Die CES 2022 findet zwar statt, aber viele Aussteller haben abgesagt. Und auf einmal ist die Show eine Art Automesse. Wir haben uns angesehen, was die Hersteller, die dennoch zur Messe nach Las Vegas gekommen sind, mitgebracht haben.
The ability to ‘refuel’ at home can make going electric a lot easier – but there are some hurdles for electric vehicle drivers to get their heads around first
Access to charging is one of the most common concerns drivers have about electric vehicles, but it’s often more convenient than they imagine. A home chargepoint effectively turns your driveway or garage into your own personal fuel station, and these are the locations where most charging takes place. It’s an important detail to get right, with some remaining support in place for company car drivers.
How do company car drivers install a home charging point?
Home chargepoints are already required by law for new-build houses in England, and similar regulations are on the cards in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. With growing numbers of plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles on the road, existing regulations have made it progressively easier to retrofit existing properties and it's become a routine job for electricians.
Lease companies usually enable chargepoints to be added like an optional extra when the vehicle is ordered, either funded by the employer as part of the contract or paid for separately by the driver. Unusually, home charging equipment isn’t classed as a Benefit-in-Kind, so there’s no tax liability if employers choose to cover those costs for company car drivers.
To make life easier, home chargepoints don’t require planning permission, provided they’re serving an off-street parking space or garage and the building isn’t listed, and electricians should be able to price up any required upgrades or extra wiring early on in that process.
Unfortunately, financial support has waned. Drivers who have an electric or plug-in hybrid vehicle assigned to them for at least six months can claim up to 75% of the cost of installing home chargepoints, to a maximum of £350 per unit – and that includes company cars, salary sacrifice schemes and rentals. However, funding is now focused on flats and rental properties, which means homeowners in houses and bungalows are no longer eligible.
Drivers without off-street parking have fewer options. Home chargepoints can’t be installed within two metres of a public highway, so vehicles would have to be charged from a domestic three-pin or industrial CEEform socket, and the rules about trailing cables across pavements differ between councils. Government funding is available to authorities to install on-street residential charging, but it isn’t widespread yet.
What expenses can I claim for charging at home?
Reimbursement for electric vehicles is a little more complicated than it is for their fuel burning counterparts. HMRC doesn’t consider electricity to be a fuel, and the cost of business journeys can be hard to separate from the rest of the household’s utility bill. Drivers and employers have to prove how that energy has been used, otherwise the expenses claim can be classed as additional, taxable, income.
The easiest way to avoid any administrative headaches is to use HMRC’s mileage rates instead. Drivers can claim 9p per mile for business trips in electric vehicles, regardless of size, while plug-in hybrid rates are based on the size of the petrol or diesel engine. The latter should be more than enough to cover the cost of the fuel and electricity used, especially if most of the journey is on battery power.
Better data is also helping. Since 2019, all grant-funded chargepoints have had to include a data connection and the ability to log usage, and this now applies to all new home and workplace installations. It’s a first step towards an energy system which will be able to respond to spikes in demand by delaying or pausing charging sessions, but it also means some can provide usage data to either a web portal or smartphone app.
In turn, this has enabled modern chargepoints be integrated with a payroll system, accurately recording your electricity costs and automatically paying you back as part of your monthly wages. However, not all of them are designed for company car drivers, where that energy is used for both private and business journeys.
Investigators said initial evidence pointed to suicide, but the probe had not been concluded. Local newspaper Helmstedter Nachrichten reported the dead person was a VW employee who had done business with the Bosnian supplier group and was being investigated for eavesdropping.
Skilled in the conciseness of Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, the congressperson said all she needed to say in the short time she was given at the DNC.
I went to a self-breakthrough workshop in Beijing to decipher the country’s tech culture. I left with a transformed vision of my Chinese American self.
Battery makers are working to reduce use of the expensive metals while Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently urged miners to produce more nickel, warning the current cost of batteries remained a big hurdle to the company's growth.
