Worker says he routinely heard the n-word at Tesla’s Fremont factory.

Marcus Vaughn is an African-American who worked on Tesla’s factory floor from April to October of this year. Vaughn charges that workers and managers on the factory floor routinely used the n-word within his earshot. When he complained to the human resources department, Vaughn says, he was fired for “not having a positive attitude.”

According to Bloomberg, Vaughn is seeking to be the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of more than 100 black Tesla workers.

The lawsuit was filed by Lawrence Organ, the same civil rights lawyer who sued on behalf of three other black Tesla workers for racial discrimination last month. Those men also said they routinely heard people on the factory floor using racial epithets. A third lawsuit, alleging similar facts, was filed in March.

“Part of not being a huge jerk is considering how someone might feel who is part of [a] historically less represented group,” Musk allegedly wrote. “Sometimes these things happen unintentionally, in which case you should apologize. In fairness, if someone is a jerk to you, but sincerely apologizes, it is important to be thick-skinned and accept that apology.”

“The law doesn’t require you to have a thick skin,” Organ told Bloomberg. “When you have a diverse workforce, you need to take steps to make sure everyone feels welcome in that workforce.”

Google has never publicly shared how much it spends on its self-driving cars. At first, Project Chauffeur was hidden away in Google’s ultra-secret X moonshot program. When that went public, its costs were bundled together in a vague “Other Bets” category that includes the company’s fiber Internet service, home automation, and life science spin-offs.

Now, a court filing in Waymo’s epic and ongoing lawsuit against Uber has accidentally revealed just how big a bet Google placed on autonomous vehicles. Between Project Chauffeur’s inception in 2009 and the end of 2015, Google spent $1.1 billion on developing its self-driving software and hardware, according to a recent deposition of Shawn Bananzadeh, a financial analyst at Waymo.

Bananzadeh was testifying as part of the lawsuit, in which Uber stands accused misappropriating trade secrets and violating patents from Waymo, Google’s self-driving-car offshoot. Because Waymo has yet to commercialize any of its technology in a meaningful way, the company thinks any damages in the case should be calculated on the basis of how much it spent building the technology in question..

When asked by an Uber lawyer how an estimate for developing one of the trade secrets, number 90, was arrived at, Bananzadeh replied: “My understanding is that it is a cost that captures the entire program spend from inception to the period of time where it stops.” He later clarified that meant from 2009, when Sebastian Thrun got the go-ahead for the project from Larry Page, to the end of 2015.

Throughout Bananzadeh’s deposition, every dollar amount was redacted to protect Waymo’s confidential commercial information. Every time, that is, except in the Uber lawyer’s very next question: “The calculation that was the basis of the $1.1 billion cost estimate for Trade Secret 90 is the same calculation that was done for Trade Secret 2 and Trade Secret 25?”

Waymo had apparently given an identical $1.1 billion cost estimate for each of the trade secrets being discussed. Bananzadeh was unable to provide a clear answer as to why that might be, except to say, “Insofar as it is part of the entirety of this self-driving system…. therefore, all of the costs of the program since inception… are what then informs that number.”

Waymo’s position seems to be that all of its trade secrets are inextricably linked to the whole self-driving car project, and any damages should reflect that fact.

In a filing, Otto Trucking called Waymo’s damages theory “entirely speculative” and “over the top,” and called on the court to forbid Waymo from offering any evidence or argument beyond the actual damages it has incurred.

Though $1.1 billion is unquestionably a massive figure, it actually seems quite reasonable compared to the recent over-heated market for self-driving car acquisitions. In March 2016, General Motors paid a billion for San Francisco–based Cruise Automation, a company that was a seller of after-market semi-autonomous vehicle kits. In February of this year, Ford invested the same amount in a joint venture with Argo AI, a two-month-old Pittsburgh start-up headed by a former Google self-driving car engineer. The largest self-driving acquisition to date, however, was Intel’s $15.3 billion purchase of Mobileye in March. The Israeli company had originally provided vision-based semi-autonomous technology for Tesla vehicles.

