[Image credit: itMoves]

Last week's widely publicized admission by Google that they have indeed a fleet of automatically driven vehicles goes beyond the anecdotal; it represents a small but very significant step towards clean mobility worthy of the XXI century.

I will not spend too much time on the details: seven cars, 140,000 miles, only one accident (caused by another driver rear-ending the Google car). Of those miles, at least 1,000 were covered without human intervention. Even more amazing, the vehicles were perfectly legal according to the California DMV, since a liable human was always behind the wheel ready to override any error (even if she was not necessarily holding that wheel at all times...)

Of course self driven cars are not new. The Japanese and Europeans have been working on it for many years (Wikipedia has of course some details). In the US, Honda, Toyota and GM were working together at the the National Automotive Highway Consortium back in 1998 (campy Popular Mechanics page here).

While working at GM Advanced Studio, we were a very close second at the 2007 California Design Challenge with our OnStar ANT. Two years later, we also participated on the Puma project, the self-balancing Segway two seater (which were intended to be shown as automatically driven at the Shanghai Expo, althought I am not sure if they accomplished the goal).

So if it's old news, why should we consider it significant?

Read the rest of this post »

[Image source: Kyocera Solar Grove™ via Envision Solar]

While researching some other project, I came across this recent Autoblog Green post where they talk about the installation of a solar parking lot with capabilities to charge electric vehicles, the first one of its kind on the Southeast according to Outpost Solar, the company responsible for the installation.

Solar car ports are of course nothing new (this one in Santa Monica has been there since 2005), but reading the upbeat quotes and press release made me think again about The Promise and The Delivery of solar as it relates to EVs.

Let's start with The Delivery:

One of the recurrent questions I got when presenting itMoves was: can you charge the vehicles with the solar panels? I explained many times that the solar panels were only there to keep the AC (or heating) running, in itself not a small feat since HVAC systems are real power hogs. By keeping the shared MEs at the perfect temperature, we could provide a nice touch to the costumer, and reduce the drain on the main battery pack (no need to turn the A/C to 11 when leaving the spot). Although not too many people complained, it always felt like everyone expected one equation to be true:

1 solar panel = 1 car.

To be honest, I felt the same way when I started itMoves, but unfortunately the mathematics do not work that way:

Read the rest of this post »

There is an interesting new article at The Economist this week talking about the spread of extended producer responsibility. The European Union already had a Directive aimed at auto manufacturers, including the requirement by 2015 to recycle 95% of the vehicle weight; now similar requirements are arriving to the US for the first time.

For itMoves it means another confirmation of some our early intuitions, like the goal to be Cradle to Cradle certified, the emphasis in easy assembly (through a small common set of parts) and a business model based on continuous refurbishing and reuse of components while keeping ownership of the vehicles themselves (Mobility as a Service).