Author: Megan Geuss

According to a testing company called Emissions Analytics, many diesel vehicles on the road in the European Union are emitting much more nitrogen oxide (NO_x) than expected at temperatures below 18 degrees Celsius (approximately 64 degrees Fahrenheit). While it’s public knowledge that automakers in the EU are allowed to kill the emissions control systems on their diesel vehicles in cold weather to prevent damage to the engine, it seems that “cold” has not been properly defined, and car engineers are taking advantage of that fact.

According to the BBC, Emissions Analytics tested 213 cars from 31 manufacturers and found that “millions of vehicles could be driving around much of the time with their pollution controls partly turned off.” Apparently, cars that adhere to the Euro 5 emissions control standard (which was announced in September 2009 but became mandatory in January 2011) are among the worst offenders. The more current Euro 6 cars did better on Emissions Analytics’ tests but also showed discrepancies at relatively warm temperatures.

While turning off the emissions control system can have benefits for the longevity of a diesel engine, it also can improve the car’s miles-per-gallon rating. That creates a tension between priorities—a car might release more NO_x but get better gas mileage, cutting down on carbon dioxide (CO₂) emitted. But NO_x is a potent greenhouse gas, too, and auto manufacturers might be motivated to hide how their cars cause pollution by favoring a high mpg number while the car is still belching toxic NO_x in order to market their cars to environmentally conscious customers.

On Thursday, Volkswagen Group CEO Matthias Müller put forth his vision for the company's future into 2025. The plan is an aggressive one coming out of almost a year of intense public scrutiny and regulatory concerns following VW Group's involvement in a high-profile emissions scandal.

The company's new strategy, which was approved by VW Group's board of supervisors, calls for the German automaker to deliver 30 new electric vehicles across Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, and its other brands by 2025. "The Volkswagen Group forecasts that its own BEV [battery-powered electric vehicle] sales will be between two and three million units in 2025, equivalent to some 20 to 25 percent of the total unit sales expected at that time," the company wrote in a press release.

The press release didn't specifically mention the BUDD-e, Volkswagen's electric concept van, which was built to show off the company's Modular Electric Toolkit (abbreviated MEB in German). In January, Volkswagen's head of electronic development, Dr. Volkmar Tanneberger, told Car Magazine that a car very much like the BUDD-e would hit production in 2020.

Rhapsody announced yesterday that it will be forsaking its given name (well, its second given name, as the music streaming service started as Listen.com back in 2001) in favor of the name "Napster." Yep, Napster is coming back (again), 17 years after it debuted and caused a culture war over peer-to-peer music downloads and file sharing.

It seems that nothing is changing about Rhapsody except the name and the branding—in fact, Rhapsody already sells its streaming service under the Napster name in countries outside the US. But the company may be looking for a new way to compete in a packed music streaming market, and pulling on the heartstrings of millions of now-grownups who gleefully marvelled at the ease with which they were able to download music in the new millennium might be just the ticket.

Of course, Rhapsody-now-Napster will still cost money: $1 for the first three months and then $9.99 every month after that to stream music from the company's library. But then, that's what keeps it "100% legal," as Rhapsody's website proclaims.

In the keynote presentation of this week's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, Apple announced that it would allow website developers to add an Apple Pay button to the checkout part of their sites. The company also revealed that iMessage will now be open to apps from third-party developers, and one of Apple's spokespeople demonstrated this new openness by sending money to a friend using an iMessage-compatible Square Cash app. Both of these new announcements will make buying things easier in the Apple ecosystem, but neither seems to be the kind of development that will (singlehandedly) propel Apple to dominate the payments market.

Apple's Web-payments function, called “Pay with Apple Pay,” only works in Safari for now. The aim is to reduce any friction a customer might experience while checking out after a little e-shopping spree—the customer just selects the Apple Pay button during checkout and then authenticates the transaction using TouchID on their phone or by tapping an Apple Watch associated with the computer the purchase is being made on. After all, if you don't have to track down your credit card and find the right security code to input, you're less likely to get distracted from your capitalist urges or have time to think about whether you should really be buying a 5lb gummy bear.

That's something PayPal and Amazon have tried to perfect, and although Apple Pay's latest features have been described as challenging PayPal, there's room for some caution in that prediction. Thad Peterson, a Senior Analyst at independent research firm Aite Group, noted that PayPal is global, platform agnostic, and has a 12-year head start on Apple Pay.

Politicians and regulators in the European Union are finding many instances of automakers using loopholes to circumvent emissions standards. Although so far only Volkswagen has been found using software to cheat the emissions tests specified by regulators, other automakers including Jeep, General Motors, and Mercedes-Benz are taking advantage of regulatory gray areas for diesel vehicles sold in the EU, according to a report from the New York Times.

Specifically, the Times noted that EU regulations allow car makers to kill the emissions control system on diesel vehicles if there's a risk that running the emissions control system could cause engine damage—“which in some cases is nearly all the time,” the paper wrote.

