Tech

An EV that cleans the air while driving might seem like a pipe dream , but a student team based at the Eindhoven University of Technology has made it reality. TU/ecomotive — as the team is called — has been creating inspiring, environmentally conscious concept cars for over a decade now.

Among the concept vehicles presented by the students, last year’s Zem — which stands for “zero emission mobility” — is the most outstanding. It’s a passenger EV that not only paves the way towards vehicle carbon neutrality, but also cleans the air while driving, something that, in turn, reduces CO2 emissions.

Zem was unveiled in July 2022 at the Louwman Museum in the Hague. Its message is clear: if a team of 32 students can create a car like this in under 12 months, then what’s stopping the automotive industry from doing more?

“We were inspired by the EU’s Green Deal,” Louise de Laat, Industrial Design student and team manager of the Zem project, told TNW. “Reducing our CO2 emissions is something very important for us, and we would really like to make a carbon neutral car. And that’s the reason for the recent project’s focus on zero emission mobility,” she explained.

CO2 neutral mobility requires a vehicle to have zero carbon emissions across its entire lifecycle, and Zem is an apt example of how close to this goal an EV like this can get.

In this piece, we’ll look at how Zem achieves this through its use, production, and afterlife — as well as what the car industry can learn from these sorts of schemes.

The air-cleaning technology

As we mentioned at the start, instead of emitting CO2, Zem captures it. Effectively, it cleans the air while driving. That’s thanks to an innovative technology called direct air capture (CAP), which “traps” carbon dioxide into a filter. Companies such as Climeworks and Carbyon have been applying this air-cleaning method via large installations. But the Zem team decided to implement it on the car.

It works like this: while driving, air moves through the car into a self-designed filter, which captures and stores CO2, allowing clear air to flow out of the vehicle. This compensates for the total emissions of all life phases.

But what happens when the filter is saturated?

“We have designed a special charging pole for this,” Louise explained. “While Zem is charging you can remove the filter and place it in a special tank inside the pole. Cleaning the filter takes about the same time as charging. At the same time, the CO2 absorbed and saved in the tank can be repurposed and used by industries that need it, to make carbon fibers, for instance,” she added.

And to increase the vehicle’s sustainability even when not in use, TU/ecomotive has equipped it bi-directional charging technology to provide electricity to homes, as well as solar panels to store energy.

Maximising sustainable production and afterlife

To achieve a high level of sustainability, the TU/ecomotive opted for a novel production method: additive manufacturing — or simply, 3D printing. The team collaborated with partners — such as CEAD and Royal3D — to develop the car’s fundamental structure. Specifically, the monocoque and the body panels.

As Louise explained, they also 3D-printed parts of the interior, including the car seat shell, the dashboards, the middle console, the steering wheel, and the roof beams.

According to the team, this manufacturing process results in nearly zero waste materials, as the various car parts were printed in the exact shape needed. At the same time, they did the printing using circular plastics. These are granulates that had already been used and can be shredded and reused afresh in other projects.

“You can use that same material again to make the same event over three times before it loses its specifications,” Louise noted.

The vision of circularity has been applied throughout Zem’s design as well.

For example, the seat upholstery is made from the residue released during pineapple production. The roof upholstery and the floor mats consist of ocean plastics. And, through the collaboration with Black Bear Carbon, recycled black carbon from worn tires has been used for the EV’s coating and tires.

As a result, the concept car boasts “as little CO2 emissions as possible” during the production phase. At the same time, the types of materials, their ease of separation, and their circularity, all contribute to keeping CO2 emissions during the end-of-use phase at a lower level — especially when compared to conventional cars.

But, according to Louise, it proved extremely challenging to give a specific number to Zem’s overall emissions via the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method, revealing a gap in the industry.

“We need a lot of data from the partners where we get the parts from and some of them don’t know the exact LCA of their product,” she said. On the upside, she considers it beneficial that this project meant their partners acknowledged the vehicle’s environmental footprint.She also remains hopeful that respective legislation from national governments and the EU in general will standardise the use of LCA.

