Month: January 2023

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Tesla | Airplane!)

Tesla filed its annual 10-K report with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday night, and the document confirms that, among the many open federal investigations into the company, the US Department of Justice is looking into the automaker's controversial driver assistance features.

In the section detailing "Certain Investigations and Other Matters," the 10-K briefly describes Tesla being subpoenaed by the SEC following CEO Elon Musk's tweets about taking the company private in 2018. That investigation led to a consent decree with the regulator but did not mark the end of the company's SEC headache; in February 2022, we reported that the SEC was investigating both Musk and his brother for potential insider trading.

"Separately, the company has received requests from the DOJ for documents related to Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD features," Tesla wrote.

Enlarge / The Ioniq 6 will be the next EV to debut using Hyundai's clever new E-GMP architecture. It goes on sale in the US later this year. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

This morning, Hyundai revealed that the US Environmental Protection Agency has finalized an official range estimate for the brand's next electric vehicle, the Ioniq 6 sedan. At 361 miles (581 km), it's certainly impressive, even beating the longest-ranged Tesla Model 3 sedan.

As those familiar with EVs already know, not every version of the Ioniq 6 has quite so much range. You'll need the single-motor, rear-wheel drive version, riding on 18-inch wheels for maximum efficiency. Helpfully, this will be the cheapest version on sale in the US. The company has not announced pricing yet, but expect it to cost similar to that of the Hyundai Ioniq 5 crossover.

Adding larger wheels helpfully illustrates the deleterious effect they have on an EV's range efficiency. With 20-inch wheels, the single-motor Ioniq 6's range is 305 miles (491 km).

One of the easiest and cheapest ways to get more life out of your existing laptop or desktop is by upgrading your system’s memory and storage. If your PC is sluggish, adding more RAM and additional or faster internal storage can speed things up. These simple upgrades are often easy to perform and won’t break the bank, especially if you’re not ready to upgrade to an entirely new computer.

For performance users, the best deal we’ve spotted for upgrading your storage is Western Digital’s WD Black SN850X. This NVMe solid-state drive was originally listed for $180 but is now discounted by $70, taking the price down to just $110 for 1TB of reliable storage. If you need more storage, Seagate’s FireCuda’s 4TB capacity NVMe drive is now discounted to $530. There are also smaller deals on 1TB drives if you don’t need that much capacity.

On the memory front, Corsair’s Vengeance LPX desktop RAM kit currently has a 25 percent discount. There are also other smaller discounts on DDR4 and DDR5 memory for both laptops and desktops. You can check out our complete list of RAM and SSD deals below.

Enlarge / NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken (foreground) work on Crew Dragon's touchscreen displays. (credit: NASA)

Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday will bestow the Congressional Space Medal of Honor on Doug Hurley and Robert Behnken. The former NASA astronauts launched on the debut flight of SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft in May 2020.

Hurley, the spacecraft commander, and Behnken, its pilot, will receive the medal for "bravery" exhibited during the Demo-2 mission to the International Space Station. Their debut mission was a complete success, and since this pioneering flight, NASA has flown five operational missions on board Crew Dragon, along with two private spaceflights.

An operational Crew Dragon has provided NASA with its sole means of reaching the space station aside from the Russian Soyuz vehicle—saving the space agency from the embarrassment of having to rely on Russia for this transport amid escalating tensions surrounding the war in Ukraine.

Enlarge / A train carrying cars loaded with coal leaving a nearby coal mine is seen in front of Dry Fork Station, a coal-fired power plant operated by Basin Electric Power Cooperative, on Monday May 8, 2017, in Gillette, Wyoming. (credit: Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

A coal-fired plant near Gillette, Wyoming, stands alone in the nation on one measure of economic viability—a positive distinction for that plant, but a damning one for coal-fired electricity in general.

Dry Fork Station, with generating capacity of 405 megawatts, is the only coal plant in the country that costs less to operate than it would take to replace the plant’s output by building new wind or solar plants in the same communities or regions, according to a new report issued today by the think tank Energy Innovation.

The report joins prior editions in 2019 and 2021 that, when viewed together, show how the economics of coal power are deteriorating. In 2019, the authors found that more than 70 percent of coal plants were more expensive to operate compared to the alternative of building new wind or solar. That share has now grown to 99 percent, with only the plant in Wyoming stopping it from being 100 percent.