Month: June 2022

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Hedrick/Porsche)

As I'm fond of saying, electric motors just make cars better. Regular readers will notice that most of our automotive coverage is about electrified cars, but the other kind still represents more than 95 percent of all new cars sold in the US, so we have reason to drive a few of those from time to time as well. And when we do, it's often an exercise in frustration—even a performance car like a Porsche 911 Turbo can't match the immediate slug of torque from an electric motor doing its thing.

And that's good. Electric cars need to be the future of personal transportation if we want to avert the worst ravages of climate change, albeit only alongside everyone walking, cycling, and taking public transport more. (We could do with a comprehensive redesign of our built environment to make all that safer, too, but I realize I'm veering dangerously into a post-scarcity utopia there, whereas it currently looks like we're in the Mirror Universe.)

But the uncomfortable truth for the EV-loving driving enthusiast is that while EVs make perfect sense for getting from A to B—absent the occasional edge-case like an emergency cross-country trombone delivery—I'm not sure they're quite there yet when it comes to that last bit of fun.

Enlarge / SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, on April 19, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

SpaceX has reportedly fired at least five employees who circulated a letter that urged company executives to condemn CEO Elon Musk's public behavior.

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell explained the firings in an email to staff, according to a New York Times article. "The letter, solicitations and general process made employees feel uncomfortable, intimidated and bullied, and/or angry because the letter pressured them to sign onto something that did not reflect their views," Shotwell wrote, according to the NYT. "We have too much critical work to accomplish and no need for this kind of overreaching activism."

Shotwell's email to staff also said, "Blanketing thousands of people across the company with repeated unsolicited emails and asking them to sign letters and fill out unsponsored surveys during the work day is not acceptable." Shotwell urged employees to "stay focused on the SpaceX mission, and use your time to do your best work. This is how we will get to Mars."

Enlarge / Samples of the new perovskite photovoltaics, ready for testing. (credit: Bumper DeJesus)

While silicon-based solar cells dominate the photovoltaics market, silicon is far from the only material that can effectively harvest electricity from sunlight. Thin-film solar cells using cadmium and telluride are common in utility-scale solar deployments, and in space, we use high-efficiency cells that rely on three distinct materials to harvest different parts of the spectrum.

Another class of materials, which we're currently not using, has been the subject of extensive research: perovskites. These materials are cheap and incredibly easy to process into a functional solar cell. The reason they're not used is that they tend to degrade when placed in sunlight, limiting their utility to a few years. That has drawn the attention of the research community, which has been experimenting with ways to keep them stable for longer.

In Thursday's edition of Science, a research team from Princeton described how they've structured a perovskite material to limit the main mechanism by which it decays, resulting in a solar cell with a lifetime similar to that of silicon. While the perovskite cell isn't as efficient as what is currently on the market, a similar structure might work to preserve related materials that have higher efficiencies.