Tesla Model X: The electric SUV we’ve all been waiting for

With the announcement of the Tesla Model X Tuesday, the innovative company tacks with the prevailing winds of customer choice and finally offers an SUV electric vehicle. The majority of cars sold in the US now are SUVs or light trucks. While it’s built on the same chassis as the existing Tesla Model S, the Model X will be a bit longer, taller and heavier, and that means Tesla will be challenged to return 200 miles per charge. It will be a true seven-seat vehicle with a forward-facing third row of seats.

The Model X will be about $71,000 before state and federal credits (which Tesla bakes into the large type in ads, as do other EV makers), and the performance edition will be around $96,000, plus options, less those federal and state credits.

First deliveries in early 2016

For those tracking car tech, the Model X seems like an old friend — and for good reason. Tesla announced the Model X in February 2012 and said first units would ship by the end of 2013. There have been several several postponements since, and now it looks as if the first-in-line customers will get their Model Xs in February 2016.

Tesla says the Model X will offer 60-kWh and 85-kWh batteries. On the Model S, the EPA says they’re good for 208 and 255 miles, respectively. The Model X has more frontal area and heavier all-wheel-drive, with a motor in front as well as in back. Tesla estimates the Model X will come in about 10% less, meaning Tesla may or may not be able to claim its entry version goes 200 miles on a charge. That’s one number we’re hoping to hear described at Tuesday’s rollout.

Expect the Model X to have the most current safety technologies including driver assistance and rudimentary self-driving. Tesla is the leader in over-the-air software updates, so any Tesla with current hardware can be as up-to-date as brand-new Teslas. The benchmark among combustion engine vehicles would be the BMW X5 as well as Volvo’s dazzling new XC90.

The only premium SUV EV for a year

Assuming the Model X finally does ship, it will have the category — high-end SUVs with electric drive — all to itself for at least a year. That’s when Audi is reportedly shipping the Audi Q8 E-tron crossover. The idea of an electric-only crossover is intriguing. A big crossover or SUV is the preferred vehicle of suburbia for soccer momming as well as for two, sometimes three couples going for a night on the town when somebody else watches their kids. But it’s also the go-to vehicle for long vacation trips, and that will pose a challenge. Every time Tesla talks about how many Supercharger stations it has, those being the 440-volt devices that refill the tank in 45 minutes at no cost, it’s a reminder of how many places Superchargers aren’t.

Up next: $35,000 Tesla Model 3

Many are looking past the Model X to the Tesla Model 3. If Tesla can do a knockout sedan, it can do a knockout SUV. The Model 3 (formerly Model E) is the Volks-Tesla, a people’s car with a starting price of around $35,000, although that could well be the after-tax-credits price. But still, below $50,000 to start. It will be sized and priced to compete with the Audi A4, BMW 3 Series, and Mercedes-Benz C-Class. That is expected to launch in 2016 with deliveries in 2017 and full production in 2018.

The announcement is listed as Tuesday at 7 p.m. PDT. For an interesting read, check out Tesla fans trying to figure out what time it will be on the east coast.

Volvo wants to replace garbage collectors with robots

Remember that friendly nod you received from the garbage man last week? These small acts of bonhomie between garbage collectors and householders may soon be a thing of the past, thanks to an initiative by Volvo which aims to replace garbage men with drone robots. Though this will no doubt provide ample opportunity to wax nostalgic, the past has always looked inordinately bright and someday we may well find ourselves pining for these robots when they are replaced by mini plasma powered incinerators, removing the need for garbage collectors altogether. Putting the psychological element aside, it’s worth taking a deep dive into the tech fueling Volvo’s encroachment into civilian robotics.

The first thing that must be said is that the aim here is not to replace garbage collectors entirely, at least not initially. In the plan laid out by Volvo, the robots would be under the supervision of a garbage truck operator and be responsible for the carrying, lifting and emptying of the bins into the truck. Thus you may still receive a friendly wave from a truck operator for some time yet, perhaps all the more jovial for not having just thrown out his back hoisting your overfilled garbage bin.

On the other hand, this will certainly mean less garbage men actually manning the vehicles. Whereas a typical garbage truck today requires two operators, one to control the lift while the other fetches the bins, the latter position will disappear with the advent of Volvo’s robots.

