Latest news with #US140
7NEWS
4 days ago
- Automotive
- 7NEWS
GWM teases Ferrari-fighting supercar
GWM is set to unveil its first supercar as it looks to muscle in on Ferrari, Lamborghini and McLaren turf. Company chairman Wei Jiajun posted an image of what appears to be a low-slung, two-door sports car on social media to celebrate the automaker's 35th anniversary. The vehicle under a silk cover sits below the waist height of the executives surrounding it, with a low bonnet and arching rear silhouette suggesting it has a mid-mounted powertrain. To be launched under a new 'super luxury' sub-brand called Confidence Auto, development of a GWM supercar was confirmed by GWM chief technology officer Wu Huixiao earlier this year. CarExpert can save you thousands on a new car. Click here to get a great deal. The confirmation came with the bold promise it would be better than the Ferrari SF90, the Italian brand's first plug-in hybrid (PHEV) supercar. In Australia, the SF90 has a list price of $846,888, meaning a price tag of more than $1 million once on-road costs are added. Car News China reports the GWM supercar will be priced at $US140,000 ($A211,600), to be cheaper than both the SF90 and the $A398,975 Yangwang U9 electric supercar made by rival BYD. The flagship Yangwang – a brand under consideration for Australia – uses four electric motors to give the electric U9 a 960kW output with a 2.36-second 0-100km/h claim and top speed of 309km/h. It's not the only Chinese supercar, with GAC's Hyptec brand offering the SSR with a 900kW/1230Nm tri-motor electric powertrain that gives it a claimed 0-100km/h time of as low as 1.9 seconds. ABOVE: Hyptec SSR, Yangwang U9 Ferrari's SF90 uses a mid-mounted 4.0-litre twin-turbocharged V8 engine and a trio of electric motors to produce 735kW/800Nm, enabling a 2.5-second 0-100km/h time and 340km/h top speed. GWM showed off a 4.0-litre V8 petrol engine of its own earlier this year, developed entirely in-house and designed as part of a PHEV powertrain. The V8 was originally destined for a large pickup truck to compete with the Ford F-150, Chevrolet Silverado and Ram 1500 in the US. Those plans have been put on hold given the import tariffs introduced on Chinese-made vehicles by US President Donald Trump. While GWM has previously suggested the engine's physical dimensions ruled it out for the supercar, it could be repurposed given the idling of the V8 US truck project. GWM International vice-president James Yang told Australia media in Shanghai earlier this year the new V8 was under consideration for several models to be sold in China and export markets, including Australia. 'For the past three-four years we have been working on this V8, including lab as well as real-world testing,' said Mr Wang. Mr Wang also suggested the V8 is under consideration for GWM models, including the Tank 300 off-roader.
Sydney Morning Herald
7 days ago
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
Australian energy giant ditches US plant as Trump attacks green power
Woodside, the largest Australian oil and gas company, has abandoned plans to build a lower-carbon fuels plant in the United States as energy users and producers reel from Donald Trump's decision to slash tax breaks for green technologies. The Perth-based energy giant told investors on Wednesday it would take a $US140 million ($214 million) profit hit after deciding to walk away from the H2OK liquid hydrogen project it had been planning in Oklahoma, blaming the rising cost of making cleaner hydrogen and weaker-than-expected customer demand. 'We have made the decision to exit the H2OK project, demonstrating our disciplined approach to portfolio management,' Woodside chief executive Meg O'Neill said on Wednesday. Woodside, a producer of oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG), is pursuing the development of lower-carbon hydrogen as part of its climate transition strategy. Because hydrogen emits only water vapour when burned, it is considered by many to be a promising climate-friendly energy source that could eventually substitute fossil fuels and help clean up heavy-polluting industries, as long as it is made using low- or zero-carbon energy sources. Woodside's H2OK would have used an electrolyser, powered by the electricity grid, to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. However, Woodside announced it was pausing the H2OK project in January, shortly after Donald Trump's return to the White House. It also scrapped a separate plan to build a concentrated solar thermal energy facility in California through a partnership with Heliogen, a company backed by billionaire Bill Gates. While not directly attributing those decisions to Trump's energy agenda, Woodside at the time said it needed to consider the implications of the administration's pledge to dismantle support for US clean energy investments, including halting the disbursement of funds from the $567 billion Inflation Reduction Act, which had been offering generous tax breaks for renewable developers. This month, Trump secured the passage of a giant tax and domestic policy bill through Congress, which will make it cheaper and easier for companies to drill and produce fossil fuels, while cutting funding for electric cars and wind and solar farms. Woodside remains committed to one clean energy investment in the US, the Beaumont lower-carbon ammonia project in Texas. The project was 95 per cent completed as of June 30, the company said.
