Many of the challenges of the EV transition have to do with batteries—from consumer concerns about charging to industry-wide efforts to make batteries cheaper so plug-in vehicles are more accessible.

Tech Brew went deep on all things battery tech last week at Detroit’s Battery Show, a conference and expo featuring roughly 1,150 battery and hybrid/EV suppliers. The schedule was chock full of informative discussions on everything from emerging battery chemistry innovations to considerations for commercial fleets to EV charging infrastructure.

Here’s a roundup of some cool tech that caught our eye.

Get in formation: Tech Brew caught up with Don Wright, VP of engineering at Unico, which provides EV test solutions. The company unveiled the BAT350, the latest iteration of its battery cell formation and testing technology.

Wright explained that the tech could significantly speed up the battery-cell manufacturing process, enabling automakers to either reduce the size of their battery plants or as much as triple their output of battery cells. It could also help drive cost efficiencies, a key consideration for automakers looking to bring down the cost of EV batteries.

“Instead of it taking three weeks to make a cell, it might take you one week,” Wright said.

Keep reading here.—JG

Tesla CEO Elon Musk pulled up to a stage on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, California, last week in a futuristic-looking vehicle that reflects his vision for turning the EV maker into an AI and robotics company.

Musk laid out a scenario in which individual owners—or “shepherds,” as he called them—would amass their own “flocks” of robotaxis called “Cybercabs,” which they’d make money on by offering paid rides to passengers.

“I think the cost of autonomous transport will be so low,” Musk said, “that you can think of it like individualized mass transit.”

But Tesla’s stock was down following the event, and Musk’s presentation generated some skepticism about the plan’s technology, timeline, and business model.

“This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me,” Edwin Olson, CEO of AV company May Mobility, told Tech Brew of Musk’s robotaxi business model. “If you’ve got autonomous vehicles and they are cash-printing machines, because you can just turn them loose and they make money, then finding equity or investors to finance these vehicles shouldn’t be hard. Why do you need individual ‘shepherds’ going and buying 10 vehicles at a time?”

Keep reading here.—JG

With AI tech progress outpacing regulations to rein it in, digital artists have little guarantee that their work won’t be fed to a dataset that could ultimately help an image generator mimic their style.

Adobe is aiming to change that with a new tool that would give creators a means to digitally sign their images, videos, and audio files and potentially control how they are used.

The software giant’s new tool, set to roll out early next year, will allow creators to attach Content Credentials to their work, a “nutrition label” of sorts that includes attribution data and preferences around use in generative AI training.

The credential system is part of the Content Authenticity Initiative, an Adobe-led industry group that aims to create a standard for tagging the provenance of digital media at a time when sophisticated AI visuals have eroded a sense of reality online.

“We all read headlines about copyright lawsuits and GenAI models scraping the web with impunity, without any regard for ownership or compensation; these are real concerns that we’re hearing from our community,” Andy Parsons, senior director at the Content Authenticity Initiative, told Tech Brew. “Until there are copyright laws and court cases that protect that explicitly by law, we think it’s very important now and into the future beyond those times, to ensure that creators have agency to specify their preferences.”

Keep reading here.—PK