Uber shelled out a reported $680 million for self-driving truck maker Otto in August 2016, sight almost unseen. But it’s the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of Otto, and in particular its lidar technology, that are at the heart of Waymo’s case against Uber. Otto’s founder, Anthony Levandowski, allegedly had a draft contract for the purchase of the company before he even quit Google.

By spending its money earlier than others and mostly in-house, Google’s billion-dollar investment now looks relatively modest—almost a bargain. Waymo has, by far, the most sophisticated self-driving software. It has simulated over a billion miles of driving, and its cars have had the most self-driving experience on real streets (over 3 million miles in multiple cities).

The court case seems to suggest that Waymo has also built up an enviably solid platform of intellectual property. So, undesirable as this peek into its books might be for Google today, the company should pride itself on demonstrating that in-house R&D can still make a lot of financial sense.

A revolutionary new fuel technology developed in Britain could drastically improve the emissions produced by your engine and save you fuel. 

The hydrogen additive product, developed by British manufacturer CGON, can reduce the emissions your engine produces by up to 80 per cent and offer you fuel savings of up to 20 per cent.

It is the product of eight years of extensive research, development and road testing. 

CGON claims the new technology significantly reduces emissions such as CO2, HC, NOx, PM and PN (carbon dioxide, hyrdocarbon, nitrogen dioxide, Promethium, Pnictogen).

It is a 100 per cent recyclable zero hydrogen additive, which is fitted within the engine bay and can work on any fossil fuel including petrol, diesel and LPG.

With the Government’s recent announcement that they would be banning he sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2040 in the UK, this could be a way for motorists to consciously and responsibly still use their petrol and diesel cars. 

How the technology works is by introducing small amounts of very pure and very powerful hydrogen directly into the inlet chamber where it then combines with the fuel-air mixture. 

This resulting fuel-air-hyrdrogen mix creates a more combustible cycle as it has a cooler burn than a conventional mixture. 

What the result of this is that there is almost all waste gases are eliminated which ion turn drastically reduces harmful emissions from being emitted. 

Another by-product of the technology is that less fuel is used in the process, resulting in savings of up to 20 per cent. 

Diesel drivers can also see a larger benefit from the product as the cleaner emissions produced through the use of the hydrogen additive put less strain on the particle filter. 

The initial idea for the technology came from a Royal Navy Engineer and firm founder Brian Sheard who worked on nuclear submarines.

CGON’s technology creates hydrogen by electrolysis using very precise chemistry and the correct materials for the cathode and anode - a specific type of titanium with a special coating. 

When combined with the electrolyte solution, enough hydrogen is generated at an extremely low current with no hazardous bi-products. 

The particular type of hydrogen used in the technology is orthodox hydrogen, which burns quicker and promotes a more complete combustion. 

CGON’s ezero products don’t store any hydrogen onboard but creates small amounts on demand.

Every 6,000 miles the ezero box is topped up with the electrolyte solution, which costs £5 for a 250ml pouch. 

There are three different variants of the ezero range - ezero1 is for smaller engines in passenger cars and vans, exert H1 is targeted at larger vehicles such as small coaches and LGVs and ezeroH2 for HGvs and buses.  

The company’s flagship consumer product, the ezero1 has been independently tested on the road by the unrivalled expert in the use of Portable Emissions Measurements Systems (PEMS), Emissions Analytics.

For the urban drive cycle, independent PEMS testing has shown reductions of 91.3% in PN (Particulate Number, or soot) plus a 47.9% reduction in NOx and a 50.6% reduction in NO2. 

The ezero1 can be fitted to any internal combustion car in approximately one hour. 

The box costs £459 including VAT and fitting and has a 12-month guarantee.

Elon Musk’s plan to dig tunnels under cities for cars to circumvent traffic is coming to fruition — starting in the SpaceX parking lot in Los Angeles.

The serial entrepreneur is breaking ground with his new startup The Boring Company, which Musk says should have its first car elevator operating next week.

