sciencehabit writes: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has, for more than 20 years, pioneered collecting spectra from millions of astronomical objects, from nearby stars to supermassive black holes. But this year, the survey is making a change: Instead of employing a small team of technicians for the daily chore of plugging optical fibers into preprepared plates so that -- when placed in the telescope -- they collect light from exactly the right position in the sky, the SDSS is going robotic. For the project's upcoming fifth set of surveys, plug plates are being replaced by 500 tiny robot arms, each holding fiber tips, that patrol a small area of the telescope's focal plane. They can be reconfigured for a new sky map in 2 minutes. Although such robot spectrographs have been built before, the SDSS is part of a rush to retrofit robots to older telescopes so astronomers can grab spectra from the wealth of interesting objects that will soon be streaming from new imaging surveys.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Technology that harnesses wave energy through a "blowhole" is being tested at a remote Tasmanian island in a project backed by federal grants and investors. When the mostly above-water unit is connected in about a month, King Island in Bass Strait will be powered by three renewables -- wave, wind and solar. And there are hopes the project can be expanded across Australia's vast southern coastline.

Wave Swell Energy co-founder Tom Denniss says the pilot will provide crucial data about the system's potential. "It's very much like an artificial blowhole," he said. "There's a big underwater chamber that's open out the front, so the water is forced into the chamber. "It pushes that air back and forth. The movement of air that spins the turbine and produces electricity." Research by the peak scientific body estimates wave energy could contribute up to 11% of the nation's energy by 2050, the equivalent of a city the size of Melbourne. The boat-like structure can generate up to 200kW of power but there are plans for larger 1,000kW models.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After a year of working with businesses and getting feedback, Boston Dynamics is launching a new Spot revision, a long-awaited arm attachment, and some new features. Now, with the new "Spot Arm" -- a six-degrees-of-freedom gripper that can be mounted to the front of the robot -- Spot can actually do stuff and manipulate the environment around it. Boston Dynamics' latest video shows an arm-equipped Spot opening doors, picking up laundry, dragging around a cinderblock, and flipping switches and valves. Since this is a Boston Dynamics video, there's also a ton of fun footage like three Spots playing jump rope, planting a tree, and drawing the Boston Dynamics logo with a piece of chalk. The arm is not just a siloed device on top of Spot; any arm movement is coordinated with the whole body of the robot, just as a human's arm works. Boston Dynamics pointed to a 2013 video of the (much bigger) BigDog robot heaving a cinderblock across the room. This advanced "lift with your legs, put your back into it" whole-body movement is the core of Boston Dynamics' arm locomotion.

In the palm of the gripper is a 4K color camera, a ToF (Time of Flight) sensor for depth imaging, and LEDs for light. The camera is great to not only see what you're trying to pick up but also as a movable inspection camera that offers a lot more flexibility compared to the stationary face- and back-mounted cameras. The arm weighs 17.6 lbs (8kg) and with a half-meter extension can lift 11 lbs (5kg). The gripper's peak clamp force is 130N. That's far below the average human adult grip strength of 300N and puts Spot in the range of a frail senior citizen, but it's good enough to turn a doorknob. It's especially impressive that in this video, Spot demoed opening a smooth, round doorknob, not an easier-to-open ADA-compliant door handle, which is what most robot/door interactions focus on. It can even make sure the door doesn't hit it in the butt on the way out.

Just like for regular movement, controlling the arm via the tablet uses a user-friendly "supervised autonomy" system. You tell the robot what to grab, and it will figure out how to grab it using all the joints of the arm and legs. There's even a special "door opening" mode, where the user points at the doorknob, enters which side of the door the hinge is on, and Spot will do the rest. There's also an API for the arm control, allowing developers to make their own control interface. There's also a new version of Spot called "Spot Enterprise," which features the ability to self-charge via an included charging dock, where Spot can park itself on the charging dock when it is low on power. It takes about two hours to fully charge.

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from Bloomberg, written by Liam Denning and Elaine He: Electrifying U.S. vehicles wipes out the equivalent of our entire current power demand. The U.S. consumes a lot of energy; last year, about 100 quadrillion BTUs (equivalent to 17 billion barrels of oil; which, we'll admit, is only marginally less abstract). But only about a third of that is ultimately used in terms of actually lighting lights, turning wheels and so forth. The second law of thermodynamics means, for every unit of thermal energy we actually put to useful work, roughly another two end up wasted as heat. How we don't use energy is just as important to understand as how we use it. Here's a simplified version of a Sankey diagram from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory showing the various inputs to the U.S. energy system and where they end up.

