Electric vehicles

Audi strives to take electric mobility to the next level and plans to offer more than 20 electrified models by 2025 - some will be plug-in-hybrids - more than half will be fully-electric.

One of the biggest drawbacks of electric vehicles - that they require hours and hours to charge - could be obliterated by a new type of liquid battery that is roughly ten times more energy-dense than existing models.

Alta Motors is an electric motorcycle start-up with a focus on off-road competition bikes. The company is making inroads in the U.S. market, with plans to expand internationally by 2020.

NEXT announces the introduction of its fully automated multiservice 'online-to-offline' platform, including a modular vehicle solution and the supporting operating system required to bring an ecosystem of logistics services to market at scale.

IDTechEx will be hosting a free webinar on Tuesday 2 October titled Fuel Cell Vehicles

Daimler and Bosch have announced the successful premiere of their joint Automated Valet Parking pilot in Beijing. The technology symbolizes a pioneering effort in infrastructure-supported driverless parking and marks the first pilot of its kind in China.

A key trend across many sectors is the multifunctionality of structural parts. This has extended to fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) composite material and the added functionality ranges to: enhanced electrical & thermal conductivity, embedded sensors & actuators, energy storage & harvesting, data transmission, self-healing, and adaptive response (morphing) mechanisms.

Electric vehicles are rapidly scaling up in production, but under the surface of this explosive growth there are significant competitions taking place across the supply chain.

Like the car equivalents, 48V mild hybrid trucks do not start as electric vehicles (driving the wheels electrically some or all of the time) but they are headed that way.

After surfacing its Vespa Elettrica concept at EICMA last year, a large motorcycle trade show known for these sort of announcements from manufacturers, Piaggio finally announced that it will go to production this September, and that it will take preorders in October with the first deliveries later that month.

Tritium is receiving a portion of $3.2 million in federal funding awarded to the Electric Power Research Institute for developing an extreme fast charging system that can connect to the grid.

A rather unusual trolleybus has been navigating the streets of Zurich in recent months. With its large windscreen and covered wheels, it could easily be mistaken for a tram. It ­features a hybrid electric drive system that allows it to draw power from an on-board traction battery as well as ­overhead wires. But this bus is also "smart", boasting specially designed software that automatically gathers information on the route.

This is a technological megatrend. Dumb load-bearing metal structures move to plastic and composite and incorporate energy harvesting and storage material - massless energy. Indeed you could call some of it negative mass energy. Goodbye components-in-a-box.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May will announce £106 million for R&D in green vehicles, new batteries and low carbon technology.

Walmart Canada announced plans to power its fleet using 100 per cent alternative power by 2028. To meet that goal, the company has announced plans to acquire an additional 30 Tesla 18-wheeler semi-trucks, building on its original order of 10 trucks in November 2017.

IDTechEx will be hosting a free webinar on Tuesday 25 September titled Electric two-wheelers: the EV underdog?

Mothership Aero started at August 2016. Mothership provides a relatively huge airship that might be able to carry heavy payloads and to generate power.

Kray Technologies provide drone spraying of agricultural fields and products.

Delair is a French company specializing in the design and manufacture of fixed-wing drones.

Nuvve is a San Diegan company that provides the tools that facilitate 'vehicle to grid' (or 'v2g') services for electric vehicles, with a focus on the software aggregation platform rather than the hardware (bi-directional chargers). The company is global and has received major investment from utilities like EDF Renewables.