Month: August 2018

Enlarge / The lines of sight in the BYD factory are all like this: a row of buses stretching to the horizon. (credit: Megan Geuss)

LANCASTER, CALIF.—One single diesel transit bus consumes the equivalent of 10,440 gallons of gasoline a year, according to the Federal Highway Administration. Replacing that diesel-burning transit bus with an electric bus has some obvious benefits. Electric buses improve local air quality, because the particulates that come from burning diesel don't exist. And, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, an electric bus runs cleaner than a diesel bus no matter where you plug it in on the US grid, even if you're plugging into a grid fed by a fossil fuels.

In the desert north of Los Angeles, a Chinese company called BYD (short for "Build Your Dreams") is banking on transit managers realizing this. BYD offered Ars a tour of its Lancaster facility in July, and we found a bustling factory floor filled with 900 workers who were building, welding, shaping, and painting about 90 buses in various states of completion. The company's workforce, recently unionized, is expected to grow to 1200 in the near future.

So far, BYD has put more than 250 electric buses on US roads, and as of mid-July, the company had more than 400 orders in the pipeline. That's a significant number of buses in this nascent industry: last December, Reuters estimated that only 300 public buses on US roads were electric. Of course, BYD's numbers include publicly- and privately-owned electric buses, while Reuters' statistic only tallies public buses. Still, the numbers show just how aggressively the electric bus industry is growing, considering the size of the market just six months ago.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Earlier this year, we launched Ars Pro, our new subscription program. It's pretty simple: for just $25 per year (or $3 per month), subscribers get to browse Ars Technica without ever seeing a single ad.

Ars Pro has been a big success, and one of the reasons why is because we're listening to feedback from our readers to make it even better. One of the biggest requests has been support for PayPal. So we've made it happen!

In addition to an ad-free experience, all Ars Pro subscribers get full-text RSS feeds and can read Ars Technica free of tracking scripts (with the exception of scripts that come with objects embedded in stories, like tweets and videos from YouTube). Pros also get access to our subscriber-only forums, PDFs of all our long-form content, and single-page view for multipage articles.

Enlarge / The launch screen for Fortnite on Android, as rendered by a Samsung Galaxy S8+. (Account information has been scrubbed.) (credit: Epic Games)

Last week, Epic and Samsung took the wraps off a huge Fortnite promotion—albeit after the surprise had been ruined by leakers. Fortnite's mobile version was indeed launching on Android, as Epic had already promised, but only Samsung phone users (and only certain models) would get exclusive access, for a limited time.

Any Android handset and tablet owner can hunt for and install the game's APK, but as of press time, Samsung's exclusivity deal means the game won't boot beyond a title screen on most devices. This is notable, in part, because of Epic's choice to forgo the Google Play app store, which is likely driving users to download and install the APK without a clear answer about device compatibility. (Google has since chosen to address the game's Play workaround.)

But testing the free-to-play shooter on my own Galaxy S8+, one of the Android version's first compatible phones, has revealed another notable tidbit: that Epic's self-imposed hardware limit hasn't made the game run smoothly in the slightest.

Enlarge / The launch screen for Fortnite on Android, as rendered by a Samsung Galaxy S8+. (Account information has been scrubbed.) (credit: Epic Games)

Last week, Epic and Samsung took the wraps off a huge Fortnite promotion—albeit after the surprise had been ruined by leakers. Fortnite's mobile version was indeed launching on Android, as Epic had already promised, but only Samsung phone users (and only certain models) would get exclusive access, for a limited time.

Any Android handset and tablet owner can hunt for and install the game's APK, but as of press time, Samsung's exclusivity deal means the game won't boot beyond a title screen on most devices. This is notable, in part, because of Epic's choice to forgo the Google Play app store, which is likely driving users to download and install the APK without a clear answer about device compatibility. (Google has since chosen to address the game's Play workaround.)

But testing the free-to-play shooter on my own Galaxy S8+, one of the Android version's first compatible phones, has revealed another notable tidbit: that Epic's self-imposed hardware limit hasn't made the game run smoothly in the slightest.