Large-scale waste is unavoidable with a thermal energy system, or one where we mostly burn stuff or split atoms (97% of the inputs in 2019). Burning fossil fuels also generates the carbon emissions causing climate change; so wasted energy is a proxy for the damage being done (apart from nuclear power). In contrast, renewables such as wind, solar and hydropower capture energy directly from infinite sources. While a small amount is lost in transmission, the vast majority is used. So here's a thought experiment: What if the entire U.S. light-duty vehicle fleet (currently about 270 million cars and trucks) were electrified by 2030 and we expanded wind and solar generation at a rapid pace, while eliminating coal power, at the same time? The result is that we not only end up with a drop in U.S. carbon emissions of almost 30%, but also a far more efficient system overall.

"Until recently, it was unclear whether variable renewable energy, nuclear, or fossil fuel with carbon capture and storage would become the main form of generation in a decarbonized electricity system," argues a recently-published analysis titled Carbon-Neutral Pathways for the United States.

"The cost decline of variable renewable energy over the last few years, however, has definitively changed the situation."

Ars Technica reports: In many areas of the United States, installing a wind or solar farm is now cheaper than simply buying fuel for an existing fossil fuel-based generator. And that's dramatically changing the electricity market in the U.S. and requiring a lot of people to update prior predictions. That has motivated a group of researchers to take a new look at the costs and challenges of getting the entire U.S. to carbon neutrality.

By building a model of the energy market for the entire U.S., the researchers explored what it will take to get the country to the point where its energy use has no net emissions in 2050 — and they even looked at a scenario where emissions are negative. They found that, as you'd expect, the costs drop dramatically — to less than 1 percent of the GDP, even before counting the costs avoided by preventing the worst impacts of climate change. And, as an added bonus, we would pay less for our power...

The researchers estimate that the net cost of the transformation will be a total of $145 billion by 2050, which works out to be less than one-half percent of the GDP that year. That figure does include the increased savings from electrical heating and vehicles, which offset some of their costs. But it doesn't include the reduced costs from climate change or lower health care spending due to reduced fossil fuel use. These savings will be substantial, and they will almost certainly go well beyond offsetting the cost. Due to the reduced cost of renewable generation, the authors project that we'll spend less for electricity overall, as well... Part of the reason it is so cheap is because reaching the goal doesn't require replacing viable hardware. All of the things that need to be taken out of service, from coal-fired generators to gas hot-water heaters, have finite lifetimes. The researchers calculate that simply replacing everything with renewables or high-efficiency electric versions will manage the transition in sufficient time...

The scenarios with additional constraints produce some odd results as well. The only scenario in which nuclear power makes economic sense is the one in which land use is limited.

Jalopnik reports: The United States government operates a fleet of about 645,000 vehicles, from mail delivery trucks to military vehicles and passenger cars. On Monday, President Joe Biden announced that his administration intends to replace them all with American-made, electric alternatives...

In 2015, the government operated 357,610 gasoline vehicles and 3,896 electric ones; in 2019, those numbers grew to 368,807 and 4,475, respectively. That's excluding the tens of thousands of E-85 ["flex fuel"] and diesel-based vehicles on the road, which, together, comprise nearly a third of the 645,047 total. So, yeah, there's certainly a lot of work to do...
The Washington Post reports: The declaration is a boon to the fledgling electric vehicle industry, which has grown exponentially in the past decade but still represents less than 2 percent of automobiles sold in the United States... "It's important as a symbolic thing," said Timothy Lipman, co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley. "But I think it also will have a way of helping to jolt the industry forward at a time when it kind of needed that...."

One of the biggest issues: Just three automakers currently manufacture electric vehicles in the United States, and none of those cars meet Biden's criteria of being produced by union workers from at least 50 percent American-made materials. The closest is the Chevrolet Bolt, assembled at a General Motors plant in Lake Orion, Michigan. But most of that car's parts — including the battery, motor and drive unit — are produced overseas. But that could easily change, said Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry, labor and economics at the nonprofit Center for Automotive Research.

