[Video via The Auto Channel]

Ivan, one of my coworkers here in London, has a funny way to describe his admiration for his former employer BMW; he just paces back and forth muting they cover and master every single angle of the business, e.v.e.r.y single one, all while shaking his head in disbelief.

Proving Ivan right, BMW announced last week that they were starting a premium car-sharing program in Germany.

The news comes right on the heels of their February announcement of the i sub-brand, a division that wants to be to environmental vehicles what the M brand represents to performance, as well as the launch of i-ventures, their venture capital arm.

Why would a conventional car company move into such a fundamental threat to their core business as car-sharing? While the launch of the i sub-brand is understandable from a product point of view, creating a venture firm and a car-sharing organization might seem, at first glance, odd. I see three possible explanations:

1- The Conspiracy theory: eyeing car-sharing as an attack to the fundamentals of their business model, BMW has decided to start its own car-sharing company and get in the game, only to follow with a string of acquisitions (Zipcar?) that will ultimatly allow them to dominate the business. Full domination achieved, they will declare the division a money loosing operation and close it down. Very unlikely, but we have seen this movie before.

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[Image via The Big Picture]

As the sole stockholder, president, CEO and employee of itMoves Design Limited, I couldn't help but LOL at the comic strip.

It brought back memories of the months I spent last year endlessly working on the P&L, Use of Cash, Revenue Model, Headcount & Labor Costs and other financial charts seemingly indispensable when going out the door looking for funding (a job I actually found enjoyable, to my surprise).

It also reminded me of how weird it felt, as a beginner, the first time one has to write down his own Exorbitant Annual Salary... ahahah, good times.

[Image credit: itMoves]

It's been fifty days since I moved to the United Kingdom (many more since I last wrote a post) and changes have been, as anyone would imagine, substantial:

• At the personal level, I am getting to know one of the most vibrant cities on the planet. After more than a decade living (and why not, enjoying) Southern California, Central London feels like it is bursting at the seams. The people, the energy and the visual landscape are, at least in Soho where I spend most of my time, exciting, phenomenal, and at times, overwhelming. The downside of it all (the overrun subway system, the tourist crowds, the prices) has not yet managed to ruin it for me yet, and with the rest of the family joining me in August, the excitement of The New is going to stay with me for a while.

• At the professional level, I have been forced to (temporarily?) give up any startup adventure and get back to the corporate design world. As far as car design studios go, Ford's Strategic Concept Group at the old ingeni building is as good as it gets, mixing design, engineering, marketing and product planning in a promising new way, forward-looking but with our feet planted in reality. Along with the fantastic location, the fact that they still remember me from my past days at Ford helped me seal the deal.

So what to do with this blog? The logistics of the move, which included renting out and getting out of our apartment while packing my suitcases, simply sapped too much time and energy out of me for a few weeks; once I moved here, the excitement of the new, plus a small dose of guilt (how can this guy keep writing about new mobility when he is working for Ford?) conspired to create what I can only describe as writer's block (pretentious as it sounds). However, as days and weeks went by, I realized that different flavors of the same problems that made me quit and start itMoves (oil and commodity prices climbing up again, the rise of motoring China, the inescapable feeling that Times They Are A-changin' in the transportation world) are not only still here, but turning ever more complicated, as the recent events is Japan and the MIddle East certify.

The blog will continue. I will of course no comment on anything related with our internal studio activities for confidentiality reasons. I will also have to be careful around any Ford related topic, just for decency sake (after all, They pay the bills now). But other than that, it would be a shame to miss the opportunity to report not only from one of the most vibrant metropolis in the world, but also a city on the frontlines, in the gasoline-soaked battle between individual freedoms and the common good.

After all, if they managed to turn rainy London into an almost (almost) bicycle friendly city, anything can happen here.

So let's keep it rollin'

[Image credit: itMoves]

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about Bjørn Lomborg, an interesting author who gained notoriety back in 2007 by writing the book Cool it!, and who had impressed me with a few articles (like this one) where he called for a different, more rational approach to global warming. His two main arguments were, succinctly, that hysteria will only produce a backlash, and that every dollar spent in R&D and basic science will go many times further than most of the expensive and inefficient solutions we are using today. So far, so good.

Feeling guilty for not having read the book, I finally purchased it a week ago; what a disappointment...

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My friend and mentor Dan Sturges is one of the panelists. What do they talk about? :

In the last 1.0 hundred years mobility was largely about automobile ownership.  The conversation now moves to the role of vehicles in a more complex mobility mix.  How must automakers adapt?

This webcast was live at 9AM PST on December 9th.

I am not a big fan of subsidies, which tend to obscure market realities and generally benefit the incumbents (from agriculture to manufacturing) instead of leaner, more efficient newcomers.

Targeted, time-limited consumer tax credits are a different animal however. When well designed, they can be a decisive force helping new industries cross the chasm faster. The tax credit available for EVs is a good example.