Taiwan has faced existential conflict with China for its entire existence and has been targeted by China's state-sponsored hackers for years. But an investigation by one Taiwanese security firm has revealed just how deeply a single group of Chinese hackers was able to penetrate an industry at the core of the Taiwanese economy, pillaging practically its entire semiconductor industry.
At the Black Hat security conference today, researchers from the Taiwanese cybersecurity firm CyCraft plan to present new details of a hacking campaign that compromised at least seven Taiwanese chip firms over the past two years. The series of deep intrusions—called Operation Skeleton Key due to the attackers' use of a "skeleton key injector" technique—appeared aimed at stealing as much intellectual property as possible, including source code, software development kits, and chip designs. And while CyCraft has previously given this group of hackers the name Chimera, the company's new findings include evidence that ties them to mainland China and loosely links them to the notorious Chinese state-sponsored hacker group Winnti, also sometimes known as Barium, or Axiom.
Die Corona-App selbst ist zwar datenschutzfreundlich aufgebaut, dennoch bleiben Infizierte nicht immer anonym. Grund ist eine Telefon-Hotline und Probleme bei der Digitalisierung im Gesundheitswesen.
On the app, users drape themselves in the trappings of Black culture—and steal the viral spotlight. It’s exploitation at its most refined and disturbing.
Neuer Bosch-Antrieb, MX-Laufradmix, solide Ausstattung: Die neue E-MTB-Marke Swype will mit starken Bikes zu fairen Preisen und einem besonderen Service- und Vertriebskonzept den Markt aufmischen.
The 2019 Bentley Continental GT has recently stepped out of the auto show realm and into the real world. We've brought along a fresh example of this, with the Grand Tourer having been spotted in London.
As you can imagine, the lavish coupe caused quite a stir. After all, its elegant shapes, which have been created using aluminum superforming techniques, simply can't be ignored.
The standard palette of ... (continue reading >>)
Das Thema Handelskrieg wird immer lauter, beinahe täglich liest man neue Nachrichten. Freitag traten die Gegenzölle der EU in Kraft und nebenbei kündigt Trump schon die nächsten Zölle gegen China an. Als hätte der Präsident mittlerweile Freude an dem Spielchen. So droht er auch weiterhin deutschen Autobauern mit weiteren Zöllen. Beim Warten auf die nächste Stufe des Trump´schen Handelskrieges ist aktuell der VW Discounter MF5WHDdie richtige Wahl
Die Discounter von Morgan Stanley handeln Sie ab einem Ordervolumen von 500 Euro bei flatex kostenfrei. Hier finden Sie die Aktion des Online Brokers.
Lesen Sie auch unsere spannenden Beiträge vom Wochenende:
Ergänzend blicken wir auf den Kommentar der Wisdom Tree-Experten zu den aktuellen Entwicklungen bei der OPEC:
OPEC hat wieder einmal unter Erwartung geliefert. Die Auswirkungen sollten sich preislich positiv auswirken. Alles, was sie vereinbart hatten, war, auf Konzernebene wieder die 100 prozentige Konformität zu erreichen, das heißt 1,2 Mio. Barrel pro Tag weniger als im Oktober 2016. Das bewegt die Gesamtproduktion von OPEC kaum.
Die Ölmärkte dürften daher weiterhin angespannt bleiben. Sie waren bei den tatsächlichen Zahlen sehr zurückhaltend und scheinen einzelne Länderziele aufgegeben zu haben. Es wurden keine Angaben darüber gemacht, wer den Fehlbetrag ausgleichen wird. Die Märkte erwarteten größere Produktionssteigerungen. Dadurch dürften die Preise steigen.
Seit rund zwei Wochen ist die neue Datenschutzgrundverodnung nun in Kraft gesetzt. Erste Klagen ließen nicht lang auf sich warten. Das sorgt für Verunsicherung bei Unternehmen und Verbrauchern. Continental zieht jetzt die Reißleine.
