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Chema Bonilla Díaz

Chema Bonilla covers the auto industry and mobility from Madrid, with a focus on new model launches, the arrival of emerging manufacturers in Europe, and the pace of electrification across the region. He trained in automotive technology before studying journalism at Universidad Francisco de Vitoria in Madrid, and has written for the Spanish motoring outlets Motorlife Magazine and Auto10.com. He also specializes in digital and social publishing. His beat gives AutoNotion readers a view of developments that hit Europe first: Chinese brands building out dealer networks, EV mandates already in force, and model launches that reach the US years later, if at all.

Latest articles

AeroVironment LOCUST laser JLTV

A 30-kilowatt laser has to hold its beam on one square inch of a drone that is actively trying to get away, and the Army has just ordered dozens of them after four decades of burning targets on test ranges without ever buying a single one

09.07.2026
Herrenknecht AVN microtunneling machine

A sealed German cutting head with nobody inside and no reverse met what its contractor counts as more than 2,000 boulders under a Canadian city, up to 15 crowding its face at once. It ground every one against a cone crusher into gravel small enough for a pipe and holed through 5,600 feet later

09.07.2026
Altius 700 Black Hawk launch drone

A US Army Black Hawk fired a drone off its wing pylon over the Mojave, it joined others, one of them found a target and told the rest, and another hit it. Nobody in the helicopter steered any of it, and the Hellfire that crew usually carries reaches 6.8 miles

09.07.2026
MARTAC Devil Ray T38

A 38-foot drone boat that once spent 192 hours alone at sea came up behind a float towed by a Navy ship off Virginia, pushed a fuel probe into it, took on 400 gallons over dozens of hookups and let go each time, and somebody was steering the probe on every one

09.06.2026
Saltstone Disposal Unit Savannah River

A 375-foot concrete tank in South Carolina, wrapped in 341 miles of cable like a wine barrel, is cleared to take 33 million gallons of nuclear grout that pushes outward as a liquid until it sets into a plug nobody moves. The sign-off came 26 months after the last pour

09.06.2026
Swarmbotics FireAnt robot

Five 70-pound ground drones are riding in the brackets on the side of a Bradley where the explosive reactive armor normally bolts on, and they roll into the trench first, while the squad sitting behind that armor stays buttoned up on a hull from 1981

09.05.2026
Jaia Robotics JaiaBot drone

A 6.5-pound drone thrown off a dock by hand sprints across the surface at 8 mph, stops, dives 197 feet straight down for a reading and pops back up, and the Navy spent two days in August watching pods of them hunt other underwater drones in a harbor

09.04.2026
Søens Tech Shadowfin underwater drone

A 23-foot Danish drone submarine built out of a length of 20-inch fiberglass pipe carries 660 pounds, about what the warhead of a Mk 48 torpedo weighs, and that weapon needs a submarine with people in it to go anywhere. This one costs pickup truck money

09.04.2026
Norwind Helm vessel drone

A 280-foot ship built so a technician could walk a 105-foot gangway onto a wind turbine is going to the Danish navy instead, because the crane that sets cargo down in a swell also picks an 8-ton drone submarine back up, and it has 37 spare bunks for the operators

09.03.2026
Mk 54 torpedo P-8 Poseidon Boeing

A 268-pound torpedo would come off a bomb rack at 60,000 feet, pop its wings, glide to the target area on its own and only turn into a torpedo when it hits the water — 59,900 feet higher than a bare 607-pound one goes in today

09.03.2026
Moog RIwP unmanned surface vessel drone

A 39-foot drone boat wrapped in solar panels from bow to stern carries a turret under an armored hatch in its nose, gathers 24 kilowatt-hours a day against the 2.5 it spends holding position, and the yard that built the hull makes wake boats

09.02.2026
sonobuoy P-8 loading

A 39-pound tube shaped the way American sonobuoys have been shaped since 1942 pinged at underwater drones this summer, gave away its own position doing it, and sank, while a 21-inch reel unspooled nearby into a listening array and never made a sound

09.02.2026
MBARI Benthic Rover II

An 8.5-foot drone has been crawling the seafloor 13,100 feet under California on two watts, driving 32 feet at a time and then sitting 48 hours while it counts the oxygen the mud is breathing, and it has covered 6.8 miles in seven years

09.01.2026
Tiberius Sceptre 155mm shell

A 155-millimeter shell left a howitzer over New Mexico at 18,000 times the force of gravity, which is 2,000 times what knocks a fighter pilot out, then lit a liquid-fueled jet engine in midair and flew on under power, and the 93 miles it is built for is still a design number

09.01.2026
Q-CTRL quantum gravimeter gps

A 95-foot boat crossed 51.6 miles of the Coral Sea with satellite navigation cut out of the chain entirely, steering on the gravity of the rock passing under the hull, and held position to within 6,076 feet, an error too coarse to dock on that stops growing instead of piling up

