As the line between automotive electronics and consumer electronics grows ever closer, the list of new-car options has grown at an incredible pace. As a person who’s constantly in a new vehicle and has an insatiable love for gadgetry, click through the jump for my top 10 must-haves and the 10 options you should avoid at all costs. Picking the right options can help your car’s resale value and choosing the wrong ones can lower it or even limit the market for your ride.

1. iPod/USB integration with voice commands

We all love tunes and you know that we all secretly love to tell our car what to do. It’s a match made in heaven.

2. Adaptive cruise control

I’m not convinced self-driving cars are going to pass legislative and legal hurdles, not to mention the inevitable flood of lawsuits, but one key technology the systems depend on is available on a wide variety of cars: adaptive cruise control. Using a radar system mounted on the front of the car, the car’s computer works the stop and go pedals for you to keep you under your pre-set speed and a safe distance from the car you’re following. The steering and panic stopping are up to you of course, but if you’re in moderate to mild freeway traffic I find it makes me a better driver by dealing with the slow down, speed up, slow down nature of traffic that drives me crazy. The fact that most systems will alert you if you’re not paying attention and are about to rear end the school bus is just icing on the cake.

3. Keyless entry/go

Keys are so last century.

4. Collision mitigation systems

A car that’s out to save my bacon (and my insurance premiums) ranks high on my list. I dislike systems that intervene too early, but the systems by Lexus and Volvo wait until the 11th hour (or the 11th nanosecond) to do something about your rear-ender-in-progress. I was a skeptic at first, a Volvo XC60 stopped itself automatically when I was momentarily distracted and that made me a believer.

5. Bluetooth integration

One of the greatest changes sweeping the industry over the last 5 years is the near universal availability of Bluetooth. While many new cars come with the technology standard, it is still on option some so do your homework. Don’t order a car without it. Aside from speaker phone capability, Bluetooth allows you to stream audio from your music device to the car and is one of the few technologies likely to survive for your car’s lifetime.

6. Dynamic beam headlamps

You know, the ones illegal in the USA? Yea. Them. In a nutshell the car scans the road ahead with a camera and using a sophisticated projection headlamp array it “blocks out” the light that would shine onto a car ahead of you (your direction or the opposite side of the road) so that your high beams can light up the rest of the road without blinding anyone. I’ve had the opportunity to drive several prototype vehicles and the system has to be the best thing since French car sales stopped in the USA. Sadly the Feds won’t let us have snazzy headlamps.

7. Heated steering wheel

Much like anal sex, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.

8. Automatic climate control

Many years ago I decided that any new car I own must have certain features. Power seats, a telescopic steering wheel, heated seats and lastly automatic climate control. Over the years I have added plenty of must-haves to my list, but none top the automatic climate control. Why? Because I am that buy that’s too lazy to adjust knobs and buttons on my own.

9. Active suspension systems

I’ve owned three vehicles with active suspension systems and driven at least 40 to date. The systems on offer vary from simple load-leveling systems like the one in my GMC Envoy that drastically improve vehicle behavior when towing (and make it easy to deal with heavier-than-normal tongue weights) to fully-dynamic systems that alter the ride height and damping firmness. While the early systems on the Volvo S60R/V70R  had some software bugs, every modern system I have tested has done exactly what it says on the tin.

10. Heads-up displays

As the name implies, the goal is to give you information while keeping your eyes on the road. While I wouldn’t pay extra for the GM or Toyota systems, BMW’s full-color system is gorgeous and is the first system to display enough information to be worth ordering. In addition to the usual suspects of speed, tachometer, and gear information it will also show you your cruise control info, the speed limit on your current road and you can browse your media device. Last time I was in a dealer I broke my “never interfere” rule and told a customer “no, seriously the sales dude is right, the heads up thing rocks, get it.” If you own a 2013 BMW 3-Series and don’t have it, you should be forced to drive a Chevy Spark.

1. Lane watching cameras

The idea sounds good, it’s kind of like blind spot monitoring with a camera. At the press of a button, or when you use your turn signal, the system shows the video feed on your infotainment screen. My problem is: the same information can be gleaned by turning your head and looking over your shoulder and/or in the mirror which is on the side of the car anyway. If you must have a blind spot nanny, get one that beeps if someone’s in your blind spot, that’s more helpful.

2. Electric parking brakes

Sweet Jesus, save me. I love gadgets as much as the next person. I love power seats, power mirrors and power windows, but why on earth would I want an electric parking brake? Sure, they automagically set themselves when you turn the car off, but releasing them is an exercise in frustration. By all indications they are less reliable than the traditional mechanisms and should you ever need to use it as an “emergency brake,” they are a royal pain. Pray to whatever deity you believe in that the creator of this lever of horrors is struck by lightning.

3. Capacitive touch buttons

I love an easy-to-clean surface as much as the next guy, but I’m bright enough to know that if you are trying to pay as much attention as possible to the road, buttons that you can stab without looking down are the way to go. Instead, the automotive trend has been moving towards “touch” buttons. The button-free buttons don’t move when you press them and are impossible to find by feel. Sure, some companies but little bumps on them so you think you can hunt by feel. When you attempt that process you just hit all the wrong buttons sending your infotainment system into a crash-inducing tailspin. Of course, Cadillac’s CUE system doesn’t need any help to go haywire and crash.

4. Night vision

Night vision is a great technology if you’re hunting the enemy in Desert Storm part 2. In suburbia it’s just a $2,500 option that won’t get you laid. Trust me, I’ve tried. The systems allow you to “see” further than your headlights in the dark, but don’t try driving by looking at the screen you’ll get yourself into a world of hurt. The field of vision is too narrow, the response time is too slow and it’s in the wrong position anyway. I have a better idea: if you can’t see at night, don’t drive. Problem solved.

5. Launch control

Launch control sounds like a great idea and I couldn’t wait to get in a car with a modern launch control system. Sadly, like most things you eagerly anticipate, LC isn’t all its cracked up to be. Most systems are overly complicated with too many steps to follow before you’re ready to race. By the time you follow the procedure, the modded pickup you were trying to race has forgotten all about you. Adding insult to injury I have yet to test a system that made a difference in our 0-60 tests. The M6, M5, Challenger SRT8, Grand Cherokee SRT8 and others all posted better numbers when I used my 1990s launch control system: a properly calibrated right foot. Trust your instincts.

6. Satellite mapping

Don’t confuse this with navigation. I love me some navigation. I’m talking about Google satellite imagery overlayed on the car’s nav map. Until I get the flying car that was promised on the Jetsons, I don’t see why I need a mile-high view of the mall. Maybe if it was displaying big brother’s “creepy-live” data so I could see what parking spots are free, but until then just say no to yet *another* cellular data subscription.

7. Integrated booster seats

They sound like a great idea. You’re either planning on having kids or you have kids. The trouble is, if you’re planning on having kids, plenty can happen between the vehicle purchase and the time your progeny are age/weight appropriate. If you have kids already, it won’t be long before they are too old or too heavy to be in the booster seat. This just means you’ve paid for a very expensive set of booster seats that you’re stuck with until you ditch the car. Oh, and the seats are less comfortable for everyone, the kids in the seat and any adult unfortunate enough to have to sit in it.

8. Fog lights

In N. America we’re talking about front fog lights, not the rear fog lights required in some countries. Although, I really should talk about both. Front fog lights stopped being about fog and started being about fashion soon after they started. I live in a foggy area and I have yet to drive a vehicle whose fog-lights helped visibility. At best they light up the area immediately in-front of your bumper, but nine times out of ten they throw light everywhere making visibility worse. Rear fog lights are great, except nobody in America knows how to use them, especially Audi drivers who think its cool to leave them on 24×7.

9. Sports appearance packages

Just say no. Sports appearance packages do nothing to make your ride go faster, they usually just make it depreciate faster. Ouch. Sports handling packages can help the car’s dynamics with stiffer springs but your money is usually better spent on better tires.

10. Rear seat entertainment systems

Yep, RSE systems are totally cool but they are also one of the worst things you can spend your money on. Aside from the fact that most RSE systems have small displays, clunky software, crappy integration and are expensive, they are often integrated into strangely shaped front seat headrests that destroy the aesthetics of your car. Save yourself some cash and get an iPad or two. Not only are they better at entertainment duties while in motion, the digital babysitter is portable and will go with your kid on the plane.

As the technology that will one day network cars together and reorganize the roads in the name of safety and efficiency continues to rush towards us, word comes that the computerized systems used to control commercial aircraft in flight are now vulnerable to hackers via android devices. Net-Security.org is reporting on an April 10th presentation at the “Hack in the Box Conference” by German security consultant Hugo Teso during which he demonstrates how a wireless device can be used to transmit malicious code into an aircraft’s computer through at least two different systems currently used to exchange information between aircraft and ground stations. Those of you who are already afraid to fly will want to read all of the excruciating details here: http://www.net-security.org

Like many people, I believe that the highways of the future will be heavily automated. The possibilities of computerized roads are enormous and the technology could change the way our society functions by combining the benefits of cheap, efficient public transportation with the convenience enjoyed by car owners today. Imagine a world where a car will arrive at your doorstep moments before you leave for work, carry you in comfort and privacy on a trip that will meet with no traffic jams, stop at no lights, and during which you will be free to watch TV, browse the internet, catch a nap or just look out the window. Upon dropping you off, the car will then head off to its next customer or, if you are one of the Neanderthals who insist on owning your own vehicle, head off to a designated parking facility until you summon it again.

That future is heavily dependent upon the seamless integration of a number of networks and like modern aircraft, cars of the future will need to exchange a great deal of data to coordinate even the simplest of trips. Within that coordination lies the opportunity for mayhem and our lives will hang in the balance. While I look forward to that better, brighter future, for the time being I will keep my feet firmly on the ground and my hands wrapped around the steering wheel.

It’s now apparently legal to have self-driving cars in California and Nevada, and this should spread across the country rapidly. One industry report predicts we’ll have them by 2019. For the purposes of this article, let’s assume that the costs will come down slowly but surely and adoption will grow quickly. Let’s jump all the way to the end point, where self-driving technology is safe, reliable, and mandatory (yes, mandatory), just like seat belts, air bags, and so forth.

Last time I wrote about robocars, I focused on the computer security threats (and the risk that hackers will steal your car remotely). This time I want to focus on the regulatory and implementation issues. Consider the case of the humble four-way stop. Today, you’re legally required to stop, even if there’s nobody there. Your robocar, however, could send out a message. “Anybody approaching this intersection?” If not, you blow on through. (Saving time and energy!) Likewise, if every car can compute exactly when it will arrive at the intersection, that means they can negotiate with one another. Maybe you speed up a little and I slow down a little and we nicely miss each other by a few inches. Sounds great, right? Extrapolate a little bit more, and traffic lights become completely unnecessary. Instead, you’ll have cars flying through the intersection, seemingly at random, but always managing not to hit each other. Even if a car experiences a tire failure or other catastrophic event, it can communicate that to everybody nearby, and they’ll respond quickly and safely. (But see my caveats below.)

Now consider that all the Google robocars have a big red button next to the steering wheel that forces the computer to disengage and return the car to your manual control. If you freaked out in one of these busy intersections and hit the big red button, everybody else’s scheduled entry to the intersection is now at risk. Nobody can predict what you’ll do next. Consequently, you could be liable for the damage caused by taking manual control of your car!

Of course, in the future, we’ll still have pedestrians and we’ll still have bicycles, roller skates, pets, and so forth. While a car can negotiate a very specific plan to go through the intersection, pedestrians and bicyclists will almost certainly still be subject to their current constraints. This leads to an interesting question of how robocars and pedestrians will relate. We could retain the current press-to-walk buttons and walk/stand signals. We might instead put fancier sensors that detect your pedestrian presence and telegraph it to every car approaching the intersection, forcing them to slow down and accommodate you, even if you’re jaywalking in the middle of the street. We might also require pedestrians to carry beacons that telegraph their location (maybe building this into their super-duper smartphones) and use those phones to tell them “please wait 30 seconds and then traffic will open up for you.” While this will work great for most cases, there will always be exceptions. For example, unless global warming kills off all wildlife, we’ll still have deer and other critters with which to contend.

Recall William Gibson’s famous quote, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” That tells us a good deal about how we’ll ultimately solve these problems. There will be high-traffic intersections and roads that will be heavily instrumented: Total Traffic Awareness. Likewise, there will be lower-traffic intersections and rural areas where the cost/benefit of modern instrumentation won’t justify it. When our robocars have more information, they’ll be able to drive more aggressively. Without this information, they will necessarily revert to our current, more conservative traffic behaviors.

But what about your award-winning, meticulously restored V8 muscle car? If you want to use it on public roads, and it doesn’t have a robo-drive controller, you may be restricted to only driving off hours. You will almost certainly be required to have a transponder to warn all the other cars, and you’ll pay a lot of money for the privilege of driving it, since you’re slowing everybody else down. And, of course, you’ll be unhappy at the lack of parking spots, since the robocars just drop off their occupants and head off to a remote garage somewhere. Maybe I’m wrong, but you probably won’t want to drive your classic car except on special occasions.

Caveats: One of the many obvious gains to be had from robocars is that they can form freeway “trains” with minimal spacing between them. This improves road utilization and saves energy, since the lead car in the train is breaking the wind for everybody else. But what if something goes wrong, mechanically, with the lead car? Time will pass before the pack has figured this out and has begun to take countermeasures. That might not be enough time, particularly as you pack the cars in tighter. The same problem would occur in instrumented traffic intersections and anywhere else where cars are negotiating over their future locations. What’s the solution? More information and better predictions. Say the car in front reports it has low tire pressure on one wheel and the tire is nearing the end of its rated treadwear; it might still be perfectly drivable, but the cars behind will compute an increased probability of a tire failure and will give the lead car a little bit of extra room, just in case. They might even compute which way the front car is likely to spin and preemptively stay to the other side. Better safe than sorry, right?

For this to work, we’ll need two things: correctness and trust. We need all of these sensors and car-to-car messaging protocols to work correctly, but we also need some assurance that nobody’s cheating. If any car is making stuff up, they could cause all sorts of mayhem for the other cars in the neighborhood. Computer security academics have been working on this problem for almost a decade now (see, for example, this research group in Switzerland), but the legal side of the equation is pretty interesting. Car makers will bend over backward to avoid having liability for crashes. In order to do that, we can predict that they will have standardized, government-approved software (“don’t blame us; you were running the standard package, same as everybody else!”), along with tamper-resistant mechanisms to keep you from monkeying with that software. Maybe automotive tinkering will still be allowed, but expect it to be treated the same as that V8 muscle car. You tweak your car, then you’re restricted in when and where you can drive it. Yeah, this sounds a bit like a dystopian future, but it mostly indicates the transition from cars as a romantic possession to cars as a boring utility to get you where you need to be.

