The new Bentley Continental GT was already an imposing figure before this one left the factory in Crewe clad in dark satin paint and devoid of the usual chrome. And under the bonnet—or hood, if you prefer—you'll no longer find 12 cylinders. Instead, there's now an all-new twin-turbo V8 plug-in hybrid powertrain that offers both continent-crushing amounts of power and torque, but also a big enough battery for a day's driving around town.

We covered the details of the new hybrid a bit after our brief drive in the prototype this time last year . At the time, we also shared that the new PHEV bits have been brought over from Porsche. There's quite a lot of Panamera DNA in the new Continental GT, as well as some recent Audi ancestry. Bentley is quite good at the engineering remix, though: Little more than a decade after it was founded by W.O. , the brand belonged to Rolls-Royce, and so started a long history of parts-sharing.

Mind if I use that?

Rolls-Royce and Bentley went their separate ways in 2003. The unraveling started a few years earlier when the aerospace company that owned them decided to rationalize and get itself out of the car business. In 1997 it sold the rights to Rolls-Royce to BMW, or at least the rights to the name and logos. Volkswagen Group got the rest, including the factory in Crewe, and got to work on a new generation of Bentleys for a new century.

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The new Bentley Continental GT was already an imposing figure before this one left the factory in Crewe clad in dark satin paint and devoid of the usual chrome. And under the bonnet—or hood, if you prefer—you'll no longer find 12 cylinders. Instead, there's now an all-new twin-turbo V8 plug-in hybrid powertrain that offers both continent-crushing amounts of power and torque, but also a big enough battery for a day's driving around town.

We covered the details of the new hybrid a bit after our brief drive in the prototype this time last year . At the time, we also shared that the new PHEV bits have been brought over from Porsche. There's quite a lot of Panamera DNA in the new Continental GT, as well as some recent Audi ancestry. Bentley is quite good at the engineering remix, though: Little more than a decade after it was founded by W.O. , the brand belonged to Rolls-Royce, and so started a long history of parts-sharing.

Mind if I use that?

Rolls-Royce and Bentley went their separate ways in 2003. The unraveling started a few years earlier when the aerospace company that owned them decided to rationalize and get itself out of the car business. In 1997 it sold the rights to Rolls-Royce to BMW, or at least the rights to the name and logos. Volkswagen Group got the rest, including the factory in Crewe, and got to work on a new generation of Bentleys for a new century.

Read full article

Comments

The new Bentley Continental GT was already an imposing figure before this one left the factory in Crewe clad in dark satin paint and devoid of the usual chrome. And under the bonnet—or hood, if you prefer—you'll no longer find 12 cylinders. Instead, there's now an all-new twin-turbo V8 plug-in hybrid powertrain that offers both continent-crushing amounts of power and torque, but also a big enough battery for a day's driving around town.

We covered the details of the new hybrid a bit after our brief drive in the prototype this time last year . At the time, we also shared that the new PHEV bits have been brought over from Porsche. There's quite a lot of Panamera DNA in the new Continental GT, as well as some recent Audi ancestry. Bentley is quite good at the engineering remix, though: Little more than a decade after it was founded by W.O. , the brand belonged to Rolls-Royce, and so started a long history of parts-sharing.

Mind if I use that?

Rolls-Royce and Bentley went their separate ways in 2003. The unraveling started a few years earlier when the aerospace company that owned them decided to rationalize and get itself out of the car business. In 1997 it sold the rights to Rolls-Royce to BMW, or at least the rights to the name and logos. Volkswagen Group got the rest, including the factory in Crewe, and got to work on a new generation of Bentleys for a new century.

Read full article

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Most robots rely on complex control systems, AI-powered or otherwise, that govern their movement. These centralized electronic brains need time to react to changes in their environment and produce movements that are often awkwardly, well, robotic.

It doesn’t have to be that way. A team of Dutch scientists at the FOM Institute for Molecular and Atomic Physics (AMOLF) in Amsterdam built a new kind of robot that can run, go over obstacles, and even swim, all driven only by the flow of air. And it does all that with no brain at all.

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Most robots rely on complex control systems, AI-powered or otherwise, that govern their movement. These centralized electronic brains need time to react to changes in their environment and produce movements that are often awkwardly, well, robotic.

It doesn’t have to be that way. A team of Dutch scientists at the FOM Institute for Molecular and Atomic Physics (AMOLF) in Amsterdam built a new kind of robot that can run, go over obstacles, and even swim, all driven only by the flow of air. And it does all that with no brain at all.

Read full article

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Most robots rely on complex control systems, AI-powered or otherwise, that govern their movement. These centralized electronic brains need time to react to changes in their environment and produce movements that are often awkwardly, well, robotic.

It doesn’t have to be that way. A team of Dutch scientists at the FOM Institute for Molecular and Atomic Physics (AMOLF) in Amsterdam built a new kind of robot that can run, go over obstacles, and even swim, all driven only by the flow of air. And it does all that with no brain at all.

Read full article

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This week's Tuesday Telescope photo is pretty meta as it features... a telescope.

This particular telescope is under construction in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, one of the darkest places on Earth with excellent atmospheric visibility. The so-called "Extremely Large Telescope" is being built on a mountaintop in the Andes at an elevation of about 3,000 meters.

And it really is extremely large. The primary mirror will be 39 meters (128 feet) in diameter. Like, that's gigantic for an optical telescope. It is nearly four times larger than the largest operational reflecting telescopes in the world .

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This week's Tuesday Telescope photo is pretty meta as it features... a telescope.

This particular telescope is under construction in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, one of the darkest places on Earth with excellent atmospheric visibility. The so-called "Extremely Large Telescope" is being built on a mountaintop in the Andes at an elevation of about 3,000 meters.

And it really is extremely large. The primary mirror will be 39 meters (128 feet) in diameter. Like, that's gigantic for an optical telescope. It is nearly four times larger than the largest operational reflecting telescopes in the world .

Read full article

Comments

This week's Tuesday Telescope photo is pretty meta as it features... a telescope.

This particular telescope is under construction in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, one of the darkest places on Earth with excellent atmospheric visibility. The so-called "Extremely Large Telescope" is being built on a mountaintop in the Andes at an elevation of about 3,000 meters.

And it really is extremely large. The primary mirror will be 39 meters (128 feet) in diameter. Like, that's gigantic for an optical telescope. It is nearly four times larger than the largest operational reflecting telescopes in the world .

Read full article

Comments