the electric car company, is slowly reshaping how people think about driving. Following the same pattern can help any social entrepreneur get people excited about world-changing products.
ELECTRIC CARS AND THE DIFFUSION OF INNOVATIONS THEORY Elon musk is the man behind Paypal Spacex, and Tesla Motors.
to build a market for electric cars, beginning with luxury cars, and then expanding over time to reach a broader consumer base.
that is, it wasn t simply about building an amazing electric car, it was also about creating an environment in
and he understood what it would take to get that group behind the wheel of an electric car.
He would need to design a car that could be compelling enough to act as a status symbol for young professionals in the insular community of Silicon valley.
He knew his audience would be highly technologically literate and very social in both how they bought the car
He needed a luxury car that would be theit car in Silicon valley. But perhaps as importantly, he would need to find a solution for the incredibly expensive battery technology needed for the car to work.
Just the battery for an electric car costs more than double the price of an entry-level car in the market.
For this reason alone, Tesla would have to focus on the luxury end of the market.
Tesla s cars are designed and built for the Google or Apple executive. The Apple headquarters boast more Teslas than a Tesla showroom.
Five years after the introduction of its Model S car Tesla was reporting a profit,
and the Model S had become the third best-selling luxury car, behind only the Mercedes E Class and BMW 5 Series.
ensuring the car is safe before it gets on the road, and in turn bringing along the more risk-averse parts of the population.
Tesla is building a network of car superchargers so that owners can drive coast-to-coast without range anxiety.
The next segment it needs to reach is the early majoritywho can move the company from a niche car manufacturer into a global powerhouse.
he needs to invest in the electric car market, and not just his cars. Tesla won t succeed just by selling electric cars.
They need to grow the overall electric vehicle market. They need to remove barriers for their competitors so they can join them in moving away from gas-fueled cars.
To this end, Tesla now sells their patented powertrain components to competitors. They are concerned less about the competition taking up market share than building the market
and creating scale that will bring the prices down enough to be viable options for the average car buyer.
By selling luxury electric cars first Musk and his team at Tesla have accelerated actually the development of technology for the market.
Tesla s success has created further hope for electric cars and spurred investment in research and development. Musk s initial customers were largely in Silicon valley
and connected to venture funding, a proximity that ultimately increased investment in batteries and renewable energy.
and ultimately it will need to be easier than owning a gas fueled car. In order for the laggardsthe most risk-averse group of allto come along,
or simply no more gas stations left to fuel their antique cars. But if Musk sluxury cars for the tech-elite strategy works, it will ultimately allow Musk to sell electric-powered sedans and minivans to families in Ohio.
It sounds intuitive, maybe even obvious, but most entrepreneurs (particularly those working on social issues) don t follow this model.
why Elon musk first entered the electric car market by focusing on luxury cars, and other social changes like sustainability, same-sex marriage, andin my casepro bono services.
has positioned itself to sell drones in much the same way as General motors works with its dealers to peddle cars.
They operate above the fray, independent of the frenetic energy of today s highways, airports, train, and bus depots.
First as an expensive option for luxury cars, but eventually it will become a safety feature stipulated by the government.
Delivery Dispatchers 105. Traffic Monitoring System Planners, Designers, and Operators 106. Automated Traffic Architects and Engineers 107.
Robotic Earthworm Drivers The most valuable land on the planet will soon be the landfills
And of course some homes can't be retrofitted mobile homes for example have no slab to fasten a shelter to.
In-ground shelters can be equally as elusive in mobile home parks. The landowner is typically not the homeowner
so who is going to make the investment to make a shelter in the mobile home park?
There are races for off-road vehicles Formula 1 race cars and snowmobiles. There is a competition for high-mileage vehicles
and race are variations on the familiar bicycle. Most are recumbent with riders sitting down in a more aerodynamic position than they would on standard bicycles.
Most also have aerodynamic fairings to increase speed. Some have three or even four wheels.