Related reading: science fiction author and computer scientist Vernor Vinge has a great book called Rainbows End. He describes a near-future to our own that’s full of interesting gadgets. His vision of what cars might become is pretty close to what I’ve been talking about here.

Tesla has officially launched their long-awaited “Supercharging” network last night to a star-studded crowd in Southern California. (We assume it was star-studded since our invitation got lost in the mail.) The EV network promises to enable Model S and Model X owners to charge 150 miles of range in 30 minutes. What about your Roadster? Sorry, you aren’t invited to this charging party. Have a Tesla and a LEAF? You’ll have to be satisfied with separate but equal charging facilities as the Tesla proprietary charging connector restricts access to Tesla shoppers only. Is this class warfare or do we parallel the computer industry where connectors come and go with the seasons?

What’s the big deal with charging? Let’s go over the Model S’s charging time chart and you’ll understand. From a regular 120V wall outlet the Model S will gain 4-5 miles per hour of charging and consumes about the same amount of power as a space heater. Charging at 41 amps, the car gains 31 miles per hour and consumes as much power as TWO average electric clothes dryers. Charging at 81 amps (a service that many homes with older wiring or smaller services cannot support) the Model S gains 62 miles an hour and consumes more power than an average home’s A/C, dryer, washer, stove, oven, lights and small appliances put together. With a range of 300 miles and a 10 hour charge time at the 41A rate, it’s easy to see why fast charging stations are appealing. Tesla’s Supercharger’s specs are yet to be revealed, but by the numbers it is apparent the system is delivering a massive 90kWh charge which is likely 440V DC at around 200A. An hour of charging at that rate is 70% of the power that my home uses in an entire month.

Is this a Tesla issue? No, it’s an EV issue. If you expect your EV to drive like a regular car, modern EVs are a delight. If you expect your EV to refuel like a regular car, we’ve hit a snag. But it’s more complex than that, you see, only three of the four Model S trims support DC fast charging and the only other EVs on the market with a DC charge port are the Nissan Leaf and Mitsubishi i-MiEV. Except they don’t use the same connector or the same standard. Oops. Adding more complications to the mix are the EVs with no DC charge connector like the RAV4 EV, Volt, Prius Plug-In, Accord Plug-In, Focus, Active E and Coda while the new Chevy Spark is rumored to début a third standard: the SAE combo plug.

Of course, if you think of your car like you think of your cell phone, this makes sense as the phone you bought last year wont use the same charger as the phone you buy today. If you think of this in car terms however it’s like buying a new car and finding out that most of the gas stations have a nozzle that won’t fit your car.

Back to those Tesla charging stations. Tesla opened the first four in Southern California and announced two more stations will go online in October with stations in Las Vegas, Northern California and Oregon by summer 2013 with the 100 station network being complete by 2015. If that network sounds familiar then it should, because the recent settlement in the California vs NRG lawsuit means there will be 200 new CHAdeMO stations in California over the same time frame in addition to the 8 already installed and the 75 commercial stations planned or under construction. It isn’t just California on the CHAdeMO bandwagon however, the Department of Energy claims there are over 113 CHAdeMO stations in the USA and a 1,200+ unit installed base in Japan.

What does this mean to Tesla owners? Until Tesla creates a CHAdeMO to Tesla charging adapter cable (much like they have a J1772 to Tesla cable for use at public AC charging stations), Tesla owners will be restricted to regular AC charging or the smaller Tesla only charging network. On the flip side, Tesla is promising the Tesla charging stations will be free to Tesla owners, positioned next to trendy restaurants and you won’t have to mix with the Leaf owning rabble. You can also feel superior because Tesla’s newer standard charges 80% faster than the 50kWh CHAdeMO connector.

What does this mean to LEAF and i-MiEV owners? It means this is just the beginning of a standards battle. If you bought an EV before this raft of new J1772-connector-toting models, you know what I’m talking about. While CHAdeMO has the lead now, depending on what standard the rest of the industry supports this could change rapidly.

What about the rest of us? If we continue to build more battery electric vehicles and continue to develop batteries that are more and more power dense, you can expect even the snazzy Tesla charging connector to be outdated on a few years. If you expect an EV SUV to deliver 300 miles of electric range, AWD, decent performance, mild off-road ability and Range Rover quality luxury trappings, then expect it to have a battery that is 50-100% larger than the Model S’ massive 85kWh pack. This means you have to either take all the charging rates and nearly double them, or you have to develop a charging method that charges 50-100% faster to keep the same performance.

Of course, just like LEAF owners experience battery degradation caused by repeated use of DC quick charge stations, Tesla owners should be mindful that batteries don’t last forever and the faster you charge them the shorter their life will be.

This contest closed today, Wednesday, July 4^th 2012 at 2 pm Eastern Time.

Please stay tune for the results.

I am not on a press trip. I am at a place off-limits to outsiders. Only a chosen few ever had access, under strict security measures. I am instructed that I will have to wear protective clothing. I will be under constant surveillance. Pressure, no presents. Find out where I am, and you can win an iPad that was given by someone else to another TTAC writer at another location.

The iPad is a 16GB White iPad 2, WiFi only.  It is preloaded with a press kit. Hint: The press kit has nothing to do with the location where I am. Not even close.

From July 9 through 13, TTAC will run a five-part series based on the location in the picture. By way of this five-part series, readers of TTAC will receive unprecedented access. You will receive a behind-the-scene look, exclusive, never before published proprietary pictures, and a glimpse into the future

The contest ends July 4^th, 2012 at 2 p.m. Eastern Time.

The location and the winner will be disclosed after July 4^th, 2012 at 2 p.m. Contestants can submit multiple guesses. Only one guess per person after July 4th, 2012 at 10:02 am. Correct guesses will not be acknowledged before contest ends. Official Rules apply.

If you want to pretty-up the P&L of a car company, there are two quick fixes: You cut marketing expenses, or you cut R&D. A cut of R&D expenses won’t show up negatively for three to five years, when you suddenly lack new cars to sell. In the meantime, you look like a hero. General Motors plans to cut about a quarter of the workers at its R&D facility at the Warren Technical Center in suburban Detroit, Automotive News [sub] says.

According to the report, GM plans to lay off about one fourth of the roughly 400 R&D personnel at the Warren complex. 90 R&D workers at a GM research facility in India will also receive the pink slip, an Automotive News source said.

In a statement, GM confirmed a restructuring of its R&D department, but would not confirm the number of layoffs.

When government, media and industry agree that a trend exists, it’s generally taken as fait accompli. After all, these three institutions wield immense cultural power, and together they are more than capable of making any prophecy self-fulfilling. But there’s always a stumbling block: acceptance by the everyday folk who actually make up our society. And when a trend is taken for granted, the ensuing rush to be seen as being in touch with said trend often generates more heat than light. Such is the case with the trend towards “green cars.” Few would deny that they are “the future,” but at the same time, there’s been precious little examination of how this future is to be realized. And when such examination does take place, it tends to raise more questions than it answers.

Case in point: the Union of Concerned Scientists recently published a report examining just how “green” the “greenest” cars available, namely electric cars, are. By examining the average C02 emissions of the various regional power grids, they are able to show on a roughly apples-to-apples basis how carbon-efficient EVs are in comparison to their gasoline-sipping cousins. And their findings show that in broad swathes of the US, pure-electric cars are little better than hybrids like the Prius in terms of average C02 emissions.

This ACS report is something of a dual-edged sword. On the one hand, it makes an important point about EVs: that they are only as environmentally-friendly as the grid from which they draw their power. This fact has long been ignored by policymakers who take the “greenness” of EVs for granted and create uniform national EV stimulus, as if EVs were uniformly “green.” On the other hand, the ACS clearly has a pro-EV agenda, and its report concludes that

There are no areas of the country where electric vehicles have higher global warming emissions than the average new gasoline vehicle.

Given that EV offerings are currently limited to the Compact and Subcompact segments, this is hardly a fair comparison. And since the EPA includes cars like the Bentley Continental GTC as a “subcompact,” a fair comparison would take some real work. To be fair though, the UCS is correct when it points out that 45% of Americans live in the coastal regions where relatively clean grids offer strong environmental incentives for EV use. More importantly, those areas which have dirtier grids tend to be the same regions (the South and Midwest) where geography and development patterns create more practical disincentives for EV use. For this reason, the somewhat disappointing results of the study are unlikely to dramatically hurt the nascent EV market.

Still, this geographical distribution has important consequences for public policy. For one thing, it points out the futility of a nationwide EV incentive program, at least as an environmental policy. Luckily, this reality seems to have taken hold in D.C., where EV-only incentives are being broadened to include multiple fuels and encourage local solutions. On the other hand, the fact that EVs are a hot trend means local governments are often more anxious to show off their trend-awareness than craft sensible policy based on local realities.

For example, Colorado has one of the least “green” grids in the country, and yet its state government has been one of the most aggressive in handing out EV tax credits. Prior to 2010, Colorado allowed Tesla buyers to take up to $42,000 in credits. Today EVs get a $6,000 incentive in addition to the $7,500 (soon to be $10k) federal credit, and a local group has received half a million dollars in federal grants to promote EVs in the state. Given that Colorado-based EVs emit equivalent emissions to a 33 MPG combined gasoline car (think: Hyundai Elantra), this is proof that hopping on a PR-driven bandwagon often outweighs the actual benefits of such “environmental” policies.

But, in a profoundly ironic twist, Colorado may well become a leading market for EVs… and not just because of its generous government incentives either. In fact, Colorado’s relatively dirty grid actually makes it one of the cheaper states in which to operate an EV. In its cost analysis of individual cities, the UCS finds that Colorado Springs’ 2.4 cents-per-mile operating cost for a Nissan Leaf is one of the cheapest in the country, especially when compared to cities with the best emissions scores. Though there’s not enough evidence in this study to support a direct link between the cost and cleanliness of electrical grids, it’s no surprise to find that they do trade off with each other to some extent.

This is one of the key takeaways from the report for the simple reason that running cost, rather than pure environmental benefit, is what will drive the EV market beyond its early adopter niche. And as utilities invest in ever-greener powerplants in hopes of improving the environmental performance of EVs, running costs will rise. And as EVs become more popular, increased demand on the grid will further drive up prices. This tradeoff encapsulates the dilemma of all EV stimulus: the hoped-for environmental benefits are dependent on the mainstream economic viability of EVs, which in turn depends on cheaper (rather than cleaner) power and much, much cheaper EVs. The UCS report’s conclusion attempts to square this circle by pushing EV adoption as the overriding concern, noting

Of course, cleaning up the nation’s electricity production won’t deliver large reductions in the transportation sector’s emissions and oil consumption unless electric vehicles become a market success. While they are now coming onto the market in a much bigger way than ever before, EVs still face many hurdles, including higher up-front costs than gasoline vehicles. Lower fueling costs for EVs, however, provide an important incentive for purchasing them, and our cost analysis of 50 cities across the country shows that EV owners can start saving money immediately on fuel costs by using electricity in place of gasoline.

While this is true enough, it fully ignores how the market works. For one thing, the fuel savings touted in the report are in comparison to an “average gasoline compact vehicle,” and therefore fails to account for most of the market segments. Consumers buy cars that fill their needs, and many Americans need cars larger than a compact. Furthermore, though those savings are estimated to be as much as $1,220 per year (for a Nissan Leaf), these savings do not include amortization of the EV’s up-front cost premium. Consumers will see “immediate savings” on fuel costs, but will be far behind on total ownership cost for years.

Currently the EV market is truly a “green” market, as potential EV consumers are currently motivated by the desire to reduce their carbon emissions. But EVs simply won’t have much of an impact on national emissions until they offer the kind of “green” that actually motivates consumers: money, in the form of real savings. As long as federal and state governments focus, as the UCS has, on carbon emissions, EVs simply won’t find much of a market. If, as the UCS claims, reductions in transportation-sector C02 emissions require mass EV adoption as a prerequisite, the carbon question is currently little more than a distraction. Environmental benefits must give way to economic reality, lest all of the possible “green” benefits of EVs remain a permanent mirage.

 ”Do you want to accompany? or go on ahead? or go off alone? … One must know what one wants and that one wants”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight Of The Idols

This week’s news that GM would stop production of the Chevrolet Volt for the third time in its brief lifespan came roaring out of the proverbial blind spot. Having watched the Volt’s progress closely from gestation through each month’s sales results, it was no secret to me that the Volt was seriously underperforming to expectations. But in the current media environment, anything that happens three times is a trend, and the latest shutdown (and, even more ominously, the accompanying layoffs) was unmistakeable. Not since succumbing to government-organized bankruptcy and bailout has GM so publicly cried “uncle” to the forces of the market, and I genuinely expected The General to continue to signal optimism for the Volt’s long-term prospects. After all, sales in February were up dramatically, finally breaking the 1,000 unit per month barrier. With gasoline prices on the march, this latest shutdown was far from inevitable.

And yet, here we are. Now that GM is undeniably signaling that the Volt is a Corvette-style halo car, with similar production and sales levels, my long-standing skepticism about the Volt’s chances seems to be validated. But in the years since GM announced its intention to build the Volt, this singular car has become woven into the history and yes, the mythology of the bailout era. Now, at the apparent end of its mass-market ambitions, I am struck not with a sense of schadenfreude, but of bewilderment. If the five year voyage of Volt hype is over, we have a lot of baggage to unpack.

When a history of the Volt is written, it will be difficult not to conclude that the Volt has been the single most politicized automobile since the Corvair. Seemingly due to timing alone, GM’s first serious environmental halo car became an icon of government intervention in private industry, a perception that is as true as it is false. I hoped to capture this tension in a July 2010 Op-Ed in the New York Times, in which I argued that

the Volt appears to be exactly the kind of green-at-all-costs car that some opponents of the bailout feared the government might order G.M. to build. Unfortunately for this theory, G.M. was already committed to the Volt when it entered bankruptcy.

But by that time, the Volt was already so completely transformed into a political football, the second sentence of this quote was entirely ignored by political critics on the right. The culture of partisanship being what it is in this country, any nuance to my argument was lost in the selective quoting on one side and the mockery of my last name on the other. One could argue that that this politicization was unnecessary or counter-productive, but it was also inevitable.

The Volt began life as a blast from GM’s Motorama past: a futuristic four-place coupe concept with a unique drivetrain (which still defies apples-to-apples efficiency comparisons with other cars), a fast development schedule and constantly-changing specifications, price points and sales expectations. It’s important to remember that the Volt was controversial as a car practically from the moment GM announced (and then began changing) production plans, becoming even more so when the production version emerged looking nothing like the concept. But it wasn’t until President Obama’s auto task force concluded that the Volt seemed doomed to lose money, and yet made no effort to suspend its development as a condition for the bailout, that a car-guy controversy began to morph into a mainstream political issue.