Details are still sketchy on the exact nature of the robots doing the lifting and emptying, but in  a company graphic, they appear to be roughly humanoid in appearance, with a Segway-like locomotion mechanism. Information relevant to the operation of the robots has been somewhat more forthcoming. The drone robots will be slaved to the trucks operating system, where all the heavy computing will take place. They will likely have some simple “instinctual algorithms” hardwired into them that prevent things like inadvertently clothes-lining a gawking child.

Advances of this kind have been finding their way into industrial robots recently, where injury to workers and technicians has long been a hazard. Many industrial robots now have simple reactionary circuits so that if they encounter unexpected resistance they immediately go limp, thus avoiding potential lethal human injuries. While Volvo has not revealed whether such safety measures would be part of their design, it seems probable that they will.

What should prove more interesting is to see how their robots address some of the many exigencies that would inevitably arise while collecting garbage bins. These include things like dealing with a raccoon that happened to be rummaging in the bin at the time of its collection, or knocked-over trash bins that have been haphazardly put out by inferior human teenagers. Such instances would require responses more on the level of generalized human intelligence, something robots still find tricky. Whether Volvo has some aces up its sleeve for dealing with these situations remains unknown, but we won’t have long to wait for an answer as the company states they could be deploying prototypes as early as 2016.

VW warned not to cheat on diesel emissions in 2007, suppressed internal 2011 whistleblower

As VW’s chain of lies about the emissions of its cars continues to unspool, investigators are moving to discover exactly when VW’s various executives and departments knew it had a problem, and what actions they took (or failed to take) to address it. Such findings could be critical to assessing penalties and fines from various regulatory agencies; If the cover-ups happened at the engineering level, that’s one thing. If senior management actively participated in hiding results from regulators, that’s another.

Unfortunately for VW shareholders, it appears that multiple companies knew VW was cheating, yet took no action to prevent. A letter from electronics manufacturer Bosch to VW in 2007warned the company not to use its testing mode for vehicles it intended to sell, noting that the “test mode” changes were meant for VW’s internal testing only. That means VW was implementing these safeguards, or at least considering how to implement them, at least two years before it introduced its then-next-generation TDI diesel vehicles in 2009. The fact that Bosch, a supplier, was aware of VW’s plans and cautioned the company against them is fairly good evidence that the problem was widespread, not limited to a handful of key individuals.

Perhaps more damaging are the reports that VW actively buried whistleblower reports back in 2011. An internal audit showed problems with VW’s diesel engines back in 2011, but by all accounts nothing was done to resolve the problems. This early news is courtesy of a new fraud investigation launched by German authorities into former CEO Martin Winterkorn’s role in the scandal. Since the news broke, VW has suspended Heinz-Jakob Neusser, head of VW brand development, Ulrich Hackenberg, who oversees R&D at Audi, and Wolfgang Hatz, who handles R&D for Porsche. VW has always had a reputation for centralized development and governance, and the fact that the suspensions have already spread to related car brands could be read as tacit proof that there’s still a day of reckoning coming for the German automaker.

VW hasn’t just been shuffling corporate officers, however — it’s also launching a website to provide US owners with additional information about any recalls, remedies, or issues specific to particular vehicles. There’s not much on the site right now, except for a video from the CEO and a letter detailing the current state of the situation, but VW states “Volkswagen is committed to finding a remedy as soon as possible.” That’s borderline hilarious, considering we now know the company perpetrated this scheme for as long as eight years — “as soon as possible” didn’t actually involve complying with the law until the company got caught.

Could this scandal bring down more than just VW?

So far, there’s been conflicting reports on whether or not other autos from other companies are implicated in VW’s massive cheating. CAFEE, the same organization that tested VW vehicles in real-world conditions, and reported those results to the EPA, found no evidence that the third car it tested, a BMW, had broken emission standards in anything like the same fashion as BMW. According to the UK-based Transport & Environment, independent testing shows that multiple diesel vehicles sold in the EU use up to 50% more fuel then they claim in laboratory tests. The graph below measures excess CO2 emissions, but CO2 emissions are a significant component of measuring fuel economy. This has become an increasing problem in the EU in recent years; the gap between real-world measurements and lab results was just 8% early last decade but certain cars have breached 50% in recent years.

