UK: millions of second cars could be electric

In late June, during the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership conference in the UK, Edmund King, the UK Automobile Association president, presented his thoughts on why he believes millions of second cars in households could be electric.

According to King,
74% of AA members park their cars overnight off the road and on their own land (58% on the driveway, 16% in the garage) where, potentially, they could be charged overnight.
50% of 18,688 respondents in AA Populus survey in April have access to two or more cars, 12% of them drive the ‘second’ car.
Second cars are more likely to have access to charging, 79% v 74% overall.
Second cars are less likely to be used for long journeys: never drive between 100 and 200 miles a trip – 25% v 15% overall, never drive 200+ miles a trip – 38% v 25% overall.

The UK Automobile Association says that 2.5 million second cars could be electric and rely solely on home charging.

King says that second cars differ from first cars in the following ways:
Slightly lower range expectation from an electric vehicle – 105 miles per charge v 109 overall.
Slightly lower expectations of reliability and safety.
Slightly less concerned about charging time.
Less likely to be concerned by the cost of battery replacement.
Less likely to be concerned by possibility of increased taxation.

So, your first car might still be ICE, but it’s quite likely that a second car being electric would fit your needs.

Imagining The Future With Driverless Cars

TechDissected.com: 7:00 am. My alarm is yelling at me. I shower and get ready for the workday ahead. Hands need shaking and a deal needs closing with Mr. Bigwig. My phone vibrates notifying me that my car is arriving in 5 minutes.

There are many cars I could use to get around. They used to be called “driverless cars” and then “AutoCars” but once virtually every vehicle on the road became autonomous they were simply referred to as “cars.” Some people actually own their own car. The majority, like me, pay monthly for access to a basic commuter.

Commuter cars charge based on the number of miles traveled, specific city taxes, insurance (still required for some reason), and any incidents and damage charges. I have a separate bill for the one-off special occasion cars. Google’s car is one of the best as far as price due to ads subsidizing the cost and all of the included entertainment features.

The car is scheduled to pick me up at 8:00 am every day. Sometimes it’s a few minutes late. If I’m more than 5 minutes late getting into the car I’ll be charged a fee, have to wait for the next car to pick me up, and my rating will be docked. Currently, I have a 4.8/5 star rating. This means I’ve almost never caused damage to the car and I’m rarely late. A good rating means cars will arrive faster, I’ll be allowed to ride in newer, cleaner cars and my monthly rates will be lower.

Having Cars Drive You

I step into the car and sleepily nod to the other commuters already seated and heading into the city. Almost everyone commutes. Living far outside of the city is not an issue when you can work and entertain yourself the entire way. I could choose to ride solo but riding with others is much more affordable. The tax for entering the city on a solo car is outrageous. Every city has a tax on all cars to prevent congestion in the city and to makeup for the lack of funds from the highway patrol of the past.

The door automatically closes as I sit down and settle in for the 54 minute ride ahead.

This car is pretty typical. You won’t find a steering wheel, shifters, brake pedals, airbags, seat belts or really any of the “features” of the death boxes of the past. This car also doesn’t even have a windshield. It has plastic windows on all sides but lacks wraparound glass common on antique cars. There is an emergency button to pull over immediately.

There is a touch panel in the middle of the car. When not in use, the panel scrolls through advertisements and discounts to local eateries and stores. It can be a little annoying at times but without it the Google Car wouldn’t be one the cheapest options. I mostly tune it out. Once in a while the advertisements come in handy. I’m hungry and Google knows my favorite places to eat within a few minutes of my location.

Most of the interactions for this car occur through an app on my phone or tablet. Google’s app is called Google Go. It allows me to change the climate for my seating area, view the route, select entertainment or add in a new destination. When riding with other passengers, new destinations or entertainment require their approval. I ride with the same passengers most days so it’s rare when a detour is needed and we tend to keep to ourselves. If a detour is needed and deemed too long by the other passengers you can be dropped off in an area with low risk of accident and crime and picked up by another car within minutes.

We are zooming along a 6-lane highway. In the morning, the highway uses 5 of the lanes for those entering the city and one for the cars leaving. On the way home, the lanes will switch to prevent any congestion when leaving the city. Nothing really changes other than the direction of the cars. It’s not like there are traffic signs, medians, guardrails or any other “safety precautions” to reposition. Usually we travel behind the road trains (“semi’s” or “trucks”). It’s more efficient for smaller vehicles to draft behind larger vehicles.

Traffic is cruising smoothly at 70 mph — bumper to bumper and door to door. There’s a fast lane to the left that sustains 100 mph. It costs extra but it’s helpful if I’m late.

The cars aren’t perfect but they are getting better. Once in a while there will be a minor issue: repairs to the road, a suicidal deer, making way for an emergency bullet car (bullet cars are allowed to travel much faster than regular cars), or because your car had a mechanical problem. Even the newest cars can still have issues. While rare, it costs you a few minutes while you wait for another car to pick you up. And let’s not mention the car hack that caused all that ruckus a couple of years back.

There are never traffic jams although traffic slows to about 40 mph once we get into the city. When cars need to come to a full stop in the city they will resume by accelerating together in perfect unison.

As we enter the city, traffic slows as the cars stop to drop off their passengers. Cities are much more compact than they once were and also much larger. It’s funny to think that cities used to be full of pavement. Cars sat idly during the day waiting patiently like my dog wagging its tail at the front door. Parking lots are now skyscrapers. There are a couple large battery swap stations on the outskirts of the city which resemble a parking lot though nothing like the vast concrete deserts of yesteryear.

During the day the car never sits in one place for more than about 20 minutes. Many cars will get a rest at night during off-peak hours in one of the car elevators where the cleaning bots scurry to ensure the car is ready for the next day’s customers.

After 54 minutes, we arrive at our drop-off point. We all exit the car and it zips off to pick up the nearest rider. I enter the office to chat with colleagues and prepare for my sales meeting with Mr. Bigwig. I’ll need a fancier car for this. First impressions are important. I can’t have the client thinking I’m an everyday Joe.

There are many types of cars. There is the common cheap commuter car, along with a typical a mid-range, and the luxury style. There are also sleeping cars, party cars, entertainment cars, romantic cars, and a wide range of other niche designs and features. Once in a while after a long night I’ll splurge on the “hangover car” to the office the next morning: no windows, a recliner, the soft sounds of nature and an Advil dispenser; the only way to travel on those days.

Taking out my phone, I open Google Now, “Grab me an empty luxury car with a full bar for a meeting.”

The nearest available luxury car with these specifications is 8 minutes away. Google Now knows that when I mention the word “meeting” to find a car with at least two seats facing each other and a screen for presentations. Behind me is a full bar. I make myself a cocktail on the way which is charged to my account. We arrive at Mr. Bigwig’s place of work and he gets in the car. It’s only 15 minutes to our lunch destination but it’s enough time to start the pitch. I turn on the screens on the side of the car and start talking numbers.

Damn. That meeting was a disaster. Looks like I won’t be getting any business from Mr. Bigwig. Oh well, you can’t win them all. After a short stint at the office, I change into some gym shorts and decide to take an exercise car on the way home to release some pent-up energy.

“Grab me an exercise car with a bike.”

As I step onto the bike the doors shut behind me. Screens surround me and ask what scenery I would prefer for my ride. I decided on the Irish countryside to unwind from the hectic day. The kids will be dropped off by a car soon and the groceries will be arriving shortly thereafter. The family has a full weekend planned. We’re taking a recreation car up to the mountains for a camping trip. It’s a 12-hour drive so we will leave after dinner and sleep on the way.

In the morning, I will wake up and switch the recreation car into manual mode and get behind the wheel. I’ll hit the gas and drive ourselves to a desolate off-road camping spot.

Tougher Air Pollution Targets In EU Could Save €40 Billion In Air Pollution Costs

CleanTechnica.com: Tougher national caps on the emissions of common air pollutants may soon be headed to the European Union, following the approval of European Commission proposals by the Environment Committee (ENVI) of the European Parliament.

The new caps call for the emissions in question to be reduced by 70% by 2030 (saving an estimated €40 billion in air pollution costs).

The report — coming via Julie Girling (European Conservatives and Reformists, ECR, UK) on the National Emissions Ceiling directive (NEC) — was adopted by a fair margin — 38 votes “for” versus 28 “against” (2 abstentions). Next up is a plenary vote set for October in Strasbourg.

