Digital Automaking

Start Your Motors!!!

2010-05-17T00:18:00.000-07:00

After a successful debut at Isle of Man,
arguably the most famous motorcycle venue
in the world that single handily launched
Honda from the garage into a global force
digital bikes just ran the 1st USA race
a few miles from where I grew up at

Sears Point nka Infineon Raceway.

New racing benefits helped
spectators, crew, workers, etc.
talk normally during a race and
it only cost $100 in fuel to power
the entire field of a dozen vehicles!

Economically, the field showed that
the USA is leading the digital 2-wheel race
for now with a hybrid team effort running fastest.

According to Brand X Daily, 10 of the 12 teams
were from California most riding
Designed and/or Made in USA Digital Cycles!

Higbee took the analogue checkered flag
in an international hybrid collaboration
gliding a frame with Santa Cruz, CA DNA
amped by an Agni Indian (as in India)
direct current (DC) motor based in the UK
designed by a

digital genius who has worked
his whole life for this moment of joy!

The digital vehicle event received dozens of
positive reviews from the press, spectators,
participants and even the traditional race crowd.

Compared to the 1st Gen Digital Prius love hate
it's GREAT to see that digi-racing is here to stay!

Quiet ripples across a global quiet ocean storm brew
as teams of positively charged revolutionary mag heads
accelerate the world's biggest yet damaging business
towards a cleaner safer and faster future...

Men and Women Start Your Motors!!!

Porsche Drives Digital Fast!!!

2010-02-11T18:41:00.000-08:00

Just got an email from Porsche
and they've caught up in the
digital race that's revolutionizing
the world's biggest and farthest reaching
business (automaking + related and supporting industries)

What do you think of digital hybrids now?

2 Toyota Principles

2010-01-21T14:35:00.000-08:00

Having researched the auto industry for several years culminating with a 170+ page MBA thesis (The Hybrid Phenomenon) that exceed expectations by boiling down 1,000 pages of research into publication (The Futurist) after a three year investment that included visiting a Toyota production line in the USA and talking to end users in Japan...

I have boiled Toyota (including lean) down to a few basic principles:

TOYOTA PRINCIPLE 1
The first is that Toyota is NOT a car company in an industry full of struggling car companies.

Toyoda started out as a loom copmany, so it's DNA started with a very simple high volume low defect rate production system. Manufacturing was simple, few moving parts with empowered machine operator.

The founder's son I believe, started Toyota. He ventured into cars because of his passion. But in Japan, sons almost always obey and respect elders, especially fathers, so the DNA of duplicating simple materials with a low defect rate were transferred to the new subsidiary.

Even Today, almost all of Toyota's car products look similar. For example the shape of the Camry, Corolla and Prius noses share the same lines.

So from the old school Toyoda non-car company DNA, I believe lean was inherited from a simple loom (few moving parts) producing a high volume amount of cloth with almost no defects. A very simple, yet automated process with few moving parts and an operator that stopped the machine anytime a problem arose...

TOYOTA PRINCIPLE 2
After visiting NUMMI for a factory tour, my second principle became crystal clear. Aside from all the details that follow Japan's DNA of kaizen, Toyota's production line had one SIMPLE process that differed from anything in any production line, let alone the world's largest business (auto and realted industries).

ANY employee, team member, manager, temp, etc. had the ability to STOP THE PRODUCTION LINE for ALMOST ANY RELATIVE REASON!!!

When each second could cost the parent company millions of dollars, why would Toyota build in this stop safe into the world's leading production line?

Let's go back to the loom company (Toyoda) that Toyota really is. Think of machines weaving cloth run by one worker each. When a defect or accident occurred, every yard or meter of cloth thereafter would be ruined. In other words Toyoda, decades before Toyota, learned that stopping the production process immediately yielded higher quality in the longer run.

After all, if anything interfered with the production of a material, it was naturally apparent via the human eye. Lean relies on the operators.

I believe that lean is a HUMAN PROCESS OPPOSING the view of much of the literature and comments above that treat lean as a system of machines and processes.

I disagree with the Western's interpretation of
"lean" and "waste" and "continuous improvement"
from my decade long analysis of the auto industry
and years living in and researching Japan on the ground
as well as visiting NUMMI's production line!

