Car 2.0 Update from TED: Electric vehicle proponent Shai Agassi, founder of Better Place, outlines his vision for a oil-free nation by 2020

April 13, 2009 at 11:42 am

(Source: TED)

Forget about the hybrid auto — Shai Agassi says it’s electric cars or bust if we want to impact emissions. His company, Better Place, has a radical plan to take entire countries oil-free by 2020.

Just over a year ago, BusinessWeek ran a great piece aboutShai Agassi and his audacious plans to produce a mass market electric vehicle and thereby revolutionize the auto industry. So it was great to get an update from the former software entrepreneur turned zero emission transport guru on the main TED stage earlier today.

TransportGooru is a big fan of TED and of Mr. Agassi.  For those who have not heard about Mr. Agassi, here is a brief bio of from the TED website.  

Business Week’s report on Mr. Agassi’s TED presentation offers this:  “Much of what Agassi had to say was familiar, but it was fascinating to hear how the Better Place project is scaling to places such as Australia and Hawaii (it started life in Israel, with the support of politician Shimon Peres.) The emergence of Car 2.0, as Agassi described it, entails an entirely new business model for car ownership, whereby drivers will pay for miles as they currently pay for minutes on a phone. And Agassi, who cut an imposing and definitive figure on stage, professed to be interested in only two figures: Zero, as in zero emissions; and infinity, as in this model should be available for every driver, worldwide.”

The quote from Wired Magainze nicely captures Mr. Agassi’s personality – Charismatic &  convincing. 

“Shai Agassi has only one car, no charging stations, and not a single customer—yet everyone who meets him already believes he can see the future.” – Wired

Here is Mr. Agassi’s presentation at TED

USDOT Publishes Report on Key Transportation Indicators for March 2009

April 13, 2009 at 11:21 am

(Source: Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) of the U.S. Department of Transportation)

This report is intended to provide timely, easily accessible information for the transportation community. It was developed by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) of the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), and is updated on a regular basis on the BTS website.

The indicators fall under two broad categories: those that provide context about the economy and society in which transportation functions, and those that convey information about an aspect of transportation. To the extent possible, these latter indicators are transportation-wide in scope; however, some apply to only part of the transportation system. Reference tables at the beginning of the document provide key statistics about U.S. social and economic characteristics, and about the extent of the transportation system.

For indicators that are highly seasonal, the current value of that indicator is compared to the same time period in the previous year (e.g., April 2001 compared to April 2000). Otherwise, the tables show a comparison of the current value to a comparable preceeding period of time (e.g., the data for the month of April 2001 compared to that of March 2001).

 Click here to read the report in HTML.

Match Made in Ether! Zipcar Plans Partnership With Zimride

April 8, 2009 at 12:51 pm

(Source: Wall Street Journal)

Zimride

Zipcar Inc., the world’s largest car-sharing company, plans to announce Wednesday a partnership with Zimride, a fast-growing online carpooling service that uses social networking tools like Facebook Inc. to match potential riders and drivers on university campuses or at companies like Wal-Mart.

The partnership — being launched first at Stanford University — means carpoolers can share rides, even if they don’t own a car, using Zipcar’s hourly rental system. Car-sharing companies allow drivers to rent cars by the hour from locations close to their homes. 

When reserving a car on Zipcar, members will be able to automatically post the date, time and destination of their rental onto the Zimride Stanford University Web site. Then Zimride finds and notifies users looking for a ride. Zimride’s users also will be prompted to consider booking a Zipcar for their trip.

Online carpooling service Zimride uses social-networking tools to match riders and drivers on university campuses or at companies.

Zipcar hopes to quickly launch the program at other universities across the country. “The intent here is to go big fast,” says Scott Griffith, chairman and chief executive of Zipcar. “I would guess in the next couple of months, you will see dozens of these things rolling out.”

Zipcar declined to provide financial details on the partnership.

In recent years, online carpooling services such as Goloco.org and Pickuppal.com, which use social networking to link drivers and riders, have sprung up, but significant user growth has proved elusive.

 

In 2007, Zimride launched as the first online carpooling service to integrate a Facebook application — free software programs that Facebook members can use — to arrange ride-sharing within specific communities like universities or companies. Zimride could then use the social-networking site to show potential riders and drivers the people who might be riding with them.

 

Click here to read the entire article.

Paradigm Shift Does G.M.’s P.U.M.A. Rethink Transportation?

April 8, 2009 at 12:13 pm
G.M.'s P.U.M.A. Concept

The Project P.U.M.A. prototype on 18th Street in Manhattan.