Following the vote, Girling spoke on the topic, making some interesting points:

This legislative process has been overshadowed throughout by the Commission’s threat to withdraw their proposal and their stated intention to hold a review after the European Parliament adopts its initial position. It is estimated that around 400,000 people a year die prematurely across the EU from air pollution. This is not acceptable, we are all directly impacted by this crucial health issue.

I believe my original proposal presented the right balance between ambitious targets and realistic goals. Unfortunately a coalition of socialists, liberals and greens have focused on increasing the already ambitious targets set by the Commission. Therefore I fear that we are now embarking on a long and protracted negotiation, rather than taking the quicker route of improved health for EU citizens.

Green Car Congress provides more:

The Environment committee wants the future NEC directive to include caps on mercury (Hg) from 2020, as well as binding, rather than indicative, new caps in all member states on emissions of the air pollutants sulfur dioxide (SO2); nitrogen oxides (NOx); non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOC); methane (CH4); ammonia (NH3); and particulate matter (PM2.5) to be achieved by 2020 and 2030, that are proposed by the Commission. The committee stressed that more ambitious targets should be set in order to reach 2030 goals.

In addition, the committee argues for the creation of fully binding midpoint targets for 2025 and the elimination of offsets for international shipping, amongst other things.

As it stands, air pollution in Europe (according to the European Commission) results in total health-related external costs of between €330–940 billion a year.

The Fossil Fuel Energy Industry Is Now Entering Terminal Decline

Originally published on RenewEconomy. By Paul Gilding

It’s time to make the call – fossil fuels are finished. The rest is detail.

The detail is interesting and important, as I expand on below. But unless we recognise the central proposition: that the fossil fuel age is coming to an end, and within 15 to 30 years – not 50 to 100 – we risk making serious and damaging mistakes in climate and economic policy, in investment strategy and in geopolitics and defence.

I’ve written previously about 2015 being the year the “Dam of Denial” breaks, referring to the end of denial that climate change requires urgent, transformational economic change. While related, this is different. It is now becoming clear we’ve reached a tipping point where fossil fuels will enter terminal decline, independently of climate policy action.

Given climate policy action is also now accelerating, fossil fuels are double dead. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, “So long and thanks for all the energy”.

I understand this is a very big call, especially in regards to timing. There are many drivers that lead me to this conclusion, but it’s their integrated impact that makes me so confident.

Think of energy like you think about an iPhone

The first and most important driver is the argument I first made early in 2014, in a paper with RenewEconomy editor, Giles Parkinson. For over 100 years, energy markets have been defined by physical resources, supplied in large volumes by large, slow-moving companies developing long-life assets in the context of slow-moving shifts in markets.

The new emerging energy system of renewables and storage is a “technology” business, more akin to information and communications technology; where prices keep falling, quality keeps rising, change is rapid and market disruption is normal and constant.

There is a familiar process that unfolds in markets with technology driven disruptions. I expand on that here in a 2012 piece I wrote in a contribution to Jorgen Randers book “2052 – A Global Forecast” (arguing the inevitability of the point we have now arrived at).

This shift to a “technology” has many implications for energy, but the most profound one is very simple. As a group of technologies, more demand for renewables means lower prices and higher quality constantly evolving for a long time to come. The resources they compete with – coal, oil and gas – follow a different pattern. If demand kept increasing, prices would go up because the newer reserves cost more to develop, such as deep sea oil. They may get cheaper through market shifts, as they have done recently, but they can’t keep getting cheaper and they can never get any better.

In that context, consider this. Renewables are, today, on the verge of being price competitive with fossil fuels – and already are in many situations. So in 10 years, maybe just five, it is a no-brainer that renewables will be significantly cheaper than fossil fuels in most places and will then just keep getting cheaper. And better.

Then we add in electric cars, which are now on the same path – converting a staid, slow moving industry (traditional auto companies like GM) into a disruptive technology-driven one (innovators like Tesla). Electric cars will accelerate the end of fossil fuels by joining with renewables to create a system shift, both directly by using clean power to charge them and indirectly by driving battery costs down to create storage for distributed renewables.

This all then unleashes competition across sectors bringing new players to old industries. For example utilities facing the much discussed death spiral triggered by solar, will find the motor vehicle fuels market very appealing. This would then unleash a huge political and commercial driver for growth in electric cars with the utility sector providing infrastructure to use their product, locking in customers with long-term supply deals backed by renewable power and lobbying for electric cars (to also protect the grid).

Within a decade, electric cars will be more reliable, cheaper to own and more fun to drive than petrol-fueled cars. Then it will just be a matter of turning over the fleet. Oil companies will then have their Kodak moment. Coal will already largely be gone, replaced by renewables.

The incumbents won’t respond in time. They are steeped in their analysis that they are the underpinning foundation of the economy – which of course they have been. This is so deeply ingrained in their worldview they can’t see their error. Energy is the essential foundation of the economy, but we now have a better, cheaper way of producing energy.

Fast beats slow

One of key competitive advantages the fossil fuel industry has had is the huge capital, complexity risk and high level engineering skills required to develop them.

This has two impacts. Firstly it created huge barriers to entry in the market – a disruptive entrepreneur can’t build a coal power station, drill in the deep ocean, buy an oil tanker or develop a coalmine. They can play on the edges, like shale gas, oil trading or mineral exploration, but they can’t play the main game. Secondly the industry has had huge incumbency power – it’s very expensive and politically hard to consciously and deliberately close down such a powerful industry and replace it. Thus action on climate change has stalled for decades.

Both of these benefits are gone when you combine “energy as a technology” with most growth in energy demand being in developing economies.

With renewables already competitive today without subsidy in some markets and the above trends playing out, it is inevitable that before long – maybe a decade – virtually all new electricity generation will be from renewables. Add in the need to be clean – not just for climate change reasons but for local air quality – and the choice developing countries will face will be between large, old, dirty, hard to finance infrastructure that requires heavy government support or small scale, easy to finance, more convenient, popular and clean energy and transport that will get even cheaper over time. Tough choice?

So the very thing that the fossil fuel industry had relied on for its growth – the rapidly expanding need for energy in the developing world – is the very thing that will drive the competition to wipe them out.

Implications

It’s hard to know where to begin with what this all means, because this really does change everything. Of course no one can accurately forecast the dates involved. But the assumptions pretty much everyone’s working with – that without policy intervention the energy system will be dominated by fossil fuels in 2050 and beyond – is frankly delusional. How could an incumbent, unpopular and dirty technology with increasing prices beat a disruptor that is cleaner, better, lower risk and falls in price every year?

Once you accept that, whether we stop burning fossil fuels in 15 years or 30 years is important, but it’s not the main question because either way it’s a very different outcome than most are planning for.

As I argued in early 2014, in Carbon Crash – Solar Dawn, the industry’s condition is terminal and once everyone wakes up to that reality, it will die faster because the market will discount it, taking away capital and shifting it to the future winners. This process will drive scale deployment and innovation of renewables while denying capital to fossil fuels, constraining their options.

Then the only logical strategy for fossil fuel companies will be to get their depreciating assets out of the ground as fast as possible and invest zero in exploration and development, instead paying out spare cash as dividends to shore up their stock price. With everyone doing this, prices will fall, chasing the declining market, undermining the value of the fossil fuel industry, and reducing its political influence further.

All businesses, like humans, fight death. And fight they will, with all the considerable power they have. So it will be messy and chaotic, and not consistent around the world. But in the end, the fossil fuel giants have no strategy that involves fossil fuels which makes any business or economic sense.

Other companies like utilities and auto companies, meanwhile, have great options – like taking away a large share of the oil industry’s market with renewable powered electric cars. They know that today we spend around twice as much on motor transport fuel as we do on electricity.

But big oil versus big utilities aligned with big auto is not the only disruptive impact for investors. There’s a whole range of industries that will benefit and join the party that will dance on the grave of fossil fuels: battery manufacturers, copper and lithium miners, electronics producers, software developers, electric engine makers, smart grid builders and, of course, solar and wind power manufacturers, installers and financiers. Shell and Exxon don’t see Google and Apple as competitors, which is just why incumbents so often lose. In combination, these forces will unleash the predictable pattern of technology driven market disruption.

