Lada Powered By 50 Cordless Drills Is The Only EV Swap That Matters
Specifically, the battery-powered Lada is motivated by hashing together 50 cordless drills by YouTube channel Garage 54. If that name sounds familiar, that's because we've previously covered all their crazy antics involving ATVs, exploding tires and Ladas. Lots of Ladas.
For this latest project, the bonkers Russian wrenchers worked to build a kind of electric engine out of cordless drills. The 50 battery-powered drills were mounted around a common crankshaft, which linked all fifty motors together via a complex array of belts and pulleys. It's beautiful in its complexity. It's a little like that electric-swapped Porsche that raced at Pikes Peak that one time, but more Russian.
When the drill-powered motor was first revealed, we estimated that it could produce as much as 25 hp and '400-ish lb-ft of torque,' which our Brad boldly claimed 'should be more than enough to move a little Lada around.' It's almost like the folks at Garage 54 read his /mind/ post, as that's exactly what they set about doing next: powering a Lada.
To do this, the team took a Lada that had already been lengthened to make space for a chainsaw-powered V16, stripped away all those nasty gas motors and dropped in the gargantuan electric motor.
It's quite the site to behold, with the bright orange arms of half the drills sticking up out of that enormous hood. You'd certainly do a double take if Garage 54 rolled past you in this on the highway.
When it comes to driving the battery-powered Lada, the motor is connected up to the car's gearbox and there's a rudimentary switch inside to control the power. On the first test, the car (amazingly) moves away from the stand under its own steam with the roar of 50 power drills soundtracking its first steps.
The rest of the tests that the garage 54 crew put the car through are, as you'd expect, a bit ridiculous and a lot of fun to watch. There's a bit of smoke and a few minor disasters, but the drill-powered car really does work. If you want to see how well it works for yourself, hit play on the video above.
Once you've done that, head here to see Garage 54 attempt to break the sound barrier with a tire or here to see what kind of abominable snowmobile the channel created out of old ATVs.
For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Insider
2 hours ago
- Business Insider
‘The People's IPO' -Ukraine's Telecom Giant Kyivstar Set to List in U.S. as Peace Hopes Rise
Ukraine's biggest telecoms operator, Kyivstar, is set to become the first company based in the war-hit country to list in the U.S. Elevate Your Investing Strategy: Take advantage of TipRanks Premium at 50% off! Unlock powerful investing tools, advanced data, and expert analyst insights to help you invest with confidence. According to a Reuters report, the company is expected to raise between $50 million and $200 million later this year. SPAC Listing The article stated that it would join the Nasdaq via fintech entrepreneur Betsy Cohen's special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Cohen Circle, thereby avoiding a traditional initial public offering (IPO) route. Other major listings this year include CoreWeave (CRWV), Figma (FIG) and Circle Internet Group (CRCL). The Ukrainian company's Dubai-based parent VEON (VEON) has said the listing was expected by the third quarter of 2025 and that it will retain a minimum of 80% of the issued and outstanding shares of the telecoms business. VEON has reportedly already secured $52 million in non-redemption agreements with institutional investors, representing the minimum it expects to raise. The maximum could reach $200 million depending on redemptions. The move comes at a pivotal time for the country, which has been battered both economically and socially following the Russian invasion of its territory back in 2022. U.S. President Donald Trump will meet the Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Alaska later this week potentially paving the way for a ceasefire and ultimately an end to the conflict. Will the Conflict End? VEON hopes the Kyivstar listing will help to stoke investor appetite for Ukrainian assets ahead of the country's reconstruction. VEON Chief Executive Kaan Terzioglu said after the company reported earnings last Thursday that it had extremely strong support for the Kyivstar listing from U.S. authorities, Ukraine and the European Union. Indeed, he said that the listing was 'the people's IPO', hoping that investors around the world would show their support for Ukraine. Kyivstar, which is valued at around $2.21 billion, is the market-leading mobile operator in Ukraine with 24 million subscribers. Edison Group equity analysts Nick Paton and Dan Ridsdale said the narrative around the deal was built around Ukraine's postwar reconstruction and digital infrastructure's role in that recovery. However, investors will also likely question the strength of that recovery and the likelihood of any peace deal between Ukraine and Russia holding over the long-term.