As per Louise, Zem has succeeded in reaching its goal to drastically lower CO2 emissions to the maximum extent possible. Yet, the EV does come with disadvantages that would require further work to enable its scaleup into a marketable product.

“If you build a car in less than one year, there will be some flaws that you still need to work on,” she noted. “Zem drove smoothly on the DRC track during the US tour, but the closer you get to the vehicle, the easier it is to see its flaws.” And that’s to be expected when you work with new materials and new technologies within a short period of time, Louise added.

A win-win for students and commercial partners

Now that the Zem project has been concluded, a renewed team has started working on the next concept vehicle. Stijn Plekkenpol — a sustainable innovation student — will lead the next project.

“What we really want to do now is build a climate positive car by 2030. This means, a vehicle which is marketable, which could be produced, and actually have a positive impact on the environment instead of any negative ones,” Stijn told TNW.

In the meantime, Louise aims to keep working on the filter technology and would be excited to see Zem turn into a mass-produced car. After all, it’s not uncommon for a student concept to grow into a startup and a real-life product. Think of Lightyear, the now famous solar EV Dutch startup, which was also started by students of the Eindhoven University of Technology.

While both Louise and Stijn attribute Zem’s success to the students’ team “long working hours and [their] dedication”, they explained the vital role commercial patterns played as well.

“The majority of our partners are from Eindhoven’s Brainport region, which is known for its high density of R&D, and is called the Silicon Valley of the Netherlands,” Louise said.

These partners supported the project by providing parts, materials, knowledge, and financial support. And as for what they gained in return, Louise summarised three main advantages: employee recruitment, exposure, and the enjoyment and inspiration stemming from the collaboration with young people bringing bold ideas to the table.

Both Louise and Stjn have optimistic views on the future of mobility. They believe that cars will remain an integral part of transportation, but that they have the potential to be climate-positive instead of adding to carbon emissions.

And, as Zem showcases, we should trust in the innovative ideas of the younger generations, further seeking the collaboration between daring university projects and commercial partnerships.

The new concept vehicle will be revealed on July 27 — and I, for one, can’t wait to see what the students have in store for us.

A “metal sock” in the ground stuffed full of hydrogen. Vats of scorching sand. Huge weights moving very, very slowly up and down old mineshafts. Is this the future of energy?

This menagerie of strange machines and heat-retaining vessels is poised to emerge across Europe as the continent seeks ways of storing the surplus energy produced by renewables. The UK, for example, wasted half a billion pounds’ worth of wind energy in 2021 because it had nowhere to store it. Without such storage, electricity must be used at the very moment it is generated.

As wind energy continues to go to waste across Europe, the EU is spending record sums – billions of euros – on gas imports as it slashes its reliance on fossil fuels from Russia.

“We’re at an inflexion point,” says Dominic Walters, chief corporate affairs officer at Highview Power, a UK-based firm that is working on a means of storing energy as liquid air. “There is a need to accelerate everything everywhere,” he adds, referring to the colourful array of energy storage projects currently at early stages of development in Europe.

Proponents of alternative energy storage technologies argue that lithium-ion batteries will only get us so far. Their production relies on mining, they don’t have very long lifespans, and are arguably not ideal for storing energy longer than several hours.

“If we don’t work out how to stabilise Europe’s electricity grids soon, we’ll come to regret it,” says Jacopo Tosoni, head of policy at the European Association for Storage and Energy (EASE): “You generally have a risk of blackouts in 2030.”

A scramble is now on to put the necessary storage media in place so that energy can be kept ready and waiting until those moments when it is required.

The heat is on

In an industrial corner of Kankaanpää, Finland, a town home to around 12,000 people, there is a seven metre-tall, dark grey silo full of sand. Sand that can store energy in the form of heat.

