Can MB Challenge Tesla?

On the heels of Tesla announcing a home and commercial battery product line, Mercedes-Benz unveiled its own brand of energy storage products for those with solar systems to store surplus power.

The Mercedes-Benz energy storage plants for private use are available for order now and are expected to ship in September.

The batteries were first developed for cars, but Mercedes-Benz said the energy storage units “meet the very highest safety and quality standards” for home use.

Up to eight battery modules with an energy capacity of 2.5 kWh can be combined into an energy storage plant with a capacity of 20 kWh.

“Households with their own photovoltaic systems can thus buffer surplus solar power virtually free of any losses,” the carmaker said in a statement.

What wasn’t announced by Mercedes-Benz was information about the size of or pricing for the new batteries.

In May, Tesla announced its Powerwall batteries for home use and its Powerpack batteries for commercial use. Today, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced his company would double the power output of the Powerwall batteries but keep their prices the same.

Tesla’s Powerwall batteries will go from having a two-kilowatt (kW) steady power output and 3.3kW peak output to a 5kW steady output and 7kW peak output, Musk said. The price of the batteries will remain the same: $3,000 for the 7kW/hour (KWh) daily cycle version and $3,500 for the 10kWh backup UPS version. Total installation cost will run around $4,000, according to Musk.

Up to nine Powerwall battery units can be daisy-chained together on a wall to provide up to 90kWh of power.

The average U.S. household uses about 20 kWh to 25 kWh of power every day, according to GTM Research.

Tesla Energy’s new commercial-grade battery is called the Powerpack, and will sell in 100kWh modules for $25,000 each. Musk said the Powerpack can scale infinitely, even powering factories and small cities.

Mercedes-Benz’s batteries, being produced by subsidiary Deutsche Accumotive, are its first industrial-scale lithium-ion units, and they’ve already been tested “on the grid,” the company said.

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Blackberry Goes Infotainment

Blackberry’s QNX Software Systems has announced a partnership that will allow its infotainment system to be placed in car’s digital instrument clusters.

The technology will allow drivers to see their music lists and album art, turn-by-turn navigation directions and local news in between instruments such as the speedometer and tachometer.

BlackBerry announced its collaboration with Rightware, a maker of automotiveuser interface design tools, at the Telematics Detroit show here. The collaboration combines the QNX Neutrino operating system and the Rightware Kanzi user interface.

QNX demonstrated the instrument cluster in a Mercedes-Benz concept car. The system also uses MirrorLink, an industry standard for the integration ofsmartphones into infotainment systems. The system is able to mirror Android-based smartphones to both the infotainment center on the console and the instrument cluster display.

With the MirrorLink connection, the instrument cluster can display realtime information, such as local speed limits, turn-by-turn directions, traffic reports and incoming phone calls. Because the cluster is fully digital, it can dynamically change views, highlighting the most important information and using advanced visualizations to help the driver process information more quickly.

“QNX Software Systems and Rightware have already worked together on successful production programs, including the exciting new Audi virtual cockpit,” said Peter McCarthy, director of global alliances for QNX.

With the Kanzi software, developers can create UIs with photorealistic, real-time 2D and 3D graphics. The QNX OS enables the Kanzi UI to access vehicle data and services, including navigation, multimedia, speed, RPM, and car diagnostics. It essentially provides an abstraction layer based on QNX’s persistent publish/subscribe (PPS) technology.

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Cars May Come With nVidia’s Tegra

One of the things that we keep hearing as a big business opportunity for ARM manufacturers is to get their chips in cars. We heard this before, but this time we are not talking about navigation / entertainment systems.

The idea behind the concept is that more and more cars will come with collision detection mechanisms, road tracking that can keep your car stay in the high way lane. It gets better, the car can now lock on the car in front of you and accelerate and decelerate with it, so called adaptive cruise control with some manufacturers.

Fancier cars today come with elaborate stability assistance systems and many other features that might put such processors to good use, for something far more useful than just navigation and playing music.

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