Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

A plane just flew around the world without a single drop of fuel. Let that sink in for a minute

By

Piloted by co-founder Bertrand Piccard, Solar Impulse 2 nailed its historic landing this week and became the first aircraft to fly around the world powered only by the sun. The journey began in March 2015 when André Borschberg took off from Abu Dhabi and completed the plane’s first 13-hour, fuel-free flight.

A total of 17 legs were needed to complete the 25,000 miles included in the round-the-world trip. Now that this journey has been completed, what is next for the Solar Impulse plane and it Swiss founders? Well, let’s just say the future does not include the word retirement.

Recommended Videos

Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg spent more than 10 years and 150 million euros in the research and development of the Solar Impulse solar-powered plane, and they are not ready to stop. During their journey from concept to successful flight, the pair delved deeply into the world of energy-efficient batteries and green technology, becoming experts in both fields. Using this knowledge and experience, Piccard and Borschberg plan to focus on applying what they learned to the broader areas of aviation and travel. “The future is clean. The future is you. The future is now. Let’s take it further,” said Solar Impulse co-founder Piccard following the completion of the groundbreaking flight.

First and foremost, the team is not ready to retire the Solar Impulse airplane. The craft was designed to fly up to 2,000 hours and has only 700 hours of flight time from the recent around-the-world mission. With 1,300 hours of flight time left, the team wants to use the plane to spread its message about clean technology in both aviation and ground transportation.

They also hope to use the aircraft to develop and test autonomous flight controls. Though you likely won’t see a solar-powered, independent 747 flying in and out of your local airport, the technology developed by the Solar Impulse team lends itself well to drones. Further testing of the current and future Solar Impulse planes could be used in the design of upcoming, long-range, solar-powered drones.

On the advocacy side, Piccard and Borschberg recently formed the International Committee of Clean Technologies, which is an extension of the team’s #futureisclean initiative. The committee is organized to help both governments and businesses make informed decisions on clean technologies. “The International Committee of Clean Technologies is a fantastic opportunity to bring together a group of experts, with diverse experiences and backgrounds, to speak in one voice and leverage the efforts needed to bring change and influence global decision makers in the areas of clean technologies and renewable energy,” said co-founder Borschberg in a related statement.

Topics
Kelly Hodgkins
Kelly Hodgkins
Contributor
Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…
Rivian set to unlock unmapped roads for Gen2 vehicles
rivian unmapped roads gen2 r1t gallery image 0

Rivian fans rejoice! Just a few weeks ago, Rivian rolled out automated, hands-off driving for its second-gen R1 vehicles with a game-changing software update. Yet, the new feature, which is only operational on mapped highways, had left many fans craving for more.
Now the company, which prides itself on listening to - and delivering on - what its customers want, didn’t wait long to signal a ‘map-free’ upgrade will be available later this year.
“One feedback we’ve heard loud and clear is that customers love [Highway Assist] but they want to use it in more places,” James Philbin, Rivian VP of autonomy, said on the podcast RivianTrackr Hangouts. “So that’s something kind of exciting we’re working on, we’re calling it internally ‘Map Free’, that we’re targeting for later this year.”
The lag between the release of Highway Assist (HWA) and Map Free automated driving gives time for the fleet of Rivian vehicles to gather ‘unique events’. These events are used to train Rivian’s offline model in the cloud before data is distilled back to individual vehicles.
As Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained in early March, HWA marked the very beginning of an expanding automated-driving feature set, “going from highways to surface roads, to turn-by-turn.”
For now, HWA still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The system will send alerts if you drift too long without paying attention. But stay tuned—eyes-off driving is set for 2026.
It’s also part of what Rivian calls its “Giving you your time back” philosophy, the first of three pillars supporting Rivian’s vision over the next three to five years. Philbin says that philosophy is focused on “meeting drivers where they are”, as opposed to chasing full automation in the way other automakers, such as Tesla’s robotaxi, might be doing.
“We recognize a lot of people buy Rivians to go on these adventures, to have these amazing trips. They want to drive, and we want to let them drive,” Philbin says. “But there’s a lot of other driving that’s very monotonous, very boring, like on the highway. There, giving you your time back is how we can give the best experience.”
This will also eventually lead to the third pillar of Rivian’s vision, which is delivering Level 4, or high-automation vehicles: Those will offer features such as auto park or auto valet, where you can get out of your Rivian at the office, or at the airport, and it goes off and parks itself.
While not promising anything, Philbin says he believes the current Gen 2 hardware and platforms should be able to support these upcoming features.
The second pillar for Rivian is its focus on active safety features, as the EV-maker rewrote its entire autonomous vehicle (AV) system for its Gen2 models. This focus allowed Rivian’s R1T to be the only large truck in North America to get a Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
“I believe there’s a lot of innovation in the active safety space, in terms of making those features more capable and preventing more accidents,” Philbin says. “Really the goal, the north star goal, would be to have Rivian be one of the safest vehicles on the road, not only for the occupants but also for other road users.”

Read more
Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan hit the brake on shipments to U.S. over tariffs
Range Rover Sport P400e

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced it will pause shipments of its UK-made cars to the United States this month, while it figures out how to respond to President Donald Trump's 25% tariff on imported cars.

"As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans," JLR said in a statement sent to various media.

Read more
DeepSeek readies the next AI disruption with self-improving models
DeepSeek AI chatbot running on an iPhone.

Barely a few months ago, Wall Street’s big bet on generative AI had a moment of reckoning when DeepSeek arrived on the scene. Despite its heavily censored nature, the open source DeepSeek proved that a frontier reasoning AI model doesn’t necessarily require billions of dollars and can be pulled off on modest resources.

It quickly found commercial adoption by giants such as Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo, while the likes of Microsoft, Alibaba, and Tencent quickly gave it a spot on their platforms. Now, the buzzy Chinese company’s next target is self-improving AI models that use a looping judge-reward approach to improve themselves.

Read more