Forbes
18 hours ago
- Forbes
The Enemy Within: How AI Uncovers Corporate Espionage In Real Time
Raghu Para is a tech exec with over 15 years of progressive experience in software, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Picture this: At a Silicon Valley tech firm, the office Keurigs kept mysteriously dying. IT wrote it off as hard water until their AI security system cross-referenced maintenance logs with HR records and discovered the outages always occurred precisely 27 minutes after Greg from Facilities received negative feedback in his quarterly review. Turns out Greg had been remotely triggering maintenance alerts as petty revenge, proving even coffee machines aren't safe from workplace drama. When confronted, Greg claimed it was "just a weird coincidence," right before the system flagged his LinkedIn activity, showing he'd connected with three competitors that morning. This isn't some Black Mirror episode. It's the new reality of corporate security, where the line between employee and insider threat is thinner than the patience of a sysadmin during a server migration. Forget Russian hackers—today's most dangerous threats wear employee badges and know where the good snacks are. According to the 2024 Verizon DBIR, the "human element"—including errors and misuse—is involved in 68% of data breaches. Enough time for a disgruntled worker to do the digital equivalent of keying the company Ferrari while maintaining perfect deniability. AI-powered sabotage detection is like giving every cubicle a lie detector—with a psychology degree and zero chill. These systems don't just block hackers; they analyze digital sweat. From too-perfect mouse jiggles to passive-aggressive Slack emoji storms, they flag patterns even the drama club would call extra. What if a bank caught a quant tweaking risk models? His 'random' seeds matched his employee ID, edits always came at 4:45 p.m. on Fridays, and he Googled 'how to adjust financial models without getting caught' on his work laptop. The AI would likely flag it as fraud. Traditional rule-based security is like hunting for plastic explosives with a metal detector while wearing oven mitts. Sure, it catches the massive downloads and sketchy links but misses the nuanced sabotage. Think subtle algorithm tweaks that nudge forecasts or slow-drip data theft: 10MB a day that quietly turns into a hemorrhage. In hyper-connected workplaces, it's not the firehose that will get you—it's this steady leak. One national bank discovered its employees using mouse movements to fake activity. They'd perfected the "minimum viable productivity" approach until the company's activity tracking software was in play. Even better now, AI can start to notice their "work" followed mathematically perfect sine wave patterns no human could maintain (unless they'd developed robot-level precision). The system can also catch agents deliberately sabotaging knowledge base articles to generate more calls, like changing "restart your computer" instructions to something weird. Modern detection systems combine three scary-smart technologies that would make even the NSA blush. 1. Behavioral biometrics monitor typing patterns, login timing and mouse movement to flag anomalies—like a daytime analyst suddenly typing erratically at 3 a.m. while digging through sensitive files. 2. NLP-based tone analysis tracks emotional shifts in communication. One system using sentiment features on email data achieved 91% accuracy in detecting insider threats using a Random Forest model. 3. Graph AI maps digital relationships to catch suspicious behavior, such as sudden encrypted chats or odd emoji signals before trades. Financial institutions increasingly employ graph-based behavioral analytics to identify potential insider collusion. By mapping communication and trading interactions into a network, anomalous relationship patterns can surface as early warning signs. The benefits are obvious: Prevention beats damage control, and AI can monitor employees without needing coffee breaks or developing personal biases (though some systems can be caught flagging too many Daves in IT departments). Many banks now use AI audit trails as courtroom evidence, turning HR investigations into episodes of Law & Order: SVU, where the smoking gun is a suspiciously timed VPN connection instead of a bloody glove. But there's a dark side to our new digital hall monitors: Imagine working under constant surveillance where your keystrokes are analyzed more closely than a polygraph test and your Slack tone is graded like a high school essay. A company could flag an employee for "suspicious activity" because he job-searched on LinkedIn during lunch (the horror!), while another company's AI nearly caused a mutiny when it started questioning why the marketing team spent so much time on "unproductive" sites like Pinterest and Instagram (clearly built by engineers who've never heard of visual content creation). Under the hood, these systems use self-supervised learning—essentially teaching themselves what shady behavior looks like by studying millions of data points until they can spot anomalies