If you think this is all far into the future, think again. In the USA, coal companies have lost around 75 per cent of their value in the past few years, while the Dow Jones went up nearly 70 per cent! And electric car maker Tesla, producing less than 40,000 cars per year, is valued at over half of GM, which produces 9 million cars per year! The market can smell death and knows that fast beats slow.

For climate advocates and policy makers, nothing changes in their approach, but everything changes in the result – and their level of confidence and influence.

With fossil fuels on the run, that industry’s support will evaporate. Governments are much more inclined to regulate when what they seek is already happening, but needs speeding up. So as fossil fuels are falling off the cliff, governments will give them a kick so they can claim credit.

Climate advocates, whose main challenge is speed of action, don’t need to change their approach. Their strategy is working: make fossil fuels harder, make solar easier. The only change, now, is that victory is at hand. Everyone loves a winner.

In conclusion, I will summarise my argument:

• The fossil fuel energy industry is now entering terminal decline and will be all but gone within 15-30 years. The key driver is not what most see as their greatest threat – future climate change policy. It’s that competing energy products of renewables and batteries, in a system with electric vehicles, will behave as a disruptive technology always does, delivering ever lower prices and ever higher quality in a decades’ long period of innovation and deployment, which fossil fuels can’t match.

• Because of the nature of this transformation, there will be a wide variety of new business players entering the market from the side, profoundly changing the market. The obvious example is utilities promoting electric cars as an enormous new market opportunity, which will assist them in avoiding the “death spiral” threat posed by the end of centralised generation.

Joining already are companies like Apple and Google who are both developing battery and car opportunities, with a close eye on the technology integration opportunity. Together this will form a powerful economic force both driving disruption and advocating climate action, undermining the historically dominant political and economic resistance of the fossil fuel companies.

• In combination these forces will unleash the predictable pattern of technology driven market disruption. The incumbents will stay in denial and fail to respond to what’s coming, despite it being obvious. They will hold on and fight against change as long as possible, but in the end will be wiped out by nimbler, new players without the cultural or asset baggage of the old. There will be an unknown tipping point – I think before 2020 – at which time the momentum will rapidly accelerate.

• The key difference in this transition, versus previous technology-driven change, is that it has the added dimension of climate change, making the resulting transformation a very high priority for policy makers and an unbeatable source of public support for the disruptors.

Fossil fuels are dead. The rest is detail.

Driving in the Networked Age

Reid Hoffman via linkedIn: A roadmap for navigating the transition from human-controlled cars to a better driverless future

In the six-plus years that Google has been developing self-driving cars, its test fleet has achieved an impressive safety record: Nearly one million miles of real-world autonomous driving, eleven minor accidents, no injuries, with none of the accidents caused by the self-driving cars themselves.

That impressive track record has people projecting when the first commercially available autonomous vehicles will hit the streets. But commercial availability is just a waypoint on the truly transformative journey that lies ahead of us. And that means there’s a bigger question we should be considering now. Namely, how soon will it be illegal to operate human-driven cars on public streets?

At a conference in March, my friend and colleague Elon Musk raised this proposition, exclaiming that “people may outlaw driving cars because it’s too dangerous.”

In a follow-up tweet, Elon clarified that "Tesla is strongly in favor of people being allowed to drive their cars and always will be."

That perspective makes sense. Although Tesla is developing autonomous technologies, its high-performance cars are a blast to operate in a traditional hands-on manner. Many Tesla customers buy the company's cars precisely for this reason, and as a smart and dedicated CEO, Elon will continue to serve his customers well.

But even though I'm a happy Model S owner myself, I also recognize that self-driving cars have the potential to radically reshape the world in ways that will benefit everyone. In the future, getting from point A to point B is going to be safer, faster, more energy-efficient, more economical, and more fun.

In addition, autonomous vehicles will also be able to share information with each other better than human drivers can, in both real-time situations and over time. Every car on the road will benefit from what every other car has learned. Driving will be a networked activity, with tighter feedback loops and a much greater ability to aggregate, analyze, and redistribute knowledge.

Today, as individual drivers compete for space, they often work against each other’s interests, sometimes obliviously, sometimes deliberately. In a world of networked driverless cars, driving retains the individualized flexibility that has always made automobility so attractive. But it also becomes a highly collaborative endeavor, with greater cooperation leading to greater efficiency. It’s not just steering wheels and rear-view mirrors that driverless cars render obsolete. You won’t need horns either. Or middle fingers.

Already, the car as network node is what drives apps like Waze, which uses smartphone GPS capabilities to crowd-source real-time traffic levels, road conditions, and even gas prices. But Waze still depends on humans to apprehend the information it generates. Autonomous vehicles, in contrast, will be able to generate, analyze, and act on information without human bottlenecks. And when thousands and then even millions of cars are connected in this way, new capabilities are going to emerge. The rate of innovation will accelerate – just as it did when we made the shift from standalone PCs to networked PCs.

So we as a society should be doing everything we can to reach this better future sooner rather than later, in ways that make the transition as smooth as possible. And that includes prohibiting human-driven cars in many contexts. On this particular road trip, the journey is not the reward. The destination is.

The True Transformative Power of Autonomous Vehicles

Human-driven cars won’t disappear entirely. There will be designated areas where people can drive for pleasure – race tracks, larger areas that are similar to golf courses or game preserves, public roads in extremely remote areas, or areas where weather or terrain make it difficult to optimize infrastructure for autonomous driving.

But the benefits of self-driving cars are so significant that in time the public will demand prohibitions against old-fashioned legacy driving in most public spaces.

To date, most discourse on driverless cars has focused on their ability to reduce collisions – especially fatal ones. In reality, driving is already a fairly safe activity. According to Federal Highway Administration statistics, there are around 189 crashes involving injury or property damage for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the U.S., and only 1.04 fatal collisions per 100
million VMT.

But even though collision rates are low, the fact that we do so much driving means that the real tolls that traditional driving exacts are significant. In the U.S. alone, around 33,000 people a year die in traffic accidents. Globally, there are more than 1.2 million traffic deaths per year, with China suffering around 275,000 and India 238,000.

And when collisions do occur, it’s usually the drivers – rather than mechanical failure – who are responsible. In fact, human error accounts for more than 90 percent of all motor vehicle accidents. Alcohol plays a role in more than 1 in 3 traffic-related fatalities.

Replacing the most fallible component in the driving experience – the human driver – will lead to significant reductions in the number of accidents and fatalities that automobility produces.

Autonomous vehicles equipped with lasers, infrared sensors, cameras, detailed 3D road-maps, and other technologies are able to assess their surroundings in ways that human eyes can't. They can detect objects behind walls. They can accurately estimate distance at speed. They can brake and accelerate faster than humans can and change direction with more precision. They don't drink and drive, text and drive, nod off six hours into a long trip, or experience road rage.

But it’s not just the capacity of autonomous vehicles to make a fairly safe activity even safer that makes them so transformative. It’s that they will substantially reduce fatalities and collisions while simultaneously increasing overall transportation efficiency and decreasing our need to pay attention while driving.

If thousands of human-controlled cars suddenly started traveling down highways at 90 MPH, with little space between their bumpers, there would certainly be a lot more than 189 collisions per 100 million VMT. If all those drivers also started texting and watching TV, those freeways would likely begin to resemble war zones.

But autonomous vehicles will be able to pull off such feats. Indeed, their ability to travel at speed with less distance between them can potentially increase freeway capacity by 6 or 8 times.

A world of networked cars will also mean less idling at traffic lights, no stop-and-go slogs during rush-hour, no endless circling for parking. Commutes will be shorter. Crashes will be rarer – so the traffic jams that crashes create will be rarer too. And because crashes will be rare, cars can be built smaller, from lighter materials. If they’re still using combustion engines, they’ll burn less gas. If they’re powered by electricity, they’ll travel farther on a single charge.

Any time spent in cars will also be far more productive. According to Harvard Medical School, the average American driver spends 101 minutes behind the wheel each day. There are 210 million licensed drivers in the U.S., which suggests that collectively we spend around 5.3 billion hours a year wondering why that minivan in front of us is going so slow and listening to soft-rock hits from the 1970s.

Traditional cars liberated us from geography and time. Autonomous cars will liberate us from driving. In the future, motorists will be able to work, sleep, you name it. Watching a game on TV will replace listening to the game on the radio. Enjoying a leisurely meal with a knife, fork, and a glass of wine will replace gobbling down a burger with one hand.

