Month: October 2021

Enlarge / Toyota's current lineup of electrified vehicles will be joined by a battery electric crossover in 2022. (credit: Toyota)

In 2025, Toyota will open a new North American battery manufacturing plant as part of the automaker's electrification strategy. The company made the announcement on Monday morning, stating that it will spend $3.4 billion (¥ 380 billion) on high-voltage batteries for electric vehicles in the US between now and 2030.

"This investment will help usher in more affordable electrified vehicles for US consumers, significantly reduce carbon emissions, and importantly, create even more American jobs tied to the future of mobility," said Ted Ogawa, CEO of Toyota Motor North America.

Toyota was an early leader in electrified vehicles and has sold more than 18.7 million hybrids since it introduced the first Prius in 1997. But it has been overtaken by other OEMs in the shift toward emission-free battery electric vehicles and will only release its first modern BEV—a RAV4-sized crossover called the bZ4x—in mid-2022.

Enlarge / One of the Lucy spacecraft's solar arrays, with a human for scale. (credit: NASA)

NASA's Lucy spacecraft launched safely into space early on Saturday morning from Florida, but after the deployment of its two large solar arrays, one of them failed to latch properly.

Combined, the two solar arrays have a collecting area of 51 square meters. Such large arrays are necessary because the spacecraft will spend much of its 12-year journey about five times the distance from the Sun as the Earth is located. Lucy's solar panels can only generate about 3 percent of the energy at a Jovian distance than they can at Earth's orbit around the Sun.

The solar panels are critical. Mission scientists say that Lucy will travel further from the Sun, for a longer time, than any previous solar-powered spacecraft before.

Enlarge / In 2024, Ram will offer a battery-electric Ram 1500 pickup truck, with battery packs of up to 200 kWh. (credit: Stellantis)

On Monday morning, the car conglomerate Stellantis and LG Energy Solution announced a new joint venture to produce lithium-ion battery cells destined for electric vehicles in North America. The factory—to be built at an as-yet-unnamed site—should start producing cells in 2024, with a targeted output of 40 GWh/year once it is fully operational.

Stellantis was formed at the beginning of 2021 with the merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA)—which owned the Fiat, Ram, Jeep, and Chrysler brands, among others—together with Peugeot SA (PSA). FCA had been looking to partner up with another large OEM to prepare for the coming electrified future, and PSA had plenty of that expertise to bring to the table.

In July, Stellantis showed off its electrification roadmap, a $35.5 billion plan that includes four battery electric vehicle platforms, including one for the big body-on-frame pickups and SUVs that are so beloved by US customers.

Enlarge / Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress in April 2018. It wasn't his only appearance in DC this decade. (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images)

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sounded an optimistic note three years ago when he wrote about the progress his company was making in automated moderation tools powered by artificial intelligence. “Through the end of 2019, we expect to have trained our systems to proactively detect the vast majority of problematic content,” he wrote in November 2018.

But as recently as March, internal Facebook documents reveal the company found its automated moderation tools were falling far short, removing posts that were responsible for only a small fraction of views of hate speech and violence and incitement on the platform. The posts removed by AI tools only accounted for 3–5 percent of views of hate speech and 0.6 percent of views of violence and incitement.

While that’s up from 2 percent of hate speech views two years ago, according to documents turned over to The Wall Street Journal by whistleblower Frances Haugen, it's far from a vast majority. One of the company’s senior engineers wrote in 2019 that he felt the company could improve by an order of magnitude but that they might then hit a ceiling beyond which further advances would be difficult.