 (Source: Wheels Blog – New York Times)

When General Motors unveiled Project P.U.M.A. in New York on Tuesday (with partner Segway), it was showing not so much a vehicle as a vision for a new transportation system. And that’s high risk, high reward, because as much as new concepts are needed, they’re excruciatingly hard to actually put in place. Our highways are haunted with unfulfilled visions, from electric station-cars to statewide hydrogen-refueling networks.

The P.U.M.A. is a two-wheeled, two-seat gyroscopically balanced urban transit device with a top speed of 35 miles an hour and the potential to be remotely operated. Toyota has also shown a fanciful personal mobility option, called the i-Swing, a single-seater pod on wheels, with joystick controls.

So far, the P.U.M.A. concept is receiving cautiously optimistic reviews. “It’s exactly the right vision, and it’s the kind of thinking we need desperately in transportation,” said Dan Sperling, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California-Davis and coauthor (with Deborah Gordon) of “Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability.”

Mr. Sperling points out that the Low-Speed Vehicle (L.S.V.) category, limited in most states to 35 miles an hour, was created by the Department of Transportation in the 1990s to respond to the type of technology that G.M. is now talking about.

The L.S.V. category, which includes battery-powered neighborhood electric vehicles, has been slow to take off. But Mr. Sperling said he saw those vehicles, including the Chrysler GEM, gaining popularity around Davis for use in retirement and gated communities, military bases and office parks. “We need more diversity of vehicle types,” he said. “There’s no reason everything has to be 3,000-plus-pound cars and trucks. But for this to take off it needs one extra step to integrate the vehicles into the broader network of roads.”

 

For David J. Friedman, research director for the clean vehicles program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, the P.U.M.A. has possibilities, though what he called “the massive monitoring and managing of traffic to minimize congestion and maximize road usage” has been tried before; the general category is called Intelligent Transportation Systems. G.M. experimented with hands-free Buicks on automated highways in 1997, but the efforts were thwarted by high costs and driver confusion.

“We need to design our cities around something other than two- or three-ton vehicles,” said Mr. Friedman. “The data suggests that by 2030 half of the built environment in the U.S. will be new. What if we designed new suburban towns with integrated shopping so you could walk, bike or use a P.U.M.A. to get around, with conventional vehicles only for longer trips?”

 

Click here to read the entire article

Zero Takes Electric Motorcycles to the Street

April 8, 2009 at 12:13 am

(Source: Wired)

Zero_s_01

The dust kicked up by the 24 Hours of Electricross has barely settled and Zero Motorcycles is back with a street-legal electric motorcycle it will have in driveways later this month.

The Zero S builds upon the the technology underpinning the Zero X dirt bike by doubling the size of the battery to deliver 60 miles of electric commuting and corner-carving. The Santa Cruz startup promises a top speed of 60 mph and a zero-to-60 time of about 5 seconds from a highway-legal bike that weighs just 225 pounds.

The Zero X proved its mettle last weekend during an unprecedented 24-hour endurance race where 10 teams log as many as 507 miles flogging the bikes around a track in San Jose. But while the Zero X is strictly an off-road machine, the S is designed for city streets and the occasional back-road run.

 

The brushed permanent magnet motor produces 31 horsepower and the bike weighs 225 pounds, making the Zero S a little less powerful – but 96 pounds lighter – than a Suzuki DR-Z400SM. With 62.5 foot-pounds of torque on tap, the Zero S has significantly more grunt than, say, the KTM 690 SMC.

Juice comes from a 4 kilowatt-hour lithium ion battery that weighs 80 pounds and charges in less than four hours when plugged into a 110 volt outlet. Zero predicts the battery will last five or six years with normal use. No word on the replacement cost, but an extra pack for the Zero X – which uses a 2 kilowatt-hour pack – costs $3,000.

Power flows directly to the back wheel – no transmission – and the bike offers 9 inches of suspension travel up front and 8 at the rear. Zero wouldn’t offer any details on who’s producing the suspension or brake components.

 

Click here to read more.

Cycling Mecca (Holland) reclaims the World’s safest country for cycling title

April 7, 2009 at 8:26 pm

(Source: Treehugger)

Img: Daniel Sparing @ Flickr

The Dutch and the Danish pass back and forth the crown for best cycling country. Now new research (from the Dutch) shows Holland to have the safest cycling roads (graph after the jump). Here’s how Tineke Huizinga, State Secretary of Transport, views the bike:

“The bicycle oils the wheels of the municipal traffic system. Cycling means arriving at work, school or the gym in a more alert frame of mind, feeling creative and positive.”

That may seem like a subjective statement, but the Dutch have found cyclists do have fewer sick days. And, amazingly, cycling safety is NOT give the highest priority in Dutch planning.