Even if it proves true that Audi, BMW, Mercedes, VMW, and Toyota lied about their vehicle testing in the EU, it doesn’t automatically follow that they cheated US buyers. The European Union and the US don’t just have different emission standards, they have different test conditions. The fact that VW could program the ECU inside the car to disable parts of the emission control system is evidence that modern depend heavily on software to set their running parameters — this isn’t just a hardware problem. That said, a company willing to break the law of its home market is also more likely to break laws in other countries if it believes it can get away with it.

If it’s proven that automakers in other EU countries broke emissions standards, it could kill the use of diesel across Europe and America as well. If the scandal runs deep enough, fixing the problem on aftermarket vehicles could crush revenues at the various automakers and leave buyers substantially less happy with their vehicles. Whether or not light-duty diesel vehicles can recover from that kind of blow would be very much open to debate. In the US, future VW vehicles will have to meet much more stringent testing standards.

Sony to skip PlayStation Vita 2, blames mobile gaming for handheld’s decline

Earlier today, we covered how the PlayStation TV can be hacked to play Vita titles. Today, Sony executive Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, more-or-less confirmed that Sony was planning to exit the dedicated handheld business once the Vita reaches the end of its lifespan. When asked about the possibility of a follow-up to Sony’s PSV, Yoshida noted that mobile gaming has created a tough climate for handhelds and called the possibility of a successor a “tough question.”

Yoshida put blame on the general rise of smartphone gaming, the advent of free-to-play titles, and the fact that handhelds have different hardware control schemes that simply don’t translate well to modern touch-based smartphones, Eurogamer reports. Of these points, the last is definitely true — games that try to ape the functionality of a joystick or buttons by providing virtual touch-based interfaces are often difficult to control and reserving screen space for a joystick chews up valuable real estate.

There’s no doubt the advent of smartphones created a challenging environment for handheld gaming, but I’m not convinced iPhones and Android are entirely to blame. When Sony announced in June 2013 that the PlayStation Vita would have a new feature, Remote Play, that allowed it to stream games from the PS4, sales of the Vita began to spike ahead of the PS4 launch. As this chart from VGChartz illustrates, PSV sales exploded from October to December, 2013. The Vita has sold 12.26 million units since it launched — and moved nearly 15% of them in 

Clearly, the problem wasn’t with the Vita hardware, which always held up well in comparison with the Nintendo DS. Nor was it an issue of an intrinsically limited market. If it was, Nintendo’s 3DS would never have broken the 50-million mark. While that’s just a fraction of the Nintendo DS, the DS was produced for a decade, while the 3DS is just 4.5 years old. It may never reach the DS’ sales volume, but it should have no trouble racking up another 10-20 million units over the course of its life.

There are multiple reasons why Sony’s Vita sits at 12 million units shipped as compared to 53 million for Nintendo that have nothing to do with mobile gaming. Remote Play was billed as a late-launching Vita feature, but it’s has always had asterisks attached to it. While it works, the Vita doesn’t have an identical set of inputs as the PS4, which means certain functions are emulated using the rear touch panels. Lag is also a common problem, unless you’re sitting on top of the PS4.

But the problem isn’t just Remote Play’s lackluster implementation. From the beginning, Sony has gouged users for memory cards ($100 for a 32GB Vita-compatible card, instead of $18 for a standard model), offered lackluster ports, and published just a handful of titles relative to Nintendo. Nintendo published 35 of the top 50 games for the 3DS, as measured by total sales. Sony published just 13 of the top 50 Vita titles. The bestselling title for the Vita, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, moved 1.47 million copies worldwide — which puts it at 26th place on the 3DS chart.

Even today, Sony continues to lock games behind whitelists or simply ignores them. There’s a universe of potential PS2 games that could be playable on Vita, but aren’t. Time and time again, the company has ignored its handheld division, and while it has a reputation as a great platform for indie games and JRPGs, that’s not enough to sustain it in the face of competition from mobile and Nintendo.

When the 3DS debuted and promptly tanked, I wondered if there was still a market for dedicated handhelds. Nintendo proved there was, provided you hit price points and committed to supporting it over the long term. Sony didn’t — and that fact explains far more of the difference between the two companies than all the smartphones in the world.

