Carmakers struggling with parts shortages have recently faced intensifying headwinds, including soaring energy and borrowing costs. While the growth in demand for battery cars is good, SMMT warned that corporate buyers accounted for two-thirds of new EV registrations.
The UK needs to convince more personal drivers to buy an EV if it wants to meet its temperature marks, including by speeding up the installation of charging points, SMMT said. The group also condemned the UK’s plan to subject EVs to road taxes from 2025, saying the move would penalize customers of zero-emissions vehicles.
The shift was inevitable. The question of the pace, Mike Hawes, SMMT’s chief executive officer, told reporters.
Tesla Inc.’s Model Y and Model 3 were the two most prominent electric cars in the UK last year, followed by Kia Corp.’s e-Niro. SMMT expects around 1.8 million new-vehicle rosters this year as supply chains stabilize and the global semiconductor shortage improves.
Automakers had their most destructive year of UK sales in three decades, with only electric vehicles providing a bright spot.
Battery-powered cars accounted for around 17% of new-vehicle rosters last year, surpassing diesel for the first time, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders said Thursday. That didn’t stop shipments from falling 2% to 1.61 million — the lower level since 1992.
Carmakers struggling with parts shortages have recently faced intensifying headwinds, including soaring energy and borrowing costs. While the growth in demand for battery cars is promising, SMMT warned that corporate buyers accounted for two-thirds of new EV registrations.
The UK needs to convince more private drivers to buy an EV if it wants to meet its temperature targets, including by speeding up the installation of charging points, SMMT said. The group also condemned the UK’s plan to subject EVs to road taxes from 2025, saying the move would penalize customers of zero-emissions vehicles.
“Right now is the time of ideas and experiments, and some quickly become part of industrial manufacturing. Our time is typical for people divided into doubters and believers in terms of new technology,” says Sami Myllymäki, Doctor of Engineering at the University of Oulu.
The team at Oulu is a team of believers. They’re looking at using wood-derived nano cells to create printed electronics: electronics printed onto materials, like any text or image. They can print on a range of cheaper and more flexible materials than traditional ones, thus more accessible to mass production—usually, electronics designed on silicon or other semiconductors.
As a natural material, using nitrocellulose instead of plastics significantly benefits the environment. It’s easy to recycle, too, as it is water-soluble. It is a light, strong material and readily available, Myllymäki says. Eventually, inventions like these enable nature to complete with technology:
“It’s as if we make a living organism from wood fabric, and it remains a permanent part of our environment,” Myllymäki concludes.
Chips, those thin slivers of silicon covered in billions of tiny buttons. They’re in everything from cars to smartphones. Unfortunately, they also contain materials, such as plastic, that do not mix well with the environment. That means a pile of old chips from disused electronics defunct. In an ideal world, we’d make the bases of these chips from another substance, something natural more quickly. Sound familiar?
A study team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has created a biodegradable chip out of wood – or, well, the components of a computer chip from nano cell derived from wood. Their chips work just like ordinary chips but without the usual plastics and other materials that can lead to environmental pollution.
Nano cells are a support material for solar cells and other electronic devices, but this is the first time in high-frequency radio circuits. Biodegradable chips broken down by common fungi could solve the problem of piles of old electronics decomposing in landfills worldwide.
Compared to traditional ones, the new chip is cheaper and expected to be more sustainable in terms of the natural resources for the semiconductor industry, says Zhenqiang Jack Ma, an electrical and computer engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
