Abu Dhabi's state fund Mubadala Investment buys a 1.85% stake in Reliance Jio Platforms for $1.2B — Jio Platforms has now received investments totalling ₹87,655 crore in six weeks. — Reliance Industries has gained yet another investor, with Abu Dhabi state fund Mubadala Investment …
IIHS study of 5K+ crashes: self-driving cars would've prevented only one-third, which were caused by “sensing and perceiving” errors and driver “incapacitation” — DETROIT (AP) — A new study says that while autonomous vehicle technology has great promise to reduce crashes …
GM’s electric offensive to bring at least 20 new EVs to market by 2023 reportedly includes a commercial van.
Reuters reported Thursday that the company is developing an electric van for the commercial market code named BV1. The vehicle is expected to start production in late 2021 and will use the Ultium battery system that was revealed in March, according to the report.
When, and if, GM delivers on that goal in 2021 it will join an increasingly crowded pool. Amazon ordered 100,000 electric delivery vans from Rivian, the first of which are expected to be on the road in 2021. Ford has announced an electric Transit van that’s expected to launch in 2021. Startups such as Arrival, Chanje, Enirde, and XoS have received orders for electric vans from package delivery companies such as Ryder and UPS.
Tesla is one outlier that hasn’t revealed plans to produce commercial electric vans. GM’s move has been cast as a strategy to get ahead of Tesla in the commercial marketplace.
But there are likely other reasons driving GM’s decision, including high margins that can be achieved selling commercial trucks and vans as well as governments enacting increasingly strict emissions laws, particularly in urban centers.
Electric vans are logical fit for delivery companies, which tend to have predictable routes, a specific geographic area and operate a high utilization all of which fits with the EV infrastructure and charging ecosystems that enables their full economic use, a research note released Thursday from Morgan Stanley argues.
Morgan Stanley notes it hasn’t been “smooth sailing” for all EV vans. For instance, DHL’s StreetScooter program was recently shut down.
Prior to Reuters’ report, it appeared GM’s EV strategy was pinned to passenger vehicles. In March, GM revealed an electric architecture that will be the foundation of its future EV plans and support a wide range of products across its brands, including compact cars, work trucks, large premium SUVs, performance vehicles and a new Bolt EUV crossover expected to come to market next summer.
GM said the modular architecture, called “Ultium,” will be capable of 19 different battery and drive unit configurations, 400-volt and 800-volt packs with storage ranging from 50 kWh to 200 kWh, and front-, rear- and all-wheel drive configurations.
GM’s focus on making this EV architecture modular underlines the automaker’s desire to electrify a wide variety of its business lines, from the Cruise Origin autonomous taxi and compact Chevrolet Bolt EUV to the GMC HUMMER electric truck and SUV and the newly-announced Cadillac Lyriq SUV. GM also showed a variety of electric vehicles that had not yet been announced, to show how this modularity will be exploited further out in their product plan, including a massive Cadillac flagship sedan called Celestiq.
In a statement, Instagram says it does not provide users a copyright license to display images on other websites when using its embedding API — People may need to get permission before embedding someone else's Instagram photo. — Instagram does not provide users of its embedding API …
South Korean prosecutors said on Thursday that they have filed an arrest warrant for Samsung’s vice chairman and anointed heir Jay Y. Lee and two other former company executives over an alleged accounting fraud and a controversial merger back in 2015.
Lee, whose father is Samsung’s chairman, has previously denied charges. Samsung cannot be immediately reached for comment.
Updating…
Slay the Spire's success story is a remarkable one. As one of thousands of games to land on Steam in 2017, this fusion of roguelite progression and "deckbuilding" mechanics, made by a heretofore unknown development team out of Seattle, managed to become a phenomenon due entirely to word-of-mouth. The game has since surpassed its "2.0" milestone and climbed the download charts on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch.
Yet the game has stayed an arm's length away from smartphone platforms this whole time, in spite of being built primarily using libGDX, a flexible, open source development framework with smartphone-specific hooks. That changes this month, as the development team at MegaCrit ironically used its Steam community page on Wednesday to announce Slay the Spire's next platform: iOS.
iOS screenshot: Slay the Spire's hero selection expands as you complete more "runs" of the game. [credit: MegaCrit ]
The game's first smartphone port will launch at $9.99 "this month," according to the developers at MegaCrit, with an exact date likely coming during the upcoming Guerrilla Collective game reveal stream, currently scheduled for June 6-8. ("You should try to tune in" on the event's first day, June 6, according to MegaCrit's latest update.)
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New York Times : Electricians are flocking to regions around the US to build data centers, as AI shapes up to be an economy-bending force...