“Our year-round efficiency is about 90% for the system, so 10% losses, which is obviously quite good,” says Tommi Eronen, chief executive and co-founder of Polar Night Energy, an eight-people-strong startup that’s raised €1.25 million to date. Eronen described how the sand, heated to 600˚C using surplus electricity, will stay hot for months on end thanks to insulation lining the walls of the steel container. Pipes filled with hot air run through the sand in order to transfer heat in or out.

This sand battery is connected to a heat exchanger, says Eronen, so that operators can transfer thermal energy to district heating systems or, in possible future versions of the technology, turbines for electricity generation.

Eronen explains that early versions of the firm’s sand battery are relatively small in scale. The Kankaanpää unit offers 100kW of heating power, or a capacity of 8MWh, but Polar Night Energy is planning 100MW units and above, which could one day yield several GWh of juice. Such units would be around eight metres tall and 44 metres in diameter, a spokesman for Polar Night Energy says. 

Expect news regarding the delivery of a 2MW version as early as this spring, adds Eronen.

In the Netherlands, GroeneWarmte is working on a different kind of thermal energy store called Ecovat, which uses water heated to temperatures up to 95˚C instead of the much hotter sand chosen by Polar Night Energy. “It basically just stores water in a big underground tank,” says project engineer Marijn van den Heuvel. “It’s a very large thermos.”

There’s a bit more construction required in setting this system up, though. The concrete “thermos” must be carefully installed in a huge, cylindrical hole in the ground. But after that, it can be covered over and the storage works in a similar way to Polar Night Energy’s design. The warmth the vessel cradles, for several months if necessary, would be transferred via heat exchangers to district heating systems. Van den Heuvel says GroeneWarmte with its team of eight people is engaging with a Danish company on a possible first deployment of this technology.

These approaches are fairly new, but Highview Power is already building a 50MW facility in Carrington, England, where energy is to be stored in the form of liquid air. The site will form a mind-boggling array of silos, pipework and platforms bunched together. It will comprise thermal and cold storage units and containers for the liquid air itself.

“We filter it so effectively it is clean air, that air is liquefied, and then we cryogenically freeze it,” explains Walters, referring to the process in which air is chilled to nearly -200˚C. By heating this very cold, liquid air later, it turns back into a gas and expands, and can be used to power a turbine, throwing electricity back to the grid. The system achieves an efficiency of 55-65%, which Highview says is comparable to other storage technologies. One of the benefits of this approach is that the technology should have a multi-decadal lifespan, much longer than lithium ion batteries, so governments might be able to plan around such infrastructure more easily.

Walters says the Carrington site should go live by the end of 2024. At the moment, the 55-people company is raising a £400-million funding round, and is planning a further 19 installations around the UK. It ultimately aims to supply 4GW, or 20%, of the UK’s expected energy storage needs by 2035.

Another storage method drops

Perhaps the simplest concept of all currently vying for its place in the energy storage landscape of the future is the gravity battery. Most of us learned about “potential energy” at school. Arguably, there is no better illustration of that than a big weight, held aloft, just itching to give in to gravity and fall to the floor. By attaching cables to such a weight – literally harnessing it – it is possible to slow its descent right down to about one metre per second and use the pulling force it exerts to generate electricity via a turbine.

Gravitricity’s approach in this vein, to begin with at least, is to lower its weights hundreds of metres down disused mine shafts with the help of a guiding mechanism. The company, which employs 17 people, has so far raised £7.5 million to make its vision a reality.

“If it were swinging around the place, very soon you’d get the shaft caving in on itself, which is obviously not what we’d want,” explains commercial director Robin Lane. A single weight might provide 4-8MW of power, he estimates, and could be calibrated to provide energy for a particular time period, say 15 minutes or an hour. Imagine a system where multiple weights are ready to descend, one after the other, in a carefully synchronised sequence so that electricity can be generated at a steady rate. Early commercial systems will use a combination of large weights totalling 1,000 tonnes.

