Colin’s note: We’re back with another peek into CES 2024…
That’s the Consumer Electronics Show. I’m here in Las Vegas, Nevada, with thousands of tech enthusiasts and company representatives who are showcasing the most exciting new gadgets and trends in tech this year.
And today, we’re looking at electric vehicles (EVs). Tesla is no longer the only big name in the EV game.
From autonomous vehicles… to fully electric excavators… to charging that’s gone “wireless”… the electric automotive industry and the technology surrounding it has everyone here at CES buzzing.
All this and more in today’s video update. Just click below to access it.
Colin Tedards here again at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. Today, I’m going to show you everything I saw from electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles, and the rest of the automotive industry.
I’m on the list to get a Tesla Cybertruck… But if you’re in the market for an electric truck, the iconic Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon is now fully electric. It will be available very soon. If you’ve got about a quarter of a million bucks… you might be able to buy one.
On the electric vehicle side, there’s the Bollinger B1 electric SUV. It resembles the Hummer or G-Wagon. It’s pretty bare-bones, looking inside. But it’s a pretty badass-looking vehicle if you ask me. Also from Bollinger is the B2 electric pickup truck.
These things are amazing. These are both prototypes and probably several years away from reaching the masses… But I might sign up as a customer for one of these someday.
Your electric vehicle isn’t the only thing going electric. Caterpillar – more simply known as CAT – is the world’s top manufacturer of construction and mining equipment. And it has recently unveiled the first fully electric excavator. I would love to get in one. So would my son.
One thing that’s going to come to the EV market is “wireless charging.” We have that for many of our phones as well. Maybe it’s a pad, a special case, or something that sticks on the back of your iPhone to charge it.
One version of the tech shows how you can charge your vehicle by simply parking over a charging pad. Reportedly Tesla is working on some prototypes of this as well. I can see this being popular residentially. But the real potential lies in a fleet perspective – when you need to charge multiple vehicles at once.
That includes situations such as if you have a golf course or something like that, and you’re trying to charge dozens of golf carts at one time. It could be nice to not have to plug them in.
On the more affordable side… Entry-level CLA from Mercedes. It’s a concept vehicle. And it has some flashy bells and whistles that probably won’t make it into the final product. It also boasts a 466-mile range. They can probably tone down some of the flashier aspects and make this ultra-affordable sometime in the future.
It wouldn’t be CES without a flying car. Today, I looked at a concept from XPENG. It’s a publicly traded company that makes electric vehicles primarily in China. So it has this concept flying car maybe making its way to the skies and a road near you.
Next, we’ve got a vehicle from the intersection of autonomous driving and mass transportation – the Zoox. They’re designed to carry several people facing each other. And it’s a fully autonomous vehicle – no driver, and no steering wheel. I’ve been hearing a lot about this company.
For all you outdoorsmen, there’s a very interesting take on the travel trailer from Pebble. Think of a modern take on an Airstream, if you will. They start about $100,000. You hitch them up to a traditional pickup truck.
Next up, we have an autonomous tank developed by Clemson University. This is one of the coolest tanks I’ve seen. It can take emergency supplies like water into disaster areas. It could also potentially pull off reconnaissance missions for the military.
Amazon isn’t the first company that comes to mind when you think of automobiles, sales, or manufacturing. But the company is set up here at CES with a rather large booth where they’re talking about all the different things that they have going on in the automobile market.
One thing that they’re going to work on is automobile sales. So they’re going to have different types of financing. They’re going to have predictive maintenance. They’re partnering with companies like BMW to bring artificial intelligence – specifically large language model algorithms – inside the cars.
From the AWS side – that’s Amazon Web Services – they’re helping car manufacturers make their cars better through different types of machine learning and AutoCAD. It’s an interesting business model Amazon is moving into.
That’s all for today’s peek into CES 2024. Let us know what you think at [email protected]. Thanks for tuning in. My name is Colin Tedards, and that was today’s Bleeding Edge.