Month: June 2018

Enlarge (credit: Cadillac)

The Cadillac CT6 was one of the more memorable vehicles I've tested this year. That's because it came equipped with Super Cruise, the latest advanced driver assistance system to come out of General Motors' R&D. In my review, I said GM should do what it takes to make Super Cruise available on every model year 2020 vehicle it makes. Although the automaker hasn't quite gone that far, on Tuesday it announced that Super Cruise will be available on every MY2020 Cadillac. A year later, we should see the system show up as an option in other GM brands.

Super Cruise is an evolution of the adaptive cruise control and lane keeping you may have in your own car, but it adds a couple of important new features that even Tesla's very capable Autopilot lacks. First, it's geofenced and will only work on the 130,000+ miles of highways in the US and Canada that GM has lidar mapped. Restricting its operational domain like this means the system will encounter many fewer of the complicated edge cases that keep autonomous driving engineers up late at night. And you'll be glad to know that the mapping is a constant process; anecdotally I'm hearing that Super Cruise drives better now than it did several months ago in places like California.

Second, Super Cruise comes with a proper driver-monitoring system. That's important, because Super Cruise is not a fully autonomous system; it's not even at level 3 of the increasingly unhelpful SAE levels of self-driving. So the human behind the wheel is always responsible for situational awareness. To this end, Super Cruise only works if it sees you're paying attention to the road ahead. An infrared camera on the steering column tracks your head position and gaze. Look away from the road for more than a few seconds and the warnings start. Ignore the audio, visual, and haptic feedback for 15 seconds, and Super Cruise disengages.

Enlarge / My vampire sense tells me something happened here.

Just when I would think I had completely given up on Vampyr, it would surprise me. I’d slam my head into one clumsy, frustrating boss fight for an entire hour, then be rewarded with a lapsed anarchist’s fascinating life story. Then, just when I'd think I could peel back the layers of Vampyr’s captivating cast all day, I'd get frustrated all over again by the unpolished presentation or slipshod action.

Vampyr takes some thick adventure game influences from Life Is Strange developer Dontnod’s previous project. Vampyr is indisputably at its best when it follows that series’ focus on conversations with well-constructed, interconnected non-player characters. The game only really starts to fall apart when it leans into combat, and there's far too much of that bad action to go around.

All chewed up

Believe me, I understand the desire to play with the power of vampirism with some bloody action scenes. Dr. Jonathan Reid, our protagonist vampire (despite the game’s title, the subtitles spell it without the “Y”) has all kinds of fancy-pants supernatural abilities. He can see people through walls, sculpt weapons out of blood, and mutate into a neck-munching monster.

There’s a lot of action-game potential in those kinds of supernatural abilities. It’s just absolutely miserable in practice.

Enlarge (credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

For the last month, Chinese smartphone giant ZTE has been largely shut down after the Trump administration banned US firms from selling it technology. But now ZTE has made a deal with the Trump administration allowing it to re-open. Reuters first reported the deal yesterday, and it was confirmed by US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross today.

Reviving ZTE has been a personal focus for President Trump, whose government is in the middle of broader trade negotiations with the Chinese government. Last month, Trump tweeted that he was looking for a way for ZTE to "get back into business, fast" because there were "too many jobs in China lost" from ZTE's shutdown.

According to Ross, the deal includes a $1 billion fine as well as $400 million held in escrow to deter ZTE from further misconduct. ZTE will have 30 days to change its board of directors and executive team.

A little more than half a day at 2012 DA 14's closest approach a meteor measuring about 20 meters across broke apart in Earth's atmosphere above Chelyabinsk, Russia. Thousands of buildings were damaged, but fortunately no one died. (credit: Alex Alishevskikh/Flickr)

The Trump administration has vowed to make America great again in spaceflight, and the centerpiece of its space policy to date has been a re-prioritization of human spaceflight as central to NASA's activities. As part of this initiative, the White House has sought to reduce funding for satellites to observe environmental changes on Earth and eliminate NASA's office of education.

However, a new survey of 2,541 Americans by Pew Research Center, which aims to represent the views of US adults, finds that these views appear to be out of step with public priorities.

The survey asked respondents about their top priorities for NASA, and the highest support came for "monitor key parts of the Earth's climate system" (63 percent) and "monitor asteroids/objects that could hit the Earth" (62 percent). Sending astronauts to Mars (18 percent), and the Moon (13 percent), lagged far behind as top priorities for respondents.

Enlarge (credit: FilmMagic/FilmMagic for HBO)

On Tuesday, Tesla held its annual shareholder meeting. As expected, none of the controversial shareholder votes passed—there will be no independent CEO replacing Musk, and his brother and the other two candidates were reelected to the board with no drama or fireworks. Even Tesla's chief counsel Todd Maron referred to the opening agenda items as "the boring bits." Things got more interesting once Musk took to the stage for a Q&A session, answering queries submitted in advance via Twitter and then from the audience.

It was an odd performance, often feeling more like a Netflix comedy special than a shareholder meeting. Musk alternated between emotional states, at times rambling or hesitating. He began by stressing that "we're not perfect, but we pour our heart and soul into it... we really care." As expected, the Model 3 and its ongoing production problems dominated the Q&A, but Musk was also asked about Tesla's profitability, battery advances, new Gigafactories, Autopilot, and possible future Tesla vehicles. Musk even acknowledged that he has a problem with timescales—useful context for some of the predictions that we heard.

Model 3

According to Musk, every part of the Model 3 production process has now demonstrated the ability to run at 500 cars/day, or 3,500 cars/week. As a result, Tesla should be profitable by Q3 2018 and generating positive cash flow by Q4 2018, we were told. And employee safety—the topic that caused Musk to start a feud with the press recently—is improving; the injury rate at the factory is now six percent below the industry average. But Musk complained that "it's tougher to achieve when you're building a new manufacturing line" and therefore Tesla's record shouldn't be judged alongside that of the traditional OEMs. He told the audience that Tesla's goal is to be at half the industry average, lamenting that it's impossible to completely eradicate accidents in a factory. Earlier that day, a lengthy investigation into repeated paint shop fires at Tesla was published by The Daily Beast.