Dutch Cyclists Safest graphic

More Dutch cycling = safer cyclists
The Dutch, in their 2009 Cycling in the Netherlands report, attribute Holland’s low number of cycling fatalities – 2 people killed per 100 million kilometers traveled by bike – to the fact that so many of the Dutch are also cyclists. It isn’t a ‘we versus them’ mentality any longer, now that each person owns an average of 1.1 bicycles. This coupled with the fact that, as the report states: “Wearing a bicycle helmet for daily trips is unusual in the Netherlands,” is indeed food for thought.

In addition, Dutch liability dovetails with the recent TreeHugger post of making heavier vehicles more responsible in accidents.

Click here to read the entire article. 

Project P.U.M.A – GM’s tango with Segway births an awesome personal mobility platform for urban environments

April 7, 2009 at 3:12 pm

(Source: Jalopnik)

P.U.M.A delivers 35 mile range, 35 MPH top speed, all on 35 cents of electricity 

GM and Segway have teamed up before the New York Auto Show on what they’re calling the PUMA project. The prototype vehicle was exclusively unveiled today on the Today Show. It’s no April Fool’s joke.  PUMA stands for Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility and the prototype running around outside NBC’s Today Show this morning is an experimental prototype of a vehicle Larry Burns, GM’s vice president of research and development, and strategic planning, claims we’ll see a roadable version by January.

The interesting thing here isn’t necessarily the size – barely wide enough to fit two skinny urban dwellers — the electric powertrain — 35 mile range, 35 MPH top speed, all on 35 cents of electricity — or the added mobility it provides – not much more than a bicycle and significantly less than a gas-powered scooter — but it’s vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Not only does the P.U.M.A. talk to other units, but it can detect the presence of other types of vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists; using that info to avoid collisions. It can also join together with other P.U.M.A.s to form high-speed (if you can call 35 MPH high speed) cross-city trains capable of using special lanes for uninterrupted travel.

 

Jalopnik’s review of the PUMA after taking it for a spin goes like this:  

The first impression is of how small and simple the PUMA is. There’s barely room for two full-sized adults to sit side-by-side within its roll cage and inside, under the rough plexi windshield there’s only one control: the aircraft-like yoke.

Mounted on that yoke are two buttons; one to start things up and one to shut it down. Hit the one on the right and the cabin lifts up off the ground, balancing completely level. Move the yoke forward and the cabin rotates in front of the center of gravity, initiating forward motion. Push forward for more acceleration, pull backward to shift the cabin rearwards to decelerate or come to a stop. Twist the yoke left or right to steer. Do so at a standstill and one wheel will roll forward, the other backwards, spinning you in place. That’s it, it couldn’t be simpler. In fact, it works just like a Segway, albeit a giant one that goes 10 MPH faster and lets two people sit down out of the weather.

Riding along in complete silence, sliding fore and aft is a bit eerie. The seats aren’t connected to the floor plan, meaning your feet slide out from under the seat when the cabin shifts foreword and vice versa in reverse. That feeling of connection to the movement helps orient passengers to what’s going on beneath them.

The simplicity of the control system – immediately intuitive – hints at the intended use of the PUMA. You wouldn’t need to be competent behind the wheel of a car to use one, it’s more like operating a video game. Perfect for today’s youth gone wild.

Segway just released the following video of Project P.U.M.A. in action (via The College Driver!).  Check it out::

Silverlining in the Dark Cloud! Bad economy holds highway deaths to record low

April 6, 2009 at 5:07 pm

(Source: Associated Press via Yahoo! News)

WASHINGTON – U.S. highway deaths in 2008 fell to their lowest level in nearly 50 years, the latest government figures show, as the recession and $4 per gallon gas meant people drove less to save more. Safety experts said record-high seat-belt use, tighter enforcement of drunken driving laws and the work of advocacy groups that encourage safer driving habits contributed to the reduction in deaths.

Preliminary figures released by the government Monday show that 37,313 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes last year. That’s 9.1 percent lower than the year before, when 41,059 died, and the fewest since 1961, when there were 36,285 deaths.

A different measure, also offering good news, was the fatality rate, the number of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. It was 1.28 in 2008, the lowest on record. A year earlier it was 1.36.

“The silver lining in a bad economy is that people drive less, and so the number of deaths go down,” said Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. “Not only do they drive less but the kinds of driving they do tend to be less risky — there’s less discretionary driving.”

Fatalities fell by more than 14 percent in New England, and by 10 percent or more in many states along the Atlantic seaboard, parts of the Upper Midwest and the West Coast, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

“Americans should really be pleased that everyone has stepped up here in order to make driving safer and that people are paying attention to that,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said.

Click here to read the entire AP article.  
For those interested, here is the NHTSA report on estimated fatalities for 2008 (shown below in PDF viewer)  and the report showing 2008 state-by-state seat belt use (click here to download).