Sonos debuts speaker that self-EQs based on the room it’s in

One of the things about the Bluetooth speaker revolution is that it’s easy to blend self-contained, single devices into a room. That’s great for decor freaks, but it also means you may not be getting the best sound possible out of the unit. While traditional audiophiles will still insist on a pair of stereo speakers on proper stands away from the walls — or floorstanding speakers, which still exist — that’s not practical or desirable for many music listeners. Sonos, the venerable multi-room audio company, has just unveiled the redesigned, flagship Play:5, which unlike most speakers will configure its sound profile to match the room it’s in automatically. The best part: You’ll be able to do that with any existing Sonos speaker as well.

The new Play:5’s dipole array of drivers disperses sound throughout the room, but that’s not all that’s going on here. It also has an accelerometer to help it determine where and how it’s positioned and will adjust its sound accordingly via DSP. And thanks to new software, the Play:5 and existing Sonos speakers can now account for the size, layout, and even furnishings of a room — for example, a room with hardwood floors and plenty of windows will sound quite different than one with thick pile carpeting and a couple of fabric sofas.

How does that work? Many years ago, I had an AudioControl equalizer, which came with a pink-noise generator and a small microphone that would “listen” to the sound of the speakers in the room and let you EQ the room to compensate. Sonos’s method is to use your phone to basically to do that in reverse — it listens to the sound of the room, compares the audio of what it’s hearing to what it’s playing out and seeing the difference, and then adjusts itself on its own. Sonos calls this Trueplay, and it works by using an iPhone as the mic; you wander around the room with the phone, and it will play some sounds and run some tests. (For now, this capability is iOS-only.)

Otherwise, the Play:5 works within Sonos’s multi-room ecosystem, which supports over 60 music services as well as locally stored music on up to 16 PCs, Macs, or NAS devices. It’s also a straight up Bluetooth speaker for connecting to your phone, tablet, or computer. This thing is larger than most Bluetooth speakers, though; the Play:5 measures 8 by 14.3 by 6.1 inches (HWD) and weighs a hefty 14 pounds, putting it on par with something like a Bower & Wilkins T7 or a Marshall Stanmore.

There are touch controls on the speaker itself, along with six internal antennas to stabilize wireless performance. It contains six class-D amplifiers driving three woofers and three tweeters, and you can adjust bass, treble, balance, and loudness controls via the Sonos Controller app. It also contains two non-functional mics that could be used for additional customization down the line in addition to the new Sonos app.

Sonos says the Play:5 is coming later this year, will be available in either white matte or black matte with a graphite grille, and will cost $499 a pop. You can also buy a second Play:5 and the two units will configure themselves as a stereo pair, and interestingly, you can add a pair of Play:5 speakers to a Sonos Playbar and subwoofer for a home theater setup. And of course, you can buy multiple speakers for different rooms in your house like any proper Sonos system.

Audiophiles have had a bit of a second coming lately, thanks to a renewed focus on improved audio quality, defeating the loudness wars with simple fixes like Apple’s Sound Check and Spotify’s automatic level matching, higher-quality streaming services like Tidal, and (admittedly unnecessary) attempts to market 24-bit/192kHz tracks to consumers. It’ll be interesting to see how this speaker sounds when it comes out. Sonos speakers generally sound quite good considering their form factors, although they rely on a large amount of digital signal processing that doesn’t sound exactly natural, as I found in a number of tests back when I was writing for our sister site PCMag. I’m looking forward to hearing this latest Play:5 model.

4K Ultra Blu-rays will land on store shelves by Christmas

If you’ve been hoping for a 4K Blu-ray upgrade to show off a swank new 4K television, Christmas 2015 should be the highlight of your year. According to Victor Matsuda, the Blu-ray Disc Association’s Global Promotions Committee Chair, 4K Blu-ray discs will be available for the holiday season, along with a bevy of new technologies and additional features. In addition to supporting 4K resolutions, the new discs include support for multiple types of high dynamic range (HDR) lighting, and a new “digital bridge” feature.

The digital bridge feature is the physical media world’s method of offering the kind of digital convenience that streaming services sell standard. According to an interview with Matsuda, the digital bridge will offer two functions: copy and export. “Copy” permits a bit-for-bit copy to be stored on an authorized media drive, while “export” allows a file to be transferred to an authorized media device. It’s not clear which devices will be considered “authorized,” and whether or not the licensing terms will allow for transcoding into different formats for playback on specific devices. The fact that two different standards have been created for fundamentally similar practices suggests that “copy” may be for storing copies of a movie directly on an Ultra HD Blu-ray (that’s the official 4K name) while “export” could allow a film to be shifted to a tablet or smartphone.