Lane admits that this approach can’t yet compete with lithium ion batteries on a cost per MW basis but he argues gravity batteries will be commercially competitive eventually. Plus, it ought to be possible to hoist and lower weights again and again for many years with little impact on the integrity of the system. Lithium ion batteries, on the other hand, have stricter limitations in terms of cycling.

Another firm, Energy Vault, which employs 150 people, is also pursuing gravity battery technology. It has raised approximately $410m in funding to date.

Gravitricity is also exploring completely different ways of secreting energy in old mine shafts, such as lining them with metal and turning them into hydrogen storage units.

“It’s a metal sock, which you would lower into the shaft, and then you would entomb that metal sock with a mixture of ballast, concrete and steel,” says Lane. It potentially makes it easier and cheaper to store hydrogen at high pressures than above ground, since the container can rely on the existing geology of the shaft for structural support. The hydrogen could come from electrolysers linked to wind farms and use surplus energy to produce the gas from water.

For Tosoni, the diversity of the storage projects emerging in Europe is heartening, given the expected energy requirements that countries will face in the coming years. But less important than choosing one technology over another is the financing and political strategies needed to scale any of them up.

“The big issue is funding,” he says, noting the wariness of some investors. Governments could help, he suggests, by setting more ambitious targets for the establishment of energy storage facilities.

Eronen, in general, is optimistic about the future and notes that Polar Night Energy is embarking on a new 5-10m euro funding round. But it remains frustrating to witness the present energy crisis in Europe today, knowing that, even with the best will in the world, these systems aren’t quite ready for primetime just yet.

“It feels so bad,” he says. “We see the crisis now and there’s like no way that we can help.”

According to EASE, the current rate of storage added every year in Europe, 1GW, must boom to 14GW per year if the continent is to reach the 200GW total grid-scale storage capacity it’s expected to require by 2030. So the push is certainly on. 

We might think that the conception of robots, AI, and automated machines is a modern phenomenon, but, in fact, the idea had already appeared in Western literature nearly 3,000 years ago. Long before Isaac Asimov conceived the Laws of Robotics (1942) and John McCarthy coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” (1995), Ancient Greeks myths were full of stories about intelligent humanoids.

The fact that these mythical humanoids meet the criteria of modern definitions on robotics and AI is impressive in itself. But what’s even more astonishing is that these old tales can provide us with valuable teachings and insights into our modern discourse on artificial intelligence.

Such stories “perpetuated over millennia, are a testament to the persistence of thinking and talking about what it is to be human and what it means to simulate life,” historian Adrienne Mayor, writes in her book Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology.

In other words, the desire to reach beyond humans and create non-biological life by endowing intelligence into machines seems an innate part of our nature. And this is why we can find wisdom to inform contemporary discourse in age-old myths.

Through the dread, hope, and moral dilemmas they express, these stories can provide us with an alternative way to process some of the most pressing questions regarding intelligent machines: how far should we go with AI? And what are the looming moral and practical implications of this technology?

To revisit these questions, we’ll look into three intelligent humanoids in Greek myth: the Golden Maidens, Talos, and Pandora.

The Golden Maidens: the inherent need for labor-saving technology

The Golden Maidens were built by Hephaestus, the god of fire. They’re described as female assistants made of gold who look like living young women, and can anticipate and respond to their maker’s needs.

But most importantly, “they’re endowed with the hallmarks of human beings: consciousness, intelligence, learning, reason, and speech,” Mayor remarks in her book.

There’s an immediate parallel we can draw between ancient myth and modern society: one of the main reasons for the creation of intelligent, automated machines is economic, or rather, labor-saving.

The idea that robots and self-acting devices could act as servants (or slaves) was a point also stressed by the famous Greek philosopher, Aristotle. In the first book of his Politics, he contemplates:

If every tool could perform its own work obeying or anticipating the needs of others, […] and if […] shuttles could weave and picks could play the lyre by themselves, then craftsmen wouldn’t need servants and masters wouldn’t need slaves.

The idea, though well ahead of its time, is actually very simple: a society in which people don’t have to do the drudge work, and instead, delegate it to machines. And as much as Greek society depended on the institution of slavery to function, we are now creating a new class of mechanical servants.