The idea with the Boring Company — which Musk first introduced in a series of tweets last December while lamenting about how much he hated sitting in traffic — is to lower cars underground with an elevator. The cars will then travel on a platform, like a skate, to zip through a tunnel at speeds up to 130 miles per hour.

Musk shared on Twitter a short video of the car elevator being built that goes underground Friday; he says it should be operational next week:

The tunnel digging machine is named Godot, inspired by Samuel Beckett’s famous 1953 play about procrastination, “Waiting for Godot.”

It’s not clear whether the Boring Company has been successful in getting permission from the city of LA, but Musk says he has had talks with the mayor, pointing out that it will be harder to get regulatory approval for his tunnels than figure out the technology.

More from Recode

Looking at it, you wouldn’t think the Lilium Jet could fly. It looks more like a computer mouse than any aircraft you’ve seen, and its 36 small propellers run on electricity, not jet fuel. But this funky airplane just proved it can take to the sky, and it might be the flying car you’ve been waiting for.
The jet, which isn’t actually a jet, can take off and land vertically like a helicopter and fly like an airplane, making it just the thing for congested cities because it doesn’t need a runway. In other words, it’s everything you want in a flying car: It picks you up wherever you are, and plunks you down exactly where you want to go.
A full-size prototype of the airplane made its maiden voyage an airfield near Munich earlier this month. It lasted just a few minutes, with no one in either of the two seats, and a pilot controlling it from the ground. But it flew, proving that the unconventional design isn’t total malarkey.

“The basic challenges are solved,” Lilium CEO Daniel Wiegand told WIRED and WIRED Germany in an exclusive interview. Now comes several years of flight testing before moving into serial production. The German startup has backing from the European Space Agency and millions in funding, which will help Wiegand meet his goal of tripling his staff to about 135 people.
Still, Lilium has a long way to go before a weird electric plane with a big battery, three dozen propellers, and room for five passengers carries anyone anywhere, let alone 190 miles at 190 mph, as Wiegand envisions.
“I’d say that’s impossible off the top of my head,” says Richard Pat Anderson, who runs the Flight Research Center at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and is developing his own vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. “They’re definitely exceeding some fundamental math.”
Despite advancements in battery tech—Elon Musk thinks they’ve reached the point where they can power an 18-wheeler—jet fuel still stores far more energy per pound, a key consideration in an industry where weight trumps just about everything. So far, Airbus has succeeded in squeezing 60 miles and 137 mph from the 350-pound battery in its experimental two-seater eFan.
The faster and farther you want to fly, the bigger a battery you require. Eventually, you hit a point where the added mass outweighs the benefits of more kilowatt-hours, which is why Airbus decided to try a serial hybrid approach instead and Anderson’s team started there. Serial hybrid aircraft use a fuel-burning generators to recharge the batteries while flying, which makes them something like a flying Chevrolet Volt.
But let’s say Lilium makes this happen, even if it doesn’t quite deliver the specs Wiegand proposes. Building its wild electric plan leads to the Uber-esque air taxi service Wiegand envisions. That could work—if his startup solves a few other problems. The first is figuring out how to certify an entirely new kind of aircraft (Europe will be easier than the US, which doesn’t even have any way to regulate electric planes), set up the necessary landing and takeoff infrastructure, and ensure air traffic control can handle an invasion of aircraft flying a few hundred feet above city streets.
OK, let’s say Lilium solves all that. Then, it gets to fight the competition. Advances in battery tech and electronic flight controls, paired with the success of car-based ridesharing services, have a few startups chasing the same dream. China’s EHang wants to launch its passenger-toting drone in Dubai (of course) this summer. Aeromobil in Slovakia and Terrafugia in Massachusetts have their own take on flying cars (or, as Terrafugia calls it, “roadable aircraft”). Joby Aviation wants to launch an electric flying taxi service within five years.
And if Lilium’s going to win customers away from all those opponents, offering the right balance of speed, range, and cost becomes critical. So yes, the first flight is good news. But don’t expect your flying car to take off just yet.