SUMMARY
If you want lean, give ANY team member, worker, temp,
employee, partner, supplier, downstream customer, etc.
THE ABILITY TO SHUT DOWN YOUR OPERATIONS
SO THAT YOU LOSE REVENUES IN THE SHORT RUN
in exchange for continous change (literal translation of kaiken)
and an acceptance of mistakes for higher quality in the long run.

ACHESON'S TOYOTA FORMULA

empowering everyones' mistakes

-

rewarding short term revenue loss

+

acceptance of continuous change
(not necessarily improvement)

=

LEAN

defined by John Acheson as

"holistic organizational viability"
that values internal and external members
while empowering inwards and delivering
highest quality utility outwards!!!

by John Acheson, CEO, MBA
Author of the Hybrid Phenomenon
www.johnacheson.blogspot.com

PS Did you know???

The Toyota brand is over 500 different companies including a few that build and sell houses in Japan???

NissanSport's Leaf Analysis

2010-01-19T17:51:00.000-08:00

Leaf iPhone UPDATE!!!
showing the benefits of the digital
automaking revolution that is compatible
with our daily digital lives!!!

FOR EXAMPLE we can pull into an electron station
to fill up, walk across the street to have a cup
or tea or coffee while surfing our iPhones or
catching up on email and voice mail while
the cloudy grid works for us and notifies
us when we're full on our iPhone!!!

I wonder if the charging stations
will bring FULL SERVICE BACK???

My 1st job at a full-service gas station
a few miles from where the 1st digital
motorcycle race was just held was my
favorite job to date decades later!!!

I took pride in those days (early 80s)
in offering various grades of fuel and
always asking full service customers
if they would like me to check the oil,
check all four tires including the
windshield washed as well.

With the Leaf we can check the tires,
no oil but maybe fluids and electron levels
and of course the windshield will always need cleaning
no matter a gas guzzler, diesel, sugar burner, hybrid or EV!!!

PRIOR POST
As I turn over a new leaf from desktop
to mobile iPhone post over hot drink
comfy chair and free wifi...

what could be better than taking
look at another new leaf???

In the words of Ochenreider
Publisher of Nissan Sport
in the Issue 12,

"over a century ago,
electrics ruled sales and
even held land speed records."

it's true and noisy gassers took
some time to venture out beyond
the infant analogue grid to roll
over the cleaner quieter EVs...

Ochenreider writes,
"It may happen once again."

in fact all of Teslas sales are EVs
and records are being broken every
few months at NEDRA races by
the likes of the White Zombie,
Killacycle and other Lithium launchers!!!

But these racecars and roadsters
aren't really using the digital grid
now known as the smart grid...

Turning the page over to the Nissan Leaf
in his mag shows a picture of a dashboard
that's the beginning of the changing game
from pipeline to fiber optic cables...

More simply, networked cars like the Leaf
will tell you when you're running out of
fuel and where to buy it from a grid that
hopes to make the fuel at the cheapest
possible and cleanest way.

Could you imagine if your car told
you when and where to buy gas
to save your wallet and planet
without touching any buttons?

And you don't even need GPS.

Digital automaking takes us into
an era of networked transpo
so things like turning on the
Leaf's AC with your cell phone
are easier than checking facebook.

Kudos to Nissan Sport for showing
us pictures of the first mass produced
networked drivetrain dashboard and
the Lithium pack that many will lease.

This look at the future gives me hope
as billions continued to dream of
owning their first car or truck!

by John Acheson

First mobile post

2010-01-19T17:48:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting at Borders with hot chocolate
after driving and hauling in heavy rain
enjoying free wifi on an iPhone 3GS
that has become the tool of choice
for running several online stores.

During this rare break from 24/7
entrepreneurship the wifi and
magazines in comfy chair
have spawned this first
ever mobile blog post!

Let's hope this new leaf
keeps going as we prepare
for the move to EV country!

Electric-car maker Tesla preparing IPO

2009-12-18T00:52:00.000-08:00

"Tesla would mark the first public offering from a U.S. automaker since Henry Ford's Ford Motor debuted its shares in 1956."

Congratulations! Finally a digital automaking
beach head on the edge of the world's largest
and farthest reaching businesses while five
billion 5,000,000,000 customers dream of
driving their first cars and trucks!!!