At that point, most of the car’s fundamental controversies were well known, namely its price, size, elusive efficiency rating, and competition. Well before the car was launched, it was not difficult to predict its challenges on the market, even without the added headwinds of ideological objections (which should have been mitigated by the fact that they were actually calling for government intervention in GM’s product plans while decrying the same). But GM’s relentless hype, combined with Obama’s regular rhetorical references to the Volt, fueled the furor. Then, just two months after Volt sales began trickle in, Obama’s Department of Energy released a still-unrepudiated document, claiming that 505,000 Volts would be sold in the US by 2015 (including 120,000 this year). By making the Volt’s unrealistic sales goals the centerpiece of a plan to put a million plug-in-vehicles on the road, the Obama Administration cemented the Volt’s political cross-branding.

When GM continued to revise its 2012 US sales expectations to the recent (and apparently still wildly-unrealistic) 45,000 units, I asked several high-level GM executives why the DOE didn’t adjust its estimates as well. But rather than definitively re-calibrate the DOE’s expectations, they refused to touch the subject. The government, they implied, could believe what it wanted. Having seen its CEO removed by the President, GM’s timid executive culture was resigned to the Volt’s politicized status, and would never make things awkward for its salesman-in-chief. And even now, with production of the Volt halted for the third time, GM continues to play into the Volt’s politicized narrative: does anyone think it is coincidence that The General waited until three days after the Michigan Republican primary (and a bailout-touting Obama speech) to cut Volt production for the third time?

Of course, having used the Volt as a political prop itself from the moment CEO Rick Wagoner drove a development mule version to congressional hearings as penance for traveling to the previous hearing in a private jet, GM is now trying to portray the Volt as a martyr at the hands of out-of-control partisanship. And the Volt’s father Bob Lutz  certainly does have a point when he argues that the recent Volt fire controversy was blown out of proportion by political hacks. But blaming the Volt’s failures on political pundits gives them far too much credit, ignores GM’s own politicization of the Volt, and misses the real causes of the Volt’s current, unenviable image.

The basic problem with the Volt isn’t that it’s a bad car that nobody could ever want; it is, in fact, quite an engineering achievement and a rather impressive drive. And if GM had said all along that it would serve as an “anti-Corvette,” selling in low volumes at a high price, nobody could now accuse it of failure. Instead, GM fueled totally unrealistic expectations for Volt, equating it with a symbol of its rebirth even before collapsing into bailout. The Obama administration simply took GM’s hype at face value, and saw it as a way to protect against the (flawed) environmentalist argument that GM deserved to die because of “SUV addiction” alone. And in the transition from corporate sales/image hype to corporatist political hype, the Volt’s expectations were driven to ever more unrealistic heights, from which they are now tumbling. Beyond the mere sales disappointment, the Volt has clearly failed to embody any cultural changes GM might have undergone in its dark night of the soul, instead carrying on The General’s not-so-proud tradition of moving from one overhyped short-term savior to the next.

Now, as in the Summer of 2010, I can’t help but compare the Volt with its nemesis and inspiration, the Toyota Prius. When the Toyota hybrid went on sale in the US back in 2000, it was priced nearly the same as it is today (in non-inflation-adjusted dollars), and was not hyped as a savior. Instead, Toyota accepted losses on early sales, and committed itself to building the Prius’s technology and brand over the long term. With this approach, GM could have avoided the Volt’s greatest criticism (its price) and embarrassment (sales shortfalls), and presented the extended-range-electric concept as a long-term investment.

Even now, GM can still redefine the Volt as a long-term play that will eventually be worth its development and PR costs… but only as long as it candidly takes ownership of its shortcomings thus far and re-sets expectations to a credible level. And whether The General will defy and embarrass its political patrons by destroying the “million EVs by 2015″ house of cards in order to do so, remains very much to be seen. One thing is certain: as long as it puts PR and political considerations before the long-term development of healthy technology and brands,  GM will struggle with a negative and politicized image. And the Volt will be seen not as a symbol of GM’s long-term vision and commitment, but of its weakness, desperation, inconstancy and self-delusion.

General Motors announced changes to the Chevrolet Volt’s design after a NHTSA investigation into why a Volt caught fire following crash testing.

The changes will go into effect once production restarts at the Hamtramck, Michigan facility, but customer cars already sold will follow a different protocol.

Starting in February, GM will initiate a “voluntary customer satisfaction program” to make the necessary changes to the Volt. According to GM’s Rob Peterson said that  formal recalsl must be initiated by NHTSA, and their lack of movement prompted GM to enact a voluntary one instead.

The fix involves changes to the Volt’s battery pack housing, as well as a coolant temperature sensor and a special bracket to prevent overfilling. The previous system allowed the battery housing to be punctured, which then resulted in coolant overflowing onto a circuit board causing an electrical short. The short was determined to be the cause of the fire.

The rise of the internet has had myriad effects on everyday life, not the least of which has been its profound impact on consumer behavior. With ever more data being made available online, and with the rise of independent alternative media outlets like TTAC, car buyers in particular are fundamentally changing their relationship to the car buying process. Dealers have been noting for some time that the internet has created better-informed buyers who, armed with more information, are demanding the car they want at the best possible price, wreaking havoc on traditional car dealer tactics like upselling and opaque pricing policies.

But as the eternal dance between supply and demand shifts in favor of consumers, some dealers and OEMs are having a tough time adjusting to the new reality. At the same time, the need to make money off of online consumer education has created some tension for the new breed of consumer-oriented websites. This conflict has now broken out into the open, as the auto transaction data firm TrueCar has found itself locked in a battle with American Honda over the downward pricing pressure created by more widely accessible transaction data. And the outcome of this conflict could have profound impacts on the ever-changing face of the new car market.

Early last week, TrueCar CEO Scott Painter took to the TrueCar blog with an “Open Letter To The Automotive Industry,” in which he argued

Our world is changing. Unprecedented access to information and a massive shift in consumer behavior has resulted in a challenging new automotive retail landscape. It has also enabled a consumer appetite for data transparency. To hide from evolving consumer behavior is to deny change. At TrueCar, we embrace this opportunity. We also believe that transparency is the centerpiece of trusting relationships. Some in the industry disagree.

And indeed, from personal experience I feel comfortable saying that TrueCar does provide consumers with some highly valuable information by tracking vehicle transactions from several data sources and publishing the range of transaction prices on a local level. This clearly helps consumers navigate the often opaque and confusing world of dealer-level pricing, and facilitates a more efficient interaction between supply and demand. And if that’s all TrueCar did, it would be impossible to argue with the valuable service it provides.

But in order to fund its business model, TrueCar cannot simply give away data and hope everything pans out for the best. In order to generate profits, TrueCar works with “dealer partners,” allowing them to present a lower “haggle-free” price for the model being researched at no upfront cost. If the consumer buys that car, TrueCar gets a $299 commission from the dealer; if not, the dealer pays nothing. Dealers can tailor these “guaranteed lowest prices” based on TrueCar’s data, and they seem to generally beat non-”guaranteed” prices in the TrueCar “price curve” display by only a few hundred dollars. But by offering this service to its dealer partners, TrueCar has opened itself to conflict with OEMs, as this fiscally-necessary service muddies TrueCar’s role as a pure consumer service. Which is where the conflict with Honda comes in.

In his “Open Letter,” Painter mentions no OEM by name, and TrueCar’s EVP for Dealer Development Stewart Easterby tells TTAC

 We’re not trying to pick a fight… we very much value Honda/Acura. We have strong OEM relationships through our recent acquisition of Automotive Lease Guide, and we have lots of people on staff who have work for OEMs, so we generally have strong relationships with the industry.

But in an Automotive News [sub] piece published on the same day as Painter’s “Open Letter,” the TrueCar CEO claimed that American Honda was warning dealers away from advertising below-invoice “guaranteed lowest” prices. After talking to American Honda, AN updated its piece, noting that it had

incorrectly reported that Honda singled out TrueCar.com when the automaker warned dealers that they would put their local marketing payments from Honda at risk if they offered prices below invoice on Internet shopping sites

In fact, what had happened was that American Honda had simply warned its dealers that any advertisement of below-invoice prices could jeopardize the marketing assistance money Honda sends dealerships. American Honda’s Chris Martin clarified the automaker’s position in an emailed statement to TTAC, noting

Dealers who wish to receive marketing funds are expected to adhere to certain guidelines that govern dealer participation in its Honda Dealer Marketing Allowance (DMA) Program and its Acura Carline Marketing Allowance (CMA) Program.  Among the many advertising guidelines to which dealers must adhere to in order to receive DMA/CMA Funds, Honda dealers are restricted from advertising new Honda vehicles at a price below dealer invoice plus destination and handling charges and Acura dealers are restricted from advertising new Acura vehicles at a price below MSRP plus destination and handling charges.  Such guidelines do not limit a dealer’s discretion to advertise a new vehicle at any price if the dealer is not seeking DMA/CMA Funds.  Furthermore, the dealer is free to charge customers any price it chooses, in its absolute discretion, for a vehicle.

Martin goes on to identify the central bone of contention:

The development of third party websites used for advertising is not any different than advertising pricing in a traditional newspaper or on TV.

And here, American Honda has something of a point. Whereas TrueCar’s price curve is a pure reporting tool, simply reflecting otherwise available data, it’s not entirely unfair for Honda to characterize TrueCar’s service to dealer partners as an advertising service. In practice, the only real difference between this service and any other form of advertising is that TrueCar only gets paid if a car gets sold at the “guaranteed lowest” price offered by one of its dealer partners. If you accept that reality, Honda has some very valid reasons for threatening to withhold dealer marketing assistance, as Martin’s statement explains

The function of these [DMA] guidelines is three-fold. First, it encourages dealers to use the advertising money provided by American Honda for interbrand advertising.  That is, rather than providing funds to dealers so that they can engage in discount advertising against other Honda and Acura dealers (which does American Honda and consumers no good), American Honda wants dealers to use the funds to promote the advantages of Honda and Acura vehicles when compared with competing brands. Second, discount advertising is detrimental to the Honda and Acura brand images.  American Honda has no wish to pay for ads that portray its products as “cheap” or “low-end” vehicles.  This may be appropriate for other manufacturers; it is not appropriate for the Honda and Acura brands.

So far, so reasonable. TrueCar’s service may be more palatable than the local, low-rent “Check Out Our CRAAAAZY Prices!” ads you see on TV, but in practice there’s little meaningful difference. Besides, the choice belongs to dealers: either accept Honda’s money with the inevitable strings attached, or throw in your lot with the new lower-price, but potentially higher-volume TrueCar (or CRAAAAZY Prices!) strategies. But with its third rationale for its policies, Honda strays from this reasonable territory, and betrays a distinct bias against TrueCar, arguing

Third, American Honda believes that much discount advertising is bait-and-switch advertising, which is not beneficial to the consumer and reflects badly on the manufacturer that condones it.  Dealers that advertise vehicles for extremely low prices (as some do on the TrueCar site) may engage in either direct bait-and-switch tactics or using the automobile’s brand name to sell expensive accessories, service contracts and the like.

Memo to Honda: these practices are as old as the auto industry itself. Suggesting that these tactics will never be used at dealers who toe Honda’s DMA line is just as disingenuous as the implication that TrueCar’s dealer partners are more likely to use them. If anything, TrueCar’s major sin is that it makes below-invoice advertising easier for the OEM to monitor and therefore squelch than in the pre-internet days, when consistently maintaining these DMA standards would have required a survey of every local publication and TV/radio broadcaster (not to mention direct-mail marketing), a task that no automaker was or is equipped to do.

But Honda’s apparent antipathy towards TrueCar is just the tip of a growing resentment towards the site. In a speech cited in the AN piece published last Monday, AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson expressed the angst that appears to be spreading across the auto retailing industry, especially in light of its recent deal with Yahoo [sub].

The good deal that they’re pitching to the consumer is lower than average. So to the extent that everyone goes with the TrueCar price, it moves the average down. It’s a death spiral, and the question is whether they are powerful enough to unleash that dynamic in the U.S. marketplace.

But Jackson’s implication, that TrueCar can essentially manipulate the market in favor of consumers, simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. On an abstract level, you can’t repeal the law the law of supply and demand. As Painter puts it

They’re trying to say Hondas are worth more than invoice, but if everybody’s paying less than invoice, that’s not true

More practically, however, TrueCar’s own data seems to refute the industry’s fears. Specifically, Easterby tells TTAC

TrueCar represents two to three percent of new car sales… we’re flattered that people think we’re influencing the market, but at that share, we clearly aren’t. The 21st C consumer demands transparency in all products and services, that’s what the web has done. TrueCar reflects the market, just as Zillow reflects the market for real estate, rather than determines it.

Even more importantly, Painter insists

Our goal at TrueCar is to foster healthier relationships between manufacturers, dealers and consumers through data transparency. To deliver on this promise, we require a high standard from our 5,800 dealer partners – an upfront competitive price and a commitment to a great customer experience. A discoverable upfront price is the cost of getting noticed. Contrary to popular concerns this does not create a “race to the bottom.” The lowest price only secures the sale 19.2% of the time within the TrueCar network. The sale is still won by location, selection and good old-fashioned customer service. [Emphasis added]

So where does this all leave us? Clearly Honda has the right to withhold DMA money from dealers violating its reasonable conditions on that money. By the same token, dealers have the choice of pursuing higher volumes with less traditional advertising by choosing the TrueCar strategy, or continuing to follow the time-honored tradition of collaborating with the manufacturer. And here, TrueCar’s price curve, which it says is not populated by dealer partner data but from independent, anonymized sources, becomes the killer app: it’s so good (reflecting a claimed 90% of all new car transactions), it can’t help but draw ever more buyers, who will then be exposed to its dealer partner “advertisements.”

Ultimately, it’s difficult not to conclude that TrueCar (and sites like it) won’t continue to draw ever more dealers away from the old DMA agreements, especially as online research becomes more important to the car-buying process and as traditional advertising dollars flow from TV, radio and print towards the internet. And if dealers and brands are sufficiently hurt by downward pressure on pricing, the alternative is always there. This is how competition works, and because TrueCar has more fundamentally aligned itself with consumers and the power of the market, it’s tough seeing them not coming out ahead in this struggle. And if they do, car buying could be changed forever. Again.

