Author: Megan Geuss

According to Re/code, co-founder and chief technology officer of Hyperloop One, Brogan BamBrogan, has stepped down from his position at the company. The startup, which is angling to develop a super-fast enclosed transit system, promoted former Vice President of Engineering Josh Giegel to president of engineering and has given him a seat on the company’s board.

BamBrogan was a former SpaceX employee who temporarily served as Hyperloop One’s CEO until 2015. He joined the company after Shervin Pishevar, the other cofounder, had a conversation with Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. While credited with coming up with a detailed white paper describing how a Hyperloop would work, Musk has declined to throw resources at building a Hyperloop himself, citing his many standing obligations.

Hyperloop One (formerly Hyperloop Technologies) is currently competing with Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) to see who can bring the 700mph magnetically driven rail system to fruition first. Notably, Hyperloop One is structured as a traditional startup, recently raising $80 million from investors including France’s national railway system, SNCF. HTT, on the other hand, depends largely on volunteer time from engineers who are also veterans of NASA, Boeing, Tesla, and SpaceX.

Friday morning, officials from electric car startup Faraday Future and American auto racing team Dragon Racing announced a technical partnership to get Dragon Racing through the next four Formula E race series. The partnership begins with Formula E’s third series, which starts October 9, 2016.

In a press conference in London just before Formula E’s ePrix competition, Dragon Racing Team Owner and Team Principal Jay Penske said his team was looking forward to taking advantage of Faraday Future’s intellectual property. Penske cited the startup’s Los Angeles-based team of more than 1,000 people and its portfolio of more than 320 patents.

Faraday Future has attracted some attention as a potential competitor to Tesla as a from-scratch luxury electric vehicle designer. The company revealed a concept car at Las Vegas’ Consumer Electronics Show this year, but since then it has provided scant news of what an actual production vehicle would look like. The lack of reveals has drawn criticism regarding whether Faraday can actually compete against companies like Tesla, GM, and Nissan that have already been producing road-ready electric vehicles for years.

A lawyer for Volkswagen Group told a US district judge today that the company will probably be able to fix the 85,000 outstanding 3.0L diesel Porches, Audis, and Volkswagens that were also discovered to flout emissions regulations, following revelations that nearly 500,000 2.0L diesel vehicles were built with illegal emissions cheating software.

The 3.0L diesels were not included in Tuesday’s news that Volkswagen would spend $10 billion to buy back diesel cars that were spewing up to 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxide (NO_x). The 3.0L cars were discovered two months after the first revelations of cheating and have since been on a separate track. VW Group contests that its 3.0L cars did not cheat on federal emissions tests in the same way that the 2.0L engines did, although the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has asserted that the cars in question were built with illegal auxiliary devices to circumvent emissions regulations.

Reuters reports that US District Judge Charles Breyer asked that VW Group provide and update on this fix on August 25, but the judge has not yet given VW Group a firm deadline to present a fix to US regulators. VW Group’s lawyer told the judge that the fix the company is currently working on would not be complicated or impact the cars’ performance greatly.

And lo, that which was rumored last night has come to fruition this morning. On Tuesday morning, Volkswagen Group proposed a number of companion settlements with the Department of Justice representing the Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the Federal Trade Commission, more than 40 state attorneys general, and a class-action complaint from people who bought 2.0L diesel cars from Volkswagen and Audi.

The amount of the settlements will tally more than $15 billion, with $10.033 billion going toward compensating consumers. In a conference call on Tuesday morning, Elizabeth Cabraser, the court-appointed lead counsel for Volkswagen consumer plaintiffs, detailed exactly how the German automaker would compensate its customers after the company was discovered last September to have included illegal software on many of its recent diesel models. The software helped the diesel vehicles pass federally required emissions tests in a lab but turned off the cars’ emissions control systems while under normal driving conditions, causing significantly increased levels of nitrogen oxide to spew on open roads.

Cabraser noted that owners of certain diesel VW Golfs, Passats, Jettas, Beetles, and Audi A3s would be eligible for a buyback equal to the amount the car was worth in September 2015—a range from a low of around $12,000 to a high of about $44,000. The buybacks would be accepted “regardless of condition,” Cabraser said, “as long as it’s drivable.”

The evening before Volkswagen Group and the US Department of Justice (DOJ) are supposed to submit a settlement to San Francisco District Judge Charles Breyer, Bloomberg’s sources have leaked new details about that supposed settlement.

Last week, VW Group was rumored to offer a settlement of $10.2 billion, with $1,000- $7,000 per car affected by the diesel emissions scandal that’s rocked the company since September. Today, Bloomberg is reporting that that number has gone up to a total of about $15 billion, with affected diesel owners potentially getting up to $10,000 in compensation.

Bloomberg’s sources specify that VW Group will set aside $10.03 billion to pay back the owners of nearly 500,000 Volkswagen and Audi 2.0 L diesel engine vehicles in the United States. “Those figures could rise if VW misses certain deadlines,” the news outlet writes.