MORE than eight out of 10 humans
Planet Earth still do NOT own
their own cars or trucks!!!

High Voltage WiFi

2009-12-03T17:21:00.001-08:00

There's a story about Tesla helping his friend
who had broken down on the side of the road in
an analgoue or tube electric car long before
computers were invented...

Tesla proceed to tell the friend to hold on
and ran to the hardware store and built a
small device much like a radio black box
and told his friend that he would simply
catch electricity from the air to fix the car.

Within the same day, Tesla had the black box
receiving energy and hooked up his friend's
car who drove away in his wireless electric car.

According to the article below the digital version has arrived!!!

Wireless electricity.

Can we imagine never having to fill up
or charge up our mobile devices including
the next generation of rolling high voltage computers?

Williams Less Digital F-1 Boost

2009-11-04T02:55:00.000-08:00

Williams throws out the battery
for a gyro run by flywheels turning
up to 80,000 RPMs in theory...

How did it perform in the field???

Ferrari's F-1 Digital Racing Tranny (in Italian)

2009-11-04T02:52:00.000-08:00

Much More Complex than the Crankshaft Approach
but believe it or not MUCH LESS sophisticated
than Toyota's Secret Hybrid Synergy Drive
that hides 500+ patents in a similar setup...

Mercedes F-1 Digital Racing Development

2009-11-04T02:48:00.000-08:00

Mercedes-Benz Delivers the Lightest F-1 Digital Design

White Gold News Links

2009-09-25T01:49:00.000-07:00

To celebrate A123 (AONE) better than expected IPO today
which officially starts the race towards White Gold (Lithium)
I'm providing you with some of the better news stories recently:

Orocobre Plans to Start Lithium Output in Argentina (Update1)

The Daily Start-Up: A123 Systems Strikes While Lithium Is Hot

New Material Aims to Make Lithium-ion Batteries Safer

'Saudi Arabia of Lithium' To Produce Batteries By 2016

Western Lithium Looks to Expand Carbonate Production in Nevada

Why Warren Buffet is investing in lithium

Ghosn (CEO of Nissan), Immelt (CEO of GE owner of A123 Lithium battery leader) see future for electric cars as WHEN not IF

Will China Beat the US in the Electric Car Race?

Digital's Analogue Bottleneck

2009-09-25T01:38:00.000-07:00

Although I preach and cheer for faster digital development
of automotive technologies, I must admit that the car of
the future cannot become completely run by computers...

Many argue that Lithium is the analogue bottleneck,
or in this case, the big supply & demand question mark?

Some writers think there will never be enough
and others think there's plenty of it worldwide.

What's known for sure, is that the Lithium reserves
on planet Earth are distributed differently than oil.

According to Enough lithium for hybrid boom? Most say yes,
the USA is the most serious about leveraging
Lithium reserves and is getting the most to
market proportionally while Bolivia with the
most reserves in the world.... sits tight...

Locating lithium

Shares of global lithium supply by country
Production Reserves
Chile 39.30% 22.10%
China 13.30 16.20
Australia 11.00 2.40
Russia 10.80 n/a
Argentina 9.80 14.70
United States 8.40 0.60
Bolivia 0.00 39.70

Source: Meridian International Research, 2005 levels
adapted from http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-10357588-48.html

PS Lithium has tripled in price during The Hybrid Phenomenon!!!

Analogue vs Digital WRECK

2009-09-22T15:46:00.000-07:00

What's the difference between the analogue car that would have killed you
and the digital car that would've saved your life???

Computerized (aka "digital") safety devices!!!

Computers save lives!!!

Analogue Cars and Trucks KILL MILLIONS

2009-09-22T15:42:00.000-07:00

Did you know cars and trucks
kill more people each year
than AIDS and other diseases???

Group Warns of Global Road-Death ‘Epidemic’

How many less deaths would there
be if the fleet was digital and
networked like our other devices?

VW Digital Hybrid L1

2009-09-16T21:18:00.001-07:00

VW Digital E-Up!