If Biden succeeds in making every car in the federal fleet electric, he would increase the total number of electric vehicles in the United States by more than 50 percent. "One of the big questions for companies is, 'Is the consumer there?' Well, [the government] is a big consumer," Dziczek said. "Now they know there's some solid demand from the government to support their early launches of new vehicles...." With 640,000 nonelectric vehicles, the federal fleet represents the annual output of about three or four automotive plants, Dziczek said. That's not exactly the million jobs Biden promised in his announcement Monday. But it might be sufficient to convince car manufacturers to change their supply chains or shift their production to U.S. facilities.

According to CEO Tim Cook, there are now more than 1 billion iPhones being used by customers around the world. The new milestone comes as the company earned over $100 billion in a single quarter for the first time in the company's history. 9to5Mac reports: Cook shared the new milestone in an earnings-focused interview with Reuters. The new metric is part of an overall increase of active devices around the world, reaching 1.65 billion compared to 1.5 billion this time last year: "Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook told Reuters in an interview that the company now has an active installed base of 1.65 billion devices, compared with 1.5 billion devices a year ago. Cook also said Apple now has an installed base of more than 1 billion iPhones, an increase over the 900 million the company most recently disclosed in 2019."

In the interview, he cites Apple's growth opportunity in China as a source of the company's success: "'We had two of the top three selling smartphones in urban China,' Cook told Reuters in an interview, adding that many of the company's other products and services also sold well. Cook said that Apple gained iPhone sales in China both from customers switching from rival Android devices as well as existing customers upgrading devices, but said 'upgraders in particular set an all-time record in China.'"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: When the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami ravaged Japan in 2011, ocean water flooded factories owned byRenesas Electronics Corp.Production at the swamped facilities ground to a halt -- a major hit for Renesas, of course, but also a devastating blow to the Japanese car industry, which depended on Renesas for semiconductors. Lacking chips for everything from transmissions to touchscreens, Honda, Nissan, and Toyota were forced to shut down or slow output for months. As the perils of just-in-time manufacturing and the dangers of relying on a single supplier for key components became obvious, automakers vowed to steer clear of similar snafus in the future.

Yet a decade later, the global auto industry finds itself in an almost identical predicament. The catalyst for the breakdown this time is a slower-moving natural disaster: the coronavirus pandemic, which has disrupted the supply chain for makers of the electronics that are the brains of modern cars. That left automakers -- which have long eschewed maintaining costly inventories of parts -- scrambling to secure those components when sales rebounded. The shortage could lead to more than $14 billion in lost revenue in the first quarter and some $61 billion for the year, advisory firm AlixPartners predicts. The industry is "wedded to 'lean manufacturing,'" says Tor Hough, founder of Elm Analytics, an industry consultant near Detroit. "They have gotten in this mode of just managing for next week or next month."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: General Motors said Thursday it would phase out petroleum-powered cars and trucks and sell only vehicles that have zero tailpipe emissions by 2035, a seismic shift by one of the world's largest automakers that makes billions of dollars today from gas-guzzling pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles. The announcement could put pressure on automakers around the world to make similar commitments.

G.M. said that its decision to switch to electric cars was part of a broader plan to become carbon neutral by 2040. Its announcement came a day after Mr. Biden signed an executive order to step up the fight against climate change, including a directive for the federal government to electrify its large vehicle fleet. "General Motors is joining governments and companies around the globe working to establish a safer, greener and better world," Mary T. Barra, G.M.'s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. "We encourage others to follow suit and make a significant impact on our industry and on the economy as a whole."

G.M. said it would increase the use of renewable energy, and would eliminate or offset emissions from its factories, buildings, vehicles and other sources. The company plans to spend $27 billion over the next five years to introduce 30 electric vehicles, including an electric Hummer pickup truck that it expects to start delivering to customers later this year. The company said it was working with the Environmental Defense Fund to build charging stations for electric cars and to convince drivers to switch to electric cars.

