New tech from the University of California, Riverside could basically get rid of range anxiety for EV owners. This could remove a significant barrier to adoption of electric vehicles -- there are many potential buyers who steer clear of the vehicles because they fear being stranded on the roadside with a dead battery.

University scientists developed a system that can tell you exactly how much your EV battery still has in it before requiring a recharge. And we're not talking just a percentage, either. Called State of Mission (SOM), their technology can tell you if your battery has enough life in it to complete a certain task. It uses physics-based electrochemical and thermodynamic principles plus machine learning technology to look at exactly where you want to go and factor in a host of variables like elevation, environmental temperature, traffic and driving style to see if your battery can make it.

In tests with NASA and Oxford, the SOM system reduced prediction errors about things like battery voltage, temperature and the current state of charge. The team's next steps are to optimize its performance, since it currently eats up a lot of processing power. But it could one day work not only for EVs but for other battery-operated devices like drones as well.