2009-09-16T21:17:00.001-07:00

Renault Digital ZEC

2009-09-16T21:15:00.000-07:00

Audi Digital Concept

2009-09-16T21:12:00.000-07:00

Message from Frankfurt: Hydrogen’s Out, EVs Are In; Software Is Key

2009-09-16T20:51:00.001-07:00

It's good to see the masses finally keying in on the fact that automaking's destiny is digital. Software is a foreign language written in digital known as 1s and 0s to a computer's Central Processing Unit (CPU or engine) which can't really understand anything other than a digital stream of code more commonly known as software.

Did you know that some modern cars have almost 100 small analogue to digital processing units or mini computers already in them???

Why not go electric and eliminate many of those redundant systems and software to save money, create more jobs to help society on a larger scale???

BMW Complicated Digital Concept

2009-09-16T20:18:00.000-07:00

Million Word Video

2009-09-10T13:13:00.000-07:00

Some videos are worth a million words!!!

Shockgun Weddings

2009-08-05T03:12:00.000-07:00

Here's a digital ten billion dollar list of
shotgun weddings that will change the
world's largest business forever!!!

Compact Power, Inc. (LG Chem, Ltd.) received $151,400,000 of your tax dollars to produce the lithium-ion polymer battery cells for the Chevy's Volt for GM who will invest $240,000,000 of your tax dollars into batteries
Bosch (BOM) and BMW
Ener1 (HEV) got $118,500,000 of your tax dollars to build batteries for Nissan (NSANY)
Daimler and Tesla Motors
Johnson Controls (JCL) and Ford (F) got $100,000,000 for batteries
GE and A123 who landed $249,100,000 for battery packs and systems preferred by many EV race car drivers
Buffet and BYD
Valence and Segway
Panasonic EV Energy and Toyota (TM)
Sanyo and Ford
Saft and Mercedes

Lightning in the Wheels

2009-07-26T03:22:00.001-07:00

Tesla let the electric genie out of the bottle
and England/Wales just put Lightning IN THE WHEELS
unleashing 700 digital horsepower wrapped in 007 like lines!!!

This is the beginning of computers quickly invading
the wheels after only a few years of
disrupting drive trains with Lithium...

Add GPS and networking to a digital all wheel drive
and you've got an automobile that should be able
to beat anything with four wheels in theory!!!

Thank you Lightning for upgrading Porsche's in wheel electric concept
that powered his world's first 100+ year old hybrid
to many land speed records and racing wins!!!

It's about time we reinvented all four wheels :)

The Big Digital 3

2009-05-28T00:59:00.000-07:00

with the pending GM bankruptcy as well as Chrysler
and dozens of companies in the 1,000 family of
operational businesses that those giants run
face a new digital dawn it might be time to
predict the new Big D3...

in other words the top 3 companies in terms
of digital units produced...

what is a digital unit??? a car or truck that
incorporates computers in it's drive train which
is the parts from the engine to the wheels...

most hybrids quality, all electrics, all plug-ins,
all fuel-cell vehicles qualify as digital so long
as there's computers saving you energy in the drive train
delivery you more control and performance or efficiency only:

many argues that Toyota is #1 but #2 and #3 are for the taking
and many analysts are saying that Honda is the only company
that will turn a profit this year and by making 20 million
engines with only a few hybrids and fuel-cell vehicles
could this group of 500 companies become #2???

if so, you may want to read our team's report on the multinational
which could be summarized as Japan's black sheep of automaking going global:

Group Project Report: Honda Motor Co., Ltd.
By:
John Acheson
Judy Padilla
Darryl Smith

Instructor:
Michelle Dominguez, MBA
Business 280B
May 10, 2009

Table of Contents

1.0 Introduction ………………………………..…………………………………………………………3
2.0 Business Structure …….…………………………………………………………………………….4
3.0 Overview of Multinational Operation..……………………..………………………………….5
4.0 Legal Environment …………………………………………………………….…………………….7
5.0 Advantages and Disadvantages of Operating Abroad ……………….…………………8
6.0 Recommendations / Conclusions ……………………………………………………………….9
7.0 Bibliography / Works Cited ……………………………………………………………………….11

1.0 Introduction

Honda is headquartered is in Japan and the founder of the company is Mr. Soichiro Honda (1906-1991). He had no formal education and was an apprentice car mechanic at a garage from 1922 until 1928. His father was a blacksmith and his mother a weaver.