Drinking and driving won’t be a crime – it will be an entrepreneurial opportunity. Texting and driving will still be frowned on – but only because people will be wondering why you aren’t Meerkatting and driving. When you use the word “gridlock,” your kids will have no idea what you mean. But they’ll be able to look it up on Google, even if they’re speeding down the highway at 100 MPH.

Finally, if you find yourself missing the physical pleasures of driving, you're in luck: Just slap on an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and immerse yourself in a 3D version of Grand Theft Auto. Your daily commute to work will be more tactile and exciting than ever.

On a strictly quantitative level, at least, the man-hours that autonomous vehicles will save each year by making it possible to do other things while driving will far exceed the man-hours they save each year by eliminating fatal collisions. By fully embracing autonomous vehicles, humanity will free up billions of hours to spend in more flexible and potentially rewarding ways. The fact that driverless vehicles will significantly reduce driving-related deaths and the costs associated with them is an extremely valuable aspect of them. But what makes them truly disruptive is not only their capacity to save lives – it’s their capacity to save minutes and hours, and help billions of people live more productively year after year.

Moving Forward, Full Speed Ahead

So how fast can we get to the remarkable future that driverless cars promise? Some observers believe that we’re still at least decades away from a truly autonomous car that can function safely when you throw snow, rain, poor road surfaces and other factors into the mix.

Meanwhile, according to Elon’s estimates, there are more than 2 billion legacy cars on the road, globally. Currently, the car industry can only produce around 100 million new vehicles a year. Just from a manufacturing perspective, it could take 20 years to build a new fleet that approximates the one we have now.

And yet perhaps because announcements like these are coming at such a fast and furious pace, there is still a general consensus to proceed with caution. Two years ago, German automotive supplier Continental AG declared its intention to produce driverless cars that will function with a "zero-percent accident rate." Others suggest that attaining a "four nines" safety level is necessary. That is, these vehicles must operate successfully – i.e. not crash – at least 99.99 percent of the time they're in operation.

The emphasis on infallibility is misguided. Even the best artificial intelligence systems will be hard-pressed to completely protect against falling trees, mudslides, and other “acts of God.” In a world of mandatory driverless vehicles, accidents and even fatalities will continue to occur. To suggest otherwise only sets the stage for class-action lawsuits that could inhibit genuine progress.

In addition, the truth is that infallibility is not necessary to achieve significant progress. Imagine if we were able to make a complete switch to driverless cars in 2016, and 20,000 driving-related fatalities occurred over the course of the year. This outcome would likely be positioned as an unprecedented epidemic of robot car carnage. But a drop to just 20,000 fatalities in one year would actually represent the largest annual decline in U.S. traffic fatalities ever.

When we're able to look past our fears about change and our biases toward the DeVille we know, driverless cars will make driving safer – just as higher levels of automation have made commercial aviation a remarkably safe form of travel. In fact, the Eno Center for Transportation, a Washington, DC think tank, estimates that attaining a 90 percent market penetration rate of autonomous vehicles will save 21,700 lives a year in the U.S. alone.

But why stop at 90 percent market penetration? Why not take it to 100 percent, as soon as possible?

The Great Merge

Long before software companies existed, the American car industry had perfected the art of the incremental upgrade, a new model each year with new bells and whistles. That template for innovation will be applied to autonomous

vehicles, especially by traditional manufactures.

In other words, they’ll gradually add autonomous features until eventually they’ll start selling vehicles that offer what Google’s first prototypes did – i.e. “limited self-driving automation,” or “Level 3” autonomy. These cars will be able to drive themselves for extended periods of time, but will also give drivers the option to assume control when necessary.

Such cars will share the streets with traditional cars, so the driving environment will be mixed on both micro and macro levels. Given how established traditional car culture is – it is literally entrenched throughout the world in millions of miles of roadway – this is inevitable. But it is also likely to prove somewhat challenging.

According to my friend and colleague Stefan Heck, a Stanford professor who is also founder of Nauto, a Silicon Valley startup developing autonomous vehicle technologies, research that Stanford has done shows that drivers resuming control from Level 3 vehicles functioning in autonomous mode take 10 seconds just to attain the level of ability that a drunk driver possesses. And to get back to full driving competence takes 60 seconds.

Because human drivers have little experience interacting with driverless cars, they also tend to act unpredictably when encountering them. That hasn’t been a significant issue to date, because there are so few autonomous vehicles on the road. But as autonomous vehicles become commercially available and their numbers increase, that may change. “There is a real potential for an increase in accidents when we first deploy autonomous cars,” says Stefan.

The most obvious detour around this dilemma is to minimize mixed environments. Of course, America is still a country where the right to drive is considered an essential facet of life, right up there with the right to vote and the right to own a firearm. While car sales dropped substantially in the recession, they’re rising again, even amongst millennials who had once been thought to be far more interested in car access than car ownership.

But the physical act of driving isn’t a natural or constitutionally protected right. It’s a licensable privilege. In the early days of automobility, we had to establish new infrastructure, new rules, and even new values to make them tenable – more police presence, stop signs, traffic signals, sidewalks, one-way streets, parking spaces, speed limits, crosswalks, etc. And it took decades to make the transition, as streets that had once been shared by multiple low-speed users, including pedestrians, bicyclists, horse-drawn carriages, and streetcars, were recast primarily as the domain of motor vehicles.

This time around, the new mode of transportation won't just be far more powerful than the one it is disrupting. It will also be safer. But if we want to move forward, we will have to let go of the past. And just as we reshaped our world for the first generation of cars, we'll need to create new rules and new infrastructure to accommodate autonomous vehicles as well.

Geographic Regions Must Begin to Innovate

In the early years of the automobile age, no federal or even state rules existed. Instead, individual municipalities had to figure out how best to manage this new form of traffic. A similar dynamic is already emerging with autonomous vehicles.

On a state level, California, Nevada, and Florida have led the way in passing legislation that explicitly asserts the legality of autonomous vehicles under certain conditions. Last summer, Iowa's Johnson County approved a proclamation that encourages companies to use it "as a primary location for testing driverless car operations."

In Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan is in the process of building a $6.5 million "city" on 30 acres of its campus to test autonomous cars in a simulated urban environment that will reportedly feature “complex intersections, confusing lane markings” and even “mechanical pedestrians” jumping from behind parked cars. By 2021, the university hopes to use the information it collects from this site to help Ann Arbor adopt a networked fleet of shared, self-driving cars.

In England, the New York Times reports, the British government has invested $61 million “for trials aimed at making Britain a global hub for testing rules for driverless cars and building the components for these vehicles.”

All of this recalls the early 20th century, when some cities, recognizing the transformative impact cars would have, made efforts to accommodate them sooner rather than later. Detroit, for example was the first city to adopt traffic signals, one-way streets, and many other conventions that helped usher in a new age of automobility.

The rewards for the places that lead the transition to a next stage of automobility will be substantial. Indeed, if San Francisco took this lead on this, much of the space it currently devotes to accommodating human-driven cars, including parking garages, parking lots, street parking spaces, private garages, and wide streets – could be freed up for new housing, which it desperately needs.

Still, I doubt major transitional initiatives will happen first in San Francisco or even Mountain View. Instead, they'll happen in places that are eager to be the next San Francisco or Mountain View – places willing to experiment in largely uncharted ways.

Maybe that's Johnson County, Iowa. Maybe it's Singapore, which is also positioning itself as a place that is giving a green light to driverless car experimentation.

A welcoming attitude is a key first step – but there are certainly opportunities to go further than that. To date, most driverless car development has involved trying to create vehicles that can function well in the world that exists now. This is a smart approach that has allowed researchers and entrepreneurs to simply start experimenting, without trying to persuade cities and other institutions to adapt technologies, infrastructure, and regulations that would make it easier for driverless cars to function with maximum safety and efficiency.

But we're now at a point where progress will happen faster if cities and other geographic regions embrace innovation as strongly as the institutions developing autonomous vehicle technologies.

When a Google car currently hits the road, it’s largely functioning as a solo actor and doing all the work to decipher the world it is navigating. But technologies that allow cars to talk to each other, through Wi-Fi-like networks that use dedicated short-range communications frequencies, exist too.

In these vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) networks, cars share information with each other and other smart infrastructure elements – traffic signals, sensor-embedded roads, roadside cameras, eye-in-the-sky traffic drones, etc.