09.01.2026
Aalo Pod reactor

While every other microreactor startup waits on a fuel that 900 kilograms of gets made a year, an Austin company built around the grade 440 reactors already burn, and has sold a data center on five cores nobody has started building

08.31.2026
Autosub Long Range NOC

An 11-foot drone submarine weighing 1,653 pounds was sent 4,921 feet down under a jam of icebergs off Greenland on a 170-watt motor, and while it was down there a slab of ice 3,280 feet across let go

08.31.2026
Stark Vanta-6 USV

A 20-foot plastic drone boat weighing 4,630 pounds carries 1,100 pounds of sensors, runs 1,047 miles at walking pace, sits alone in the Baltic listening for transmitters, and the German navy took delivery with nothing on board that shoots

08.30.2026
Hartlepool nuclear power station

41 blue rubber balls came off an English beach in half an hour, each one a little wider than the condenser tube it was made to wipe, dropped into a power station’s cooling water so every tube gets scrubbed every 5 to 10 minutes without shutting anything down

08.30.2026
Oceaneering Freedom AUV

A 49-foot drone flew 10 to 16 feet over 74.6 miles of North Sea pipeline in a single pass, parked itself on a seabed dock to recharge and dump its data, and the Navy has now bought one, built for the oil companies that paid for all of it first

08.30.2026
D3Energy Lima Ohio floating solar

3,100 solar panels now float on the reservoir where 35,000 Ohioans get their drinking water, on four acres instead of the ten the same output needs on land, and the mayor who proposed it in 2019 retired two years later without seeing a single float go in

08.29.2026
Greensea IQ Bayonet Sweep

A drone clamps onto a ship’s hull below the waterline and crawls it bow to stern hunting 15-pound magnetic charges built to fire if anybody pulls one off, a search that today still means a diver feeling along steel he cannot see

08.29.2026
Herrenknecht Wilma Brenner Base Tunnel

A 6-million-pound machine named Wilma was shipped to Austria in 80,000 pieces across 170 special loads, rebuilt in a chamber cut into the mountain, and spent 706 days boring north until she broke into a 34-mile hole that crews had dug toward her from another country

08.29.2026
Albacore Ghostfin drone submarine

425-pound drone submarines are coming out of a former marble showroom in South Philadelphia at 75 a year, 8 feet long, carrying a 250-pound warhead 1,000 nautical miles on a 30-day charge, and the first one went together on a kitchen table

08.28.2026
ZeroUSV Oceanus12

A 39-foot drone boat put two 100-pound robot sailboats over the side off Plymouth, software running the whole sequence, and the pair spread apart to run on wind and sunlight doing the submarine listening that ties up a frigate and its entire crew

08.28.2026
donna maria boring machine

A 584-foot machine named Donna Maria weighs 1.5 million pounds, cuts a face only 16 feet across, and goes in 130 feet under Munich below the water table, and the 1.9 miles of tunnel she is about to dig is a hole no passenger will ever ride through

08.27.2026
RTsys NemoSens micro-AUV

A 22-pound drone carries a sonar and a magnetometer in four pounds of spare room, swims 656 feet down over cables, wrecks and a century of unexploded ordnance, runs eight hours at four knots, and seven of them can hold a conversation underwater while they work the same box

08.27.2026
heliatek bmw

A 3.5-pound sheet of solar film peels off a roll, goes onto bare concrete with a hand roller, and 414 of them now cover three towers at a Bavarian car factory that had just put 500 times more onto a warehouse roof next door using ordinary glass on a steel rack

08.27.2026
ROV SuBastian Schmidt Ocean Institute

A 7,000-pound robot flew a sheet of laser light through open water off Brazil and rebuilt jellyfish in three dimensions without touching any of them, and in about two weeks it confirmed 31 species nobody had ever described, one every eleven hours

08.26.2026
Fugro Blue Eclipse USV

A 57-foot drone boat has been mapping 420 square miles of Norwegian shelf, 20 days at a stretch, driven over satellite from a room in Aberdeen, and the company that owns it is scrapping crewed ships in the same quarter it orders more of them

08.26.2026
Bull Run Fossil Plant Stellarator

An 865-megawatt coal hall in Tennessee is being handed to two machines that generate nothing, one spinning to steady the grid, one firing frozen hydrogen pellets into a plasma to prove the magnets hold, 56 years after the first load went into the boiler

08.26.2026
UK Power Networks Avenue Road drilling

A drill rig on a south London street aimed itself sideways, pushed a pilot hole 330 feet under a live railway and two tram tracks running on 750-volt third rail, widened it four times to 20 inches, and the trams kept coming every ten minutes the whole way through

08.26.2026
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