 In developed countries those types of vehicles along with more conventional bicycles can be used to relieve traffic congestion improve public health reduce airâ pollutionâ and significantly lower transportation costs.
In developing countries human-powered vehicles can provide affordable basic transportation for personal transport deliveries and even ambulance services.
They are faster and more comfortable than standard bicycles and many offer protection from foul weather.
Consider a new college graduate who purchases a human-powered vehicle rather than an automobile.
If 5 percent of the U s. population were to switch from automobiles to human-powered vehicles for most of their trips the aggregate difference would be a reduction of 31 million tons (28 million metric tons) of greenhouse
 Studies have shown that people who commute by bicycle live longer and have improved cardiovascular health compared to automobile commuters.
Additionally in many parts of the world human-powered vehicles are used to meet basic transportation needs.
A lack of infrastructure and prohibitive cost often make the automobile a nonviable choice and transit systems may not exist.
Unfortunately about half of the world's food is consumed never due to inefficiencies in the harvesting storage and delivery of crops.
and show how and when to deploy delivery trucks to ensure immediate shipment an especially important factor in farmlands where the lack of paved roads can paralyze distribution.
and heavy rain can cause trucks to get stuck in mud. Coupling predictive analytics and modeling techniques with other sophisticated farming methods can prove to be quite beneficial
Beyond providing cosmic delivery food would also be tailored for astronauts'daily activities. will printed food go beyond novelty value?
and orbit control system part of its onboard systems bus. Engineers could configure this system to emulate Mars'gravity.
When we design a component for a car or aircraft we need to ensure that the probability of failure of that part per year is something like one in a million.
This is important because shaving a few percent off the weight of a component in a car means lower material costs less fuel usage less CO2 emissions and so on.
that's equal to 6. 4 billion pounds or as much as the weight of 1. 4 million new Ford F150 pickup trucks.
Car-mounted devices sample the air and can locate leaks and estimate their magnitude from a distance which avoids the challenge of acquiring property owner permission that bedevils direct on-site measurement.
Google usually uses camera-equipped cars to take images for its Street view but because the Rio Negro region is inaccessible by car the researchers had to come up with an alternative method.
To capture the images the teams strapped a camera onto a bicycle and pedaled it down dirt paths through the forests
and they even mounted it onto a boat to collect images of a section of the Rio Negro the Amazon's largest tributary Google explained on one of its Outreach pages.
and more portable than the camera used on the bike. This will enable us to run Street view to farther places and show more about our largest natural asset:
The US Environmental protection agency (EPA) has agreed to set new rules governing emissions of mercury and other toxic chemicals from power plants by November 2011,
but the administration of former US President George w bush avoided this in part by creating a market-based system that would allow mercury emissions to continue at some plants
they are talking about apples and oranges and Porsches and whales and moons, he says.
had torched his car last year. I will not feel fear in response to your increasingly desperate and puerile attempts to frighten,
Now, mechanical diggers and dump trucks are much more common. Peru is the sixth-largest producer of gold in the world,
An estimated 45-50 Â tonnes of mercury are used each year in Madre de dios to extract the prized gold,
Miners combine mercury with sediments that contain gold  typically using their feet to mix them in a bucket
to boil off the mercury and leave gold behind. In March, Katy Ashe, a graduate student in environmental engineering at Stanford university in California, published the first study (K. Ashe PLOS ONE 7, e33305;
2012) to show the scale of the health threat from mercury in Madre de dios. She found that in mining zones,
elevated mercury levels were much more common in those who ate a lot of fish: 18%of people who ate 12 Â
or more fish meals each month had unhealthy mercury levels, in contrast to just 6%and 7%of low and moderate fish consumers, respectively.
such as the mota (Calophysus macropterus) and doncella (Pseudoplatystoma fasciatum), had the highest levels of mercury.
Fernandez is now leading a project to conduct a more extensive survey of the levels of mercury in fish and humans.