Adding such infrastructure elements is one way that cities could help accelerate the development of autonomous vehicles. Designating some streets or downtown areas as driverless only would be an even bolder and more useful move. Detroit, in other words, has a shot at becoming the Detroit of the 21st century. All it has to do is ban traditional cars from its streets.

New Rules for New Rides

Networked autonomous vehicles will bring new challenges along with new opportunities. Cybersecurity will be an issue. The first self-driving car that gets hacked in some cataclysmic way will generate just as many headlines as the first one that’s involved in a fatal collision (especially if it’s the same car).

Privacy is also a concern. Still, hacking is already an issue with current on-board systems like OnStar. And such systems are already able to collect information about your driving patterns, how fast you go, and more.

On a similar note, the Drug Enforcement Administration and many other law enforcement agencies use license-plate cameras to build increasingly comprehensive databases that keep tabs on millions of vehicles over time. Using a feature built into OnStar called Stolen Vehicle Slowdown, police can remotely decelerate a vehicle that has been reported stolen.

But OnStar and its analogs are optional. Law-enforcement license-plate surveillance relies on a relatively fixed number of data collection points. Autonomous vehicles will literally be able to record and store your every move. And unlike smartphones, you won't be able to leave them behind or disable their GPS if you want to go off the grid for a while. Autonomous vehicles can't function unless you tell them where you're going.

At the very least, the companies developing these technologies will need to be extremely transparent about how they collect and use the data these vehicles generate. And ultimately consumers will likely demand regulations that let them control their privacy – especially if human-driven cars are prohibited.

The algorithms that govern facets of these cars' behavior will also have to be transparent – and codified into law. Already, manufacturers are consulting philosophers to help guide how their algorithms make decisions in moments of emergency. For example, should an autonomous vehicle risk hitting a cyclist in its efforts to avoid a schoolbus that is heading straight for it, if choosing the former course of action will likely minimize overall deaths and injuries? If an autonomous ambulance is racing toward a hospital, should it take riskier actions as the patient it's carrying is moving closer to death? And what sorts of preferences should emergency and law-enforcement vehicles be given in general?

Even in cases of non-emergency, a high degree of transparency is necessary. Every time a passenger indicates a desired destination, an autonomous vehicle must make choices about the optimal route. Presumably, it will do so based on current traffic conditions, as Waze does now. But it's also possible that the companies designing these cars could choose routes for other reasons. For example, advertisers might pay companies to route passengers past their businesses. Passengers with preferred status could receive access to faster streets while others are routed to slower, higher-volume streets.

In some cases, passengers may accept these decisions. You might pay less or receive some other perk if you agree to take the slow route home, or pay more to take the fast one. On a similar note, we will probably see the introduction of literal “marketing vehicles,” i.e., cars that take you to your destination for free as long as you complete a survey or watch a promotional video of some kind.

Because the various algorithms that govern car behavior will encompass issues of liability, risk, and morality, no one company should be allowed to simply make up their own rules. Instead, we’ll need to establish uniform rules and standards through public processes. In the same way that we currently have regulations involving emissions standards, safety equipment, and other aspects of car manufacture, we’ll also have regulations that establish the parameters for how the necessary algorithms operate.

While government will clearly play a role in this regulatory process, we must also consider what limits to place on how government agencies utilize coming technologies. If you become a suspect in a crime, how extensively will police be allowed to examine your driving history? Will law enforcement agencies have the ability to tap into the system and control the routes of persons they want to detain? Public records detailing exactly how such agencies are using whatever capabilities are granted to them will be necessary.

Liability is another major that must be addressed. Because driver error is most often the reason for collisions involving traditional cars, insurance is currently oriented toward individuals. In driverless scenarios, however, a car's occupants will be functioning as passengers, not drivers. Thus, when accidents happen, who will be held accountable?

Because most of the companies that produce driverless cars will be large and well-capitalized, the incentives to file lawsuits – and to award high-dollar damages – will be great. Unfortunately, if the threat of lawsuits is high enough, it could keep companies from offering cars that would ultimately reduce the overall number of traffic collisions and fatalities. Recognizing this, we must start thinking about how to ensure that liability laws fairly compensate victims without unnecessarily preventing the spread of technologies that will lead to better overall outcomes for everyone.

Throughout the 20th century, traditional cars functioned as engines of personal freedom and prosperity. The highly personalized mobility they provided gave people more access to a wider range of jobs, homes, friends, etc.

Autonomous vehicles, in turn, promise a new range of capabilities. But as we merge from our old way of driving to a new one, there will be objections. Some people will characterize self-driving cars as an infringement on personal liberty and an individual’s ability to fully control his own destiny. Others will raise concerns over privacy and the ways that driverless cars will collect and share data in their pursuit of greater safety and efficiency.

But autonomous vehicles won’t curtail personal freedom – they’ll amplify it. Autonomous vehicles will extend the convenience of individualized driving to people who aren’t currently able to obtain driving licenses –senior citizens, people with various disabilities, young people. They will let everyone pursue a greater range of activities while they're in transit. They'll speed up transit times and help people forsake transit altogether. (I.E., your car will run errands for you while you stay at home.) They'll reduce the need to actually own a car, and thus release people from the economic obligations of that.

And privacy norms are not a fixed phenomenon. They change over time, in tandem with new technologies, new social standards, new expectations. As driverless technology evolves, we’ll develop features and policies that will allow people to maintain appropriate levels of privacy. But they will also have access to greater transportation capabilities than even George Jetson ever dreamed of.

An asphalt utopia is on the horizon. It promises streets that will be safer than they were when a tired horse was the fastest means between two points. It promises shorter, more productive commutes. It’s time to put the pedal to the metal in pursuit of this vision, and accelerate toward a world where self-driving cars are not just allowed but mandatory in the vast majority of spaces.

Faraday Future Unstealths, Full Of Former Tesla Motors Staff - Great Quote!

CleanTechnica.com: Electric car enthusiasts are pretty quick to drop the term “vaporware” these days… because there’s a lot of vaporware in this market. Heck, there’s a lot of vaporware in the car market in general. So, when Faraday Future* unveiled plans this week to build high-performance electric cars, it decided to jump straight to the chase with this statement: “We’re not Tesla. But we’re not Fisker either. We’re not fucking around.”

I think it’s a good idea to be realistic and make it clear that you are not claiming to be an equal to Tesla — no company is. It would be great to see more electric car companies launch, survive, and thrive, but it took Tesla nearly a decade to get where it is, so anyone claiming they can match Tesla right out of the blocks needs to have their head checked or be called out for their bullshitting.

The Fisker Karma is apparently about to relaunch after years of difficulty… under Chinese ownership, but honestly, let’s not even go there. Faraday Future’s point is that it doesn’t intend to crash and burn like Fisker did. Fair enough.

Faraday Future is still in the early stages of its work, though. It was just founded last year and it is now reportedly looking for a manufacturing facility in the US. That said, it must have some serious investors behind it, as it already has about 200 employees. Former Tesla Motors Director Vehicle & Chassis Engineering Nick Sampson is apparently Faraday Future’s Product Architect and VP Product Research & Development, as well as a cofounder. Nick was the Director Vehicle & Chassis Engineering at Tesla from 2010 to 2012, means he was heavily involved in the development of the world-shocking Tesla Model S (see here, here, here, here, and here if you don’t follow Tesla news like it’s a life necessity). Not a bad person to have on your founding executive team.

“The links between FF and Tesla Motors don’t stop here, the company appears to be heavily hiring from Tesla,” Elektrek‘s Fred Lambert notes.

Aside from Sampson, a quick LinkedIn research shows a lot of other former key Tesla employees, including Alan Cherry, VP of Human Resources, a former senior Director of HR at Tesla from 2008 to 2012, and quite a few engineers like Umran Ashraf, a former Design Engineer at Tesla, he was a key architect of the Model S’ aluminum body.

Not directly related to Tesla, but worth mentioning, FF hired Porter Harris, a former Energy Storage Engineer at SpaceX, to lead their battery engineering effort. He left SpaceX, a company founded by Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, in November last year.

Here are a few other former Tesla employees now working for Faraday Future:

• Sue Neuhauser: Former Senior Lead Designer CMF at Tesla from 2011 to 2015. Now Chief Designer CMF at FF
• Matt Sampson: Former Vehicle Packaging Engineer at Tesla from 2010 to 2015. Now Principal Engineer at FF
• Paul Famiglietti: Former Contract Launch Support Engineer at Tesla from 2012 to 2015. Now Principal Engineer at FF

In other words, yes, this ain’t no joke. This ain’t no Fisker. And these guys certainly aren’t just f***ing around.