McKinsey Quarterly: Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, proposes an electric plan for energy resilience

April 3, 2009 at 1:04 pm

(Source: McKinsey Quarterly ;Video:  The Auto Channel @ YouTube)

The fastest way to reduce America’s dependence on oil imports is to convert petroleum-driven miles to electric ones by retrofitting the SUVs and pick-ups now on the road with rechargeable batteries. Here’s how.

Our aim should not be total independence from foreign sources of petroleum. That is neither practical nor necessary in a world of interdependent economies. Instead, the objective should be developing a sufficient degree of resilience against disruptions in imports. Think of resilience as the ability to absorb a significant disruption, bigger than what could be managed by drawing down the strategic oil reserve.

 Our resilience can be strengthened by increasing diversity in the sources of our energy. Commercial, industrial, and home users of oil can already use other sources of energy. By contrast, transportation is totally dependent on petroleum. This is the root cause of our vulnerability.Our goal should be to increase the diversity of energy sources in transportation. The best alternative to oil? Electricity. The means? Convert petroleum-driven miles to electric ones.

Electric miles do not necessarily mean relying on all-electric cars, which would require building an extensive and expensive infrastructure. They can be achieved by so-called plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). (Since many plug-in cars are modified hybrid automobiles, they are sometimes called PHEVs.) PEVs have both a gasoline-fueled engine and an electric motor. They first rely on the electricity stored onboard in a battery. When the battery is depleted, the vehicle continues to run on petroleum. The battery then can be charged when the vehicle is not in service.

The engineering and organizational issues involved in retrofitting on a large scale are far from trivial. The biggest problem, however, is the availability of batteries. The most suitable battery technology, which offers both a sufficient range and enough power to provide the acceleration required by today’s drivers, is the lithium-ion battery system. Current battery-manufacturing capacity is limited, and nearly all of it is dedicated to supplying batteries for the nearly 200 million laptop computers and other handheld electronic devices built each year. Making the batteries required for one million vehicles would mean doubling current manufacturing output.

Click here to read the entire article (Register for Free to read and hear the entire discussion).
NOTE:
TransportGooru is proud to share Andy Grove’s keynote address on the critical importance; and business opportunity and viability; of moving transportation from oil to electricity.

 

National Transportation Safety Board: Fatalities rose in 2008 for air taxi, tour flights

April 2, 2009 at 4:57 pm

(Source: Associated Press via Yahoo! Finance)

 

Safety board says fatal accidents were up sharply in 2008 for air taxi, medical, tour flights

WASHINGTON (AP) — There was a spike last year in deaths from crashes of air medical, air taxi and tour flights, federal safety officials said Thursday.

The National Transportation Safety Board said there were 56 so-called on-demand flight accidents in which 66 people were killed in 2008. That’s the highest number of fatalities for such flights in eight years and an increase of 13 deaths over 2007. The on-demand accident rate was 1.52 accidents per 100,000 flight hours, virtually unchanged from the previous year.

The board held a public hearing earlier this year examining the safety practices of the air medical helicopter industry. Fifteen people were killed in four medical helicopter crashes in 2008.

Major U.S. airlines, however, suffered no accident fatalities in 2008 for the second consecutive year despite carrying 753 million passengers on more than 10.8 million flights, the NTSB said. Major airlines experienced 28 accidents last year, the same as 2007.

 Commuter airlines, which typically fly smaller turboprop planes, also didn’t have any accident fatalities despite making 581,000 flights last year, the board said. However, there were seven commuter airline accidents in 2008, up three from the previous year.

There were 495 people killed — one fewer than the previous year — in general aviation accidents in 2008, the board said. General aviation includes private and corporate planes.

Acting NTSB Chairman Mark Rosenker said the aviation safety record for 2008 was mixed.  Click here to access today’s press release and interesting statistical tables.

Table 1. Accidents, Fatalities, and Rates, 2008 Preliminary Statistics
U.S. Aviation
  Accidents Fatalities Flight Hours Departures Accidents per 100,000 Flight Hours Accidentsper 100,000 Departures
All Fatal Total Aboard All Fatal All Fatal
U.S. air carriers operating under 14 CFR 121
– Scheduled 20 0 0 0 18,730,000 10,597,000 0.107 0.189
– Nonscheduled 8 2 3 1 621,000 190,000 1.288 0.322 4.211 1.053
U.S. air carriers operating under 14 CFR 135
– Commuter 7 0 0 0 290,400 581,000 2.410 1.205
– On-Demand 56 19 66 66 3,673,000 1.52 0.52
U.S. general aviation 1,559 275 495 486 21,931,000 7.11 1.25
U.S. civil aviation 1,649 296 564 553
Other accidents in the U.S.
– Foreign registered aircraft 6 4 7 7
– Unregistered aircraft 7 1 1 1