Ryan Smith, writing at AnandTech: Following plans first unveiled last year during the launch of their DG1 GPU, Intel sends word this morning that the first Iris Xe video cards have finally begun shipping to OEMs. Based on the DG1 discrete GPU that's already being used in Intel's Iris Xe MAX laptop accelerators, the Iris Xe family of video cards are their desktop counterpart, implementing the GPU on a traditional video card. Overall, with specifications almost identical to Xe MAX, Intel is similarly positioning these cards for the entry-level market, where they are being released as an OEM-only part. As a quick refresher, the DG1 GPU is based on the same Xe-LP graphics architecture as Tiger Lake's integrated GPU. In fact, in broad terms the DG1 can be thought of as a nearly 1-to-1 discrete version of that iGPU, containing the same 96 EUs and 128-bit LPDDR4X memory interface as Tiger Lake itself. Consequently, while DG1 is a big first step for Intel -- marking the launch of their first discrete GPU of the modern era -- the company is planning very modestly for this generation of parts. The first DG1 GPUs were shipped in the fall as part of Intel's Iris Xe MAX graphics solution for laptops. At the time, Intel also indicated that a desktop card for OEMs would also be coming in 2021, and now, right on schedule, those desktop cards have begun shipping out. Further reading: Intel's Iris Xe DG1 Graphics Cards Not Compatible with AMD, Older Systems.

Razer's Viper 8K is a refresh of the 2019 true ambidextrous Viper. For the most part, it's identical and is now available at the same $79 asking price, but it has some key upgrades for competitive gamers who are hoping that tech might help them get the edge over their opponents. From a report: First off, Razer now includes the Focus Plus 20,000DPI sensor used in many of its other 2020 mice, along with the latest generation of optical switches that have a more tactile click feel, according to the company (although it didn't stand out as noticeable to me when I tested the mouse). The biggest news is that, according to Razer, the newly revised Viper can achieve the fastest polling rate of any mouse currently available: up to 8,000Hz -- far higher than the industry standard of 1,000Hz. The polling rate measures how often per second the mouse tells your computer where it's located on-screen. The more frequent the polling is, the smoother your mouse tracking can be. In the case of Razer's new Viper 8K, an 8,000Hz polling rate can deliver a whopping 8,000 pings to your PC per second, while reducing the response time of those pings from one millisecond to just an eighth of one millisecond. On paper, it seems really impressive.

Thelasko shares a report from CNET: Navistar, the company formerly known as International Harvester, announced on Wednesday that it's partnering with GM and OneH2 for a "complete solution for customer implementation of a zero-emission long-haul system," which is a fancy way of saying an entire ecosystem devoted to electric trucking. The group will work together on the trucks themselves, in addition to the ancillary stuff required to keep them operating.

It starts with the trucks, which in this case will be International RH Series hydrogen fuel-cell electric trucks. Each RH Series semi will get two GM Hydrotec fuel cell power cubes, each of which contains more than 300 hydrogen fuel cells in addition to the management systems that run the whole show. Navistar plans to have these trucks ready for commercial purchase in the 2024 model year, with test models operating in a pilot phase by the end of 2022. The hope is that these trucks will pack a range of 500 miles or more with a fueling time of less than 15 minutes and Navistar hopes that its propulsion system will sport a per-mile cost similar to diesel.

When it comes to the fuel itself, that's where OneH2 comes into play. Navistar will rely on the company for the production, storage and safe delivery of the compressed hydrogen required to power the trucks. To deepen the partnership, Navistar announced that it will purchase a minority stake in OneH2, as well. OneH2 doesn't just deal in gas-station-style fill up locations; the company has a mobile fueling solution, too, which should help in the early stages as the US' hydrogen fuel infrastructure is still very much in its infancy. [...] Navistar has chosen J.B. Hunt Transport to be in charge of its vehicles during the pilot program. J.B. Hunt, a name you've likely seen on the highway, will put Navistar's GM-powered International models on dedicated routes to see how these vehicles perform in place of traditional diesel-powered semi trucks.

MojoKid writes: This morning, NVIDIA lifted its embargo on the performance and experiences of new GeForce RTX 30 Series-powered gaming laptops. Thinner, higher-performance form factors aren't the only features NVIDIA is touting with this launch. A number of new laptops will also sport 1440p, high refresh rate IPS displays like the MSI GS66 Stealth with a GeForce RTX 3080 mobile GPU tested at HotHardware. This machine features a 15.6-inch IPS, 1440p panel with a 240Hz refresh rate and G-Sync support. However, the biggest difference between these new laptop GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs and their desktop counterparts, are their core counts. Desktop GeForce RTX 3080, 3070, and 3060 series GPUs have 8,704, 5,888, and 3,584 CUDA cores, respectively, whereas these new laptop offerings have 6,144, 5,120, and 3,840 -- it is only the RTX 3060 laptop GPU that has more cores than its similar-branded desktop counterpart.