with the accuracy of a mother knowing exactly which child took the last cookie. They establish baselines (your normal work patterns), then use isolation forests (statistical outlier detectors that sound like rejected Hunger Games locations) to spot anomalies. Advanced systems are now exploring reinforcement learning approaches to detect sophisticated 'false flag' tactics—cases where attackers deliberately mimic legitimate activity to evade detection, a phenomenon detailed in MIT's attribution research on cyberattacks. We're now in an arms race where employees use ChatGPT to generate activity logs while companies deploy "honeypot" trap files with names like "LAYOFF_LIST_FINAL_FINAL_REALLY.xlsx" that trigger alerts when opened. Behavioral biometric systems are now so advanced that they may one day build profiles even for devices—from typing pressure on keyboards to interaction patterns—to detect abnormal activity and potential misuse. The future might involve thermal sensors detecting stress during sensitive tasks or analyzing keyboard acoustics to verify identities. The ethical tightrope is real. Yes, AI can prevent sabotage, but at what cost to workplace trust? The solution lies in transparency explaining how monitoring works (without tech jargon), allowing appeals (because even AIs make mistakes), and auditing the algorithms themselves (preferably before they develop opinions about who deserves promotions). After all, the best defense against betrayal isn't just smarter tech but creating a culture where going rogue doesn't pay better than just doing your job. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to explain why I just Googled, "How to write about corporate espionage without looking suspicious" three times in a row. For research. Obviously. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Yahoo
21 hours ago
- Yahoo
Tesla owner stunned after disturbing scene unfolds in parking garage: 'Some people just hate Tesla'
Electric vehicles continue to rise in popularity. Unfortunately, with anything popular comes a backlash, and reports of vandalism against EVs or their charging ports have been widespread. A Redditor recently took to the r/TeslaModel3 subreddit to post a video of one such disturbing incident. Some people just hate Tesla byu/mchid3 inTeslaModel3 In the dashcam video titled "Some people just hate Tesla," a man is seen ripping out a charger from a Tesla parked in a garage. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Another video captured a woman kicking a Tesla that was also parked in a garage. Yet another video showed a man unplugging an electric vehicle from a charging port in an airport parking lot. All of these instances of vandalism occurred before Tesla's unenviable first six months of 2025, with slumping sales and fluctuating stocks. This seems like the brand's new — though possibly temporary — norm amid backlash to CEO Elon Musk, whose polarizing politics and social media feuds made some consumers reconsider their loyalty to the brand and worried investors. When EV vandalism occurs, it can be particularly frustrating because it can slow widespread adoption of EVs. But widespread adoption is what the world needs to help cut our reliance on dirty energy sources such as gas and oil, which are the leading generators of toxic, heat-trapping air pollution. While not everyone ties their support for a brand to the face of the company, other people actively dislike EVs because of common misconceptions. A report from the University of Oxford recently debunked one such theory. Researcher Hannah Ritchie explained that the mining of oil and gas still far outweighs the mining of rare earth minerals used in EV batteries. Another study, reported by Reuters, showed that you only have to drive your electric vehicle 13,500 miles before you begin to do less harm to the environment than traditional gas guzzlers. Luckily, consumers still seem to be catching on. In fact, in 2024, more than 20% of all new car sales were electric vehicles, according to the International Energy Agency. Besides the environmental benefits, EVs can offer dramatic cost savings each year. Do you think Tesla can bounce back from its recent struggles? Yes It depends on Elon's actions I don't think it's struggling Nope Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. Many EV owners gain even more monetary benefits by installing solar panels and using clean energy to charge their vehicles. It is now easier than ever to install solar panels thanks to EnergySage, a company that offers a free online tool to compare quotes from vetted vendors that could save potential customers up to $10,000. Commenters on the original Reddit post were shocked by the vandal's behavior. One said, "In the future we [will] all be driving EVs … How about we all get over it and be nice." Another added, "I pray that this gentleman will learn compassion for his fellow man [and] the importance of respecting the property of others." Join our free newsletter for easy tips to save more and waste less, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet. Solve the daily Crossword
