Autonomous Vehicles

Intramotev is a St. Louis-based company founded in 2020 to develop autonomous, zero-emission rail solutions that decrease railway costs and promote environmental responsibility across a longstanding yet dated freight segment plagued by diesel pollution.

Today, the company shared video footage of its TugVolt battery electric railcar retrofit deployed at a calcium mine in Michigan.

TugVolt can be controlled from a smartphone and decouple from the consist (the group of railcars as a whole), and operate independently for first—and last-mile legs of trips on existing freight lines.

Although it’s been only less than a week since Tesla (TSLA) released its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) version 13 to early access beta testers, we’re witnessing a ton of testing already done on it.

According to FSD v13 testers, the system has improved even beyond what Tesla mentioned in the software’s release notes. FSD v13 has made Autopilot driving smoother multi-fold even compared to v12.

The current version with early access testers is FSD v13.2 (2024.39.10) which is a limited-release update. Tesla plans to roll out FSD v13.3 as a wide release but a solid timeline of this point-release update has yet to be announced by the tech automaker.

These things are everywhere in my neighborhood and even though I try to take transit (or walk) as much as possible, sometimes you a car is the best option to get where you're going and these are so much nicer than an Uber/Lyft/taxi. No surprise that ridership has exploded since they became accessible to the general public.

BYD are making giant strides to the point I believe they have a chance of making something good here, but it's way too early to tell. More competition in the space is good for everyone though.