremely fond of cultivating hype in the lead-up to new product launches, and the brand’s first ‘concept’ phone – a […]

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A closer look at Vivo’s all-glass, port-free concept 5G phone

Picture this: you're holding two glossy all-glass concept phones for a photo, then one slips off and shatters another unit on the table. The room goes quiet. Everyone looks on in awe. You are left red-faced not because you broke a phone, but because…
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Xiaomi’s flexible phone concept folds on both sides

Xiaomi truly is working on a foldable phone, company president and co-founder Lin Bin has confirmed in a teaser he posted on Weibo. In the video, you'll see the executive using a tablet-sized gadget — until he folds its sides and uses it like you wo…
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Infiniti unveils its electric QX Inspiration concept

Infiniti is surprisingly late to the EV game, considering what its rivals are doing and the fact that parent Nissan has been making the Leaf since 2010. It just unveiled the QX Inspiration, a concept rather than a production car, that it will show of…
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Nissan’s electric SUV concept will enter production

Nissan's current electric car lineup revolves almost exclusively around the Leaf, but it's ready to diversify its selection. The company's European design chief Mamoru Aoki has revealed to Autocar that a production version of the IMx concept SUV (abo…
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Google exploring concept of a dedicated YouTube Edition Android phone

According to a report of a survey currently underway by Google, the company is exploring a unique specialization for a smartphone. The survey seeks input on what would be considered a “YouTube Edition” of an Android smartphone. The concepts described in the survey cover software, interface and even potential hardware. For consumers of content, the […]

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Sony’s autonomous concept would make a great party bus

Sony's concept vehicle is all about entertainment on the go. Naturally. Its SC-1 (translated) is more or less a shuttle outfitted with high-res image sensors, displays, AI, 5G data connectivity via Docomo, alternative fuels, LIDAR and a bevy of ultra…
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Feel like you’re flying in VR using these clever Samsung concept headphones

Samsung has flung the doors of its concept product lab open again, showing off three new projects, including a set of headphones that make VR a full-motion experience, and a pair of fun new apps.

The post Feel like you're flying in VR using these clever Samsung concept headphones appeared first on Digital Trends.

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Panoz unveils a concept version of its arrow-shaped road car

Panoz's years-long vision of an arrow-shaped road car is finally coalescing into something tangible. The automaker has unveiled a real-world concept version of the car, the DeltaWing GT, that shows that the idea isn't far-fetched. Despite Panoz's…
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