In the benchmarks, with a retail-ready Alienware m15 R4 gaming laptop powered by a GeForce RTX 3070 mobile GPU, the new platform offered sizable performance gains of 15-25% over the previous generation RTX 20 series mobile offering, and an even stronger performance lift with ray tracing enabled, sometimes in excess of 40%. NVIDIA GeForce 30 Series laptops are in production now and available in the next few weeks from major OEMs like Alienware, ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte and others.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Amazon is enabling a new feature today that allows Alexa to proactively complete tasks around the house, such as turning off lights, based on your habits and frequent requests. Alexa has been able to sense these habits and ask about them since 2018 -- the company calls them "hunches" -- but before this update, Alexa would ask permission before acting on something like lowering the thermostat before you went to bed. If the new proactive hunches are enabled, though, Alexa will skip asking for permission for a task and just do it.

While proactive hunches seem like they could make Alexa a lot more useful, having granular controls over what Alexa can automatically act on will be important. An Amazon support article seems to suggest you can select what types of hunches Alexa can complete on its own, but we've reached out to Amazon for more information on how much you can customize proactive hunches. In addition, Amazon is rolling out its Guard Plus security subscription service. "The service can alert you if Alexa picks up on certain types of sounds in your home and offers access to human agents who can call emergency services on your behalf, similar to ADT," reports The Verge. It'll cost $4.99 per month.

The company is also rolling out an energy dashboard via the Alexa app that can monitor and estimate how much power compatible devices connected to Alexa use if their manufacturers support it.

Dan Riccio has served as senior VP of engineering overseeing all of Apple's hardware since 2012, but now he's stepping back from that role. A press release revealed he's focusing on a mysterious "new project" at Apple and will still report directly to CEO Tim Cook. Engadget reports: Exactly what that new project is remains unclear, although recent rumors have pointed to Apple's plans for augmented and virtual reality or building an electric car. Of course, maybe it's a differently color iPhone or an even-more-expensive pair of noise-cancelling headphones. Riccio previously lead the iPad team before taking over as senior VP, and oversaw projects all the way up to the recently-launched AirPods Max.

Replacing Riccio on Apple's executive team is John Ternus, who has been the VP of hardware engineering since 2013, and is noted as a key figure in Apple's rollout of its new M1 CPUs. Meanwhile, Riccio will still hold the title of vice president of engineering and "play an instrumental role in shaping the future of Apple's products."

Renewable energy became the biggest source of electricity in the European Union in 2020, beating fossil fuels for the first time. Germany and Spain also hit that milestone individually last year -- so did the UK, which officially left the EU in January 2020. From a report: Renewables powered 38 percent of electricity in the EU last year, according to a report released today by energy think tanks Ember and Agora Energiewende. That gives renewable energy a narrow lead over fossil fuel-fired generation, which accounted for 37 percent of Europe's electricity. The remaining quarter comes from nuclear energy.

The rise of renewables is good news for the health of the planet. Still, renewable energy will need to grow at an even faster rate to stave off a future with more climate change-induced disasters. "Renewables overtaking fossils is an important milestone in Europe's clean energy transition. However, let's not be complacent," Patrick Graichen, director of Agora Energiewende, said in a statement. "Post-pandemic recovery [programs] need to go hand-in-hand with accelerated climate action."

Reuters reports on big changes at BP (the company formerly known as British Petroleum): Its geologists, engineers and scientists have been cut to less than 100 from a peak of more than 700 a few years ago, company sources told Reuters, part of a climate change-driven overhaul triggered last year by CEO Bernard Looney. "The winds have turned very chilly in the exploration team since Looney's arrival. This is happening incredibly fast," a senior member of the team told Reuters.

