Electric vehicles

Robots are becoming uncaged, mobile, collaborative and increasingly intelligent and dexterous, moving beyond their traditional strongholds to bring automation to previously inaccessible tasks.

After several years of excitement, investment and growing interest in thermoelectrics and their potential in energy harvesting applications, it's now time to clearly look at what's hype and what's reality, and the technology developers in the field know that well.

Off-grid power has been in decline. Widely seeing it as the poor man's option, users have aspired to get beyond it to the more secure, "troublefree" world of on-grid - or so they believed.

Evovelo has just announced its prototype electric trike, which can reach speeds of 45 kph with a drivers' cab and solar panel on the roof.

Electric vehicles are the future and ones that make their own electricity are the end game for these.

All the publicity currently goes to the race to make regular and premium cars have longer range

There is more energy to harvest at sea. True, water craft have stronger resistance to overcome but on balance, it means that energy independent electric boats are more common than their equivalents on land or in the air and they have lessons for both.

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Companies get vaporised when market segmentation widens. Classics are those making steam trains missing the move to electric and to other modes of travel and NortonVilliersTriumph thinking that dominance of the UK motorcycle market protected them when, of course, motorcycles are a world market appropriately addressed by others

This article charts the development of water vehicles towards energy independence.