Cold weather is often cited as a reason to deactivate emissions control in the interests of extending the life of the engine (car companies in the US used such a justification against the accusations of environmentalists as early as the 70's). But a German study found a Jeep Cherokee sold by Fiat Chrysler in Europe turned off certain emissions controls when the car experienced temperatures as high as 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Recently, an independent investigation by a German environmental lobbying group, the magazine Der Spiegel, and a German TV program called Monitor found that Opel's Zafira was turning off emissions controls at high altitude and at speeds greater than 87 mph. Opel has denied that it's done anything illegal in designing its diesel cars.

At this year's E3 conference in Los Angeles, Sony invited famed game developer Hideo Kojima on the stage during the company's PlayStation 4 press conference to announce the latest from Kojima Productions, curiously called Death Stranding.

In the trailer, a quote from William Blake introduces a strange world: "To see a world in a grain of sand / and a heaven in a wildflower. / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / and eternity in an hour." Then we see a naked man with one handcuff around his wrist pick up a naked, crying baby and begin to cry, but the baby quickly disappears leaving only black oil on the man's hands. He watches oily baby footsteps (but no baby) walk away from him, and he gets up and walks across a desolate beach peppered with dead whales. And that's the end of the trailer.

The man clearly looks like that guy from The Walking Dead, and sure enough, Norman Reedus, who plays Daryl Dixon on the AMC TV show, is listed in the Kojima Productions credits.

The feud between Elon Musk company Tesla Motors and an auto blogger has sparked an indignant open letter from the company.

The feud started on Wednesday when Edward Niedermeyer posted on his blog, the Daily Kanban, that while investigating reports of suspension breakage in Tesla’s Model S and X cars he found something troubling. A poster in a Tesla Motors forum claimed the suspension in his 2013 Model S had failed. The car had 70,000 miles on it and was out of warranty, so Tesla apparently told the owner that the company would not pay for his repairs. Several days later, Tesla contacted him and offered to pay for 50 percent of the repairs if he agreed to sign a Goodwill Agreement. The agreement stipulated that the owner of the Model S would keep confidential the details of the incident and the work required to fix the car.

The Daily Kanban posted part of the agreement, which reads:

Shortly after Apple Pay launched in 2014, people began noticing that drug store chain Rite-Aid was pulling support for Apple Pay and Android Pay (then Google Wallet) at its cash registers. Although it was done without any fanfare, the reason for the pivot was that Rite-Aid was a member of the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), a consortium of retailers that included Walmart, BestBuy, and CVS, among others. MCX wanted the retailers and their customers to use its own payments app called CurrentC.

Now two years later, CurrentC is shutting down. The company wrote on its website that all user accounts would be deactivated June 28.

CurrentC had actually been in development since 2011, conceived as a way to break big retailers from the shackles of having to pay credit card companies interchange fees every time customers charged their bill to a card. As it was originally conceived, customers would link their checking and debit accounts directly to the app. When a user got to the cash register, the cashier would scan a QR code from the customer’s phone provided by the CurrentC app to authorize the payment.

Hewlett-Packard Enterprises (HPE) gleefully announced on Monday that it has been working with Paramount over the last few months to “develop three conceptual technologies” for Star Trek Beyond, the latest in the new Star Trek movies.

In an HPE press release, the company writes: “Without giving any spoiler alerts [editor's note: I think you simply mean "spoilers" here, HPE], we collaborated on three different technological concepts in the film: The quarantine, the diagnostic wrap, and the book. Each of these concepts showcase HPE’s vision for the future of technology, but are rooted in developments we hope to introduce much sooner.”

That futuristic technology that HPE is promising “much sooner” is related to a product called “The Machine,” which a larger, less-fractured HP promised in 2014. The Machine would use memristors (technology theorized in the ‘70s and built in 2008 by HP to employ flexible electrical resistance as memory) as well as optical interconnects to create a new genre of hardware that was supposed to revolutionize supercomputers and mobile devices alike. The company was sufficiently gung-ho about its R&D to claim in 2014 that it would commercialize the technology in The Machine within the next few years “or fall on its face trying.”

According to Google’s May 2016 Self-Driving Car report (PDF), the company has been teaching its self-driving prototype “bubble cars” how to honk. A human driver can be easily distracted, says Google, and if a bubble car encounters a distracted driver on the road, it should have a mechanism to get that driver's attention back on driving.

“The human act of honking may be (performance) art," says Google, "but our self-driving cars aim to be polite, considerate, and only honk when it makes driving safer for everyone.” (That’s what Google says now, but just wait until its cars achieve sentience and have something to celebrate. Or when another autonomous vehicle goes off the rails and two self-driving cars get caught in an endless honking loop.)

Prototype bubble cars equipped with internal horns can now honk when they see another car backing out of a driveway or swerving into their lane. Why no external horn? Untrained software that honks at a bad time is more likely to confuse or distract nearby drivers with an external horn than an internal one. Over the course of 10,000 to 15,000 test-driven miles per week, Google engineers noted when the cars honked appropriately and when they honked inappropriately and trained the software to become more accurate.