Hundreds have left the oil exploration team in recent months, either transferred to help develop new low-carbon activities or laid off, current and former employees said. The exodus is the starkest sign yet from inside the company of its rapid shift away from oil and gas, which will nevertheless be its main source of cash to finance a switch to renewables for at least the next decade. BP declined to comment on the staffing changes, which have not been publicly disclosed... Looney made his intentions clear internally and externally by lowering BP's production targets and becoming the first oil major CEO to promote this as a positive to investors seeking a long-term vision for a lower-carbon economy.

BP is cutting some 10,000 jobs, around 15% of its workforce, under Looney's restructuring, the most aggressive among Europe's oil giants including Royal Dutch Shell and Total. The 50-year-old, a veteran oil engineer who previously headed the oil and gas exploration and production division, aims to cut output by 1 million barrels per day, or 40%, over the next decade while growing renewable energy output 20 fold.
Elsewhere Reuters reports that due to the pandemic, acquisitions of new onshore and offshore exploration licences for the top five Western energy companies "dropped to the lowest in at least five years," citing data from Oslo-based consultancy Rystad Energy.

After their house was vandalized, long-time Slashdot reader lsllll needs some help finding a battery-powered, wifi-enabled camera that can dump motion-detected videos to a local server: There are some nice cameras out there that'll work for nearly 5 months off a rechargeable battery. You can even pair them with a solar panel which would keep them constantly topped off. But none of them offer anything other than local storage (free on SD card) or in the cloud (subscription).

Obviously, being a programmer and a sysadmin, I realize that the effort to dump a video to a cloud service and opening a connection to a local FTP/SMB server require the same bandwidth, battery usage. So this decision to not support local FTP/SMB servers must be intentional and the way everything is going nowadays: juice the customers for as much money as you can after they've purchased your product.

The question is, are the any cameras out there that run on rechargeable batteries, support WiFi, and dump videos to a local server?
Share your suggestions in the comments!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Electric vehicles are close to the "tipping point" of rapid mass adoption thanks to the plummeting cost of batteries, experts say. Global sales rose 43% in 2020, but even faster growth is anticipated when continuing falls in battery prices bring the price of electric cars dipping below that of equivalent petrol and diesel models, even without subsidies. The latest analyses forecast that to happen some time between 2023 and 2025.

The tipping point has already been passed in Norway, where tax breaks mean electric cars are cheaper. The market share of battery-powered cars soared to 54% in 2020 in the Nordic country, compared with less than 5% in most European nations. Prof Tim Lenton, at the University of Exeter, said: "There's been a tipping point in one country, Norway, and that's thanks to some clever and progressive tax incentives. Then consumers voted with their wallets."

Data from Lenton's latest study showed that in 2019, electric vehicles in Norway were 0.3% cheaper and had 48% market share. In the UK, where electric cars were 1.3% more expensive, market share was just 1.6%. Once the line of price parity was crossed, Lenton said, "bang -- sales go up. We were really struck by how non-linear the effect seems to be." BloombergNEF's analysis predicts lithium-ion battery costs will fall to the extent that electric cars will match the price of petrol and diesel cars by 2023, while Lenton suggests 2024-2025. McKinsey's Global Energy Perspective 2021, published on January 15, forecasts that "electric vehicles are likely to become the most economic choice in the next five years in many parts of the world."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: The DMC DeLorean has been out of production for almost 40 years, but now we've learned that the iconic vehicle might be coming back as an electric car. In 1995, Stephen Wynne bought the company's old inventory and trademark to relaunch the brand based in Texas. At first, the plan was to bring back the same vehicle with more modern technology in low volume. For the past 5 years, the company pushed for the adoption of new rules for low volume vehicle production with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). These new rules were finally recently adopted, but the delay was so long that it complicated DeLorean's plans. The engine that they plan to use is not going to be compliant with emission standards starting in 2022 and the landscape has changed significantly.

In a new blog post, the company is now hinting that going electric with the DeLorean: "That said, with EV's becoming more mainstream, we've been considering switching to an all-electric as the future. It certainly makes for an easier path through emissions maze which still looms large over any internal combustion engine. While an electric Cobra or Morgan may be a little extreme for their potential market, we've already seen that an EV DeLorean -- as we displayed at the 2012 New York International Auto Show -- is not such an 'out there' idea." The company hints at being in the process of looking to secure financing to bring an electric DeLorean and says "stay tuned."