Unfortunately, the other EV tax credit (the one that helps individuals and businesses purchasing charging infrastructure) was not that well designed, and because it comes from a different pot of money, it is set to expire by the end of this month. Ah, the irony, right when the first serious EVs in a generation are finally going to appear on the road, one of the main sweeteners for the consumer (especially if they are not too committed) is going to disappear.

There is still a chance that it can be extended, but for that to happen, action is needed. Please visit this Plug-in America link and sign the petition so it gets forwarded to your representatives in Congress (it only takes 30 seconds).

In another time this would have probably been extended without a glitch, but nowadays, with tea-lovers controlling one party and Compromiser In-Chief leading the other, I'm afraid anyy clean tech advance made during the past few years could be on the chopping block starting January.

Hey, they have to find the money somewhere to pay for the tax credit extension for the top two percent, right?

You can't certainly accuse Louis Palmer of having a boring life. After cycling over 10,000 kilometers in Africa, flying across South America in the smallest plane ever, and crossing Afghanistan by car (in 2002!!), he decided three years ago to drive around the world in a solar car (the SolarTaxi), an event that made the news all over the world.

I still remember the SolarTaxi, and the fact that solar was a relative term; unlike the ultra efficient racers at the World Solar Challenge, the taxi was topped up regularly from the grid. In theory, they had a solar power plant on a rooftop in Berne (Switzerland), from where the electricity was fed into the grid, offsetting electricity generated by using fossil fuels. Ok, I believe it, but I can't help but think that solar means powered only by the sun...in any case, it was a long drive in a pure battery powered vehicle, an amazing feat in itself.

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The LA Auto Show press days came and went. As a car show, it is a weird hybrid event, certainly more than a regional auto show, yet still not recognized by most auto makers or the media as the international event it could and should be. California is, after all, the biggest car market in the US (accounting for one out of every ten vehicles), and many auto trends still start here. Most Asian companies have their headquarters here as well, and although engineering is mostly done in Michigan, the LA area has by far the highest concentration of car design studios in the world. Lastly, but very importantly, any media person you ask would admit that they would rather spend a couple of warm November days in Los Angeles than enjoying Detroit in early January (although things are not as bad at NAIAS since they moved, a few years ago, their nonsensical January 2nd opening day to mid January).

Back in 2007 and especially 2008, with Toyota (based in Torrance, near LAX) taking over as biggest car manufacturer in the world, the Chinese market making another giant Leap Forward, the Big Three drowning in debt, and a thriving EV start-up scene ready to take over, it looked like the time had come to move the only US-based international auto show from Detroit to Los Angeles.

Two years (and $60 Federal billion) later, with an invigorated Ford, a stumbling Toyota, a very successful government IPO, and Californian VCs starting to think that perhaps social media is an easier bet than green-tech, the LA Auto Show seems to be going back to its previous, almost there status.

On the EV front, there is no doubt that this is a transitional period. Green champion Schwarzenegger is out of the picture, and the lingering recession is still present, so the activity looked to me a bit subdued. After several years of increasing EV buzz, everyone seems to be taking a breather. Nevertheless, several themes where clearly noticeable:

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This one just for fun.

While preparing a 3D environment for a client and friend, I couldn't resist the temptation to drop the ME geometry into this early fall Pasadena environment I photographed yesterday. Although Autodesk Showcase is a better tool for static renderings, there is still something magic about watching a design one knows slowly rotate inside a street composed of nothing more than 140 individual images.

It's not 100 percent perfect, but it's not too bad for just a few hours of work.

[Video source: Cool It the Movie official website]

I have read a few late opinion pieces by Bjørn Lomborg (the latest one, The Return to Reason, via Project Syndicate), one of the most controversial figures in the climate change debate, and to my surprise, I have to admit his arguments are quite persuasive.

When I heard about Mr Lomborg, it was always in the context of his 1998 book (The Skeptical Environmentalist), and thought of him as nothing more than one of those scientist (he is actually a political scientist) on Chevron's payroll, denying climate change and creating more false debate. I am as innately bias as anyone (we are all more receptive to ideas we agree on, aren't we?), so I didn't pay too much attention. Proving again that my 7th grade Civics teacher was right, reading what the other side has to say has proven to be an interesting experience.

It turns out Mr Lomborg is not a denier, since there is nothing to deny about climate change. Data is data. What Mr Lomborg maintains, and the reason why he is vilified by the environmental activists (establishment?), is that first there is no point scaring our kids silly as if they will not have a world left to inherit, and secondly, that before dumping billion of dollars into inefficient technologies, it would be wiser to spend the money in R&D and find out real solutions that are both effective and economically feasible, while at the same time look for short term adaptation to the real changes that are already happening, changes that are too late to stop, and that will mostly affect poor people around the globe.

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