Elon Musk dashes remote work, EV uptake is looking good, but needs more traction to reach carbon neutrality, and Sony says smartphone cameras will rival DSLRs by 2024.
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That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now, welcome to Hashtag Trending. It’s Thursday, June 2, and I’m your host, Samira Balsara.
Elon Musk doesn’t like a lot of things, like Twitter, which he’s now iffy about acquiring. Now, we can also add remote work to the list. According to Bloomberg, the Tesla CEO has told company executives that remote work is no longer acceptable. He proposes that all employees must spend a minimum of 40 hours per week in the office or “depart Tesla.” Further, Musk specified that they must be in the main Tesla office, and not a remote branch. But Musk isn’t completely unsympathetic to remote workers and expressed in the email that he’s willing to make exceptions under exceptional circumstances. The Verge speculated that his passion for in-person work may have been derived from his own work ethic. It’s been widely reported that Musk practically lived in Tesla’s factories while expanding his business.
On the topic of electric vehicles, its sales are expected to triple by 2025. Still, governments and manufacturers need to do more work to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. In a report titled Long-Term Electric Vehicle Outlook, BloombergNEF reported that EV uptake is now projected to exceed 20 million by 2025, largely thanks to rapid adoption in China. This news is optimistic, but it’s a long way from replacing all 1.2 billion internal combustion engine vehicles on the road today. Heavy commercial vehicles are especially lagging behind in this shift. The research paper expects only a third of the commercial fleet to decarbonize by 2025.
Sony, the company renowned for its Playstation gaming console and professional cameras, has made a bold prediction: smartphone cameras will eclipse professional DSLR cameras by 2024. DSLR cameras, or digital single-lens reflex cameras, have long been used by pro photographers. But the president of Sony Semiconductor Solutions has said that the two will reach parity in image quality sometime in 2024. Smartphone image quality has seen tremendous improvement every generation thanks to improved sensor technology and AI software. With that said, Sony has never cared for DSLRs. Instead, it mainly focuses on professional mirrorless digital cameras, which operate on a different mechanism than DSLRs.
Swedish automaker Volvo is turning to a video game engine to advertise its next-generation electric vehicles. According to the Verge, Volvo has partnered with Epic Games to build a human-machine interface platform using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. The human-machine interface is just a fancy term for the software displayed to the driver, think Tesla’s digital dashboard as an example. Volvo says that the game engine will enable its platforms to deliver safer, more realistic presentations through photorealistic visuals. It’s not clear when this new platform will come to market, but Volvo has moved its software team in-house to expedite the development.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash briefings or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. Also, catch the next episode of Hashtag Tendances, our weekly Hashtag Trending episode in French, which drops every Thursday morning. If you have a suggestion or a tip, drop us a line in the comments or via email. Thank you for listening, I’m Samira Balsara.
