Tech track: New Polestar has extra eye on safety

The upcoming Polestar 3 SUV will come with some advanced driver safety technology.

The new vehicle will have a new system called ‘Smart Eye’, which is a closed-loop system that monitors the driver and can potentially prevent fatal accidents.

Various cameras and sensors inside the cabin keep an eye on the driver's status and look for signs of drowsiness, distraction or even disconnect.

The system does this with the use of artificial intelligence algorithms.

If the system detects something troubling, by monitoring the driver's eyelids, head and eye movement, it will initiate warnings in the form of messages and sounds to attract the driver’s attention.

The system can even take preventative measures and stop the vehicle if needed.

“This technology addresses some of the main reasons behind fatal accidents and can help save lives by prompting the driver to refocus attention on the road – and can initiate preventive action when they don’t, or can’t,” Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath said.

EV battery degradation tested

One of the common questions that comes up in discussions about EVs is battery degradation.

All lithium-ion batteries will degrade with charging and discharging cycles but to what extent?

In Finland, a degradation test was performed on the battery of a Mercedes EQC that was used as a taxi and ran for 234,518km.

An important thing to note is that the car in question wasn't charged at high-power chargers, it mostly used a 40kW charger.

That may have impacted the degradation and possibly in a substantial way.

After two years and 234,518 km the battery capacity was measured at 73.3 kWh.

The initial usable capacity for the EQC is 80 kWh, so the battery only lost about 8.45% of its capacity from new.

This was after an estimated 585 charge cycles, though it's very hard to actually calculate how many there were.

 This goes to show that even under an extreme use case, with lower power charging, severe battery degradation should not be an issue.

3D printing of electronics

A new Canberra-based start-up, born out of the Australian National University, has made a multi-material 3D printer that can produce prototype electronics at a fraction of their current price.

Syenta has just finished a $3.7 million seed funding round to help it deliver the first printers to its  customers.

Syenta prints with electrochemistry, using a purely additive method.

“We basically focus the electric field into a very small area so that it (whatever material is being used) only deposits where we want it to deposit,” Head of Research and Development Ben Wilkinson said

This approach holds potential to reshape manufacturing costs due to simplicity, but also because the printer uses what are essentially precursor materials.

“That is, if someone wants to print with copper, for instance, the ‘ink’ is actually a copper sulphate,” Mr Wilkinson said.

“Our method turns the raw material into copper as we’re printing it.

“The other really cool thing about that is our process can work in reverse. So we’d use a voltage to turn the (for instance) copper back into copper sulphate, and that just becomes new ink that we can reuse.”

In terms of manufacturing, the approach strips away many process layers, thereby reducing the amount of both energy and materials that go into producing electronics.

The other side of the proposition is what the 3D-printed electronics themselves can offer to industries like solar, batteries and other renewable technologies.

“We can then make much more sophisticated designs and have complex geometries which improve performance for batteries and solar as well as reducing cost,” Mr Wilkinson said.

“The geometry of those two technologies (solar and batteries) very strongly determines the performance.

“So how far physically do ions in batteries have to move to charge or discharge? Or, in solar cells, what is the resistance of electrons moving through the solar cell?

“If we can make that really, really small, on a nanoscale, we can dramatically reduce that resistance or time to charge.”

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