The lowest point hits us about 5 am. Frozen legs, numb toes and crooked backs. For the past eight hours we’ve been huddled in sleeping bags and bivvy bags, willing the sun to rise. There are still two hours to go. Needless to say, this wasn’t how we’d imagined this trip.
A now annual tradition
It has become something of a tradition that once a year Julian, who works in the marketing department at SCOTT, and I set off on our bikes to discover somewhere new. The premise is pretty simple: do our best to avoid convention and get off-the-beaten track. The first of our trips was four years ago when we unearthed singletrack heaven at Singltrek pod Smrkem as we traversed Poland and the Czech Republic. The following year was our inaugural E-MTB quickie in the Stubai Alps, followed 12 months later by a two-wheeled tourist trip around Rome. This year decreed Trentino, or more specifically Monte Calisio, where our buddy Felix joined us for bike-packing and bivvy-bagging. Might sound a bit #BrokebackMountain, but it was more survival than sensual.
Bikepacking 2.0
Successful bikepacking trips are reliant on a few key ingredients: having the right equipment is a good place to start, along with experience and selecting the right season (in terms of climate). We had unwittingly made some grave errors in our absence of planning; it turns out there isn’t perpetual warmth in the south, especially not after sunset – which, coincidentally, is why the first ingredient is top of the list. Any self-aware packer will place great emphasis on blissfully packing a decent sleeping bag, roll mat and even dry wood in order to get a fire started. None of us owned any special frame bags for bikepacking so we fashioned carriers on our handlebars for the sleeping bags. Each allocated things to carry; I’d been put in charge of cooking paraphernalia. My choice of a mini gas canister was met with snorts of derision from Julian. We reasoned that a quick detour to the nearest petrol station should solve the issue – it didn’t. Nor did the longer detour to Decathlon. Turns out that gas canisters have an even more perplexing range of ‘standards’ than the bike industry.
Fortunately, we’ve got an ace up our novice bike-packing sleeves: instead of the customary dropper bar, rigid fork set-up for a trip like this, we’ve got powerful SCOTT E-Mountainbikes, which look set to majorly increase the fun we’ll get on climbs as well as the descents.
If it were summer we’d all be doing it!
Scaling history on the climbs
This precise mountain is known as ‘Argentario’ to the locals given its history as a silver mine until the 15th century. Silver, which translates as ‘argento’ in Italian, was a key commodity for Tyrol and Merano. The mining industry clearly left its mark here; the gravel access roads are a remnant of the heavy-duty work that went on here, and as we pedal we keep passing tunnel entrances built into the mountainside and plateau.
Make your bed, now lie in it
We reach the summit after an hour of fairly leisurely Eco-mode riding, with some sections ridden in Trail mode. Up here we’re met by the plateau with a lot of holes and grooves, a littering of trees and some spectacular views. Time for us novices to find a suitable sleeping patch. We select a sheltered pace, out of the wind with a breath-taking view towards the East. The general consensus is positive; tomorrow morning we count on awaking to the warmth of the sun.
Refuel and heat up – nothing else matters on a night like this.
Back to basics
Naturally there’s a dearth of Wifi in our makeshift hotel, but even on this mountain peak there’s a great 4G connection. Yet instead of updating our Instagram stories, we’ve got other, more primitive priorities like making a fire. For which we need dry wood, and plenty of it to get us through the many, quite frankly daunting, hours of darkness ahead. Based on the numbness of our toes, the choice of cleated shoes is a rookie error that we won’t be making again.
Cleats + snow = frozen toes!
The longest night of our lives
Away from the cosiness of joggers and Netflix, we’re sitting around the fire, philosophising over pasta and pesto. The self-imposed weight restrictions for the ride had put paid to my pleas to bring a bottle of red wine, but now they’re all regretting it too. After three toasty hours next to the fire we decide to crawl into our respective sleeping bags and bivvy bags. Felix and I have both brought our own, while Julian borrowed ‘a really great one’ from a well-meaning friend. Another rookie error! No longer such a fine specimen, his rather anaemic sleeping bag is clearly past its best and has visibly shed most of its thermal interior over the past decade. Not the best case when the outside temperature is -4°C and there’s a clear sky. Despondent and shivering, Julian lay down between the two of us, encasing his upper body in one down jacket and his legs in another.