Word is that Faraday Future will launch an electric vehicle in 2017. Not many more details are available, but there are some details on the heart of the vehicle, its batteries (via Electrek):

• It will have 15 percent higher specific energy than a Tesla Model S 85 kW-hr pack. That works out to 98 kW-hr.
• It’s a multi-cell solution, like Tesla’s.
• The company is aiming for the highest energy density and specific energy vehicle on the market.
• It will be single cell, thermal-runaway fault tolerant (will not propagate to other cells)
• Single or groups of cells can be replaced.
• Module designed for mass production, utilizing new processes and technologies
• Same battery design to be used in all vehicles with only a change in capacity (no change in voltage)
• The higher energy density allows for larger crumple zones than on the Tesla Model S.

That sounds freakin’ exciting, doesn’t it? It certainly would be nice to have some actual Tesla competitors on the market!

*Note: Faraday Future doesn’t appear to be at all related to Faraday.

ELIX Wireless Introduces 10kW Wireless Charging Solution

PureGreenCars.com: Vancouver-based ELIX Wireless announced the E10K Wireless Charging System, the industry’s first wireless charging solution that delivers a full 10kW of wireless power transfer.

The E10K Wireless Charging System is based on ELIX Wireless’ patented Magneto-Dynamic Coupling (MDC) technology, which delivers to customers a safer and faster wireless charging solution ideal for harsh environmental conditions as well as hazardous operating environments.

The global drive to reduce carbon emissions has led to a growing demand for electric vehicles and machinery. In addition to automobiles, new applications include larger electric vehicles such as buses, trucks, mining equipment and other heavy-duty machines for industrial applications. However, charging can be an issue when vehicles or machines need to remain on the road or at work in the factory. Typical wireless charging solutions available in the market today are based on inductive technologies and can deliver up to 7.7kW. To meet the demand for a faster, higher power wireless charging solution that can operate under extreme environmental conditions, ELIX Wireless developed the E10K Wireless Charging System based on its MDC technology. In addition, E10K “building blocks” can be combined together to create even higher power systems.

MDC operates at an extremely low frequency (120-140 Hz range); around 1000 times lower than a typical induction based system. Its low electro-magnetic radiation properties make it safe to operate in hazardous environments such as oil & gas, mining, subsea, chemical processing and more. One of MDC’s key benefits is it can automatically remove any foreign objects that may come into the charging zone without human intervention.

“When we set out to deliver the highest power wireless charging system in the industry, we didn’t just build upon existing inductive systems – we created an entirely new technology that meets customer demand for fast, safe and reliable charging,” said David Smith, CEO, ELIX Wireless. “The E10K Wireless Charging System leverages our ground-breaking MDC technology to deliver the power and consequently shorter charging times that our customers need. Its combination of low frequency, high power and compact form factor make it ideal for a wide variety of applications and operating environments.”

ELIX Wireless rolled out its initial product offering, the E1K Wireless Charging System, to customers in early 2015. The E10K Wireless Charging System is now commercially available to customers and partners.

ELIX began as a spin-out from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 2013 to commercialize a fundamentally different wireless power transfer technology. From a proof-of-concept to charge electric campus service vehicles at UBC, ELIX is growing to expand into a wider range of applications and markets such as auxiliary battery charging for emergency vehicles and full-scale EV charging.

ELIX is headquartered in Vancouver, BC, Canada and has a presence in Santa Clara, California.

About the E10K Wireless Charging System

- Full 10kW wireless power transfer
- Safe – lower frequencies than competing solutions with no electric sparking
- Zero RF interference
- Highly efficient at >90 percent
- Small form factor
- Operates in harsh environments
- Water and weather resistant
- Automatic foreign object detection and removal
- Compatible with commercial battery chargers
- Full battery charge detection and shut down

23% Of New Cars In Norway Now Electric Cars

CleanTechnica.com: Electric car sales keep climbing and climbing in Norway. In 2013, many of us were shocked to learn that electric cars were account for about 10–15% of new car sales in the country. We are now well aware of the fact that the Norway electric vehicle market is in a league of its own, and just yesterday I wrote about the breakdown of June electric car sales in the picturesque country. But I skipped one important note, the percentage of new car sales that were electric car sales.

Jeff Cobb reminded me of this important matter when he published an article yesterday highlighting that 22.9% of new cars in Norway are now plug-in electrified cars. And if you want some serious perspective here, catch this line: “Comprised of battery electric cars and plug-in hybrids, if the same thing were to happen in the US on a percentage basis, it would have meant 1,943,177 new PEVs on American roads since January.” We have 50,503 new PEVs on our roads since January, about 2.6% of that number….

And while PEV sales in some countries, like the Netherlands, are dominated by plug-in hybrids, Norwegians are big fans of the fully electric models. Since January, 18.4% of all new cars registered in Norway have been fully electric cars, while 4.5% have been plug-in hybrids.

Now for the depressing context: It takes a long time to shift the entire vehicle fleet. Norway’s 62,500 or so PEVs just represent about 2.4% of the 2.6 million cars on Norway’s roads.

Norway Electric Car Sales (June 2015)


Anyway, though, this is supposed to be a fun post, so here’s one more statistic I imagine you’ll enjoy: the top-selling Volkswagen e-Golf = 71% of all Volkswagen Golf models sold in Norway since January. The #2 Tesla Model S, meanwhile, recently had its top-end P85D trim voted the best car in Norway, beating out the Mercedes AMG GTS, Ferrari 458 Speciale, Jaguar F-Type AWD 3.0, BMW X6M, and every other car on the market.

Bosch + GS Yuasa “On Target” To Offer Lithium-Ion Batteries With Twice The Energy Density At Half The Cost By 2020

CleanTechnica.com: With Tesla’s Gigafactory apparently now set to end up far larger than was originally reported, others in the race towards dominance of the lithium-ion battery industry are apparently unwilling to keep silent either, based on recent comments from the head of Bosch Japan.

Bosch and its partner GS Yuasa are apparently now “on a good path” towards the production of a lithium-ion battery with two-times the energy density for half the cost — with the aim being for production to begin by 2020, according to Bosch Japan President Udo Wolz.

The news — coming to us via a report from Automotive News Europe — concerns the joint venture between Bosch and GS Yuasa known as Lithium Energy and Power GmbH & Company KG. The joint venture is based out of Stuttgart, and was formed relatively recently — back in November 2013. The ownership split for the venture is: Bosch holds a 50% stake, GS Yuasa International holds a 25% stake, and Mitsubishi Corporation holds a 25% stake.

If production does end up beginning before 2020, that likely still puts the joint venture (and the companies involved) a fair bit behind Tesla (and perhaps others). Considering that the lithium-ion battery sector is expected to explode by then (with regard to sales growth, that is), this will perhaps not have any bearing on success with regard to sales.

By the way, if you haven’t read the story alluded to above concerning the Gigafactory potentially being much larger than was previously thought, you should give it a read — it’s very interesting. For those without the time, here’s the shorthand: according to Story County official Dean Haymore, Tesla is currently planning to build 7 “blocks,” with the Gigafactory currently under construction representing just one of the 7!

Secretive upstart Faraday Future is poaching from Tesla to build its own electric car

TheVerge.com: A bunch of Valley veterans have taken on funding and set up shop in California to fight the legacy auto industry with an all-electric car. Sound familiar? This isn't Tesla, though: it's Faraday Future, which promises a "launch" in 2017. Beyond that, little is known about who or what Faraday is — as Motor Trend reports, they won't even reveal who's at the helm of the company.

Independent EV builders have come and gone over the past decade — the auto industry is extraordinarily difficult to break into, and even Tesla is hanging on for dear life — but Faraday is at least legitimate enough to have poached from a who's-who of competitors. A LinkedIn search reveals dozens of employees who hail from Tesla, GM, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler; Motor Trend notes that they've also brought on Richard Kim, who led design on BMW's i8 and i3 concepts, and Pontus Fontaeus, who's worked on interiors for Lamborghini, Ferrari, and Land Rover. It all sounds a little like Magic Leap: there's extraordinary hype here backed by real talent, but there's no consumer-grade product on the horizon — and we know precious little about what that product will be. (Faraday' site features a highly conceptual render of a car, which it promises will be "100% electric, zero-emission, fully-connected and personalized in ways you've never even considered possible.")

