Toyota plans to offer more than 10 EV models by the early 2020s

Toyota recently hinted that it was finally ready to embrace pure electric cars , and now we have a better sense of what that commitment entails. The automaker has outlined its goals for low- and zero-emission cars in the next decade, and it expects to field “more than 10” EVs worldwide by the early 2020s, starting with China before spreading to markets like Europe, Japan and the US. And by 2025, every Toyota and Lexus will either be EV-only or have an electrified option like a hybrid or hydrogen fuel cell . Not that the company’s goals are especially ambitious. It hopes to have sold somewhere over 1 million zero-emission cars (either pure EVs or hydrogen models) by 2030, and 5.5 million with some kind of electric powerplant. That sounds like a lot, but it’s fairly modest in practice. Ford has said that it wants at least 10 percent of its sales to be EVs by 2020, while GM hopes to have 20 EVs on the market by 2023. And of course, Tesla may well beat Toyota’s numbers far in advance. There were roughly half a million Model 3 reservations by August , and that’s not including other EV models. Nonetheless, the targets are important. Even though Toyota is hedging its bets by making hydrogen a part of its future, it’s treating EVs as a significant part of its lineup. And when Toyota is clearly one of the world’s largest car brands, that’s bound to make an impact on what people drive. You may at least consider an electrified car where it wasn’t an option before. Source: Toyota

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Toyota plans to offer more than 10 EV models by the early 2020s

The external graphics dream is real: Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box reviewed

Enlarge / The Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box and Sapphire RX 580. (credit: Mark Walton) Specs at a glance: Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box Power 350W Asaka AK-PS035AF01 SFX Ports 1x PCIe 3.0 X16, 1x Thunderbolt 3.0 Size 18.5cm x 34.0cm x 20.2cm Other perks 120mm Asaka Fan Price $300 (~£300, but TBC) The external graphics card (or eGFX), long the pipe dream of laptop-touting gamers the world over, has finally come of age. Thanks to Thunderbolt 3 —which offers up to 40Gbps of bandwidth, the equivalent of four PCIe 3.0 lanes—consumers finally have access to enough bandwidth in a universal standard to make eGFX a viable option. So the theory goes, you can now take most laptops with a Thunderbolt 3 port, plug in a box containing a power supply and your GPU of choice, and enjoy better visuals and higher frame rates in games, and faster rendering in production tasks. You can even whack a PCIe video capture card or a production-ready audio interface in that external box, if you so wish. Thus far the limiting factor, aside from some potential performance bottlenecks and driver support, has been price. The Razer Core , as beautifully designed as it is, costs a whopping £500/$500 without a graphics card—and that’s if it’s even in stock. Meanwhile, the Asus ROG XG Station 2—which is most certainly not beautifully designed—costs £400/$400. When paired with a decent graphics card like an Nvidia GTX 1070 or an AMD RX 580, a full eGFX setup runs just shy of £900/$900, not including the price of a laptop to pair it with. Read 34 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The external graphics dream is real: Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box reviewed