A good, long sleep in your own bed is an overlooked luxury, which is confirmed by the intrusive cold we encounter during this night. With minimal roll mats and no real pillows, we’re all restlessly awake by 5 am. There are still two hours to go until sunrise.
It’ll be warm once the sun hits … or not.
The sun’s rays aren’t the first thing to warm us up; that’ll be the freshly done mocha pot and steaming coffee. Once the caffeine starts to coarse through our bloodstream and activate our synapses we muster the energy to repack the equipment in the bags and load up the bikes. The frozen displays on the bikes are the last remaining evidence of the cold night we’ve just had.
The cold is rapidly forgotten as we drop onto the trail, and our senses are wide awake. The narrow trail is full of tight, twisty turns, and is majorly exposed at times. Running down the south-facing side of Monte Calisio, it’s the sort of techy trail that’d require some handling on a regular mountain bike, but imagine a heavy backpack and fully loaded E-MTBs; it’s a full-on challenge, but one that we’re embracing.
The cold is rapidly forgotten as we drop onto the trail, and our senses are wide awake. The narrow trail is full of tight, twisty turns, and is majorly exposed at times. Running down the south-facing side of Monte Calisio, it’s the sort of techy trail that’d require some handling on a regular mountain bike, but imagine a heavy backpack and fully loaded E-MTBs; it’s a full-on challenge, but one that we’re embracing.
In a sublime ode to the Vertriders, we find ourselves endo’ing our way down the trail, turning with skills, on the early steep parts before it gets smoother, faster and more flowing. The quicker we go, the more the nominally attached sleeping bag hurls its weight back and forth across the handlebars. Fortunately the bikes hold their line brilliantly and the 700-metre drop of altitude is ticked off all too quickly.
South-facing trails FTW! Hot hot heat as we navigate the techy descent in the sun.
Back on the valley floor we treat ourselves to a cappuccino and a reflection on the past few hours. While we reason that it’d have been far easier in summer, we know that the experience took us to the edge of our comfort zone (and even beyond in the case of Julian’s sleeping bag) so it’s certainly going to have embedded itself into our memories. And if it was easy, where would be the fun in that?
BMW's new flagship coupé has been spied testing on the Nurburgring again; it's due to go on sale in 2018
The reborn BMW 8 Series convertible has been spotted testing at the Nurburgring for the second time, as engineers prepare it for market launch in 2018.
This latest sighting offers the best glimpse of the car's front bumper design, which features three openings, as well as its trapezoidal exhaust surrounds and heavily raked rear.
BMW’s flagship model is a two-door coupé version of the 7 Series saloon, in much the same way as the 4 Series and 3 Series are related. A convertible sibling, spied previously, will join it, as will an M8-badged performance flagship.
The 8 Series coupé and convertible will indirectly replace the 6 Series coupé, which will finish production in 2018. The 6 Series convertible will then be replaced by the 8 Series convertible the following year.
The final 6 Series variant, the Gran Coupé, despite running out at the same time as the convertible, is unconfirmed for replacement, but could be replaced with another 6 Series Gran Coupé.
Meanwhile, the 5 Series GT will be replaced later this year by a 6 Series GT, with an inside source describing it as "sleeker and sportier" than the current model.
It might not be the end of the road for the coupé and convertible 6 Series variants though; BMW is still undecided as to whether direct replacements for the two will be introduced.
The long-rumoured 8 Series will feature the same top-end technologies found in the 7 Series, including the latest and next-generation semi-autonomous features.