To buy or not to buy

The big question, of course, is whether or not Blu-ray UHD is going to find much of a market. When 720 and 1080p movies hit retail shelves nearly ten years ago, they were an immediate and obvious upgrade over DVDs, just as DVDs had been a huge upgrade over VHS. With 4K, the differences become more subtle, and the advantage depends more on the quality of the encode and the size of the TV you’ll be watching. If you have a 32-inch 1080p screen, you may not notice much improvement from 4K output. If you’re planning to install an 80-inch monstrosity, on the other hand, 4K will be a huge upgrade, even compared with upscaled 1080p.

BD UHD will be popular with users who have limited bandwidth, low-speed connections, or who simply want to enjoy the absolute best-quality screen, but the standard may be slow to percolate, especially since video-on-demand services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime have likely sopped up at least some of the potential customer base. Studios who rush to market with the same handful of remastered titles that they previously offered on 1080p may find viewers less interested this time around. Upgrading from an old VHS to a 1080p version of a movie was worth calling it a “remastered” edition, but the 1080p to 4K jump is going to be much smaller as far as the objective final quality of the film.

It’s hard to get a handle on how much better current Blu-ray is than streaming services because the quality can vary sharply from movie to movie. In some head-to-head comparisons, Blu-ray wins by a mile, while in others, the gap is extremely hard to see. Finally, as far as we know, neither Sony nor Microsoft supports Blu-ray Ultra HD content in their respective game consoles. Both companies could hypothetically include support in future generations of the Xbox One or PlayStation 4, but not without replacing the conventional Blu-ray player with a more advanced model.

It’s expected that new players will retain the option to play 1080p Blu-ray discs, just as modern Blu-ray players can still handle DVDs without a problem. There’s no plan for a 3D standard for media players this time around, because there’s no native 4K 3D content. The shift to 10-bit color, however, should pay dividends — provided that television manufacturers cooperate by shipping panels that can actually display movies in that mode.

Super-efficient Perlan 2 glider aims for the edge of space

The only aircraft to make it to the edge of space thus far have been advanced military jets, but next year an engineless glider could reach a record altitude, at least that’s the goal of the team behind the super-efficient Perlan 2 aircraft. The Perlan 2 just completed its first test flight at a modest altitude of 5,000 feet, but next year it’s headed for 90,000 feet — and all of it without any means of propulsion.

The only two winged aircraft to fly at such high altitudes are the US Air Force’s SR-71 Blackbird and the U-2 spy plane. The SR-71 holds the current record at 85,096 feet, and the U-2 managed just over 70,000. A commercial airliner typically flies at about 30,000 feet. These aircraft both used powerful engines to reach the edge of space, but how can an unpowered glider do it? It surfs the air currents of the polar vortex.

The polar vortex is a massive circulating air current around the north and south polar regions. At certain times of year, the polar vortex can add significant energy to sub-polar air currents. As air currents pass over mountainous regions, massive updrafts are created in the atmosphere. When the polar vortex is active, these updrafts can reach well above the troposphere (where we live) and into the stratosphere. These are the currents that will allow the Perlan 2 glider to reach the upper atmosphere. It’ll still have to be launched with the aid of a powered airplane, though.

An early version of this aircraft has managed to cruise along at over 50,000 feet back in the 90s, but now the project is backed by aerospace firm Airbus. The more refined Perlan 2 glider has a wingspan of 84 feet, but the fuselage is tiny, with barely enough space for two pilots and a few scientific instruments. This is not going to be a replacement for passenger planes any time soon.

Simply maintaining stable flight at 90,000-100,000 feet is a challenge. At that altitude, the Earth’s atmosphere is as dense as that of Mars. The Perlan group will spend the next year performing additional flight tests at increasingly high altitudes. The big 90,000 foot attempt will take place in the summer of 2016 over Patagonia.

This project isn’t just about setting records. The Perlan 2 glider could be a boon to climate and atmospheric research. Looking down on Earth from this altitude could give scientists access to a mountain of data about weather, ozone depletion, and more. And it might do it all without burning a drop of jet fuel.