Some march through Puerto Maldonado s main plaza shouting through megaphones that mercury is killing everyone,
Variations of the mercury-amalgamation technique have been used in gold mining for centuries, and it is difficult to dislodge such deep-rooted practices among artisanal miners.
and recovers about twice as much gold as does mercury amalgamation. But cyanide requires more careful handling than mercury
and few artisanal or small-scale miners have the necessary knowledge and skills. The more modern process of thiosulphate leaching might offer a nontoxic alternative,
To reduce miners exposure to mercury, non-governmental organizations have distributed retorts that can capture the toxic vapour.
and the Association for Integral Research and development in Lima have developed other mercury-free technologies for extracting gold.
and is no more expensive than mercury amalgamation. For now, he adds, miners are worried more about the government s demands for them to formalize their work,
and until the price of mercury goes up, or its use is banned, there is little incentive for them to change their practices.
For example, his"Utility MACT rule is aimed purportedly at reducing mercury pollution, yet the EPA estimates that the rule will cost $10 billion to reduce mercury pollution by only $6 million (with an"m). This has stopped not the President from trumpeting the rule as"cost-effective and"common sense,
while claiming it will"prevent thousands of premature deaths. The trick? Making the rule so expensive that it will bankrupt the coal industry,
The price of pure ethanol at the pump is so high that in most states it is cheaper to fill up flexible-fuel cars with petrol blends that contain about 20%ethanol.
The shift back to fossil fuels, combined with rapid growth in the number of cars on the roads (see Fuelling Brazil s transport boom),
Meanwhile, the government has tried to stimulate the economy with tax breaks on the sale of new cars.
but the mobile home parked there is) and I doubt there will be lot of demand for outdoor space...at firstfrom the movie RIDICK YOU CAN KEEP
Everything on the moon the rovers the flag the mirror could have been placed there by probes.
and folds his six-foot-six-inch frame into the driver's seat of his white Lexus.
He's got a chauffeur and it's a robot. Levandowski backs out of his suburban driveway in the usual manner.
By the time he points his car down the street it has used its GPS and other sensors to determine its location in the world.
Levandowski's car and those around him are represented by little white squares. The graphics are reminiscent of Pong.
And with that Levandowski has handed off control of his vehicle to software named Google Chauffeur. He takes his feet off the pedals and puts his hands in his lap.
The car's computer is now driving him to work. Self-driving cars have been around in one form
or another since the 1970s but three DARPA Grand Challenges in 2004 2005 and 2007 jump-started the field.
It's not just Google that's developing the technology but also most of the major car manufacturers:
Audi Volkswagen Toyota GM Volvo BMW Nissan. Arguably the most important outcome of the DARPA field trials was the development of a robust and reliable laser range finder.
It's the all-seeing eye mounted on top of Levandowski's car and it's used by virtually every other experimental self-driving system ever built.
and mandates for car-borne beacons that will broadcast location information to other vehicles on the road.
The beacons will warn drivers when a collision seems imminent when the car ahead breaks hard for example or another vehicle swerves erratically into traffic.
Automakers may then use this information to take the next step: program automated responses. Automatic driving is a fundamentally different experience than driving myself. when
I arrive at work I'm ready. Levandoswki's commute is 45 miles long and if Chauffeur were perfect he might use the time napping in the backseat.
In reality Levandowski has to stay awake and behind the wheel because when Chauffeur encounters a situation in
which it's slightly unsure of itself it asks him to retake control. Following Google policy Levandowski drives through residential roads
and surface streets himself while Chauffeur drives the freeways. Still it's a lot better than driving the whole way.
Automatic driving is a fundamentally different experience than driving myself he told automotive engineers attending the 2012 SAE International conference.
He's the business lead of Google's self-driving-car project an initiative that the company has been developing for the better part of a decade.
Commuters in Silicon valley report seeing one of the cars easily identifiable by a spinning turret mounted on the roof an average of once an hour.