Firefighters working to contain a wildfire in the San Gabriel Mountains of Southern California were temporarily thwarted this weekend when pilots for the Monrovia Fire Department (MFD) spotted a few private drones in their path. For low-flying fire-fighting planes carrying fire retardant and smoke jumpers, an errant drone could mean life or death for the pilot and any crew. As such, the fire department decided to temporarily ground all aircraft on Saturday morning.

That decision can be a frustrating one for firefighters and residents of a fire-affected area, because there’s always the potential that the fire could burn out of control without aircraft flying in firefighters and equipment. The Monrovia Fire Department acknowledged this situation in a post this weekend.

“It is vitally important to note… fire officials cannot deploy firefighting aircraft when private individuals are flying drones in the fire response locations," the MFD wrote. "Fortunately for us here locally, the fire was more fully contained when we had to suspend air operations yesterday, however, these types of disruptions are extremely dangerous to firefighting personnel and can cause severe disruptions to the response effort.”

CBS and Paramount, the two studios that own the rights to Star Trek, announced a list of 10 guidelines for fan film creators this week. The studios are saying that they “will not object to, or take legal action against” filmmakers that follow the new rules (although the studios added that “CBS and Paramount Pictures reserve the right to revise, revoke and/or withdraw these guidelines at any time in their own discretion.”)

The new rules come amid a dispute between the two studios and Axanar Productions, a production company formed by fans who raised more than $1 million in crowdfunding and donations to create a professional-quality Star Trek fan film about Garth of Izar, a hero of Captain Kirk from The Original Series. Axanar Productions boasted about the fact that it had hired people who had formerly worked on Star Trek, and it released a 20-minute film called Prelude to Axanar in 2014. The feature-length film, simply called Axanar, was supposed to debut in 2016.

But CBS and Paramount produced a list of ways they considered Axanar Productions infringing on their copyright. In early May, a judge ruled that the fan film makers would have to face a lawsuit from the two studios.

When Ars was invited to do a test drive of the 2016 Chevrolet Cruze in Nashville, we wanted to make the most of our trip down south. Between playing the tourist by looking for live music and eating hot chicken, we made a stop at the Lane Motor Museum. Founded by Jeff Lane in 2003, the museum houses an extraordinary collection of rare and replica vehicles, including oddities and historical models. 

We took plenty of pictures, but there were a lot of cars we missed as well. For a more complete look, we recommend you stop by next time you're in Nashville.

We've separated photos of some of the coolest cars into categories. The first category are traditional vehicles, plane components, or vehicle styles that have been modified to create something new and exciting. For instance, the replica Dymaxion, originally designed by Buckminster Fuller, is a spiritual ancestor of today's nerd/maker culture. The Dymaxion was supposed to eventually be an all-purpose vehicle, capable of flying, driving, and floating. Alas, after a couple fateful accidents and a lack of funding, work on the Dymaxion was discontinued.

On Thursday, Detroit automaker General Motors and the US Navy announced a partnership in which the Navy would be able to take advantage of hydrogen fuel cell research from GM to develop a long-endurance unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV).

According to Karen Swider-Lyons, the head of the Naval Research Laboratory’s (NRL) Chemistry Division of its Alternative Energy Section, the Navy is looking for “weeks if not months of endurance” from a UUV. She stressed that research and testing is still in early stages, and that the Navy had not yet pinpointed a single application it wanted to apply fuel-cell powered underwater drones to. “As the technology becomes available we’ll see,” Swider-Lyons said on a conference call this morning. “You can look at the history of unmanned air vehicles and guess.”

Fuel cell technology has been lauded as a potentially revolutionary energy source for zero-emissions vehicles, using hydrogen to create electricity and emitting H₂O as waste. While fuel-cells are more energy dense than batteries, batteries have generally won out when it comes to building zero-emissions cars because hydrogen refueling centers are scarce and storing hydrogen itself can require a high-pressure container or very cold temperatures.

Sources speaking to Bloomberg and the Associated Press have said that Volkswagen Group will propose a $10.2 billion settlement in federal court next week. The settlement will reportedly include payouts of $1,000 to $7,000 for owners of certain diesel vehicles that included illegal software to help the company cheat on US emissions tests.

VW Group is facing over 600 lawsuits from customers, consumer protection agencies, and regulators. The suits are being overseen by US District Judge Charles Breyer in Northern California District Court.

In April, Judge Breyer said that VW Group would buy the 482,000 affected 2.0L diesel engines in the US back from owners in addition to paying out “substantial compensation” to affected customers. According to the AP, Volkswagen and Audi owners will be able to choose between having VW Group buy their car back for whatever the car was worth before the scandal broke last summer or keeping their car and letting the manufacturer fix it. It’s unclear whether VW Group will be able to find suitable fixes to make the affected diesel vehicles EPA-compliant. The source speaking to the AP said “any fix would be expensive and likely would require a bigger catalytic converter or injection of the chemical urea into the exhaust to help neutralize the pollution.”