The Age
7 days ago
- Business
- The Age
Australian energy giant ditches US plant as Trump attacks green power
Woodside, the largest Australian oil and gas company, has abandoned plans to build a lower-carbon fuels plant in the United States as energy users and producers reel from Donald Trump's decision to slash tax breaks for green technologies. The Perth-based energy giant told investors on Wednesday it would take a $US140 million ($214 million) profit hit after deciding to walk away from the H2OK liquid hydrogen project it had been planning in Oklahoma, blaming the rising cost of making cleaner hydrogen and weaker-than-expected customer demand. 'We have made the decision to exit the H2OK project, demonstrating our disciplined approach to portfolio management,' Woodside chief executive Meg O'Neill said on Wednesday. Woodside, a producer of oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG), is pursuing the development of lower-carbon hydrogen as part of its climate transition strategy. Because hydrogen emits only water vapour when burned, it is considered by many to be a promising climate-friendly energy source that could eventually substitute fossil fuels and help clean up heavy-polluting industries, as long as it is made using low- or zero-carbon energy sources. Woodside's H2OK would have used an electrolyser, powered by the electricity grid, to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. However, Woodside announced it was pausing the H2OK project in January, shortly after Donald Trump's return to the White House. It also scrapped a separate plan to build a concentrated solar thermal energy facility in California through a partnership with Heliogen, a company backed by billionaire Bill Gates. While not directly attributing those decisions to Trump's energy agenda, Woodside at the time said it needed to consider the implications of the administration's pledge to dismantle support for US clean energy investments, including halting the disbursement of funds from the $567 billion Inflation Reduction Act, which had been offering generous tax breaks for renewable developers. This month, Trump secured the passage of a giant tax and domestic policy bill through Congress, which will make it cheaper and easier for companies to drill and produce fossil fuels, while cutting funding for electric cars and wind and solar farms. Woodside remains committed to one clean energy investment in the US, the Beaumont lower-carbon ammonia project in Texas. The project was 95 per cent completed as of June 30, the company said.
AU Financial Review
7 days ago
- Business
- AU Financial Review
Woodside takes $US140m hit on ditched US hydrogen project
Woodside Energy will take a $US140 million ($213.5 million) hit to profits after abandoning a hydrogen project in the United States, one of the clean energy investments that has fallen victim to President Donald Trump's cooling on decarbonisation efforts. The oil and gas producer has also suffered a blowout in the budget for decommissioning old oil and gas fields, resulting in a cost of as much as $US500 million ($762 million) that will be booked in its first-half earnings.
The Age
24-04-2025
- Automotive
- The Age
China has an army of robots on its side in the tariff war
Elon Li's curbside workshop in Guangzhou, the commercial hub of southeastern China, has 11 workers who cut and weld metal to make inexpensive ovens and barbecue equipment. He is preparing to pay $US40,000 ($63,000) to a Chinese company for a robotic arm with a camera. The device uses artificial intelligence to observe how a worker welds the sides of an oven, and then duplicates the action with minimal human intervention. Only four years ago, the same system was available only from foreign robot companies and cost nearly $US140,000. 'Before, I never would have imagined investing in automation,' Li said, adding that a human employee 'can only work for eight hours a day, but a machine can work 24 hours.' Bigger companies bet far more on automation. In Ningbo, a huge factory for Zeekr, a Chinese electric carmaker, had 500 robots when it opened four years ago. Now there are 820, and many more are planned. Cheerfully trilling Kenny G tunes to warn any people of their approach, robot carts haul aluminum ingots to an automated elevator, which lifts the blocks of metal to a furnace at the top of a 12-metre tall Chinese-made machine. Once molten, the aluminum is cast into the shapes of various car body panels and other components. More robot carts, and the occasional human driving a forklift, take the components to a warehouse. Loading Yet more robots take the panels to the assembly line, where hundreds of robotic arms, working in teams of up to 16, do a complex dance to weld them together into car bodies. The welding area is a so-called dark factory, meaning that the robots can operate without workers and with the lights off. China's factories still employ legions of workers. Even with the automation, they are needed to check quality and install some parts that require manual dexterity, such as wiring harnesses. There are things cameras and computers cannot do on their own. Before cars are painted, workers still run gloved hands over them and sand smooth any tiny imperfections. Yet, some of the later steps of quality control are also being automated with the help of artificial intelligence. Loading Near the end of Zeekr's assembly line, a dozen high-resolution cameras take photos of each car. Computers compare the images to an extensive database of correctly assembled cars and alert factory staff if a discrepancy is found. The task takes seconds. 