At the age of 17 he was the mechanic for car racer Shinichi Sakibahara, who won the Chairman’s trophy at Tsurumi. Mr. Honda started his own auto repair business (Art Shokai) at the age of 22 in 1928. In October of 1946 Honda Technical Research Institute was established and the first product was launched--an auxiliary engine that had been used to power radios for use in powering a bicycle. Subsequently, Honda Motor Co. Ltd. was established on September 24, 1948 and was led and expanded into a multinational by President and CEO, Mr. Tadeo Fukui.

Mr. Honda’s first focus was on building small capacity motorcycle and developed the Super Cub which was similar to a modern moped. Honda stumbled upon a cheap yet valuable vehicle for societies looking for affordable and flexible mobility. Before he knew it, his Super Cub was being exported all over the world, and America was a natural place for the larger bikes and engines Honda moved up to.

Honda's business partner Fujisawa made the call to start with America arguing that if Honda could make it in America, it could make it anywhere. Even though he knew that it would be easier to start with Southeast Asia, which still relies on more motorcycles than cars today, Honda's business head chose America and in 1959 setup a sales office in Southern California with eight employees. This small office was the beginning of Honda’s international business that went on to become a global multinational powerhouse.

By 1960 Honda was an international business. Honda kept tinkering for years working on engines to become a piston ring expert: his mastery of engines started early and was called the “Japanese Henry Ford”. Today Honda produces more engines than any other company, in some years over 20 million units. Most recently, Honda started making airplane engines. As of March 31, 2008 Honda has 178,960 (consolidated) employees and 501 subsidiaries. Its chief products are motorcycle, automobiles, power products, and of course engines. Their main competitors are primarily in the automobile industry (Nissan, Toyota, Ford Motor Co., and General Motors). Services offered by Honda includes: financing, customer service, satisfaction and sales, research & development, and racing.
2.0 Business Structure

Honda’s mission statement is, “Maintaining a global viewpoint, we are dedicated to supplying products of the highest quality, yet at reasonable price for worldwide customer satisfaction.”
Their basic principle is respect for individuals and the three joys (buying, selling and creating). On Honda’s website this statement is listed that would best describe their business philosophy: “Dreams inspire us to create innovative products that enhance mobility and benefit society. To meet the particular needs of customers in different regions around the world, we base our sales networks, research and development centers and manufacturing facilities in each region. Furthermore, as a socially responsible corporate citizen, we strive to address important environmental and safety issues.”

Honda Business Structure (www.honda.com/profine/organization/)

On April 28, 2008 Honda commemorated its milestone of a 5 millionth vehicle made in Canada since starting manufacturing vehicles in the country 23 years ago. During this downward economy, Honda has been experiencing worldwide decrease in production since November of 2008 (first time in five years), although production in Asia and China set al-time fiscal records. Honda Fit was the best selling car among new vehicle registration for March 2009. During their press release last month, Honda announced that their consolidated net sales and operating revenue reflected a 41.6% decrease compared to last fiscal year. Projection of return profits to shareholders for 2009’s first two quarters is 22%, 11% for the third quarter and 0% for the fourth quarter.

Honda takes its corporate responsibility very seriously and their key phrase is “Together for Tomorrow” which captures the spirit of Honda. http://world.honda.com/community/
A few of their initiatives are educational, environmental, traffic safety and community, are dedicated to worldwide philanthropic activities. Honda has started a new venture with GS Yuasa in the creating Blue Energy Co., LTD, a company designed for manufacturing, sales, research and development of lithium-ion batteries for hybrid vehicles. Construction started April 2009 and is scheduled to begin production around Fall of 2010. This is part or their commitment to a safer and cleaner environment through exhaust emission reduction and the development of alternative fuels to help ensure harmonious coexistence with host communities. Honda FCX Clarity [hydrogen fuel cell] was named 2009 World Green Car and Honda was recognized for their commitment to environmental leadership. Another of their environmentally friendly cars is the Civic Hybrid. On Earth Day, April 22, 2009, Honda launched its second generation 2010 Honda Insight hybrid electric vehicle (40mpg under $20,000) along with the lightweight CR-Z sports hybrid concept vehicle.
3.0 Overview of Multinational Operations

Honda, the company, is actually a group of hundreds of companies, so it's difficult to understand the day-to-day operations, without understanding the structures of the different companies across national borders. For example, there are several American Honda Companies that may or may not send products outside of North American borders. This is quite different from other companies that mainly import into America. BMW, Mercedes, and most luxury brands don't have factories in America so they primarily build overseas and import to America.