Google itself reports that collectively the cars have driven more than 500000 miles without crashing. At a ceremony at Google headquarters last year where Governor Jerry brown signed California's self-driving-car bill into law Google cofounder Sergey Brin said you can count on one hand
the number of years until ordinary people can experience this. In other words a self-driving car will be parked on a street near you by 2018.
Yet releasing a car will require more than a website and a click here to download button.
For Chauffeur to make it to your driveway it will have to run a gauntlet: Chauffeur must navigate a path through a skeptical Detroit a litigious society
and a host of technical catch-22's. Right now Chauffeur is undergoing what's known in Silicon valley as a closed beta test.
In the language particular to Google the researchers are dogfooding the car driving to work each morning in the same way that Levandowski does.
It's not so much a perk as it is a product test. Google needs to put the car in the hands of ordinary drivers in order to test the user experience.
The company also wants to prove in a statistical actuarial sense that the auto-drive function is safe:
not perfect not crash-proof but safer than a competent human driver. We have a saying here at Google says Levandowski.
In God we trust all others must bring data. Currently the data reveal that so-called release versions of Chauffeur will on average travel 36000 miles before making a mistake severe enough to require driver intervention.
A mistake doesn't mean a crash it just means that Chauffeur misinterprets what it sees.
For example it might mistake a parked truck for a small building or a mailbox for a child standing by the side of the road.
It's scary but it's not the same thing as an accident. The software also performs hundreds of diagnostic checks a second.
This spring Chris Urmson the director of Google's self-driving-car project told a government audience in Washington D c. that the vast majority of those are nothing to worry about.
So far Chauffeur has a clean driving record. There has been reported only one accident that can conceivably be blamed on Google.
A self-driving car near Google's headquarters rear-ended another Prius with enough force to push it forward
and impact another two cars falling-dominoes style. The incident took place two years ago the Stone age in the foreshortened timelines of software development
and according to Google spokespeople the car was not in self-driving mode at the time so the accident wasn't Chauffeur's fault.
Considering that the Google self-driving program has clocked already half a million miles the argument could be made that Google Chauffeur is already as safe as the average human driver.
Google has been uncommonly secretive about its self-driving-car program. Though it began in 2009 the company first announced the project in a blog post a year later.
The attack came from Chrysler the smallest of Detroit's Big Three automakers in the form of a television commercial for the new Dodge Charger.
Hands-free driving cars that park themselves an unmanned car driven by a search-engine company.
A year after the Dodge commercial aired Levandowski showed up in Detroit as the keynote speaker at the SAE's annual shindig.
Google wants to make available to the rest of the auto industry all of the building blocks that we ourselves use he said
and then ticked off the goodies the Android operating system search voice social maps navigation even Chauffeur.
Instead of rebuilding a whole operating system from scratch he said automakers should focus on making the user experience their own.
For the car companies the real cost of implementing the technology would be specialized in the peripheral that Chauffeur needs to run:
But at $75000 to $85000 each Google's lidar costs more than every other component in the self-driving car combined including the car itself.
Industry scuttlebutt has it that Ford is giving Google the most serious consideration. Hall confirms that a major automaker recently summoned him to its headquarters to ask
whether he could make a next-generation lidar a ruggedized standardized automotive component. The company wanted a design that it could hide (perhaps behind the windshield) that would wholesale for no more than $1000
Self-driving cars should be achievable in five years. It takes more than five years to engineer a new car from the ground up.
If Detroit started designing self-driving cars now around components that actually exist there's no way the technology could get to the showroom by 2017.
Google is not a car manufacturer. Nor does it intend to be one Levandowski says. So what's the plan?
I don't think we need to wait 10 years for the next model or body style to come out to build the technology he told the SAE audience.
However without reinventing Chauffeur and the super-high-resolution Google maps that go with it Hall doesn't see the point.
It too is filled with catch-22's. Hall described a Powerpoint presentation containing the automaker's analysis of self-driving-car technology.
'âÂ#ÂDETROIT doesn't want to start making self-driving cars without legal clarity. And legal clarity will not arrive until self-driving cars test the law.
