Posts Tagged by Ford
“Telematics” Offers Electric Vehicle Drivers Wonderful Benefits
| June 1, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
In April’s 2GreenEnergy webinar on electric transportation, I presented a short section on telematics, and all the wonderful benefits that accrue once the car is connected to the cloud: real-time traffic, green routing, intelligent billing, etc. In this video, a Ford R&D guy is talking about developing some really cool telematics apps. It starts at 26 minutes and 25 seconds in.
EVWorld Reports: Paice Corporation Settles Lawsuit with Toyota and Ford
| July 26, 2010 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
One of my duties as a partner in www.EVWorld.com is occasional proofreading; every few weeks, Bill Moore asks me to review his newsletter, The Insider. I look forward to this, as it forces me to keep up on the news in electric transportation, and the proofreading requires almost no more time than would be consumed in simply reading Bill’s insightful writing. And frequently it makes me smile.
You may have noticed that last week brought us another wrinkle in the litigation in which Florida-based Paice Corporation sued Toyota and Ford Motor Company – a dispute involving Paice’s assertion that both the Toyota and Ford hybrid drive systems violate its patent and that it is entitled to compensation.
When I came across this sentence: As you might imagine, Toyota certainly wasn’t happy about the Texas jury’s decision, nor when they lost their apparel to the U.S. Supreme Court, it took we a few seconds to discern what Bill had intended. They lost their shirts, perhaps? No, I ultimately realized that what they had lost was their appeal, not their apparel.
So what was the news? None of the parties in the lawsuit will say how they settled, but Bill thinks “we can safely assume that Paice and its attorneys broke out bottles of bubbly last week, even if they it means they’ll likely never do business in Detroit again.”
Thoughts on the EV Adoption Curve
| March 16, 2010 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
Every so often, I like to write a short article that gets us thinking about the rate at which electric vehicles will be assilimated into our culture and brought onto our roads, replacing internal combustion engines. Here are a few ideas to consider.
1) What does Big Auto think (or, at least, claim that they think) about EV production rates? Considering there are 230 million cars on the road in the US alone, the needle will not be moving in the short-term:
Nissan: Has pre-orders for 56,000 LEAF all-electric cars.
GM: Last year, had 50,000 expressions of interest in the Chevy Volt, though presumably that figure is somewhat larger now.
Mitsubishi: Bumped up its 2011 production schedule of the i-MiEV from 8,500 units to 9,000.
Better Place: Placed an order with Renault for 100,000 electric vehicles based on the Fluence ZE for its deal with Israel.
2) But is there any reason to believe anything coming out of Detroit?
Today, the population of Detroit is about half of what it was in 1950. The city has 33,500 empty homes and 91,000 vacant lots. A recent AP article asserts that vacant property totals 40 square miles. But Big Auto is not at all apologetic for the meltdown, and points out they couldn’t have foreseen the dynamics of oil prices that created sharp inflection points in the demand for fuel-efficient vehicles in favor of the Hummer and other gas-guzzlers. If this is false, they’re disingenuous; if it’s true, they’re incredibly obtuse. Either way, it’s hard to trust what they’re saying.
One thing for sure: there is nothing good in EVs for the big OEMs. They are happy to drag this transition out for decades, selling gas- and diesel-based cars and trucks as long as possible.
3) The Department of Energy apparently is not bullish on pure (battery) EVs.
Check out this report on the future of the automobile. Although the author sees lots of hybrids in our future, he really doesn’t see any pure EVs. Remarkable. I have to think this is simply a mistake.
4) Industry analysts are hedging their bets.
As reported in EV World, Accenture recently performed a survey that showed that six out of 10 consumers are more likely to buy a hybrid or electric vehicle “only when it is superior to gasoline-only models in every way.”
I understand that merely “being green” isn’t good enough for the vast majority of car buyers. But this report strikes me as the usual MBA malarky — a consultant who reads your watch and then tells you what time it is. What about the other 40%? Isn’t that a substantial market? And what exactly does “superior in every way” mean, exactly? How will the typical consumer react to a value proposition that includes dramatically lower fuel cost and huge reductions of other pieces of his total cost of ownership?
My belief: Give me a freeway-speed battery EV with comparable fit and finish to a garden-variety 5-passenger sedan, a 75-mile range, and price tag under $25,000 after rebate, and you won’t be able to manufacture enough of them.
