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Sparks

Detroit Is About to Test the Bejeezus Out of Wireless EV Charging

The dream of charging your car as you drive faces the reality of a Michigan winter.

A cord as a road.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Tesla

One block of Detroit’s hip Corktown neighborhood is now the home to the nation's first inductive charging roadway, allowing specially-equipped vehicles to charge while on the move.

The electric road system is being deployed two years after Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced the pilot program. A joint project between the state’s Department of Transportation, Detroit, and the company that developed and installed the technology, Electreon, the quarter-mile stretch of road is packed with copper coils that allow EVs equipped with Electreon’s magnetic receivers to wirelessly charge while driving, idling, or parked. Just as importantly, it’s safe for pedestrians, animals, and other vehicles.

The stretch of 14th Street the city picked for the test was also no accident; it’s directly in front of Michigan Central, Detroit's innovation and technology hub that includes everything from autonomous vehicle developers to drone deployments. The symbolism is obvious.

Yet Electreon — a company that has partnered with other cities in Europe and its home country of Israel — might be interested in the area for more practical reasons. It’s just really hard to maintain roads in Michigan.

Concrete and pavement is pummeled year-round with excessive moisture that seeps into cracks, contracting and expanding to break apart roads from the inside. And that’s before you throw in metro traffic, tractor trailers, and the thousands of pounds of salt scattered on the road that keeps ice at bay and accelerates rust.

If that sounds like an awful place to test copper-embedded roadways and external magnetic receivers, maybe that’s the point. If wireless charging can make it in Detroit, it can make it anywhere.

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Sparks

One Reason Trump Wants Greenland: Critical Minerals

The island is home to one of the richest rare earth deposits in the world.

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A top aide to incoming President Donald Trump is claiming the president-elect wants the U.S. to acquire Greenland to acquire more rare minerals.

“This is about critical minerals. This is about natural resources,” Trump’s soon-to-be national security advisor Michael Waltz told Fox News host Jesse Watters Thursday night, adding: “You can call it Monroe Doctrine 2.0, but it’s all part of the America First agenda.”

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Sparks

An Insurance Startup Faces a Major Test in Los Angeles

Kettle offers parametric insurance and says that it can cover just about any home — as long as the owner can afford the premium.

Los Angeles fire destruction.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Los Angeles is on fire, and it’s possible that much of the city could burn to the ground. This would be a disaster for California’s already wobbly home insurance market and the residents who rely on it. Kettle Insurance, a fintech startup focused on wildfire insurance for Californians, thinks that it can offer a better solution.

The company, founded in 2020, has thousands of customers across California, and L.A. County is its largest market. These huge fires will, in some sense, “be a good test, not just for the industry, but for the Kettle model,” Brian Espie, the company’s chief underwriting officer, told me. What it’s offering is known as “parametric” insurance and reinsurance (essentially insurance for the insurers themselves.) While traditional insurance claims can take years to fully resolve — as some victims of the devastating 2018 Camp Fire know all too well — Kettle gives policyholders 60 days to submit a notice of loss, after which the company has 15 days to validate the claim and issue payment. There is no deductible.

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Sparks

What the L.A. Fires Are Doing to the City’s Air

The Santa Ana winds are carrying some of the smoke out to sea.

Los Angeles during wildfires.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Wildfires have been raging across Los Angeles County since Tuesday morning, but only in the past 24 hours or so has the city’s air quality begun to suffer.

That’s because of the classic path of the Santa Ana winds, Alistair Hayden, a public health professor at Cornell who studies how wildfire smoke affects human health, told me. “Yesterday, it looked like the plumes [from the Palisades fire] were all blowing out to sea, which I think makes sense with the Santa Ana wind patterns blowing to the southwest,” Hayden said.

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