Being so closely related to the 7 Series, it’s likely that the 8 Series will share engines with its saloon sibling. This means that an iPerformance-badged plug-in hybrid will feature in the range, as well as the entry-level 3.0-litre six-cylinder diesel found in the 7 Series and a more performance-orientated 4.4-litre V8 from the 750i xDrive, accompanied by all-wheel drive. A V12-engined model will come later in the car’s life cycle.
The naming structure of the 8 Series is expected to mirror that of the 7 Series after the first digit, so the 830d is likely to kick off the range.
I Stockholms innerstad öppnas nu ett antal enkelriktade gator för cykling mot trafiken.
– Vi tar bort enkelriktningen men man tillåts inte köra in med motorfordon, säger Per-Åke Tjärnberg, projektledare på trafikkontoret, till Stockholm Direkt.
Ingenting för den som är ostadig på benen eller har anlag för klaustrofobi. På Gruvmuseets nya permanenta utställning i Falu gruva får besökare känna på hur det var att arbeta i gruvan: hur tungt var det att klättra på gruvstegarna, hur var det för fältskären att såga i ett människoben? SvD:s Eva Bäckstedt har prövat.
Unga har dålig koll på lån, försäkringar och levnadskostnader - och deras föräldrar med. Det framgår av två omfattande undersökningar om svenskarnas kunskaper i vardagsekonomi.
No less than six years have passed since the Google Self-Driving Car Project started testing on public roads. During this time span, the fleet of vehicles that make up the project drove 1,419,672 miles (2,284,740 kilometers) in autonomous mode.
The number mentioned above pales in comparison to the three million simulated miles (4.828 million kilometers) Google’s cars drive each and every day. The question is, though, what exactl... (continue reading >>)
TID FÖR KLARSPRÅK. Hur går vi vidare efter terrorattentatet i Paris? Lösningen är utökad yttrandefrihet och mer satir – om allt och alla. Det skriver den holländske statsvetaren Cas Mudde i en uppgörelse med dem som säger sig vara Charlie, men inte är det.
Den digitala kassaboken Tink tar in 27 miljoner kronor i riskkapital. Pengarna kommer från finansnestorn Sven Hagströmer, förre Avanza-vd:n Nicklas Storåkers och det danska riskkapitalbolaget Sunstone.
The ability to ‘refuel’ at home can make going electric a lot easier – but there are some hurdles for electric vehicle drivers to get their heads around first
The 2019 Bentley Continental GT has recently stepped out of the auto show realm and into the real world. We've brought along a fresh example of this, with the Grand Tourer having been spotted in London.
As you can imagine, the lavish coupe caused quite a stir. After all, its elegant shapes, which have been created using aluminum superforming techniques, simply can't be ignored.
The standard palette of ... (continue reading >>)
Das Thema Handelskrieg wird immer lauter, beinahe täglich liest man neue Nachrichten. Freitag traten die Gegenzölle der EU in Kraft und nebenbei kündigt Trump schon die nächsten Zölle gegen China an. Als hätte der Präsident mittlerweile Freude an dem Spielchen. So droht er auch weiterhin deutschen Autobauern mit weiteren Zöllen. Beim Warten auf die nächste Stufe des Trump´schen Handelskrieges ist aktuell der VW Discounter MF5WHD die richtige Wahl
Seit rund zwei Wochen ist die neue Datenschutzgrundverodnung nun in Kraft gesetzt. Erste Klagen ließen nicht lang auf sich warten. Das sorgt für Verunsicherung bei Unternehmen und Verbrauchern. Continental zieht jetzt die Reißleine.
BMW's new flagship coupé has been spied testing on the Nurburgring again; it's due to go on sale in 2018
The long arm of the law gets the shortest car on the road.
No less than six years have passed since the Google Self-Driving Car Project started testing on public roads. During this time span, the fleet of vehicles that make up the project drove 1,419,672 miles (2,284,740 kilometers) in autonomous mode.
The number mentioned above pales in comparison to the three million simulated miles (4.828 million kilometers) Google’s cars drive each and every day. The question is, though, what exactl... (continue reading >>)