The theme that’s emerged most clearly from my interview with Bob Lutz was, somewhat counterintuitively, compromise. Every vehicle that’s developed and built is the product of nearly countless compromises, on everything from performance to efficiency, and from weight and materials to cost. The question isn’t so much if you compromise when developing a new car, but how you compromise… as was demonstrated in our last Lutzian anecdote. And even during my interview, as the conversation bounced from GM to Chrysler, from mass-market products to niche halo cars, I was thrilled that this issue kept coming up. Why? Because this theme played perfectly into the question that was at the top of my list of prepared questions. After all, there has been a mystery haunting GM followers for some time now… a mystery that I’d never seen a journalist ever ask about. And there I was, sitting with one of the few people who was even capable of fully answering it. So I just waited for a pause, opened my mouth and asked:

Why do GM cars weigh more than other cars?

I had no idea what kind of answer to expect… but I definitely wasn’t expecting the answer I got.

To be perfectly honest, I half-expected an angry denial or a brush-off… possibly even a signal that the interview was over. In the car world, weight is extremely important to engineering cultures and enthusiasts alike. The former see low weights as the achievement of engineering excellence in the abstract, while enthusiasts enjoy a low mass vehicle’s inherent advantages in handling, acceleration and efficiency. Ever since Colin Chapman built Lotus around the philosophy “simplify and add lightness,” curb weight has been the measure to look at for in-the-know-enthusiasts. And there I was asking a guy who was still informally advising GM, and would be officially back at the company a week later, why his cars were fatties.

Of course he couldn’t exactly deny the fact. Chevy, for example, won’t let you use its online “competitive comparison” system to compare weights, but if you go through the comparisons by hand you’ll find the weight of every GM car is at least a little heavier than the competition. Sometimes the extra weight isn’t much: for example, a base, four-cylinder Camry weighs 3,307 lbs to the four-pot Malibu’s 3,421. But go to the C-segment and you’ll find that a Cruze with automatic transmission weighs 3,102 to the Corolla’s 2,800 and the Civic’s 2,672. Similarly, a base Equinox is four hundred pounds heavier than a comparable CR-V. No wonder then, that Chevy struggled so long with fuel economy and the perception that it “couldn’t make a good small car.”

But if Lutz thought through all this before answering, he didn’t let it show. There was only the briefest pause as he considered the question, before the answer came:

Um, I’ll take part of the blame for that…

Huh? Really?

I said look guys, these vehicles are going to be robust, strong, I want a great ride, an absence of any noise, vibration and harshness, I want these things to be super-silent. So the guys put in heavy-duty components… also, Ed Welburne and I like big wheels, and the minute you say the minimum wheel size is 18 inches, you’ve automatically  bought yourself an extra 50 lbs of weight. We willingly and knowingly made decisions in favor of design and appearance and noise, vibration and harshness… all the things that make a vehicle feel substantial. You know, everybody cries and moans that the Buick Enclave is 400 lbs too heavy, but it’s the last thing on the customer’s list. They don’t worry if it’s 400 lbs overweight or not, they love the way it rides and drives.

And, you know, we did a lot of programs very fast, so there wasn’t always time to go back and say “gee, could we make this part out of something else?” So I will cheerfully admit that making weight reduction targets was my lowest priority… and it shows. But other than the automotive press, nobody cares about it.

And there you have it: if Lutz were simply a “car guy” in the mold of the most fanatical enthusiasts, there’s no way he would have run GM’s product development that way. But, beneath his “true-believer,” “engineers-first,” “car-guys-versus-bean-counters” image, Lutz is still a corporate executive first… a species more closely related to the “bean counters” than the “car guys” we all know from outside of the industry.  For all the passion he puts into his cars, he’s not developing them for himself. And for all of his public contempt for finance and “running a business by the numbers,” he’s always got an eye on what the majority of car buyers, not the aficionados, are looking for. In fact, it’s quite likely that most self-identified “car guys” who don’t work inside the industry would argue that Lutz’s priorities are as anti-car-guy as possible. After all, how can you truly claim to love a car in which you’ve concentrated all of its compromises into extra weight, the enemy of fun and efficiency? Since when do “car guys” trade hundreds of pounds of extra weight for a quieter ride?

Lutz didn’t provide too much more insight into this issue, sticking with his assertion that consumers simply don’t care about extra weight. And if asked in the abstract, it’s hard to imagine many “average consumers” placing “low weight” high on a list of priorities. But it’s clear that Lutz’s absolute emphasis on ride and refinement won’t last at GM, because weight simply isn’t abstract. Even if consumers don’t care about its effects on handling, as gas prices rise, they’re starting to care more about its effects on efficiency. And Hyundai certainly doesn’t seem to have compromised style, the all-important priority in the Lutz approach to product development, in order to bring down weight and achieve leading  fuel economy. So, is weight reduction going to become more important for GM? According to Lutz

Is it something that is being addressed? The answer is “you bet it is,” because it’s going to be harder to make fuel economy regulations with a heavy car. The guys are already doubling back on it. In the next generations they’ll get the weight out and hopefully still maintain the structural rigidity.

And on that note, Lutz whip-cracks back into “car guy” mode, singing the praises of beaming and torsional rigidity, saying “if you get that right, you’re 90% of the way to a great car.” Then, as I’m still struggling to remember a time when someone said “I love this car, but next time I’m going to buy one with more beaming rigidity,” the subject shifts again to CAFE regulation. I’m hardly an experienced interviewer, and my head is still spinning trying to make sense of what I’ve just heard, so the conversation flows on. I’m still not sure I understand why GM’s cars had to be so much heavier, but at least I know who to blame for it… if anyone actually cares.

A team of researchers at UC San Diego and the University of Washington, Seattle, has just published a paper titled “Comprehensive Experimental Analyses of Automotive Attack Surfaces“. Behind that dry title is a very exciting research study. In essence, they bought a modern reasonably-priced car with lots of fancy features, including a built-in cellular phone interface, and did a serious reverse-engineering exercise to determine whether it had any security vulnerabilities. It’s the most comprehensive study of its kind.

Curiously, you can read their paper all the way through and not see any name of the particular car they studied; they argue these issues apply everywhere. This seems unnecessarily conservative. Besides, if you read their previous paper and look at the photos, any car nut will be able to identify the car without any trouble. Let’s play along anyway; we’ll just say it’s a Generic Motors product.

You see, Generic Motors (and, I agree that this is about far more than any one car company) thought it would be really cool to have a telematics system that could do a variety of clever things, like automatically connect an operator to your car when the airbags deploy to ask you whether you’re in need of medical assistance. The way a security person looks at that, though, is that there’s a communications path from the inside of the car out to a data center somewhere and back in again. If the attacker can interpose on that, there’s just no end of mayhem that could be accomplished.

Earlier press reports on this research focused on how they found an attack against the car through the CD player. A carefully constructed CD-ROM, using a malicious compressed music file that would play without issue on your regular PC, could exploit a buffer overflow vulnerability and then control the CD player. Meanwhile, in modern cars, everything’s actually networked together. Consequently, from the compromised CD player, the attacker can take over everything else in the car with the greatest of ease: engine control, door locks, you name it.

Still, that attack is for chumps. How’s a car thief supposed to realistically get a malicious CD into your CD player? Do you valet park your car? No, the really exciting attack, and by exciting I mean “expensive factory recall” exciting, focuses on that built-in cellular phone interface. You see, that means that every Generic Motors car has a phone number and it turns out you can call it. Generic Motors got the security all wrong, and an attacker can thus take over your car without being anywhere physically near it.

What could this evil attacker do? Track you, actuate your brakes, listen in to your conversations, etc. This is normally the stuff that only dystopian science fiction authors dream about. If you want to get seriously dystopian, though, you have to read the paper’s own speculation (page 13). The authors imagine a world where a criminal agency tracks all of the Generic Motors cars in the city. When a garden variety criminal has an hankering for a particular car, he phones up the agency and asks where such a car might be and what it’s owners’ habits are. For a suitable fee, the agency directs the criminal to the car, helpfully unlocks the doors, and starts the engine, all for a modest fee. That’s service with a smile! Similarly, think how much fun the paparazzi could have using similar techniques to eavesdrop on the Hollywood starlet du jour.

Is this just a problem for Generic Motors? Far from it. Virtually any modern car can connect to your phone via Bluetooth and increasingly many cars come with built-in phones. To pick one example, the new Audi A7 uses this to great effect with Google Maps for navigation. To pick another example, Tesla has said that the forthcoming Model S will allow third parties to develop “apps” for their car. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Are our automotive companies and their suppliers responding appropriately? Maybe. I’ve spoken to a number of security people, both in the U.S. and Europe, who consult with these companies. The companies prefer to keep their security concerns under wraps. Suffice to say “they’re working on it.”

[Disclosure, I was the "shepherd" for this paper, meaning that the USENIX Security conference program committee asked me to help the authors of the paper make the changes that the committee requested. I'm not a co-author of the paper and I have had not personally participated in any automotive security analyses, unless you count the time, in high school, that we discovered that my Nissan key worked perfectly in a friend's Mazda. Zoom zoom.]

[Editor's Note: This piece, by Eric Peters, has been republished from the National Motorist's Association blog. It originally appeared at epautos.com.]

Big Brother’s doing a bit more than just watching you these days.

Remember the last time you got your driver’s license renewed? You may recall the procedure for taking your picture was a bit different than it used to be.

Instead of the usual “smile” you might have been told to do no such thing — very specifically. To be as expressionless as possible. And that the system seemed more “high-tech” than it used to be. Instead of receiving your new license on-site, it would be mailed to you in a week or so — from some unspecified “secure location,” perhaps.

You may have been told or seen signs or been given literature explaining that the new way of taking your picture is part of new security measures designed to make it harder for people to manufacture fake IDs (since a driver’s license is the de facto national ID in this country).

But they probably didn’t mention that the pictures — digitized images, actually — were to be downloaded into a new database that uses facial recognition software to “scan” for (are you surprised?) Terrorists — among other things.

Only it’s ordinary Americans who are being terrorized.

As The Boston Globe reports, Massachussetts resident John H. Gass had his license revoked after the facial recognition Hive Mind deemed him an un-Person. Glass had done nothing, though — other than being tardy opening his mail, including a threatening letter from the Massachussetts Registry of Motor Vehicles demanding that he prove the guy pictured on his DL was, in fact, him.

Here’s where it gets interesting — and depressing.

Gass had already established his identity — apparently, to the satisfaction of the state motor vehicle authorities — at the time his license was originally issued. Just like everyone else who applies for a driver’s license. Now it — well, a computer — demanded he prove it again. On his nickel. On his own time.

Or else.

“Or else” being — no more driving privileges for you.

Gass tried to do so — for ten days, according to The Globe.

First, he called the Motor Vehicle Registry, explaining that he’d forgotten to open his mail, including the letter they’d sent dated March 22, which notified him his license had been revoked effective April 1. The bureaucrats at the registry advised him his digitized image had been “flagged” by the computer because it was similar in appearance to the image of someone else. Now it was up to him, said the Registry drone, to come to them with documents to prove his identity.

Again.

Remember, Gass, like everyone else who has a driver’s license, had to provide such documentation at the time the driver’s license was issued. He had complied with the letter of the law. But now the law had changed. The arbitrary determination of a computer had resulted in the capricious revocation of his driver’s license.

This is of a piece with the TSA “No Fly” lists that have created nightmare hassles for people just trying to board a plane whose only association with “Islamic Terrorism” is that they watched Syriana a couple of years back. Usually not even that.

“I was shocked,’’ Gass said in a recent interview. “As far as I was concerned, I had done nothing wrong.’’

Meanwhile, his license would remain revoked — no small thing for Gass, who drives for a living.

So Gass brought his birth certificate and Social Security card to the Registry to establish that he was in fact himself (again). Insufficient. The drones demanded he also produce additional documents with his current address on them. By this time, Gass had obtained the assistance of a lawyer, who provided the registry drones with the documents and on April 14, at last, his driving privileges were restored.

Gass is suing the state, demanding a court an injunction blocking the MA Motor Vehicle Registry from revoking anyone’s driver’s license without at least giving them a hearing first.

May the Force be with him.

And with the rest of us, too — because this business is not confined to that imprisoned land, The People’s Republic of Massachussetts. At least 34 states are also using facial recognition software — typically (as in the case of MA) funded by a “grant” from the Department of Homeland Security.

Massachussetts received $1.5 million taxpayer dollars to harass the taxpayers of Massachussetts, for instance.

“The advantage if securing the identity of 4 1/2 million drivers is of considerable state interest,” says MA Motor Vehicle Registry Obergruppenfuhrer Rachel Kaprielian. “We send out 1,500 suspension letters every day,” she croons.

And it’s up to each and every one of these hapless recipients to prove to the state that the state is wrong — another example of the casual upending of a basic tenet of what was once our common heritage in the West: That you are innocent until proven guilty.

Not the reverse.

“There are mistakes that can be made,” admits Kaprielian.

But that’s not the state’s problem, of course. It is Gass’s problem.

And quite possibly, your problem, too.

This piece, by Eric Peters, originally appeared at  www.epautos.com

I am sitting in a parking garage in a throng of torpid auto-journalists, nearly all of whom are wearing the same glazed expression of terminal information overload. On-screen, molecules of fuel and air are doing a complicated little computer-animated dance, as narrated by Susumi Niinai, program manager at Mazda’s powertrain development division. His English, while Japanese-accented, is better than, y’know, mine, but the concepts he’s explaining approach the limit of comprehensibility to the lay-person. Mind you, it’s a pretty nice parking garage.

Some of you, like me, may have been hearing all the rumblings about Mazda’s new SKYACTIV technologies and been wondering whether it’s going to turn out to be a series of technological breakthroughs or, alternatively, a load of complete cobblers thought up by some Zoom-Zoom marketing guru.

Good news everyone! It’s the former. Bad news everyone! I have to try to explain it to you. And I borderline don’t understand it myself. Here goes…

First, let’s set aside Niinai-san’s well-illustrated presentation on the SKYACTIV engine series for a moment, and talk in generalities. As was repeatedly hammered into our heads throughout the day, Mazda is a small company with limited resources.

What’s more, they’re a small company in trouble. How much trouble? Well, previous posts have outlined current flagging sales and enough profit drops to alarm Mazda fans. This is not good. To be frank, if Saab goes the way of the 9-2x Dodo a few orthodontists may be mildly upset, but for the rest of us it’s a big ol, “Meh.” Mazda on the ropes though? For the enthusiast driver, that’s bad.

So how does a beleaguered company without the resources of a Toyota or Nissan take on the pressures of ever-increasing efficiency standards? More than that, how do you pull off competitive MPGs while still maintaining the apparently-conflicting mandate of maximizing driver involvement as a priority? Two choices: cut corners, or clip the apex.

