"But China has now raced far beyond the flirtation stage. It's rolling out fleets of autonomous delivery trucks, experimenting with flying cars and installing parking lot robots that can swap out your E.V.'s dying battery in just minutes. There are drones that deliver lunch by lowering it from the sky on a cable. If all that sounds futuristic and perhaps bizarre, it also shows China's ambition to dominate clean energy technologies of all kinds,"
"These ideas, while ambitious, don't always work smoothly, as I learned after taking a bullet train to Hefei, a city the size of Chicago, to see what it's like to live in this vision of tomorrow. Hefei is one of many cities where technologies like these are getting prototyped in real time. I checked them all out. The battery-swapping robots, the self-driving delivery trucks, the lunches from the sky."
China has moved beyond early experimentation and is rolling out fleets of autonomous delivery trucks, flying taxis, parking-lot battery-swapping robots and drone delivery systems. Cities such as Hefei are being used as real-time prototyping grounds for these technologies, with experimental services aimed at taxi-like trips and rapid EV battery replacement. The state has directed trillions of dollars and extensive planning toward these efforts, incurring large debts. The program reflects an ambition to dominate and export clean energy technologies globally. Several projects face practical constraints and glitches, including size and weight limitations on vehicles.
Read at www.nytimes.com
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