'Most of our colleagues' jobs involve sitting in front of a computer monitor,' said Pinky Wu, a Zeekr worker. Zeekr and other Chinese automakers are also using artificial intelligence to design cars and their features more efficiently. Carrie Li, a designer who works at Zeekr's new office building in Shanghai, uses AI to analyse how different interior surfaces will intersect in a car. 'I have more spare time to open my mind and explore for myself which kinds of fashion trends to include in the cars' interior,' Li said. Car factories in the United States also use automation, but much of the equipment comes from China. Most of the world's car assembly plants built in the past 20 years were in China, and an automation industry grew up around them. Chinese companies also bought overseas suppliers of advanced robotics, such as Kuka of Germany, and moved much of their operations to China. When Volkswagen opened an electric car factory a year ago in Hefei, it had one robot from Germany and 1074 robots made in Shanghai. China's rapid advance in factory robotics has been propelled from the top down. Beijing's 'Made in China 2025' initiative, which began a decade ago, set out 10 industries in which China sought to be globally competitive. Robotics was one of them. To force the car industry to think about how to use humanoid robots with two arms and two legs, for example, government officials in Beijing told major automakers last year to rent robots and submit videos of them performing tasks in their assembly plants. The videos required many takes to get them right. The robots did only basic tasks, such as sorting auto parts in a warehouse. But the initiative has helped push the carmakers along. In a show of the automation push, the Beijing municipal government held a half-marathon on Saturday for 12,000 runners and 20 humanoid robots. Only six robots finished the race, and the fastest of them took nearly three times as long as the fastest runners. But the event helped draw attention to robots. Last month, Premier Li Qiang, China's second-highest official, said in his annual report to the legislature that the country's plans this year would include an effort to 'vigorously develop' intelligent robots. The country's top economic planning agency announced a $US137 billion national venture capital fund for robotics, artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies. China's government-controlled banks have increased lending to industrial borrowers over the past four years by a staggering $US1.9 trillion. That has paid for the construction of factories as well as the replacement of equipment at existing ones. China's universities produce about 350,000 mechanical engineering graduates per year, as well as electricians, welders and other trained technicians. By comparison, American universities graduate about 45,000 mechanical engineers each year. Jonathan Hurst, chief robot officer and a co-founder of Agility Robotics, a leading American robot manufacturer, said finding skilled employees had been one of his biggest challenges. As a graduate student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Hurst said, he was one of two mechanical engineers. China's rapid embrace of automation worries some Chinese workers. Geng Yuanjie, 27, drives a forklift at the Zeekr factory, where he has worked for the past two years. He said there were considerably fewer robots at the Volkswagen factory where he previously worked. Surrounded by robots, he has few co-workers to talk to during his 12-hour shifts. 'I can feel the trend towards automation,' Geng said as he watched a robot cart pull a rack of car parts past his forklift. He said that his high school education might not be enough for him to qualify for classes in programming robots, and that he worried he might lose his job someday to a robot. 'It is not just my concern – everyone worries about it,' Geng said. Automation has threatened and even eliminated jobs around the world for more than a century, often slowing automation's growth. In China, there are fewer obstacles than practically anywhere else. China has no independent labor unions, and Communist Party control leaves almost no room for dissent. Another factor behind China's automation drive is the country's demographic crisis. The number of babies born each year has dropped by almost two-thirds since 1987. At the same time, two-thirds of people turning 18 now enroll at a university or college, an educational trajectory that has allowed a new generation to aspire to careers outside factory labor. 'China's demographic dividend is over,' said Stephen Dyer, head of the Asia industrial practice at AlixPartners, a consulting firm. 'They're now in a demographic deficit, and the only way out of that is productivity.'