Think of the vacuum bot cleaners that may stroll across your floors, the surgical robots that perform complex surgical procedures, or the military bots designed to disarm bombs.

This does raise an interesting question though. While we have personal robots that can help us with small tasks, the real wealth of automation will come when entire industries are destroyed and replaced by free workers. Think of self-driving cars removing truckers from work for instance. But unless the money generated from such moves go to the dispossessed, the privileged and wealthy (i.e. those similar to Hephaestus) will benefit most.

This idea is explored further in the continuing myths.

Talos: intelligent machines in the hands of tyrants

Unlike the Golden Maiden, Talos was created to cause harm (as was Pandora, but more on that later).

Talos was a bronze giant robot, again made by Hephaestus. He was gifted by Zeus to his son Minos, the mythical king of Crete, to guard and protect the island.

The guardian robot would throw huge rocks at foreign ships approaching the island, and enemies managed to get on land, he would hug them and burn them alive thanks to his ability to heat up his bronze body.

Talos doesn’t seem to possess a human level of intelligence, but he’s able to interact with his environment and perform various tasks.

In fact, some mythological variations of his demise hint significantly at the possibility that he’s conscious of his existence and that he has a kind of agency.

As Mayor notes, ”In these versions, Talos is portrayed as susceptible to human fears and hopes, with a kind of volition and intelligence.”

If one looks at the relevant mythological corpus, they will notice that all such machines used to cause harm belonged to tyrannical rulers; in our example, King Minos of Crete, and Zeus, the father of gods and men, in the case of Pandora.

And there’s a notable moral in these stories: superior technology can help exercise control.

Think of military robots, for instance, which have been in use since World War II. To give a more recent example, the war in Ukraine has become the largest testbed for AI-powered autonomous and uncrewed combat vehicles, highlighting the excitement of military leaders about the potential usefulness of artificial intelligence technology.

And it’s not just war that AI can serve those in power.

It can also be used by authoritarian regimes to track citizens, influence the flow of information, and marginalize dissident voices, as the example of China shows.

At the same time, AI’s breadth of applications (in healthcare, finance, e-commerce and so on) is shaping a new battleground of geopolitical power — as big technological breakthroughs have historically done.

Domination of AI by powerful nations is expected to deepen structural inequalities and contribute to new forms of social and economic imbalance. Similarly, as AI is mostly centralized (meaning that it’s limited to the ownership of a single entity), it will further empower the leading Big Tech companies creating it, enabling them to pursue their own agendas.

But have these consequences been debated enough by the nations’ regulatory bodies or the companies that are currently developing AI?

“I think the Silicon Valley and Big Tech companies and billionaires control the narrative over AI so much that it creates little space for that kind of debate that’s necessary for a technology that grows so massively,” George Zarkadakis, AI engineer, futurist, and writer, told TNW.

Unless controlled, legally regulated, and removed from the individual, AI tools won’t benefit society in the way we envision. And the danger of them falling into the hands of nefarious actors who could use them to assert dominance is highlighted by the following myth where Zeus’ fear of losing his ruling power led to the creation of a perilous weapon: Pandora.

Pandora: surpassing the limits

Pandora was created as an instrument of punishment. After the Titan Prometheus (his name means “foresight”) stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind to help it create technology, Zeus commanded Hephaestus to fabricate Pandora.

The mythical humanoid was designed to be an evil disguised as a gift, something that would make humankind pay for reaching closer to the divine level, as up until then, fire and technology were unique privileges of the gods.

Hephaestus fabricated Pandora, molding earth and water into the shape of a beautiful woman. She was also endowed with treachery, deceit, and seduction. At the end, Zeus gave her a mysterious jar.

After her completion, Pandora was sent to Prometheus’ brother, Epimetheus (his name meaning “hindsight”), who forgot the warning never to accept a gift from Zeus. Once on Earth, Pandora opened the jar unleashing all kinds of evil that would plague humankind forever. Following Zeus’ instructions, she sealed the jar right before hope could escape, trapping it inside.