“FARADAY HAS SOME INTERESTING POACHES UNDER ITS BELT ”

Motor Trend was able to gather that one of Faraday Future's goals is a battery pack with the highest energy density in the EV industry, aiming for a 15 percent bump over Tesla's top-of-the-line 85 kWh configuration. That's competitive, but Tesla is undoubtedly working on higher-density cells and has the benefit of its ever-growing Supercharger network; barring an enormous investment or some unforeseen innovation, Faraday would probably have to rely on Supercharger's competitor, the multi-manufacturer SAE Combo charger.

Can Faraday hang on until its 2017 launch window? The cards are stacked against it — but then again, they've always been stacked against Tesla, which has still managed to make one of the most interesting (and, arguably, important) vehicles in the industry.

Zipcar, Google and why the carsharing wars are just beginning

GreenBiz.com: A range of mobility providers are vying for market share in the rapidly-evolving carsharing space, raising big questions about the potential cut emissions and private car ownership rates.

In urban areas like Paris, San Francisco and Boston, there is no shortage of carsharing providers with creatively-capitalized names, from Zipcar and Car2Go to Getaround or City CarShare.

Now, however, the carsharing industry is at a turning point where evolving business models — round trip or one way? free-floating vehicles or cars docked at specific stations? — are poised to collide with parallel breakthroughs in ridesharing, electric vehicles and self-driving cars.

Though big questions remain about demand patterns, who will drive these futuristic cars and what happens to the data collected by service providers, the opening to increase efficiency and ease congestion in a cost-effective way is increasingly compelling for a range of providers.

“This allows flexibility for the operator to serve more people with a single car," Susan Shaheen, director of Innovative Mobility Research at the University of California, Berkeley's Transportation Sustainability Research Center, told GreenBiz.

That math is already eliciting investment from incumbent automakers and rental car companies wary of losing market share. Broader transportation-as-a-service providers, like Uber, and large technology companies, primarily Google and Apple, are also experimenting in related areas.

But who will end up eating whom in the space, and how long might it be until all of these technologies actually come together (if ever) in one comprehensive mobility offering?

These early competitive dynamics have already resulted in automakers rushing to either acquire or partner with carsharing upstarts. Uber, meanwhile, is acquiring its own mapping talent and speculating about autonomous vehicles as Google hones its self-driving cars and tests out new ridesharing apps.

And we're not talking about just a handful of potential carsharing customers at stake. More than 1.5 million people are already using these services in the Americas, according to new researchfrom UC Berkeley:





Data as of January 2015 showing growth in the carsharing user base, as collected by UC Berkeley's Transportation Sustainability Research Center.

Still, a slight decline in customers from 2014 to early 2015 does underscore just how in flux the industry is.

"For the first time, you see a decline. I’ve already gotten a couple of emails like, 'What does this mean?'" Shaheen said. "It means that a few operators have closed and a few have opened."

While Shaheen's data doesn't include peer-to-peer providers, like Getaround, which declined to divulge their internal numbers, the carsharing space is transitioning from a mishmash of nonprofits, co-ops and a few established businesses to an industry dominated by for-profit players.

With auto industry incumbents now jockeying for position in a segment once relegated to the fringes of the transportation world, the real question is where to from here?

“Does it signal that we’re entering more into a mainstream phase, or a scaling phase or both?” Shaheen said. “It’s very important to look at this as a system, and how to create a more robust and resilient system.”
New competition

Over the course of 15 years in business, Zipcar has gained traction by offering reliable short-term car rentals to urban and suburbanites.

The key, which enticed rental car magnate Avis to pay around $500 million to acquire the company in 2013: giving members access to wheels without traditional rental car hassles, like standing in line at a counter or paying for days at a time.

Now, the window for car rentals is getting even smaller, thanks to a boom in immediate gratification on-demand services encouraged by newer competitors like Uber.

Since late last year, Zipcar customers in Boston have also been able to rent cars for one-way trips. They pay in 30-minute intervals and drop the car off at designated stations, where it’s guaranteed that a parking spot will be available.

“Largely that was driven by member demand,” Justin Holmes, Zipcar’s director of public policy and communications, told GreenBiz. “They wanted the flexibility to take a vehicle and leave it in another part of town.”

The one-way pilot started with a small pool of vehicles for employees in late 2014 and has since scaled to 200 vehicles that can be accessed at 400 locations — an expansion reinforcing the growing market for cheaper shared rentals based on even shorter time intervals.

Shaheen’s new research found that as of January 2015, about one-third of carsharing vehicles in the Americas were available as part of one-way carsharing services. There are also multiple other business models being deployed:




A snapshot of evolving carsharing business models. Graphic by Andrew Fair.

One-way carsharing systems take a cue from existing bike sharing models in many cities, which makes sense given that city planners are increasingly looking to incorporate both types of vehicles into first- and last-mile transportation offerings.

“When you look at bikesharing, the majority of systems are point-to-point, or one way,” Shaheen said. “About 80 percent of those trips are one way. It provides people with a higher degree of flexibility.”

She pegs automakers — more specifically, higher end European automakers — as the leaders to date in one-way carsharing. Several providers favor "floating" models where cars can be parked anywhere, as opposed to more infrastructure-intensive station models like Zipcar's.

BMW’s DriveNow system, for instance, offers driver’s by-the-minute rentals of electric vehicles in Europe and the San Francisco Bay Area. Costs include a one-time $39 memberfship fee, then $12 for the first 30 minutes of a rental and $0.32 for each minute after.

Car2Go, a one-way carsharing provider acquired by the moovel subsidiary of Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler AG, has scaled quickly in Europe and North America by offering on-demand rentals of compact cars in urban areas. The company charges a flat $0.41 per minute andlists other fees that can be incurred — $100 for parking in an unauthorized area, $400 for a lost key — on its website.

Those automaker models are markedly different from rental car companies like Avis, Enterprise and Hertz, which have tended to gravitate toward round-trip offerings.

“With the auto rental industry, most of their activity has been more round-trip focused," Shaheen said. "With the OEMs (automakers), the models are not round trip.”

More recently, however, Avis-owned Zipcar has thrown its hat into the ring, along with Enterprise, for a contract with the City of Boston that would make publicly-owned parking spaces available for a network of 150 free floating vehicles.

Holmes of Zipcar said that such a move, which is still being discussed with the city, would further the companies goal of providing "a range of mobility solutions."

Car2Go representatives, meanwhile, said earlier this year that the scope of the proposed pilot in Boston was too small to forge a "reliable service," since fleets in similarly-sized cities have started with closer to 300-400 vehicles.

Shaheen adds that one dual challenge and opportunity when it comes to carsharing is the variation inherent in different local conditions.

"It’s likely that we’re going to see differences that reflect the densities of the cities, along with their public transportation networks," she said.
The economics of carsharing

While futuristic prophecies of adaptable urban transportation networks have floated around for decades, one thing that has remained much less clear is how such systems might actually become economically viable.

The key behavioral mechanism at work, according to Shaheen, is changing how a person or a business pays for transportation.

"You're taking a fixed cost — auto ownership — and turning it into a variable cost," she explained.

Those costs can vary even more depending on the payment terms for different carsharing models.



ZipCar. One of the Honda vehicles in ZipCar's shared fleet available for one-way trips.

“There’s a definite economic difference. With round trip, you’re paying by the mile or the hour or both," Shaheen said. "With the one-way model, you’re essentially paying by the minute. That also has impacts on behavior."

While white-knuckle drivers racing to return a car they're paying for by the minute conjures up all sorts of safety and liability concerns, a related question is how environmental impacts may vary among carsharing models.

With round-trip models, Shaheen and others have found that more tangible cost structures make users "think differently about their trip making." Her research shows that each shared vehicle in North America reduces the need for nine-13 personal cars.

What's less clear, however, is the effect that one-way carsharing, whether station-based or free floating, has on greenhouse gas emissions or sales of privately-owned cars.

Once those impacts — along with the cost projections for a new generation of longer-range electric vehicles — are more clearly understood, there is the possibility that carsharing providers and sustainable development advocates could use supporting data to lobby for policy changes, like dynamic road pricing or new carpooling regulations.

