IO’s Week: Hey boomer, we’re going electric!

In our Sunday newsletter, we, as editors, reflect on the past seven days. We do this on the initiative of our cartoonist Albert Jan Rasker. He chooses a subject, draws a picture, and we take it from there.

Bernd Maier-Leppla’s column about this year’s IAA Mobility Show in Munich inspired cartoonist Albert Jan Rasker this week. In short, how much the legacy car manufacturers keep trying to improve their combustion engines, the future is electric. Not hybrid, not hydrogen-powered, but battery-electric, that is.

Also, a growing percentage of the cars we will use to keep moving ourselves will originate from China. Now already, every 5th car is already a Chinese car. People tend to forget that Polestar, Volvo, and Smart are now running off Chinese assembly lines. And while the IAA is a remnant of the old German car glory (recently moved from Frankfurt to Munich), we can already conclude that if the Chinese had not been at the show, the IAA would have been an extremely dull event, Bernd Maier-Leppla writes.

Thanks to two student teams, there was more mobility news last week. First, there was the TUfast Eco team from Munich who broke the world record for the longest-range electric car in the world. The team drove more than 2,573 kilometers on a single battery charge. Impressive! Then, we saw the Eindhoven University Solar Team students present their off-road solar car. Also: impressive!

For both articles, we asked our AI service to compose a video. You can find them in the articles. They are fully AI-generated and you’ll see more of them with our articles in the coming period. We’re curious about what you think of them, please let us know.

Here’s the one about the Eindhoven team:

Here’s what else caught our eyes this week:

With its Molten Salt Technology, Brabetech wants to contribute to solving grid congestion

Humidity, the new source of green energy alongside solar and wind

TNO spin-off AIKON Health: monitoring health of cardiac patients with biosensors

In the series ‘NLR People’, we show you who the experts at the Royal Netherlands Aerospace Centre are, and what they are working on behind the scenes.

124 lightyears away, it smells like Earth: an exoplanet possibly with a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a water ocean-covered surface

Data centers of the future are sustainable and fast, thanks to photonics

China after Corona is about new smart services, facial recognition as a key to everything, and the emergence of the influencers’ town

Urban Nature-Based Solutions: A hidden key to carbon neutrality

Sensing light beyond the visible: imec finds a way to give autonomous cars sight, even through smoke and fog

And here you can find the rest of the articles we wrote last week. Have a nice, sunny week!