This new style of electric tuk-tuk makes me want to drive a taxi in India
This one style of vehicle is known by many names. In India, it’s an auto rickshaw. In Thailand, a tuk-tuk (a fun onomatopoeia that arose from the traditionally loud two-stroke engines powering them). But whatever it’s called, these three-wheeled taxis have used their half-bike, half-wagon design to shuttle folks around cities for decades. And now, a new era of rickshaws is seeing electric drives enabling interesting new designs.
Take for instance this yellow behemoth of a bike I found while perusing Alibaba. It may just be one of my favorite Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week entries in a while based on just how useful it looks!
Got some kids you need to shuttle down the neighborhood to a friend’s house? Throw ’em in!
Have some grocery shopping to do? Strap those eggs into the backseat!
Does Granny need a ride to the doctor? Toss that lady in back and drive Miss Daisy to the orthopedist!
With your own electric rickshaw, you can become the open-air, eco-friendly neighborhood cab driver you’ve always dreamed of!
Behold the features such as the “stylish and exquisite exterior styling,” the “fully-functional turn signals and headlights,” and the “spacious front and rear seats for up to six people at a time.”
I’m not quite sure how you cram six people into this little thing, unless you’ve got a clown car situation or part of the rear suspension becomes the lap of your riding companion. But hey, the more merrier!
For power, we’ve got a rear axle-mounted 1,000W motor supplied by a 48V battery. It’s not clear how big the battery is, but the vendor claims a range of 70-90 km (43-55 miles), which I think is larger than any neighborhood operator could need.
At a top speed of around 35 km/h (22 mph), you’re not going to be taking this on any major roads. And even if you could, I’m not sure you’d want to go much faster in a tricycle. Three-wheelers are fun, but they do have a nasty habit of turning into two-wheelers in the turns, if you catch my drift.
And if you get going too fast into a hairpin, you’d better have someone on hand to catch your own drift.
One of the things I Iike about this design, other than the fun and bubbly shell, is that the large-diameter bike-style wheels will likely help with rougher terrain. These vehicles sometimes skimp on the suspension, and so larger wheels can help reduce the impact of bumps and dips in the road surface. It’s not going to be an off-roader, but I think that sounds like a bad enough idea that no one was planning on hitting up their local ATV trails anyway.
My favorite part of this vehicle is just how cheap it is – a mere $592! Though there are a couple of catches. First, that’s likely the price without batteries. Second, and more importantly, that’s the price when buying 100 units, which is the minimum order quantity of the Chinese factory that makes this lovable little runabout. However, if you’re prepared to buy just over half a billion units, they’ll drop the price down to $400 per unit. I’m not kidding.
I guess I won’t be riding around in my own silly yellow e-bike tuk-tuk anytime soon, at least not unless I can find 99 friends who also want to join in on the fun. I’ve got my hands full with a few containers of Chinese EVs as it is. But just imagine the sight of pulling into your neighborhood one day and seeing a parade of 100 bubble trikes rolling past in all of their bright yellow glory. Now that’s a world I want to live in!
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Recurrent Energy has secured $513 million in financing for Arizona’s largest standalone battery storage project.
Solar and battery storage developer, owner, and operator Recurrent Energy, a subsidiary of Canadian Solar (Nasdaq: CSIQ), secured financing for its Papago Storage project in Maricopa County, Arizona.
The financing includes a $249 million construction and term loan, a $163 million tax equity bridge loan, and a $101 million letter of credit facility.
Construction of the 1,200 MWh Papago Storage is expected to start in Q3 2024 and come online in Q2 2025. The project holds a 20-year tolling agreement with electric utility Arizona Public Service Company and is expected to create 200 construction jobs.
Recurrent will own and operate Papago Storage once it’s complete. The project will dispatch enough power for around 244,000 homes for four hours a day in support of renewable energy.
Ismael Guerrero, CEO of Recurrent Energy, said, “When we began developing Papago Storage in 2016, the Arizona storage market was in its infancy. Today, Arizona is one of the fastest-growing markets for energy storage in the United States, bolstered by the state’s expanding economy and cost-effective renewable energy resources.
“Today, we are thrilled to see nearly a decade of planning culminate in financing what will be the largest energy storage project in Arizona. We appreciate the continued support from our partners Nord/LB and MUFG in our shared mission to advance the clean energy transition.”
Read more: Oxford sets a new world record for solar panel efficiency
Now is a great time to begin your solar journey so your system is installed in time for those sunny summer days. If you want to make sure you’re finding a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage,a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. They have hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20 to 30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here. –affiliate link
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Elon Musk claims Tesla’s new AI supercluster will grow to over 500 MW, making it one of, if not the biggest in the world. At the same time, the CEO claims Tesla is achieving some record-breaking performance with its next-en AI chip.
A few months ago, we reported that Tesla was having issues building a new expansion at Gigafactory Texas to house a new giant supercomputer to train Tesla’s AI.
At the time, we heard that Tesla was aiming for a 100 MW cluster to be ready by August. Musk canceled other projects at Tesla to focus construction resources on the expansion.
Commenting on drone videos of the expansion, Musk said that it will grow to over 500 MW over the next 18 months:
Sizing for ~130MW of power & cooling this year, but will increase to >500MW over next 18 months or so. Aiming for about half Tesla AI hardware, half Nvidia/other. Play to win or don’t play at all.
We previously noted that it was strange that Tesla was internally referring to the project as a Dojo project, which refers to Tesla’s own supercomputing hardware, but sources were also told that the cluster would use Nvidia compute power.
Now, Musk confirmed that Tesla plans to use both its own hardware and Nvidia’s, as well as other suppliers.
However, things are getting a little unclear as Musk seems to also imply that Tesla will use some of its HW4 computers for the training clusters:
HW4 generally refers to Tesla’s in-car computer with an in-house designed chip, while Dojo is used for training, like this new cluster.
It’s unclear here if Musk is talking about using inference computing for training or just talking about Tesla’s overall planned computing power.
Electrek’s Take
Elon had mentioned at Tesla’s shareholders meeting that the company now had Nvidia-level AI chips, but the stock didn’t even move from that announcement as Nvidia became the most valuable company in the world.
I think Tesla’s AI effort is still not super credible for the market. That happens when you claim that you are about to achieve self-driving by the end of the year every year for the past 5 years.
At this point, we need to see Tesla make significant improvements to FSD with each new update. It sounded like this new cluster would help achieve that but Elon also recently said that Tesla was not compute-constrained for training right now, so it’s hard to really understand what is holding up improvements at this point.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports3 months agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports1 year agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Environment1 year agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Sports8 months agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports3 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment1 year agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Environment1 year agoTesla advances Powerwall pilot project with German electric company