“It’s unclear whether Pandora has the ability to learn, choose, or act autonomously,” Mayor notes. “Her only mission is to open the jar of all human misfortune.” In modern terms, “she does what she’s programmed to do.”

There is a pressing question we can explore using this mythological context: are we suffering from a god complex? And, with AI, dealing with elements we simply don’t understand?

An integral element of Greek mythology, which is fully expressed in Pandora’s myth, is the notion of hubris. This refers to an act that violates the natural order by disregarding the divinely fixed limits on human action in the cosmos. Such an act is always followed by god-sent punishment to restore balance, as in the case of Pandora’s jar.

According to Zarkadakis, there’s a lot of hubris in AI as well.

“I think the purpose of God is to remind people that they’re not gods themselves. And you know, in the absence of gods, we have this problem, right? We think we are gods because we don’t need God anymore. So we’re building our own gods that will be our gods in the future,” he explained. And machines that would be almost impossible to discern from a human being could also be infinitely smarter, “they would be like a god,” he added.

Zarkadakis believes that the ancient myths were trying to prevent us from going down that slippery path; but we’re heading there anyway.

This recalls Steven Hawking’s warning over the potential danger of AI. “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” he said during an interview with BBC. “It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

So should we open Pandora’s jar?

Our choice doesn’t differ too much from the one Epimetheus had to make. Much like the ancient humanoid, AI comes with a black box, the Deep Neural Networks (DNN) systems machine learning is based on. This means that while scientists have access to the inputs and outputs AI uses, they don’t know how its decision-making process works.

We don’t know what’s inside the black box, the same way Epimetheus didn’t know what was inside the jar. The moral of the myth is clear: think before you act, or act before you think — and suffer the consequences. And to relate this to our modern debate, unless we seriously consider the possible negative outcomes, it’s dangerous to rush into creating something we don’t fully understand just because we can.

To avoid opening the jar recklessly, Zarkadakis suggests posing a vital question supported by ethical and philosophical considerations: “What’s the end game?” And based on that, “what might be the cost and consequences of the technology?”

“A machine that has full autonomy and is conscious means it’s completely free, it can think in any way, and, thus, that it can be potentially dangerous,” he explained. “The number one risk is extinction, and it’s bad enough in theory to try to build such AI and see what happens.”

Zarkadakis remarked that the reason why we’re fully autonomous is because as biological social beings we are equipped with ethics and morality.

But teaching ethics and morality to AI systems has been so far unsuccessful. Think of the racism scandals of Microsoft’s Tay and ScatterLab’s Lee Luda. Or, most recently, Meta’s Galactica.

Zarkadakis believes that we don’t actually need conscious AI. “I think what we need as human society is to live a better life and having more free time is a big goal to that,” he added.

“There’s a massive usefulness for artificial intelligence to help us reach that point. What we need for AI is social integration and we should absolutely rethink the autonomy of machines and revise their manifesto.”

With this approach, AI could, in fact, be the inverse of Pandora — a democratic tool that could help make ourselves and the world better. And shouldn’t this be technology’s mission?

From myth to reality

Thousands of years ago, these three myths illuminated the potential of intelligent machines to serve a good purpose (as in the case of the Golden Maidens) or cause harm (as in the case of Talos and Pandora) — a potential we’re already seeing materializing today.

Most notably, though, they bring forth a set of questions that are vital for our pursuit of AI: whose aspirations will it serve, from whom will it learn, what do we want it to be, and how far should we go with it before surpassing the limits?

Ultimately, AI is much like Pandora’s mysterious jar. We don’t know what’s inside and we can assume it contains both good and evil. In the end, it’s all about the role we’ll play: will we be like Prometheus and demonstrate the required foresight, or will we be like Epimetheus and act before examining the consequences?

Ancient Greek myth has told us the dangers of AI, it’s now up to us to listen.