Month: April 2023

Enlarge / Tesla CEO Elon Musk poses with Tesla China-made Model 3 vehicle owners during a ceremony in Shanghai, east China, on January 7, 2020. (credit: Xinhua/Ding Ting via Getty Images)

Tesla may have a new headache on its hands. On Sunday, the electric car maker announced plans to build a new battery factory in Shanghai with an annual capacity of 40 GWh, with the cells destined for "Megapack" storage batteries, each with 3.9 MWh of storage capacity. But this plan has raised eyebrows among some lawmakers, who are suspicious of Tesla's ties with the Chinese Communist Party.

"I'm concerned about this," said Representative Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.). "Tesla seems entirely dependent, A, on the largesse of the federal government via tax breaks, and B, upon access to the Chinese market," he told Reuters. Gallagher is chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which describes itself as "committed to working on a bipartisan basis to build consensus on the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party and develop a plan of action to defend the American people, our economy, and our values."

The Select Committee on the CCP was created at the start of the year by incoming Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of VR players watching calmly as non-VR players run to finally try Half-Life Alyx for themselves. (credit: Valve)

When we named Valve's Half-Life Alyx as one of our favorite games of 2020, we added an important caveat that the game was wholly inaccessible to a "majority of interested players who either don't own a suitable VR system to play it or have no intention of getting one." Those non-VR players can rejoice this week, though, as there is now a "NoVR" mod that makes Half-Life Alyx completely playable without a headset.

Since launching on GitHub almost a month ago (and hitting "early access" on ModDB in late March), the NoVR mod has attracted "thousands" of players, according to its creators. But it wasn't until Script Update #6 this weekend that the "entire game can now be played from start to finish" without a VR headset, the creators wrote.

Installation is as simple as copying a downloaded folder into your Steam installation and adding a short text string to the launch options. And while the mod doesn't work with any save files created in the VR version of the game, you can use a handy level select to jump to your favorite parts without getting into virtual reality.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images )

Today, the US Department of Energy published a notice of proposed rulemaking that would change the way the government calculates the energy efficiency of electric vehicles. If adopted, the changes will substantially downgrade the fuel-efficiency ratings given to EVs and be used to determine corporate average fuel economy (better known as CAFE). That might have serious implications for automakers, but don't worry—the consumer-facing MPGe and kWh/100 miles numbers you see on Monroney window stickers and at the US Environmental Protection Agency's fueleconomy.gov site won't change.

They call it CAFE, but you can’t drink it

Congress enacted CAFE in 1975 in the wake of the country's first serious energy crisis. It gives an average fuel efficiency number that each automaker must achieve to not be sanctioned by the government, and the standards and penalties are enforced by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

But the fuel efficiency numbers that NHTSA calculates are much higher than the actual efficiency you or I might experience, or the numbers posted by the EPA for consumers to make buying decisions.

Enlarge / The Monitor-IO in its natural habitat, glowing green to let you know that everything is copacetic with the network to which it's connected. (credit: Jim Salter)

Monitor-IO was a gadget that did one thing: live near a router and tell you how its network is doing. It did this both with detailed reports you could access from the local network and with a screen that glowed one of three colors: green for good, purple for problems, and red for dead. It could replace, or at least augment, typing a bunch of IP addresses into a browser and waiting for them to time out.

We liked the device when we reviewed it in August 2018, despite our broad understanding of it as a "butter-passing robot," a device that relays information you could otherwise find out on your own. It had, beyond color-coded awareness, "obvious technical chops and real, careful attention to detail" in how it measured and what it could report. However, we also noted that the $100 price made sense for a small business but "might be a bit steep" for a household on a tight budget.

Monitor-IO seems to have run out of people willing to pay for better network awareness. In an "End-of-service" notice posted on its site, the company cites "rising costs and supply chain issues," among other "numerous headwinds." Faced with no better option, Monitor-IO is shutting down its business and monitoring service on April 15, 2023. (Support will be offered through May 30, 2023.)