In the gray area between personal cars and carsharing services, there are also possibilities like "fractional ownership" — a newer framing of older co-op models , where a group of private owners jointly purchase a vehicle. This approach is currently being tested in India by Ford Motor Co.

In another example of an automaker hedging its bets on carsharing, Honda has partnered with Zipcar for its one-way carsharing pilot in Boston. It might seem contradictory given the existential threat to automakers posed by carsharing companies, but the move is intended to appeal to a more targeted audience.

“Some of our strongest partners are automakers," Holmes said. While Zipcar espouses a "car-free or car-light lifestyle” in cities, he said more suburban markets give automakers, "an opportunity to introduce a fleet of vehicles to potential customers."
Pros and cons

While the competitive dynamics and environmental impacts of evolving carsharing models remain in flux, other clear flashpoints in the conversation about the future of sustainable mobility are already emerging — particularly when electric cars and autonomous vehicles enter the picture.

The irony for Shaheen and other transportation history buffs is that electric vehicles (EVs) and carsharing are far from strangers.

"They were very, very closely coupled for years, and then decoupled for a decade," Shaheen said. "Now, there appears to be a Renaissance occurring where these innovations are being joined again. Will they also join with the automated vehicle, or semi-automated vehicles?”

While both short-range EVs and carsharing networks have struggled in past hype cycles to achieve scale, the buy-in from incumbent auto industry heavyweights — coupled with a new wave of tech innovation in the form of on-demand software platforms — could change that.

Holmes said that range anxiety is still very much a factor for round-trip carsharing customers, but expanding charging infrastructure, better battery storage technology and lower up-front costs are helping to increase the number of providers investing in EVs.

While powertrain options are one issue that also translate to autonomous vehicles, self-driving cars also introduce a host of other issues. A new generation of privately-owned autonomous cars wouldn't do much to combat traffic, raising the question of how automakers or new entrants like Google may combine the technology with shared mobility services.

One potential upside: fewer first-mile conundrums when it comes time to pick up your shared ride.

"If we are in the world where the car can come to you, that’s going to make carsharing more convenient," Holmes said.

He also acknowledges a range of other obstacles — “clearly, public policy challenges” and avoiding the collection of "data that would be, for lack of a better term, creepy” — that stand in the way of that scenario.

And while Holmes contends that alignment with public transit is one of Zipcar's "key growth strategies," it is much less clear how a larger provider like Uber or a centralized Google transportation service might interact with mass transit systems.

That's where technology might find its next use, Shaheen theorizes.

"I think that public transportation is a core service and that it needs to exist," she said. "You’re not going to redistribute rail, but you could redistribute a bus line. You could change the size of a bus. You could make it on-demand."

UK: Chargemaster to expand network and replace broken charging points for free

EVmeerkat.com: Electric vehicle charging point operator Chargemaster has announced it will expand its network by installing 2000 new points across the country.

The new points will join the firm’s existing network of 4000 charging stations.

Chargemaster said the move intends to resolve issues where several third-partycharging points installed under the Government’s Plugged in Places scheme have been unserviceable.

Chargemaster is offering to replace these units for free to enable the nation’sinfrastructure to be upgraded.

The company said it will install around 1000 points in London, some of which will replace non-functional stations, while 600 stations will be placed in new locations with a focus on hotels, supermarkets and health clubs.

“Chargemaster is committed to making electric vehicles a viable option to people across the UK, and this latest move solidifies that intention,” said David Martell, chief executive of Chargemaster. “By growing our network nationwide, but also focusing on traditionally poor areas of service, such as London, we are confident we will make a marked difference for EV owners wanting to charge on the move”.

Nearly every London borough is above the legal air pollution limit

TimeOut.com: Our city is a smelly smogfest at the best of times, but when the heat is on - like it was last week, thanks to summer deciding to finally show up to the party - the pollution gets even worse. While exploring just how choking it can get out there, we stumbled across this awesome map of London’s most polluted areas from Place I Live. Central London: bad. A12: bad. North Circular: bad. The pollution represented here is coarse dust particles between 2.5 to 10 micrometres in diameter. Gross. 

In other pollution news, almost every single London borough failed the air pollution limit for toxic NO2 gas, with only Bromley and Sutton coming out clean. 

Speaking of which, Clean Air London has produced an app that reports the health impact of 'exposure to dangerous airborne particles'. It does that by displaying the 'time to the next attributable death'. Want to know when someone’s about to die of pollution-related illness? There really is an app for that. Get it here. Enjoy the sunshine!

Volkswagen Pushes Development Of Automated Parking And Charging Of Electric Cars

PureGreeenCars.com: A look into the near future of automated parking is given by 'V-Charge', an EU research project, in which six national and international partners are jointly developing new technologies. Its focus is on automating the search for a parking space and on the charging of electric vehicles.

The best part about it is that the vehicle not only automatically looks for an empty parking space, but that it finds an empty space with charging infrastructure and inductively charges its battery. Once the charging process is finished, it automatically frees up the charging bay for another electric vehicle and looks for a conventional parking space. 'V-Charge' stands for Valet Charge and is pointing the way to the future of automated parking.

In the USA especially, convenient valet parking is a big hit: you pull up in your car right outside your destination, valet service personnel park it for you and have it brought around again as and when you need it. There is no more time-wasting search for a parking place. The V-Charge project picks up on this idea. Its development goal is fully automated searching for a parking space ('valet parking') within defined zones, such as in multi-storey car parks.

There are many scenarios that illustrate the advantages of the V-Charge concept. Take one practical everyday example: a commuter notices that he is possibly going to be late and is thus running the risk of missing an important meeting at his company. With V-Charge he is able to pull up right in front of the main entrance, get out and establish the link to his vehicle via the associated smartphone application. Operating fully automatically, the vehicle has a digital map relayed to it and within the parking area or multi-storey car park autonomously navigates to a parking space. If it is an electric vehicle, the system additionally prioritizes a parking bay with an automatic charging facility. Pedestrians, cyclists and other vehicles are identified by the cameras and ultrasound sensors integrated within the vehicle. Therefore, the vehicle is allowed to travel in so-called 'mixed traffic'. The selected parking area neither has to be an enclosed domain nor is any complex technical equipment required.


As the electric vehicle nears its destination, the system recognizes via local sensors whether the allocated parking space is taken. If it is empty, the fully automatic parking man oeuvre begins and positions the vehicle exactly above the inductive charging spot. When the charging process is complete, the vehicle automatically moves to another parking space, leaving the charging station free for another electric car. When the driver returns to the multi-storey car park, he calls the vehicle back to the starting point via the V-Charge app. The vehicle moves to the defined pick-up location, with the driver not needing to set foot in the parking area or multi-storey car park.

Taking the lead in the international research consortium is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. It is responsible for visual localization, movement planning and vehicle control (Autonomous Systems Lab division), camera calibration, 3D reconstruction from images and obstacle detection (Computer Vision and Geometry Lab division). Braunschweig Technical University works on the issues of car park management and the vehicle's communication with the technical surroundings (vehicle-to-infrastructure 'V2I'), Robert Bosch GmbH contributes its expertise in the field of sensor technology, Parma University looks after object recognition and Oxford University handles the development of detailed navigation maps of the parking area (semantic mapping concepts). As the sixth partner in the consortium, Volkswagen is providing the platform equipment, safety and control modules, as well as systems for static monitoring of surroundings, object recognition and automated parking.

The test vehicle: a network of technical sensory organs
The technical prerequisites largely already exist. During the introductory stage, for instance, it was possible to utilise sensor and camera technologies that are already being used in today's production vehicles. A dense network of sensory devices enables autonomous operation of the V-Charge test vehicle, which is based on a Volkswagen e-Golf1. Four wide-angle cameras and two 3D cameras, twelve ultrasound sensors, digital maps and the so-called 'Car2X' technology for the vehicle's communication with the infrastructure ensure that the vehicle's surroundings are reliably detected and recognized. Pedestrians, vehicles and obstacles get identified, parking spaces recognized and measured and then this stream of data is put together in real time to form an overall picture – the task that the technical 'sensory organs' have to fulfil is complex and extremely varied.

As continual tests run as part of the research project show, V-Charge is already functional today. GPS-independent indoor localization, centimeter-exact parking space measurement and 360-degree recognition of surroundings all function reliably, as do the system's reactions to pedestrians and vehicles and the way in which it takes account of traffic moving in line with or across the vehicle's path.