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Sunday, 22 October 2017

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Tesla has reached a deal to build a factory in China

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Tesla has made an arrangement with Shanghai’s government to built a manufacturing plant in the city’s free-trade zone, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cites reports from people briefed on the company’s plans.

The WSJ reports that Tesla will own the factory, rather than partner with a local manufacturer, as it typically the case. Chinese officials have recently begun to considerrelaxing some of the more stringent rules concerning local partners, as a way to encourage electric vehicle manufacturers. The arrangement would be the “first of its kind for a foreign auto maker,” but will likely not allow Tesla to avoid a 25 percent import tariff.

In June, Tesla confirmed that it was in talks to build a factory in Shanghai, ending months of speculation about the company’s plans. At the time, a spokesperson explained that while the company anticipated keeping most of its production in the US, it did “need to establish local factories to ensure affordability for the markets they serve.”

The world’s largest market for automobiles, China has recently worked to encourage the development of a robust market for EVs. In September, Xin Guobin, the country’s vice minister of industry and information technology, noted at a forum that the country is beginning to phase out sales of fossil fuel vehicles as it works to cut its carbon emissions, and that existing manufacturers will need to begin building more EVs in the coming years. As such, establishing a factory in China will be a major deal for Tesla as it works to ramp up its production around the world.

We’ve reached out to Tesla for comment, and will update this story if we hear back.

Thursday, 19 October 2017

VW is building an electric racecar to try and break a record

Intent on becoming a major producer of electric vehicles in the next decade, Volkswagen is already plotting to show off its abilities in the field by trying to break a racing record.

VW said on Thursday that it will build an electric racecar with the hopes of besting the record time for the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in 2018 near Colorado Springs, Colorado. The all-wheel drive vehicle is being developed by Volkswagen Motorsport in Germany, the first time the company’s racing division has produced an electric vehicle. It will also mark the first time in 31 years VW has competed in the hill climb.

“The Pikes Peak hill climb is one of the world’s most renowned car races,” Dr. Frank Welsch, VW board member responsible for development, said Thursday in a news release. “It poses an enormous challenge and is therefore perfectly suited to proving the capabilities of upcoming technologies.”

Welsch said lessons learned through the Pikes Peak program and race will be incorporated into the electric vehicles that are eventually sold by all VW brands. That includes a revival of the iconic Microbus as an EV passenger and commercial van in 2022 and a production EV crossover in 2020.

Pikes Peak International Hill Climb has been held annually since 1916 in the Rocky Mountains. The race course is 12.4 miles long, climbing 4,700 feet to the summit at just over 14,000 feet above sea level. The current Pikes Peak hill climb record for a modified electric vehicle was set in 2016 by an e0 PP100 driven by Rhys Millen, completing the run in eight minutes and 57.118 seconds. A Tesla Model S set the record for a production car the same year, at 11 minutes and 48.264 seconds.

The 2018 race will be held on June 24th.

Coda is a next-generation spreadsheet designed to make Excel a thing of the past

When Shishir Mehrotra worked at YouTube, he was struck by the relatively pedestrian tools that kept the site running. Mehrotra, who served as the company’s head of product until he left in 2014, managed his team largely using a combination of Google Docs and Sheets. The system worked well enough, but the tools had been built for a previous age. Mehrotra began to fixate on a question: what would documents and spreadsheets look if they were invented today?

Coda, a company Mehrotra co-founded with his fellow former Googler Alex DeNeui, represents his answer to that question. The company, which is announcing a private beta today after three years of secret development, makes a collaborative document editor that combines a word processor and a spreadsheet. It’s a versatile tool that Mehrotra hopes will find a home in companies where diverse teams need regular access to shared sets of data, but want to view and manipulate that data on their own terms.

Mehrotra’s pitch for Coda, which was built under the codename “Krypton,” goes like this: “It’s a document so powerful you can build apps in it.” Open it for the first time and you’ll see a blank canvas that will be familiar to anyone who has ever used Google Docs or Microsoft Word. But drop in a table, add a few rows and columns, and you’ll find a powerful engine underneath. Coda wrote its own, modern formula language design to integrate other services into your spreadsheets. Enter “GoogleDirections” into a formula, for example, and Coda will insert a Google Map with directions from an origin location to a destination.

One of Mehrotra’s chief frustrations with the older generation of documents was what he calls “the game of Battleship” — the need to describe rows and columns in formulas using headings like “A1 to F7,” as in the old board game. In Coda documents, rows and columns are named objects, making formulas both easier to read and write. Your formulas no longer have to refer to “A1:F7”; instead you just type the name of the column.

Excel and other older documents also required formulas to be placed inside of tables. In Coda they can be placed anywhere: hit the “=” sign, and you can bring in data from anywhere else in your document. You might include a summary section in your document that includes a written account of your progress, with embedded formulas that update key numbers automatically as you make progress.

The result is a system that, to date, can be used for everything from bug trackers to wedding planning to Salesforce-style customer relationship management software. The more flexible the system, Mehrotra says, the more uses people find for it. “We think the world runs on docs and apps,” he says. The average office worker has access to company-provided software for tracking projects, clients, inventory, and other needs. And yet, Mehrotra says, “they’ll spend all day long in documents and spreadsheets.”

One place where this is true is Uber, where Yuhki Yamashita’s team has been using the beta version of Coda since July. Yamashita, a senior product manager responsible for the driver experience, says his team used a variety of project-management tools before moving gradually to Coda. A few employees who had expertise in spreadsheets ported over some of Uber’s data from Google Sheets. Then less Sheets-savvy employees began building new views of the data. Yamashita says it has changed the way his team works for the better.

The ability to link documents together, infused with live data that updates automatically, has led Uber to use Coda like a wiki in some cases. In others, engineers build complex views of databases that showcase data with a high degree of granularity, while the marketing team relies on a summary document that only displays key numbers.

Of course, Coda isn’t the first company to attempt a reinvention of Microsoft Office. SmartSheet, which launched in 2006, has 70,000 businesses using its collaborative, cloud-based spreadsheets. Quip, which was founded in 2012, sold its combined word processor and spreadsheet to Salesforce for $750 million last year. But neither of those apps has become a breakout hit in the fashion of other modern workplace tools, such as Slack or Trello.

Investors think Coda can win. The company has raised $60 million in two rounds of fundraising, from investors including Greylock, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, NEA, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. Reid Hoffman, a partner at Greylock and the co-founder and executive chairman at LinkedIn, took a seat on Coda’s board. Hoffman told The Verge that the increasingly collaborative nature of office work created an opportunity for Coda to carve out a niche. “Our goal is to try to create this new kind of productivity app,” Hoffman says. “And already in the private beta, we’ve seen organizations start adopting it in ways that lead us to think we’re right about this hypothesis.”

Even after three years of development, Coda remains at an early stage. For the private beta, the full experience is available only on the desktop. You can access it on the mobile web, but in read-only mode. The company won’t say when it will be available to the larger public. While it remains in beta, Coda plans to build out its gallery of examples and other help features that will make it more approachable to newcomers.

For now, though, the learning curve is real. The most impressive aspects of the service are the ones that require mastering Coda’s formula language — which could be a hard sell at the typical American office, where workers often only use new tools begrudgingly.