Make no mistake, Mazda isn’t interested in broadening appeal by blurring their focus. I heard the concept of jinba-ittai repeated so many times during the various presentations I was on the point of climbing on a horse and shooting someone in the face with an arrow.

Additionally, partnerships don’t seem to be high on the priority list. While there is some sort of upcoming agreement with Toyota on the hybrid powertrain front, Mazda seems to have little enthusiasm for a percentage ownership by a larger company that might allow for an increased R&D budget. When asked if anything similar to the previous Ford arrangement might be sought going forward, Mazda’s gurus said something to the effect of, “the future is unpredictable, but we don’t expect so.” They were scrupulously polite, but one might as well been asking them if they were hoping a disfiguring skin disease might re-appear.

Without the bankroll, Mazda’s got to box clever. It’s all very well to identify brand values, and quite frankly, it’s heartening to hear a group of enthusiastic engineers reaffirm that the Japanese Lotus still puts “fun-to-drive” at the top of their to-do list, but how do to so on a shoestring? First, streamline.

“Monotsukuri Innovation” is Mazda’s way of bundling architecture together to reduce costs. The cutaway SKYACTIV platform on display clearly showed a transmission tunnel capable of supporting an AWD variant, but the chassis was intended for next-gen Mazda3 and Mazda6 cars. With minimal changes needed to build the CX-7 and upcoming CX-5 off the same platform, weight-savings and rigidity developments should echo throughout the entire Mazda range.

Much hay has been made of Mazda’s borderline-impossible weight target for the next MX-5. With a total weight reduction of just 100kg, the SKYACTIV body and chassis don’t seem as revolutionary – until you notice that no exotic materials are involved: the savings are realized purely though better design and a moderate (20%) increase in the use of high-tensile steel.

By removing curves and kinks from the underbody, Mazda’s prototypes boast increased safety ratings with less material used. However, evidence of budget limitations can be seen in the ring-structure connecting the upper and lower body. Rather than a full stamped piece requiring a very large and expensive piece of machinery, a section of the structure is attached using structural adhesive.

The importance of an 8% weight-loss is easily dismissed, until you drive a Fiesta and a Mazda2 back-to-back. Of the two, the Mazda has the dynamic edge, and despite meagre power output remains a joy to drive. Best of all, the optimist could choose to see Mazda’s weight goals as marking the point at which safety-driven model bloat hit its apogee and we began moving towards a lighter future where 160hp four-bangers were more than merely adequate.

More than that, the SKYACTIV-chassis’s focus on driving dynamics has resulted in further improvements to handing with a quickened steering rack combined and increased positive caster. The difference in the steering is readily evident; not heavy but much more direct.

However, the realist will note that weight-loss and chassis improvements aren’t enough. Only a minor fuel-savings will be realized by the SKYACTIV chassis and body. The major difference will come from drivetrain improvements.

Don’t look for anything radical in the transmission department. With great pragmatism, Mazda has noted and rejected the cost of developing a dual-clutch gearbox, spurned the non-involving fuel-savings of a continuously terrible – er – variable transmission and gone instead for refinements of the good old auto and manual transmissions.

The changes to the manual are clever, but slight. Minor adjustments to throw-length and some weight-savings realized by trickery such as a shared input gear for first and reverse show a general improvement, but Mazda’s stick-shifts are generally quite good anyway.

It’s with the automatic tranny that Mazda’s pulled a fast one. One need only look at the mixed reviews of Ford’s six-speed dual-clutch or check the recall list on the VAG DSG to see the pitfalls of pouring money into a completely new tech. Mazda has taken what seems to be the easy route here, re-jigging the venerable automatic gearbox with a more direct feel that’ll keep the enthusiast happy.

That’s perhaps an oversimplification, but with a greater lock-up range and a modular unit containing calibrated hydraulic controls, the new 6-speed auto feels much more in tune to what your right foot is doing, particularly on tip-in.

So we have bundled development and a focus on honing simpler technologies rather than chasing pie-in-the-sky tech. Time to get back to Niinai-san and the SKYACTIV engine suite, where both ideas combine for some real-world fuel savings.

SKYACTIV-G and -D engines have, respectively, both the highest compression ratio for a production gasoline engine and the lowest compression ratio for a diesel engine. For both, the concept is the same: hybrid vehicles are all well and good, but people keep buying cars equipped with nothing more than a trusty old internal combustion engine. Even with a market shift more towards electric and hybrid drivetrains, the bulk of the vehicles on the road are still going to be ICE-equipped.

Thus, improving the combustion cycle in both diesel and gasoline applications is going to affect passenger car sales right now, especially as Mazda doesn’t appear to intend a premium charge for their SKYACTIV technology. Rather, next year’s Mazda3 will bow with a SKYACTIV-G engine and the improved transmissions as the standard equipment on mid-range models starting sometime in October.

The availability of SKYACTIV-D remains nebulous, although it could appear in some Mazda products as soon as next year. This twin-turbocharged diesel boasts improved torque from a combustion cycle that ignites much closer to top dead centre, giving a longer power-stroke. Multi-hole injectors allow for a more homogenous fuel-air mixture and the low compression ratio allows for more precise timing control.

Why doesn’t everyone run their diesel engines this way? Among other issues not outlined, Mazda’s engineers needed to overcome cold-start problems with variable valve-lift. As much as I hate the phrase, it’s a paradigm shift: the low compression means thinner con-rods and a lighter rotating assembly that revs higher; this is a diesel that redlines at (and pulls to) 5200rpm.

However, it’s the SKYACTIV-G that you’re more likely to get a chance to drive in the near future. Want some good news on the efficiency front? How does 13:1 compression and a 4-2-1 header strike you?

That’s right, moving in a completely different direction than other manufacturers, Mazda has put together a hi-po four-banger that gains 15% torque across the rev range while still getting better fuel economy. It’s a sprightly little engine and noticeably more potent at low revs.

How do they get away with a compression ratio higher than a 458 Italia in a four-cylinder that runs on regular gas? Control the burn. That header is designed to maintain consistent temperature levels in the combustion chamber, and the SKYACTIV-G features special piston cavities which allow for rapid and even flame-front propagation. Those multi-hole direct injectors are at work here again, although there’s a limit to the tech. Overseas versions will be running 14:1 compression, but North American fuel requirements dictated a detune.

The next-gen Mazda3 will only be partially SKYACTIV, lacking the chassis and body upgrades that will first be fully available in the CX-5 crossover (which you’ll be glad to note will be available with manual transmission). With this partial first wave of improvements, Mazda is reporting attaining 40mpg on the highway.

Revolutionary? The numbers don’t seem so. But it’s competitive, and the comprehensive focus that Mazda is bringing to its entire lineup shows a different strategy than that behind a low-volume halo car like the Nissan Leaf.

Let’s face it, people are going to continue to buy Mazda products based on the way they drive. If Mazda can reduce consumption to the point at which a enthusiast looking for an engaging drive doesn’t end up paying a penalty at the pump, they’ll have a success story on their hands.

Electric vehicles present all kinds of challenges to the traditional ways of understanding cars. From design to differentiation, from range to refueling, EVs simply act different than the internal combustion-powered cars we’ve been refining for centuries now. And yet, through consumer incentives and subsidized charging stations, governments seem to be barreling headlong towards the goal of simply replacing our gas cars with electric ones, as if the two were fundamentally interchangeable. Sadly this is not the case, and a study by Project Better Place and PJM Interconnection [PDF] illustrates in stark terms just how costly an unplanned, uncoordinated rush to electric cars can be.

PJM and Better Place open their study with a question that some might find slightly absurd: what would happen if a major metropolitan area suddenly had a million EVs? The question is only absurd from a pure market perspective, as global EV sales volume projections are generally low enough to keep the possibility of a single million-EV metropolis squarely in the realm of science fiction. From a policy perspective, however, the study offers profound insights into issues that the governments who are currently promoting EVs absolutely must consider. Without an understanding of the unintended consequences of a rush to EVs, governments risk spiraling costs, misplaced investments, and market failures.

To understand the potential effects of a million-EV metropolis, PJM and Better place have created a complex computer model which

considered a distribution of 1 million EVs in the Washington-Baltimore Metropolitan Area and modeled the impact of charging the EV batteries in three scenarios: unmanaged charging, consumer-price-incentivized charging, and managed charging via a Central Network Operator (CNO).

With a million EVs in one metropolitan area, a huge percentage of grid energy would be diverted towards transportation that was once powered by gasoline, and these three scenarios represent different approaches to managing the grid impact. The first, or “unmanaged” scenario is essentially the status quo, a market-driven pricing system in which cars are simply powered off of a standard electrical grid using home chargers and the public fast chargers that some cities are already installing (called Battery Quick Chargers or BQCs). The “Time Of Use” (TOU) scenario used a two-tier pricing scenario, modeled on the pilot EV tariff developed by Southern California Edison, which uses advanced home meters to distribute energy for (theoretically) lower grid impacts and electricity prices (as well as public BQCs). The “Central Network Operator” (CNO) scenario models a single EV services provider responsible for all charging and infrastructure, using Better Place’s in-house network models and experiences. In this scenario, the BQCs are replaced by BSSs, or Battery Swap Stations, another unique Better Place offering.

Without going into too much complexity in describing the simulation (check out the PDF for more), it starts with a transportation model which maps EV distribution, trips and charging behavior. That model is then run through each of the three different scenarios, and the results of each is then sent through PJM’s grid market model and assessed for impacts on grid load and energy prices (assuming no fundamental changes in generation and transmission techniques). The results are dramatic, and graphically illustrate the problem with a vehicle-centric approach to EV stimulus.

As the very first chart in this post shows (also shown here in grey), the unmanaged scenario causes huge peaks and valleys in grid load, as commuters follow regular schedules and charge their vehicles at roughly the same times, charging them until full as soon as they are plugged in. The red line in that chart tracks “Locational Marginal Prices” (LMPs), which are at their highest when the grid faces its highest draws. This results in $786.3m in wholesale energy increases per year, a number that the TOU scenario (shown above) actually makes worse by 4%. Where TOU does help is in the annual energy costs aggregated to EV owners (thanks to fixed prices), but it is only shown to help by a mere 3.7%.

If you replace the haphazard system of home-charging and public BQCs with Better Place’s battery swap stations (BSSs) and network management system, the peaks and valleys in the grid draw are dramatically leveled out compared to the unmanaged and TOU scenarios. And though localized marginal prices are higher at times than in the TOU scenario, on aggregate they offer 22% savings compared to the unmanaged scenario. That’s over $35m annually (in one city) that’s not coming out of consumer’s pockets. More importantly, wholesale energy prices enjoy a whopping 45% savings compared to the unmanaged scenario for a staggering $350m in annual savings. Now imagine those results multiplied across every American metropolis with a million vehicles, and the impacts of not committing to a central network operator are impossible to ignore on a national policymaking level.

In essence, only a single central network operator can manage the chaos of individual transportation without restricting mobility or causing regular stress on the grid. I personally tend to favor bottom-up, market driven solutions, and at first glance putting a single operator in charge of managing the distribution of energy for private transportation does not seem to be that. But when you go through the model it becomes clear that this single central switchboard and distribution system is actually necessary for efficient market function, allowing for constant response to localized marginal prices and constant mitigation of naturally clustered usage patterns. In light of this reality, the study’s policy implications are less shocking:

This joint study firmly concludes that the increases in wholesale energy cost due to the additional load of 1 million EVs in the Washington-Baltimore Metropolitan Area can be reduced by hundreds of millions of dollars per year if the charging is managed by a CNO responding to real-time LMPs.  These savings are without considering the value from various ancillary services and of large-scale dispatchable load for increasing the penetration of renewables, economic dispatch efficiency, and heat-rates for environmental considerations.  Existing mechanisms do not necessarily allow CNOs to capture any of this value, which could be used for infrastructure deployment.  Based on these conclusions, we emphasize how critically important both the presence of real-time LMPs and of CNOs are to reducing the impacts to the electric power system.  Therefore, we recommend that incentives be developed for advancing the power system such that PRD incorporates LMPs and for EV incentives to reach beyond the consumer to CNOs so that intelligent charging networks can be quickly constructed.

By simply giving consumers credits to buy EVs, the government is setting up the same consumers to overpay massively for their electricity, grids for overstress and utilities for waste and inefficiency. Rather than encouraging these negative outcomes, perhaps governments should consider investing in Better Place’s holistic network management approach. The upfront costs of a Better Place-style CNO are indeed large, but the alternative is well-over $350m in annual increased wholesale energy costs (in one city alone)… waste without end. Throughout history economists have found so-called “natural monopolies,” in which markets are unable to provide a service as efficiently as a single actor. With the problem of EV grid management, we seem to have found another. And because the battery-swap model also fixes the major micro-level problems with EVs, namely lack of range and battery depreciation costs, Better Place is looking more and more like a no-brainer to me all the time.

TTAC has long seen stop-start systems (which turn off the engine at idle) as one of the many common-sense technologies that will continue to improve internal combustion engine efficiency at a relatively low cost. Outside of these digital pages, though, the systems have taken longer to gain awareness in the United States, resulting in the lagging adoption rate pictured in the chart above. Up to this point, we’ve assumed that this can largely be blamed on the EPA test’s unwillingness to acknowledge the urban-driving advantages of stop-start systems, pointing to Mazda’s protests on the matter as evidence that government intransigence was keeping the technology out of the market. But recently Mazda has announced that all of its vehicles will get stop-start as standard by 2015, and Ford has said that it will begin offering the technology on “some” four-cylinder models for the North American 2012 model-year… and the rest of Detroit isn’t far behind. So what’s the deal? The EPA hasn’t changed its test… why are stop-start systems finally starting to trickle over?

Thanks to new research obtained by TTAC from the cleantech investment fund Pacific Crest, we now have a better understanding of stop-start technology, and why we’re actually glad it’s taking so long for the systems to get here.

Not having looked into the technology in any appreciable depth, Pacific Crest’s research was eye-opening. It turns out that the first generation of systems actually used variations of lead-acid battery technology known as “absorbed gas mat” (AGM) and “enhanced flooded batteries” rather than the newer NiMh or Li-ion chemistries. Though these technologies clearly offer advantages over standard lead-acid batteries (see comparison from Johnson Controls, above), they are still far from perfect. Pacific Crest’s research notes:

Gen1 AGM and enhanced flood batteries perform poorly, leaving future market share in doubt. The start-stop battery cranks the engine 10x more than a traditional battery, and the lead-acid chemistry is simply unsuited for this workload. Current AGM and EFBs degrade rapidly, with AGM batteries losing half of the charge acceptance within two weeks after first use (i.e., it loses half of its fuel-efficiency gains). They are not good at holding steady voltage during a stopping event (e.g., car stereos/windshield wipers may not work when the car engine turns off).

