Month: August 2020

Enlarge / The Air looks superficially the same as when we saw it in 2017, but almost every body panel has changed. (credit: Lucid Motors)

Like it or not, range has become the primary criteria by which electric vehicles are judged. Even though most Americans travel fewer than 73 miles a day, and the fact almost every EV owner wakes up to a freshly charged battery each morning, there remains a deep-seated psychological dread at the possibility of having to drop everything and drive from New York to California with as little time spent stationary as possible. Limited range remains frequently used as justification as to why the EV is a mere fad and will never actually catch on.

Well, road trippers, you'll soon need to find a new excuse not to go electric. Independent testing of the Lucid Air, which goes into production towards the end of the year, has determined that the car is able travel 517 miles (832km) on a single charge.

When I spoke with Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson earlier this year, he told me that the company was targeting at least 400 miles (643km) from a single charge, which would make the Air competitive with the longest-range EV currently on the market. But when FEV North America, a Michigan-based engineering company, put an Air through the EPA's multitest cycle procedure, the results were far in excess of this internal goal.

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  The earthquake alert system on Android, which for now is only in California. [credit: Google ]

Back in 2016, Ars reported on an interesting use for the bundle of sensors we carry around every day in our smartphones—earthquake detection. The accelerometers in your phone make a passable-enough seismometer, and together with location data and enough users, you could detect earthquakes and warn users as the shocks roll across the landscape. The University of California-Berkeley, along with funding from the state of California, built an app called "MyShake" and a cheap, effective earthquake detection network was born, at least, it was born for people who installed the app.

What if you didn't need to install the app? What if earthquake detection was just built in to the operating system? That's the question Google is going to answer, with today's announcement of the "Android Earthquake Alerts System." Google is going to build what it calls "the world’s largest earthquake detection network" by rolling earthquake detection out to nearly every Google Play Android phone. Here's the meat of the announcement:

All smartphones come with tiny accelerometers that can sense earthquakes. They’re even sensitive enough to detect the P-wave, which is the first wave that comes out of an earthquake and is typically much less damaging than the S-wave which comes afterward. If the phone detects something that it thinks may be an earthquake, it sends a signal to our earthquake detection server, along with a coarse location of where the shaking occurred. The server then combines information from many phones to figure out if an earthquake is happening. We’re essentially racing the speed of light (which is roughly the speed at which signals from a phone travel) against the speed of an earthquake. And lucky for us, the speed of light is much faster!

That "race" often works out to only a minute or so of warning, but that's usually enough to duck and cover if you catch the notification.

Enlarge / TCL's new 6-Series QLED Roku TVs come with mini-LED backlights. (credit: TCL)

TCL on Tuesday launched the latest iterations of its popular 6-Series and 5-Series 4K HDR TVs. Both lineups are available starting today, though TCL says the former will have "limited availability" on Tuesday.

Prices for the 5-Series start at $400 for a 50-inch model, then move up to $450 for a 55-inch model, $630 for a 65-inch model, or $1,100 for a 75-inch model. The 6-Series, meanwhile, costs $650 for a 55-inch model, $900 for a 65-inch model, or $1,400 for a 75-inch model.

The 6-Series and 5-Series tend to be TCL's most recommended models for mainstream TV buyers, having offered laudable performance and simple Roku TV software at reasonable prices in recent years. The 6-Series slots in just below the company's highest-end 8-Series models, while the 5-Series sits just ahead of the more budget-friendly 4-Series and 3-Series TVs. In general, TCL's TV business has seen increasing success in the United States; today, the Chinese electronics firm only trails Samsung in US market share.