In Smith's analysis the legal concept of driver goes back to an international agreement called the Geneva convention on Road Traffic ratified by Congress in 1950.
In those days many of the world's drivers still had reins and a whip instead of a wheel and pedals.
They drove teams of horses herds of goats drifts of sheep. Animals Smith argues are autonomous.
And under the Geneva convention a basic legal requirement for drivers whether of animals or of cars is the same.
The driver must have control. Who has control of a driverless car? For the autonomous vehicle that now drives Levandowski to work the answer (according to Smith) is logical:
the person in the driver's seat. The Google car doesn't work without one as Chauffeur needs to be able to hand back the reins with 10 20 or maybe even 30 seconds'notice.
In Smith's analysis the person behind the wheel satisfies the legal requirement of control
And even if self-driving cars do not violate an international treaty myriad state laws imply that the driver must be human.
and looking to get ahead of the curve have made the cars explicitly legal. The doctrine assigns driver-hood to the person
either in the driver's seat or the one who activates the self-driving function.
Nevada was the first to adapt the principle into state law: Its DMV even designed special license plates for the vehicles (they have an infinity sign.
What's going to happen no matter what the law says is people are going to get sued Urmson the director of Google's self-driving-car project allows.
There's one last hazard to engineer out of the modern car: human error which according to NHTSA is the certain cause of 81 percent of all car crashes.
Cars kill roughly 32000 people a year in the U s . and in 2010 Levandowski's life partner Stefanie Olsen was one of the 2. 2 million per year injured.
She was nine months pregnant at the time. My son's name is Alex and Alex almost was born never says Levandowski.
He credits the safety features engineered into the car a Prius for saving Alex's life.
Technology he says should prevent oblivious drivers from causing harm. Self-driving-car boosters talk about a virtuous circle that starts
when human hands leave the wheel. It's not just safety that improves. Computer control enables cars to drive behind one another
so they travel as a virtual unit. Volvo has perfected a simple auto-drive system called platooning in
which its cars autonomously follow a professional driver. It uses technology that's already built into every high-end Volvo sold today plus a communications system.
The vehicle-to-vehicle communications standard soon to be announced by NHSTA would at least in theory enable all makes
and models to platoon. And lidar could eliminate even the need for a lead driver.
In our self-driving future not only would traffic jams become a thing of the past every stoplight would also be green.
In Volvo's real-world platooning tests drafting resulted in average fuel savings of 10 to 15 percent
Wayne Gerdes the father of hypermiling can nearly double the rated efficiency of cars using fuel-sipping techniques that could be incorporated into auto-driving software.
Volvo's goal is to eliminate fatalities in models manufactured after 2020 and its newest cars already start driving themselves
if they sense imminent danger either by steering back onto the roadway or braking in anticipation of a crash.
-and-steel variety and automakers could eliminate roll cages returning the consequent weight savings as even better mileage.
The EPA has a new mileage mandate for car manufacturers: They must achieve a fleet-wide average of 54.5 mpg by 2025;
Mercedes offers Distronic Plus with Steering Assist as an option on the 2014 S-class luxury sedans.
and maintain a safe distance from the car in front of it. But the real engineering challenge is making sure the driver stays alert.
All kinds of problems crop up in real-world testing says auto-drive consultant Brad Templeton who worked with Google on its self-driving-car project for two years.
People start doing all kinds of things they shouldn't digging around in the backseat for example.
the car must be able to hand back control with no warning. But the temptation for drivers is to simply zone out.
So engineers have begun to design countermeasures. Mercedes for example requires two hands on the steering wheel at all times.
Everyone's looking for ways to keep the driver engaged says Dan Flores a spokesman for GM.
As the car gets more and more capable we want the driver to maintain driving expertise. Advocates like to say that there is no technical reason the new Mercedes needs hands on the wheel to steer through a turn.
The problem is that even the best radar -and vision-based pedestrian-avoidance systems fail to see the proverbial child running into the road 1 or 2 percent of the time.