Yes, you just read that right: the current generation of stop-start systems lose half of their benefits after two weeks. Which means they’re great for juicing up scores on Europe’s urban-efficiency test, but they are as good as useless for the vast majority of the life of the vehicle (we already knew they were less-effective in cold weather). In an industry that typically validates equipment for hundreds of thousands of miles of useable life, this is nothing short of shocking. Especially when you jump ahead and find out the OEM response to these concerns

Ultracapacitor prices need to decline by approximately 50% to gain significant Gen2 share. Overwhelmingly, OEMs are interested in satisfying the European legislation at the lowest cost. With few exceptions, cost is the first, second and only consideration. The poor performance of the AGM battery is something these OEMs are willing to live with as they assume consumers (and regulators) will not notice or care about the fuel-efficiency losses soon after purchase. Representatives from Ford, BMW and Porsche all dismissed ultracapacitors solely on cost, even while recognizing the greater performance. The good news for ultracapacitors is that a few OEMs are interested in offering consumers the better performance. But in order to gain real market share, the module price needs to fall significantly.

That’s right, the OEMs can “live with it.” Because they literally don’t have to live with it: consumers do. How this issue has not erupted into a semi-serious scandal in Europe is beyond us. After all, if this is accurate and verifiable, it means manufacturers are building cars that may not actually comply with emissions standards in the real world for most of their lives. Whether consumers will “live with this” is one question… whether governments will is a very different proposition. But, as the paragraph above implies, manufacturers aren’t likely to abandon advanced lead-acid designs for some time. Luckily, though, the next generation of AGM batteries should be much improved… and they had better be!

By 2013, start-stop batteries need to get much better. The next-generation battery, expected to be introduced initially in 2013 models, is expected to do much more than current models and stretch lead-acid battery technology further. OEMs are demanding significant technology advancements to meet customer demands and higher fuel efficiency standards. The Gen2 battery not only will do start-stops, but also basic regenerative braking, start-stop during deceleration and electric boost during acceleration. The battery will, therefore, need to be able to handle more cranking events, and more charge. Also, the battery will need to operate a partial state of charge (i.e., normally hold 70% to 80% charge) in order to absorb energy from braking events.

Generally speaking, batteries need a 4x improvement in charge acceptance and a 3x increase in cycle life to meet OEM demands for 2013. Lead-acid batteries, ultrabatteries and ultracapacitors are all vying for share in the Gen2 start-stop market. No OEM is committed to a single future technology, although most of the OEM testing is focused on improving AGM batteries. Most OEMs (e.g., BMW) are waiting to see the final specs on Gen2 AGM batteries before turning their attention to alternatives such as ultracapacitors. If lead-acid manufacturers can produce an improved version at the current price point, AGM will continue to dominate the start-stop market, in our view.

Pacific Crest goes on to argue that ultracapacitors (which are good for over a million cycles and don’t lose capacity like lead-acid) need to see something like a 50% price reduction to compete for attention from price-sensitive OEMs, and points out that a lack of Chinese players in the ultracapacitor space is part of the problem. Though ultracapacitors sound sexy, if the next-generation of AGM batteries improve to the point where stop-start systems are offering full benefits for longer than two freaking weeks, then we say “bring ‘em on.” Meanwhile, every auto media outlet with stop-start-equipped long-term loaners (and possibly government emissions-control agencies) should be running regular tests to verify or disprove these troubling claims. A two-week lifespan for full-function on any automotive system is nothing short of misleading.

I designed TrueDelta’s Car Reliability Survey to provide information an average of ten months ahead of the established annual surveys. Early last December we shared with TTAC readers that ”Early data on the Ford Fiesta is not good.” Then, in early March, we stated about the 2011 Fiesta and the 2010 Taurus that ”Ford does not appear to have tested either model thoroughly enough.” The late February release on the TrueDelta site went a step farther, asking, “Is Ford slipping?” The answer last week from Ford: “Yes, but we’re going to fix it.”

The official Ford line, as conveyed through Automotive News: we’re being open about our “tech glitches” because, in the words of CEO Alan Mulally, “You can’t manage a secret.” But what is Ford trying to manage by being open about quality problems? Not the problems themselves—it’s possible to be open about problems inside a company without going to the press about them. Instead, they’re trying to manage something outside the company: public perceptions.

Why now? Because later this month J.D. Power will release its annual Initial Quality Survey (IQS) results, and Ford knows that its scores are going to be significantly worse than in the past. The reason stated in the Automotive News article: glitches in the new “MyFord Touch” touchscreen-based control system. Because the IQS combines usability problems and mechanical problems (something we’ve criticized the survey for in the past), a hard to use control system will harm a car’s score even if nothing is technically wrong with it. BMW’s scores have suffered ever since it introduced iDrive.

The article refers to Consumer Reports as well, and drew on their auto chief David Champion for a couple of quotes. But, in noting that CR dropped its recommendation for the Ford Edge “in part because of the controls,” the author doesn’t seem to realize that CR’s road test evaluations and its reliability survey are two entirely separate entities. While MyFord Touch might fail the former, it could very well have no impact on the latter.

What will have an impact on CR’s reliability survey results, which will be next be updated in October: the problems noted in TrueDelta’s survey, and that aren’t mentioned at all in the Automotive News article despite Ford’s “openness.” Things like the chrome finish flaking off the taillights on the Taurus and Fiestas that won’t start, whose fuel gauges don’t read correctly, or (in fewer but more serious cases) whose dual clutch automated manual transmissions fail. The Taurus problem is admittedly minor, but it nevertheless indicates a faulty product development process. Proper testing would have discovered that the finish would peel off the taillights in less than a year. Similarly, proper testing would have found that a poor ground would lead to no-starts in the Fiesta, and that the fuel gauges in the car were often failing to read correctly. If these common problems that appear early on were missed, what else has been missed?

These glitches aren’t entirely a new development. Earlier, the 2007 Ford Edge and Lincoln MKX suffered from very common failures to the seals of their AWD units, often multiple times with the same car—and this problem persisted for at least three model years. The 2008 Taurus has commonly had problems with its front struts. And the revision to the Fusion for 2010 created transmission driveability problems where none had existed before—and which have proven hard to fix. But the Fiesta has been the least reliable new Ford in some time, with multiple common problems (that have nothing to do with MyFord Touch). And as the first Ford of Europe car to be transplanted to North America under Mulally’s “One Ford” program it could presage problems with the 2012 Focus and upcoming Escape and Fusion replacements.

Someone within Ford is certainly aware of these other problems that have nothing to do with “tech glitches.” Mulally himself is likely aware of them; otherwise, he’s got an even bigger problem on his hands. If Mulally is aware of these problems, he realizes that they will impact the IQS this month and Consumer Reports survey results in the fall. But Ford’s professed openness didn’t extend to discussing these other problems with Automotive News. Instead, they focused on debugging MyFord Touch and installing new robots to improve the precision of panel fits. It’s not hard to imagine why. This way, when those poor scores come out, journalists and the broader public they inform might think that they’re due to buggy software and panel fits, and not anything more serious.

Ford might buy themselves a little time this way. But if they want to maintain the reputation for quality they worked so hard to achieve, they must address the true scope of the problem. Mo’ better robots aren’t going to do the trick now any more than they did for Roger Smith’s GM. Their product development process needs fixing.

While the political battle lines over increasing CAFE standards are being drawn in Washington, with the industry taking on both environmentalists and itself, a line of analysis that’s been around since 2009 is exacerbating the industry’s internal divisions over the impact of CAFE increases. A two-year-old University of Michigan study has been exhumed and expanded upon in a new CitiGroup report which makes a bold claim: CAFE will actually improve both sales and profits for the industry. And with Detroit taking the lead in resisting CAFE increases, one might think that the industry’s “turncoats” like Toyota and Hyundai, who have made marketing-led decisions to support CAFE increases, would be the main beneficiaries of these reports. Not so. According to this battle-line-confounding analysis, the biggest beneficiary of CAFE increases will be… Detroit. Madness you say? You may well be right…

We’ve reported on the work of the UM’s Transportation Research Institute a few times before here at TTAC, most notably the 2009 McManus/Kleinbaum study Fixing Detroit: How Far, How Fast, How Fuel Efficient [PDF here]. That study raised our eyebrows on several occasions, forwarding as it did the counter-intuitive conclusion that Detroit would be a major beneficiary of increased CAFE standards or, as the study puts it “increasing fuel economy standards encourages automakers to create a portfolio of products that is more likely to raise the profits of the Detroit 3 automakers than to lower them”). The study noted:

Our finding that Detroit 3 automakers’ profits would increase under higher fuel economy standards is very robust.  We assessed the sensitivity of our prediction of Detroit 3 automakers’ profits to extreme values of 11 uncertain factors we predict for our model, and found that just three of the factors had extreme values capable of generating a drop in Detroit 3 profits:  an extremely low consumer response to fuel costs relative to vehicle prices (less than one-fourth Sawhill’s (2008) statistically estimated median value), a gasoline price of $1.50 per gallon (an extremely low price not seen since 1999), or direct manufacturing costs (materials and labor) that are 2.2 times the estimates we used (Meszler) and 3 to 4 times the National Research Council (2002) estimates (adjusted for inflation).  While the three factors could result in losses rather than gains in profits, the likelihood of lost profits is low.  There is a 7% chance that profits would be less than zero if CAFE were increased 30% (35 MPG), a 15% chance of a loss if it were 50% (40.4 MPG).

As intuition would suggest, the larger mandate increases the downside risk.  But it also offers greater upside opportunity, as the chance that increased profits could exceed $6 billion is 18% for a 50% increase in fuel economy, but only 6% for a 30% increase.  The total uncertainty attached to the larger increase is greater, which means both more upside and more downside.  Overall, the risk and reward profile of these scenarios is very positive, with only a small chance of losing and a very large probability of gain.

That 2009 finding was, however, put in the context of a domestic auto industry in the midst of crisis and restructuring, and as a result it focuses largely on fuel economy as a factor in a larger turnaround. At the time, GM was still emerging from the wreckage of the SUV/pickup market, still suffering from the kind of self-defeating thinking that McManus and Kleinbaum document:

For example, GM conducted internal research for decades that found customers value fuel economy far more than the company’s financial calculations assumed.  As publicly reported, the company systematically discounted these research results when calculating the benefits of improving fuel economy, often by as much as two-thirds.  In other words, if the research said the sales gain would be 10%, the number used to do financial calculations was 3%.  In fact, the belief that fuel economy was not “worth it” became so ingrained into the culture of the company, and so institutionalized in decision making that the senior people might not even be aware that they have been ignoring their own research.

That example, combined with consumer feedback confirming that lack of fuel economy was keeping them from buying American-brand autos is the fundamental basis for the study’s assumption that significant fuel economy improvements are relatively low-hanging fruit. Or, to borrow a slide from the report:

This argument is quite like the one forwarded by the Union of Concerned Scientists recently, which holds that payback in lowered fuel bills will make consumers more likely to spend more for increased fuel economy. Whether that’s entirely true or not isn’t yet clear, although early sales of Ford’s EcoBoost F-150 seems to indicate that it’s possible. Still, whether paying more upfront for longer-term savings (essentially a front-loading of lifetime costs) will prove attractive to the mass market remains very much to be seen (and the study assumes “consumers respond the same to fuel cost as to retail price”). Moreover, the McManus/Kleinbaum study depends on a return to the previously “normal” sales levels of over 15m annual sales by 2016 and over 17m units by 2020, levels which have not proven to be sustainable over the long term without dangerous levels of subprime credit lending.

Which leads us to a Citigroup/Ceres report based on the McManus/Kleinbaum study, which looks to the 2020 period and beyond for further evidence of the UM team’s basic conclusion. That report uses the same GM price elasticity and cross-price elasticity model that the 2009 report relied upon, and assumes the same $4/gal gas price average for its baseline scenario (itself a questionable assumption, given that gas prices have already risen to $4/gal). Though the Ceres report goes into more detail about the market penetration and cost increases of different fuel-efficient drivetrains, the conclusion remains the same as it was in 2009, namely that

Under the simulation, the Detroit 3 gain relative to the industry due to a number of factors, including 1) Narrowing the historical gap between Detroit 3 fuel economy and competitors; and 2) Light trucks and larger cars, in which the Detroit 3 sport a greater share, have greater potential to add consumer value through fuel economy than do smaller cars and car-based trucks. This is because future fuel economy increases have a greater impact on the fuel economy of these larger vehicles, thereby providing more utility to the consumer, and since full-sized trucks tend to be used for commercial purposes, this is a key factor in the purchase decision. Finally, the prices–and therefore the estimated variable profits– are higher for trucks and large cars.

The question that doesn’t appear to factor into the analysis anywhere: can we really rely on trucks to maintain their volume levels in the face of steadily increasing gas prices? Just as McManus and Kleinbaum question whether fuel economy is optimized in the baseline scenario (in turn leading to the low-hanging fruit for Detroit), I would question whether or not truck demand is “optimized” in the 2020 pre-CAFE senario outlined above. After all, the last time Ford’s full-sized truck sales hit the 670,000 unit level was 2007. In order to gain the unique benefits projected in this series of reports, that volume can not continue to decline as it did in 2008-2009 or settle to just over a half-million units as it did last year. Meanwhile, with the overall truck market settling into a 30-year low, that volume (and the low-hanging-fruit profits that underpin the CAFE-is-good-for-Detroit thesis) can hardly be relied upon.

In short, this line of analysis is truly puzzling. If, as it appears, the 2009 report was intended as a justification for the bailout, the Ceres/Citigroup revisit of the theme is puzzling. After all, the thesis that Detroit stands to gain the most form CAFE increases runs directly counter to the lobbying message coming out of Detroit’s governmental affairs offices as well as the Alliance of Automotive Manufacturers. On the other hand, even accounting for the flawed assumptions of $4/gal gas, strong truck sales and the consumer’s willingness to front-load costs (something the American consumer is famously allergic to), the study still sends Detroit in the right direction. Though I wouldn’t rush to assume that CAFE increases (or even higher fuel prices) will spur marginal profitability or volume gains for the Detroit automakers, steadily rising gas prices will have more of an impact on the market than CAFE. Whether profits improve or not, Detroit has little choice but to correct for its decades of anti-fuel-economy planning as the market changes. And, as Detroit has learned all to well in recent years, profits are nice but survival is the bottom line. Survival, not a groundswell of business success, is what should be motivating the Detroit automakers to stop worrying and learn to love (or at least accept) CAFE increases.

