Month: July 2022

Enlarge / A row of Tesla EVs charging at one of the company's Supercharger fast charging locations. (credit: Don and Melinda Crawford/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

These days Tesla gets a lot of flak, but sometimes it does great things. In 2008, it launched the Tesla Roadster—the first-ever serial production lithium-ion battery car. Unlike previous electric cars, the Roadster was fast, sexy, and luxurious. Since its release, over 12 million electric cars have been sold worldwide, with Tesla contributing over 1 million to that number.

But what if Tesla never existed or never sparked the electric car revolution—would we have millions of electric cars on the road today? Of course, the electric car revolution would have happened eventually. But it was only two years before the Roadster’s release that the death of the electric car was being lamented in the infamous documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? If the big automakers really did kill the electric car, as the documentary suggests, then Tesla surely revived it.

That’s great news for Earth’s future inhabitants. Taking action to reduce the harms of climate change, by buying an electric car, for instance, is an urgent matter. Just last year, a study from Nature Communications estimated that "adding 4,434 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2020—equivalent to the lifetime emissions of 3.5 average Americans—causes one excess death globally in expectation between 2020-2100."

Enlarge / The new Porsche 963 sports prototype made its world debut at this year's Goodwood Festival of Speed in England. (credit: Porsche)

Last month, Porsche used the Goodwood Festival of Speed in the UK to formally debut its newest model. It's not another 911, nor a new SUV; it's a hybrid sports prototype designed to win on the track here in the US and at Le Mans. You can tell the car has big shoes to fill just by looking at its name—Porsche is calling the new racing car the 963 because it's the spiritual successor to the legendary 962 that dominated sports car racing in the 1980s.

Unfortunately, Goodwood took place at the same time as my vacation at Watkins Glen in New York for IMSA's six-hour race, so Ars wasn't able to see the 963 run in person. But I was able to sit down with a pair of Porsche's factory racing drivers to find out a bit more about the new car.

Mathieu Jaminet and Matt Campbell are currently contesting the IMSA WeatherTech championship in a GT car—a Porsche 911 GT3R that started life on the same production line as the road-going 911s. But next year, the pair will be among the Porsche factory drivers who have been chosen to campaign the faster, more complex 963 here in the US or in the World Endurance Championship (WEC).

Enlarge / Glance's ad copy promises "authentic engagement" with its lock screen billboard. (credit: Glance)

Android smartphones can be a rough market, and to squeeze as much profit out of a phone as possible, carriers often sell every square inch of a phone to the highest bidder. Packed-in, often un-installable crapware apps fill your app drawer and advertise their services. The rules are a lot looser for packed-in apps compared to Play Store apps, so data-hungry companies like Facebook often pay for a spot where they can more easily harvest data.

According to a report from TechCrunch, one new startup is inventing a new, more invasive form of crapware: lock screen ads. The company, "Glance," is a subsidiary of Indian ad tech company InMobi, and TechCrunch reports the lock screen "content" company is "planning to launch its lock screen platform on Android smartphones in the US within two months."

Glance's app is a full-screen takeover of the lock screen. It looks a lot like a generic swipe-heavy social network, like TikTok or Snapchat Discover, but it only shows content from Glance. Imagine if every time you turned on your phone, you were first presented with an auto-playing video from a popular off-brand TikToker, and you get the idea. The company's website promises "unparalleled reach" and "authentic engagement" from its captive audience. Naveen Tewari, founder and CEO of InMobi, gave a rather dystopian description of his company's strategy to Forbes India, saying, "Consumers will move from seeking content to consuming what is shown to them."

Enlarge (credit: Meta)

Meta will shut down its pilot of the Novi digital wallet, one of the last remnants of the company's beleaguered cryptocurrency push, in September, Bloomberg reported this week.

Novi users in parts of the US and Guatemala will no longer be able to log in starting on September 1.

And as of July 21, they won't be able to add to the wallets. In fact, Novi's website urges users to empty their accounts "as soon as possible." Novi says it will "attempt to transfer your balance to the bank account or debit card you’ve added to Novi" if you still have money in your account after the pilot ends.