Obviously 99 percent just isn't good enough; we need 99.99999 says Templeton. And what people don't seem to realize is that the difference between those two numbers is huge.
Google is betting that established car manufacturers working with low-cost radar and camera components will never adequately bridge that gap.
It believes its level-three system will make cars safe enough for people to daydream
NHTSA's former deputy director Ron Medford has signed just on as Google's director of safety for the self-driving-car project.
I'm not sure it will be that much fun to drive behind a self-driving car that just dropped off the human driver
and is now looking for a parking space. It may drive very cautiously. If I see a parking space in the other aisle I'm having my wife jump out
and run over there and stand in it until the self-driving car stops. Then I'll drive around
and take the parking space. After all you can't be rude to a machine can you?
or 4 of the Microsoft Kinect devices put in various parts of the car to determine a 3d area?
if it was the person at fault or the car. I guess the car company would take fault
The first wave of the attack of the machines will be these autonomous cars running people down(:
The only way to get a Leap Forward with this technology is fully self driving to the point a 13 year old can jump in the car
or build a complete small town and engineer it for completely autonomous cars from the the ground up.
Design all the streets and topology as you would assuming that your cars were never going to be driven by people
and with a legally blind driver as the article at the link explains cheers.>>we need 99.99999
My concept car ecologically friendly and low CO2 footprint will be an external combustion CNG fueled car made almost exclusively of wood
Historically it has taken 30 years in the automobile industry for a a new technology to become a production available technology.
For the self driving car it may take much longer because it is complicated much more and litigious.
Self driving cars are getting a lot of press right now but there is something existing that will do everything a self driving car will ever do and a great deal more.
It is a form of duel mode transportation which is powered by electricity from the road bed in 2 protected automated lanes and an access and exit lane
Any vehicle that will fit into a standard parking space and with very minor modifications can be carried by the system.
Shipping containers can be transported from one terminal to another automatically without a tractor or driver.
All units move at exactly the same speed and form a train. No units can be hit by another unit or anything within or outside the system.
This can happen quickly without having to replace most of the cars being driven. Why doesn't Popular Science cover this kind of development
or anyone for that matter would be required to have a lot of practical driving experience prior to being permitted drive one of these robo-cars.
It would be nice to be able to just call your car to come pick you up
Please don't make us all car sick with jerky steering. Traffic light timing is another good project.
and reduce the number of stops than to put a regenerative braking system on every car
Thanks-Tonythis pipe dream of self-driving cars is very nice & all kind of romantic in an early 20th century sci fi way but for all practical purposes it will not happen.
but unless the concept of liability changes significantly we will never see public streets filled with robo-cars.
and the now pilotless vehicle causes a multi-car pileup? So create them so that the driver can take over you say?
HA! Not gonna happen because in order for the driver to assess the situation and gain control of the vehicle he/she would have been having to pay attention to/what the car is doing at all times/(like you do
when you're actually driving) which kinda negates the main point of having a self-driving car
i e. being able to focus on something other than driving. So who is responsible for the payout when the inevitable does happen?
Is it the car manufacturer? Perhaps the company that wrote the self-drive software? You certainly can't hold the owner responsible...
oh which also means that the business model for vehicle insurance would have to entirely change as well.
Auto manufacturers are not going to assume that responsibility . when the car ahead breaks hard??I'll trust a self-driving car
when you can get spell-check right. bike/train/bike commute beats any self driving car option. yes that would be bad short term for an economy based on consumption
but changing the infrastructure to make a mesh of high speed trains should ease transition from 1-ton-metal-can (2
if you're in US) for 1 person to 20 tonnes for+100 people..3-4 years ago I saw a Nissan Altima driving itself with the driver snoozing in a reclined seat;
I watched it in I-405 southbound through Seattle all the way from I-520 to I-90 (several miles) in traffic running from stop
and go to a full 60 mph. One of the times that we were stopped I even took t
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