Though the EPA won’t actually announce its 2025 CAFE standard until September, the California Air Resources Board’ insistence on a 62 MPG standard for ’25 has the industry’s analysts and talking heads in something of a frenzy. Smelling the smoke on the breeze, Automotive News [via AutoWeek] trots out a range of interpretations of the proposed 62 MPG standard, from the frightening to the apocalyptic. Cost increases per vehicle for a 62 MPG by 2025 standard are estimated by government agencies at $3,500 “at most,” while Alliance of Automotive Manufacturers reckons they’ll run “as much as $6,400.” Sean McAlinden of the notoriously industry-friendly Center for Automotive Research figures the market will have to shift to 64% plug-in hybrids, at a price increase of $9,970 per vehicle, while the AAM adds that 62 by 20205 “could cut car sales by 25 percent, costing the industry 220,000 jobs.” And the EPA seems to be listening to the rising chorus of grumbles, as the agency’s Margo Oge soothed the locals on a recent visit to Detroit with the words

We will be very mindful — and I underline ‘mindful’ — of the consumer throughout this process. Unless people buy these new clean cars and trucks, and buy them in large numbers, everyone loses.

But if CARB wants 62 MPG by 2025, it will get it from the EPA. Which means the real question is simply how much will the standard actually add to per-vehicle costs? Is the industry inflating its numbers in hope of a teaspoon of federal sugar to help the medicine go down? Is the 62 MPG standard really an industry killer?

The answer, it turns out, is a big, fat “depends on who you ask.” But one thing is certain: the automakers are going to use everything they have to fight the standard, a fact evidenced by the absence of clarification anywhere in the media that the scary-sounding 62 MPG standard does not mean vehicles will need achieve window stickers with ratings anywhere near that high. As Hyundai has pointed out already, CAFE is measured using the old “unadjusted” mileage test, while modern EPA window sticker ratings use the tougher “adjusted” test. As a result, there’s a huge discrepancy from the ratings consumers use in their day-to-day lives, and the staggering CAFE numbers that are being thrown around.

As you can see, 63.7 MPG CAFE is roughly equivalent to 44 MPG EPA. Not so bad after all. And yet the industry continues to use the scary-sounding CAFE numbers without any kind of qualification. Well, except for Hyundai, which points out that its 40 MPG EPA highway Elantra will achieve around 50 MPG CAFE combined by the next generation… which will debut around the same time the 39 MPG CAFE combined car standard comes out in 2016. Clearly the fear that the industry won’t build anything besides cartoonish “Pelosimobiles” when CAFE increases are overblown.

On the other hand, as a limited-line manufacturer, Hyundai has a much easier time with CAFE than the Detroit firms which have built huge portions of their businesses around large body-on-frame trucks. And even though CAFE standards are notoriously riddled with loopholes allowing vehicles like the Chevy HHR count towards the truck-side efficiency number, this is where the real challenge comes into play. GM reportedly has to cut 500 lbs from each truck by 2016, and as much as 1,000 lbs per truck by 2025, a task that has both GM and Ford looking at exotic frame materials like aluminum and magnesium.

There’s no doubt that creating direct descendants of today’s Silverados and F-150s, to be sold at the same volumes they sell at today, would be a huge struggle under a 62 MPG CAFE standard. But forcasting isn’t that simple: even five years away from the 2016 30 MPG CAFE truck standard, with gas averaging around $4 per gallon, WardsAuto reports that the US pickup market has hit its lowest level in 30 years.

Against a backdrop of sluggish housing starts, high unemployment and skyrocketing pump prices – key historical barometers for the segment – fullsize and small pickups accounted for 11.8% of total light-vehicle deliveries in the month

It is the segment’s lowest market share in the Ward’s database, which dates back to 1980. At their peak in July 2005, pickups accounted for 22.9% of U.S. LV sales.

The share shortfall occurs as sales climb. Through the first four months of 2011, pickup deliveries were tracking 17.9% ahead of like-2010. However, total U.S. light-vehicle sales were pacing 19.4% ahead of prior-year, according to Ward’s.

By 2005, the two segments were running bumper-to-bumper, with pickups controlling 18.77% of the market compared with the Middle Car segment’s 18.79%.

Through April, pickups accounted for 12.6% of U.S. light-vehicle sales, while the Middle Car segment made up a whopping 20.8%.

If pickup sales are already declining steadily as a product of higher gas prices, it’s fairly safe to say that, barring any major reductions in the price of oil, the pickup market could well be dramatically smaller come 2016. In fact, having lost about seven points of market share since 2005, it’s conceivable that the pickup segment will be closer to eight percent of the market come 2030. Yes, pickups have made a comeback as gas prices bottomed out over the last two years, but in the sweep of history it’s fairly safe to say that Detroit’s truck dependence isn’t a viable strategy for the future. The good news: Ford and GM are finally making money on smaller cars, and, as the market for pickups retracts, pickups’ impact on CAFE numbers will go down as well, as CAFE is sales-weighted.

Will the cost of developing large pickups go up as the US approaches a 62 MPG standard? Sure. But if pickups aren’t selling in huge volumes, those costs will simply be passed along to the remaining buyers who absolutely need a full-sized truck’s capability, without affecting CAFE overall. The insanely high costs and and 62-percent plug-in hybrid penetration foreseen by Sean McAlinden must surely assume that truck volume will not change dramatically between now and 2025, a foolishly dangerous assumption that, if taken seriously, would likely sink Detroit whether CAFE increases or not. With gas prices rising steadily and inexorably, the market is likely to change before CAFE even makes much of an impact. Whether the standard for 15 years from now is set at 50 MPG or 62 MPG CAFE really shouldn’t make much of a difference.

Look at the SUV market: after the crash of 2008, which was instigated by a sharp spike in gas prices, SUVs came back strong and have been growing faster than pickups and vans ever since. But there was a key difference: as the chart below proves, “SUVs” were increasingly car-based CUVs before the crash even started. When “SUVs” came back post-crash, they were largely replaced by vehicles that served the same function with slightly higher costs and greater efficiency. And not because pre-crash SUV buyers weren’t convinced that they “needed” the allegedly unique capabilities of their body-on-frame utes. Who’s to say the same dynamic won’t happen with trucks?

There has been an almost-palpable sensation of glee propagating through the various import-leaning car communities I frequent. For nearly two years, they’ve had to sit back and listen to the other guys relentlessly gushing about domestic brand turnarounds. With only a few notable speed bumps, it has been a pretty good run so far for post-bailout Detroit. Market share is up; buyers are coming back; product is improving–a sad state of affairs for the import fanboy. Then, out of nowhere, those cunning deviants over at Motor Trend—known of course for setting the magazine landscape ablaze with their out-of-left-field criticisms and take-no-prisoners, “gotcha”-style journalism—dropped a Molotov cocktail into this Texas-desert-dry landscape of domestic love.

The 2011 Explorer, they said, quite simply sucks.
“Now hold on,” you might protest, “they didn’t say that.” And maybe they didn’t in so many words, but as Jonny’s follow-up makes clear, it’s pretty much how they felt about the example they tested. And really, does it matter what anybody said? The finishing order of a comparison test is much like that of a race (or if you’re an Orioles fan like me, the AL East standings). First place is the winner, second place is the first loser, and last place is reserved for cars purchased only by the uneducated, unworthy co-workers whom you spend so much time slandering in the company of your Audi-driving Internet friends. I can only speculate as to the exact details (I don’t drive an Audi) but I’d assume the conversations largely revolve around themes such as poverty, racial discrimination, and—like any discussion about anything on the Internet, ever—pornography.

But I digress. While much to-do was made about their Explorer’s pre-production status, there was another recurring theme that I’d rather talk about, one that has been in the news a bit lately in flammable proximity to phrases like “technical service bulletin” and “frustrated owners.” I’m referring of course to MyFord Touch, Ford’s latest and flashiest SYNC-cessory.

Yes, accessory. For all the press Ford has been getting, positive or negative, there’s a serious absence of understanding as to what MyFord Touch actually is, and for that matter, what it does. MyFord Touch is essentially an extension of MyFord, the interior settings customization option that Ford has been offering for several model years in some variation or another. MyFord lets you select ambient lighting colors and brightness, display functions and colors, and other nifty settings that have little or nothing to do with anything related to the functionality of the car.

MyFord Touch extends that customization to the gauge cluster and infotainment system and offers you a pretty LCD touch-screen (hence the “Touch”) interface from which to control, well, almost everything. But wait, there’s more. Depending on the car and the trim, the Touch option also replaces many center stack controls with either raised, touch-sensitive faux-buttons or a glossy, piano-black touch panel on which more frequently-needed controls such as audio adjustments, HVAC settings and their various on/off switches are duplicated.

Remember too that all of these functions can be controlled by voice through the SYNC interface—triple redundancy. And that sums it up pretty well. By the time you’ve optioned your Ford up to the point where Touch even enters into the equation, you have probably already purchased at least two alternative control interfaces. That’s because MyFord Touch is not SYNC. It’s just a pretty interface that adds another layer of visual panache and techno-gee-whizardry to an already robust infotainment package. You don’t need MyFord Touch if you don’t want MyFord Touch.

And why would you? Well, for one thing, it’s cool. It’s the automotive entertainment equivalent of the iPad—pointless, redundant and expensive. You may know this concept by its more common colloquialism: luxury. That’s what MyFord Touch is, a luxury. It’s a premium option designed for buyers who need to be seen with an expensive gadget, and like any expensive gadget, it will have its share of growing pains. Just learning how to touch the screen properly takes practice (The trick? Just fat-finger it. Hovering delicately over the option you want, waiting for the road surface and suspension to fall into perfect harmony before jabbing daintily at the ¼”-thick bar representing your favorite Lady Gaga single is an exercise in anal-retentive futility. Aim in the general direction of what you want and mash that sucker with ham-fisted authority. You’re welcome.)

That’s not to say that MyFord Touch itself is faultless. Learning the proper technique for prodding at the interface is just the start. Even with several weeks’ worth Touch-equipped press cars under my belt, I still have to stop and think about what it is I’m trying to do. Sometimes, the interface is so unintuitive that I jab at the SYNC button with frustration and curtly inform the synthetic slave girl behind the dash what exactly it is I want “her” to do.

There are plenty of “hey, neat” moments too. The touch-screen provides a handy interface for managing Bluetooth devices, allowing you to connect multiple gadgets simultaneously, assigning each a priority and function. Want to stream music from your iPod touch but make calls from your Blackberry? Stream music from your Droid but use your passenger’s iPhone for phone calls? No sweat. It’s all right there in the phone settings menu. Tech geeks can tweak to their hearts’ content.

Well-executed too are the customizable LCD displays flaking the speedometer (Certain models get only one, mounted dead-center. Focus buyers, I’m looking at you). They share the duties of the typical center-mounted multifunction display that has recently become somewhat of a staple. The left-side screen focuses on vehicle systems (tachometer, fuel economy display, trip info, vehicle health, etc.) and the right is a further extension of the infotainment system, allowing the driver to choose quickly from different audio/video sources or adjust those already selected using wheel-mounted buttons—yes, another layer of control.

The truth is, the story of MyFord Touch is much like that of any other fancy gadget. Early adopters get the worst of it, dealing with patches and updates and pesky issues that never seem to go away. Such is the way of modern software, unfortunately. To most of us, it’ll never matter. Nobody’s forcing it on us, and we’re content to choose something else. To fanboys, it’ll be a reminder of why they’re so certain that Ford can’t build a good car.

Hey, everybody needs something to hang on to.

Byron Hurd’s “Lord Byron” column can be found here at SpeedSportLife

GM and its Korean battery partner LG Chem have signed licensing agreements with the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, giving the two firms access to Argonne’s proprietary lithium and manganese-rich metal oxide mix for use in lithium battery cell cathodes. The material will need “several years of testing” according to The General, but could extend battery life, increase charging voltages and storage, and make Li-ion cells safer. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu says GM’s agreement with the publicly-funded lab

gives General Motors the ability to use cutting-edge battery technology throughout its supply chain. The licensing of this technology will also spur the renewal of the American battery industry, creating hundreds of new jobs where they are needed most.

But that’s not quite the whole story. According to press releases, GM’s deal with Argonne allows the automaker to

to use Argonne’s patented composite cathode material to make advanced lithium-ion batteries

But LG Chem’s agreement allows the Korean firm

to make and use Argonne’s patented cathode material technology in lithium-ion battery cells

In short, a publicly-funded lab has licensed technology in a way that appears to deepen the (partially) government-owned automaker’s dependence on a foreign firm. Confused? So is the mainstream media. And so, to some extent, are we.

Though the mainstream media reports (not to mention Secretary Chu) seem to treat LG Chem as an afterthought in this deal (if they mention the Korean connection at all), the artist formerly known as Lucky GoldStar Chemical is the glue that holds everything together. The Korean chemical giant currently ships Lithium-ion cells (the actual “batteries”) from Korea to Michigan, where GM then uses them to assemble battery packs (in which multiple cells are linked together and managed) for the Chevy Volt. In 2012, LG Chem’s wholly-owned US subsidiary (known as Compact Power, but referred to in the Argonne pressers as “LG Chem Michigan, Inc”) will open a Li-ion cell manufacturing plant on Holland, Michigan which will eventually manufacture cells using Argonne’s technology for the second-generation Chevy Volt.

Those cells will be assembled into battery packs by GM, which is apparently why The General had to sign a licensing agreement to use Argonne’s technology. Of course GM will be testing and evaluating those cells in cooperation with LG, but otherwise, The General’s main role in this announcement appears to be to give a patriotic sheen to a move that cements its dependence on its Korean partner.

After all, without a GM deal to announce, it would be tough for Secretary Chu to tout “the renewal of the American battery industry” by licensing a publicly-funded technology to a Korean company. After all, if LG Chem’s Michigan plant makes it part of the “American battery industry,” wouldn’t every foreign automaker with a US production facility count as “the American auto industry”? Clearly, the Detroit talking points about how it doesn’t matter that transplants hire Americans because “profits don’t stay here” are going to need some recalibration.

And Chu wasn’t the only person hyping this licensing arrangement to gloss over some inconvenient realities. Jeff Chamberlain, who heads Argonne’s Energy Storage Initiative, had this to say:

It is especially gratifying to know that the commercialization of this Argonne-cathode is helping the development of an emerging U.S. battery manufacturing industry, as well as the creation of new American jobs.

The goal of Argonne’s battery research is to support the U.S. automobile industry… The added benefits of this endeavor are the potential creation of U.S.-based green jobs, lessening U.S. dependence on foreign sources of oil and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

American jobs? Sure. The American battery “assembly” industry? OK. But as far as American “manufacturing” and “independence” goes, this deal appears to fall way short. Instead of fostering a true “American battery industry,” this deal merely ensconces a Korean firm at the base of a supply chain that, according to Chu (as well as GM, the Argonne lab and all EV proponents), will supply the future of the automotive industry. It’s one thing for local governments to incentivize the production of transplant manufacturing plants, but it’s quite another for the federal government to do so under the guise of helping an automaker it partially owns.

But this isn’t the first time LG Chem has received assistance from the US government to make Detroit dependent on its cells. After all, its “transplant” factory in Holland, MI is being built using $151m in recovery act funds. Nor is GM the only US-based automaker to slouch towards dependence on the Korean firm: Ford will be using LG Chem battery packs in its forthcoming Ford Focus EV. Where GM simply relies on LG for the basic components of battery packs, Ford will rely on the Koreans for the whole assembly as well as the cells that make it up (but then, Ford’s Focus EV is heavily foreign-firm-dependent in other ways as well).

In fairness, no American firm offers the kind of Li-ion cells needed for automotive applications… which is a problem we’d hope a publicly-funded institution like Argonne (not to mention Recovery Act dollars) would be focused on addressing. For all the support the Obama Administration has given the EV sector, it’s more than a bit galling that none of it has been focused on addressing America’s shortcomings at the base of the EV supply chain. No amount of red-white-and-blue- or green-washing can cover for the fact that any future American EVs will now be dependent on a foreign firm.

Alternatively, America could make its peace with the fact that it’s trading one malignant foreign addiction (Oil) for a more benign but no less foreign dependence. After all, Foreign  auto firms hired thousands of Americans over the last several decades to build the cars that Detroit wouldn’t or couldn’t. But if that were to happen, all the bailout-era rhetoric drawing a distinction between the “American” auto industry and the “foreign” transplants would be revealed as the thinly-disguised protectionism it really was. And this announcement would not be used as evidence of the strength of “American” battery and auto industries.

Science fiction author Charlie Stross recently penned a blog piece on the future impact of autonomously computer-driven cars. Let’s call them “robocars.” I’ve pondered this before and Stross’s post is the perfect jumping-off point for a discussion of the many issues standing between science fiction and the robocar future. Let’s take a look.

Firstly, based on the progress from DARPA’s Grand Challenge and now Google’s fleet of robocars, it’s eminently clear that computers are getting very good at driving. Robocars rely on a variety of different ways of sensing the road (stereo video cameras, laser range-finders, sonar, radar, GPS — you name it and somebody’s tried it). One of the ways that robots gain increased accuracy is by fusing data from multiple distinct sensors, and that means that the cost and reliability of those sensors will be one of the limiting factors before robocars hit the mainstream, never mind the pesky problem of all those sensors looking decidedly ugly.

Stross posits that once robocars become affordable, insurance companies and government regulations will immediately favor them over traditional cars, and it’s easy to see why. Take away the human driver and you take away driving while drunk, distracted, or drowsy. Long-distance trucking companies would immediately jump on the chance to have their rigs running all day and night without drivers who require food and sleep. Stross suggests that we won’t even bother owning cars any more, except for the occasional nut-job / TTAC aficionado who likes to race. In a congested big city where taxis are everywhere (New York, London, etc.), plenty of people already don’t bother to own cars, and new business models like ZipCar fill in where taxis don’t really cut it. Still, while I’ve only spent occasional time in New York, I have attempted to get a taxi there while it’s raining, and let’s just say that supply didn’t meet demand. With robocars, we can easily imagine ZipCar-like services where you pay more for higher priority when demand grows. Maybe we’ll see instant auctions: I’ll pay $100 for the first car that shows up right here, right now! Or reverse auctions: I need to go from here to there, who’s willing to take me for the least money? My kingdom for a ride downtown in a Mercedes! Make it so, number one.

I see a completely different impact on suburbia. With my own house, I made the tradeoff to live close to work versus having a glorious suburban starter castle and a one hour drive-time commute from hell. What if all that pain went away and I could rig up my car to be more like a rolling office? Now living in the distant suburbs wouldn’t be nearly as bad. Robocars could drive faster, with less separation between cars, and would be far less likely to get into wrecks. And when wrecks do happen, robocars wouldn’t slow down just to rubberneck. Expensive parking lots at work or the airport? Why bother? Send the car home and it will pick you up when you need it again, or send it a few miles away to a robocar-only parking lot that can really pack the cars in for a cheaper price.

Since I’m a computer security guy, I should probably spend some time on how things could go horribly wrong. Some of Stross’s commenters got into the dystopian aspects of robocars. Much like all the robots in the inexplicably lame I, Robot movie all going evil at the same time (poor Isaac Asimov, spinning like a hidden Iranian centrifuge in his grave), it’s easy to imagine that robocars would be required to have “back door” access for the government, both in terms of reporting your whereabouts (see, for example, attempts to tax cars based on miles driven rather than gas consumed) and in terms of being able to hijack your car for any of a variety of purposes ranging from instructing a bank robber’s car to go straight to the police station to various spy-vs-spy applications, up to and including murdering undesirables by driving them at high speed into any convenient brick wall.

Perhaps less ominously, it’s easy to imagine hacking your robocar to post bogus traffic announcements that cause other cars to reroute themselves away from you, giving you a clean shot at your destination. You might also send fake messages to a car from its tire-pressure sensors causing the target robocar to slow down and pull over because it thinks there may be a flat tire (the fake message part is already feasible). Computer security researchers have already determined that in-car electronics aren’t particularly well-engineered from a security perspective, which seems unlikely to change any time soon, so there may not need to be any sort of government-mandated backdoor. It will probably be there as a consequence of poor engineering.

Malicious behavior aside, teenagers will have great fun hacking their friends’ cars to take them to incorrect destinations and hacking their own cars to ignore speed limits or take them to the party while the electronic logs say they went to the library. Tinkers will still mod their robocars in a variety of ways, such as increasing the g-limit for acceleration, braking, and turning in non-emergency situations. Why? A robocar would make for a hell of a hoontastic experience! J-turn your way into every parallel parking space. Safely and accurately.

It’s equally easy to imagine the liability lawyers getting involved in all kinds of ways. If a software bug caused my car to misbehave and I got hurt, or if a car thief told my car that it wasn’t mine any more and it left me, whose fault is that? Can I sue the manufacturer for negligence? That kind of fear, alone, will slow down the rise of the robocars. It’s a safe prediction that robocars will first come to us as an evolution of taxis and ZipCar-like services, particularly when the technology is still expensive and immature. Another easy prediction: the big consumer demand will start when the Baby Boomers, now in their 60′s, hit the age where their kids agitate for the keys to get taken away. The Baby Boomers will proudly get up, shake their canes at us, and lead us into our inevitable robocar future. Let’s just hope all the security issues have been worked out beforehand.

Linguistic note: I’m using the term “robocar”, while ABC News, in the clip below, uses “self-driving cars.” If you think about the word “automobile” — “automatic” plus “mobile” — robocars are really a step toward realizing the original purpose of the car, namely to get you where you want to be, automatically.

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Yes, I can muster some appreciation of Econolines of yore. But the painful reality is that the current E-Series is an ugly, primitive and inefficient pig virtually unchanged since 1974.  The fact that the American light truck sector hasn’t had the same revolution that European design influences have had on passenger cars is a mystery. Case in point: Ford’s Transit (not Connect) vans are a (several, actually) giant development leap ahead of the Econoline, offering FWD, RWD and AWD variants in three wheelbase lengths, numerous configurations, and driven by the most advanced diesels that can get well over 20 mpg. The Transit outsells Mercedes Sprinter in Europe. What the hell is Ford waiting for?

The remarkable flexibility of the Transit platform is demonstrated above. For a more in-depth look at the Transit, head over to the UK site here. And of course, there are passenger van versions as well.

Perhaps the cleverest aspect is the Transit’s drive train options: FWD, RWD or AWD are available, depending on your need or mood. The FWD versions offer a lower load floor for easy package delivery. The heavier rated versions naturally come in RWD. And the DuraTorque direct injection engines come in four and five cylinder versions, up to 200 hp and 470 Nm of torque. Plenty of power for towing too.

The mini-buses come with up to 17 passenger capacity.

A stubby six-speed falls right to hand. Looks like the Transit offers a somewhat more engaging driving experience to boot! Of course, automatics are available too.

And why not just ditch the F-Series too, and switch it all over to the versatile Transit platform? Oh, the whole macho high-riding American cowboy image would suffer, and our male population’s collective testosterone level would fall to that of those sissy Europeans. Can’t have that. Is that a woman on that job site? That explains it all; this is a girly truck.

No, unless it has a hood at least an acre large and a grille the size and boldness of an old Kenworth, Americans aren’t going to touch these girly toy trucks. Oh well; I guess Ford figured that out a while back. We love our Econolines!

]]> http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2010/09/the-next-generation-econoline-hopefully-yes/feed/ 59 http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2010/08/editorial-do-not-buy-a-2011-mustang-5-0/ http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2010/08/editorial-do-not-buy-a-2011-mustang-5-0/#comments Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:23:04 +0000 Sajeev Mehta http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/?p=364321

Runkle joined the company last year and is convinced that in the long run no other energy source can compete with oil, and that the internal combustion engine will be here for a long time, albeit with an entirely new architecture, the OPOC. That’s the word that Runkle kept using regarding the OPOC engine’s design, architecture. That and “disruptive”. The OPOC, according to Runkle, is cheaper, better, simpler, stronger, lighter and cleaner than any other power generating technology now or in the foreseeable future. Cheaper than hybrids and electric vehicles and with a smaller carbon footprint too.

The engine’s width is exaggerated a bit by the other dimensions which are much smaller than a conventional engine of similar power. Runkle showed a slide of a proposed two-module engine, made up of two 75 HP two cylinder modules, that easily fit inside the standard frame rails of a Ford Fusion. The modular design, with an electric coupling clutch between the modules, allows for variable displacement without the frictional loses that current cylinder deactivation systems involve. The second module is simply decoupled and shut off and doesn’t spin when not needed. The modular concept also allows for superior EPA cycle performance since it can do the complete cycle on only one module, and also heats up quicker eliminating a lot of cold start emissions. EcoMotor’s target is to meet emissions standards without specialized catalytic converters that other diesels currently need to comply.

I took a picture of Runkle holding up a mockup of one of the 75 HP modules and it’s remarkably small. Runkle also showed me a suitcase generator, a 10KW emergency generator with a 10-15 HP OPOC, that’s literally the size of a small suitcase. Ten kilowatts is enough power to run most of your home. Because of the low profile, in front engined cars, the OPOC would allow lower hoods and better aerodynamics. In rear and mid engine vehicles, it’s compact size gives more passenger and cargo space. The Fusion concept drawing was with a transverse crankshaft, but Runkle said that with only slight modifications to the frame rails, the 150HP OPOC could fit longitudinally too.

For power generation applications, the modular concept allows scalability that is not possible with current ICEs. If peak demand means you need a 1000HP, that means you run a 1000HP engine all the time. With a modular design, as load increases, more modules can be brought on line and when load decreases, modules can be shut off, saving fuel.

Runkle says they won’t be following Lotus’ model with their Omnivore engine (another two-stroke design which EcoMotors has studied along with 15 other new engines but feels that they all fall short of the OPOC’s potential). Lotus plans to license the technology but not build engines itself. EcoMotors, Runkle says, intends to use Qualcomm’s model. They both sell chip sets they make themselves and they license their technology to others, creating de facto industry standards. EcoMotors will build motors themselves for sale to non-automotive customers. He contends that no matter the application, power generation, marine, pumps, helicopters, diesel-electric locomotives, whatever you need an ICE for, the OPOC is a superior choice. It runs efficiently at both steady speeds, good for power generation and in use in range extended EVs, and under direct load from the driving wheels. OPOC architecture will also be licensed to major automakers and engine manufacturers.

The central location of the electrically operated coupling clutch between the modules seems ideal for integrating an electric motor so I asked about hybrid plans. I was shown a diagram of what they call a “tribrid”, a two module engine with an electric motor integrated into the transaxle. OPOC’s suitability for genset applications and compact size would make it ideal for range extended EVs. While I’m on the subject of hybrids, Runkle and Hurden both said that EcoMotors is not at all involved with the electromagnetic hybrid ICE engine that Bill Gates and his associates have patented through Intellectual Ventures, his IP enterprise.

Though they’ll gladly sell motors and technology that would be used in hybrid vehicles, Runkle is convinced that the OPOC is by itself superior to hybrid and EV technologies in terms of overall cost and environmental impact.

In comparison to conventional ICEs, not only does the simpler design mean lower production costs, Runkle anticipates that the cost of building the production line itself will be 30% lower than with a conventional engine, and converting an existing plant to OPOC production would yield even greater savings. The lower cost of entry is a selling point to developing countries like China and India.

With Runkle’s background running Buick’s racing program, and Colleti’s background building SVT products at Ford, I asked about motorsports and performance cars. At first Runkle, who headed development of some fairly high performance production, concept and racing cars, said that he’d already done that and was interested in an efficient, cost effective powerplant. Then he smiled and said, that the OPOC would make a “phenomenal racing engine” and proceeded to tick off what made it an ideal racing powerplant: high specific output, low weight, low aero, and low cg. He then said that it would “probably be outlawed” and that in any case racing was “not in the budget”.

When I asked for a time frame to production, Runkle said that he hoped there’d be OPOCs in production in some form within 3 years. When I asked him where he saw the company in 10 years, he said that it’d be a billion dollar company, selling millions of engines, that famous car companies and well known engine suppliers would be producing OPOCs of their own designs, making their own improvements, paying royalties.ed.

“We feel that we have the engine and technology for all reciprocating ICE’s.”

When I alluded to Zhongding’s “investment”, Runkle took pains to say that they “are not an investor, they are a customer”. EcoMotors is developing a variant of their engines for Zhongding and that the letter of intent is being formalized into a contract.

In terms of deals with other companies, the OEM automakers have shown “a lot of interest” even though EcoMotors has not made a lot of presentations, pitches and road shows. During our interview, Runkle was running through an abbreviated PowerPoint presentation they use for investors and potential customers, but so far the haven’t really marketed the concept. They have no communications staff and what marketing they are doing is being handled by an outside firm, PCGCampbell.

Runkle said that nobody’s thrown them out of an office yet, but that they want to be sure that their game is good before they start marketing the idea seriously. A $350 market is the big leagues.

In the second chapter of Pirke Avot, The Ethics of the Fathers, the concept of wisdom is discussed. Rabbi Shimon says, ” Who is wise: One who sees something from its birth”. The ability to see the end from the beginning, the possible consequences or opportunities from a situation, both the good and the bad, is indeed one of those things that separates the wise from the foolish. I’m sure that from their excitement, EcoMotors thinks that they are midwifing the birth of a great new thing. Time will tell how wise they are.