Honda is very different—in fact, it decided from day one, that it would setup in America, and keep the money made in America, to create more jobs by building more products and factories. Taking a look at Honda's global website at http://world.honda.com/ visitors are immediately blasted with everything but cars, including medical walking devices, flower accepting robots and even brain machine interface technology. So the best way to think about Honda's America's multinational parent Honda Motor Company, Ltd. (Honda Japan) is kind of like a General Electric (GE). GE runs everything from banks to airplane engines to nuclear power plants.

Management Organization of Honda’s Corporate Governance for Decision Making, Execution, Supervision and Others. http://world.honda.com/profile/governance/zoom.html

Honda R&D Americas works ideas into patents, and dozens more including financials like American Honda Finance Corp. and American Honda Receivables Corp. American Honda Finance Corporation dba Honda Financial Services helps customers looking to lease or buy. It represents the financial strength of the brand to Wall St. It operates smaller Honda banks like the one in Canada that loans people money to buy Honda products or the company that leases products. Honda vehicles rank near the top of assets that hold value so Honda's banking operations are strong. American Honda Receivables Corp. works with banks like U.S. Bank, Barclays, Deutsche Bank to turn all those loans that customers owe them for vehicles and other products into big money on Wall St. It's the American part of the Honda Bank described above.

Honda joined 70 of the biggest global multinationals headquartered in Tokyo; so we can assume taxes are low. Honda's tax strategy is much deeper and much more local than a company like Mercedes or VW that simply imports into American and exports our cash without paying all those local taxes from payroll, to the electric bill, to disability or worker's compensation. For example, Honda in Torrance, CA sells Honda cars to dealers in Las Vegas. Those dealers are not Honda—they are exclusive customers of Honda so they pay all the taxes in Nevada. But Honda of Torrance pays gasoline taxes on the trucks, transportation taxes and fuels, taxes on the income and sales, and of course anything related to employees both for the sales and transportation part of it. This doesn't include all the companies from idea to factory to Honda in Torrance. Honda’s American bank manages the money for Honda America whereas other companies send the money back overseas. There is a central bank in both countries to assist with international activities such as obtaining funding. Japan’s central bank has the second largest foreign exchange reserves after China.
4.0 Legal Environment
Honda has a compliance and risk management system. This was established so that each Honda organization, under the lead of the director in charge, can deal with legal compliance issues and risk management in a systematic manner while enabling verification of such situations on a regular basis. The Risk Management Officer oversees the risk management department and the Compliance Officer is responsible for the enforcement of legal compliance. There is also a Business Ethics Committee which is responsible for the deliberation of matters of corporate ethics and legal compliance. Honda has also established an Ethics Proposal Line for suggestions concerning corporate ethics and serve as a link to actual execution of improvements
Their government’s economic liability is the third largest public debt of any nation and this information can be obtained in the World Fact Book under public debt. Zimbabwe has the highest public debt. Japan ended its period of economic expansion in October 2007 and entered a recessionary period in 2008. In 2009 the return on interest rates are near 0%. The economy of Japan had been very solid and was considered the second largest economy in the world after the United States. The current worldwide economic crisis has impacted all nations, including Japan. Japanese workers are highly educated and Japan also has a high level of savings and investment rate. They are highly dependent on imported energy and approximately fifty percent of energy in Japan is from petroleum, one fifth from coal and fourteen percent from natural gas. Japan’s dependency on imported energy has projected Japan’s goal towards fuel economy and more diversification in its sources.

Honda is presently a member of The International Association of Traffic and Safety Sciences; it is also a member of the United Nations (1956), World Trade Organizations (1995), and The World Health Organization.

5.0 Advantages and Disadvantages of Operating Abroad

Honda was the first foreign auto maker to setup foreign operations in the U.S. and is believed to be the first to open factories in the U.S. They also structured the U.S. Honda to keep all of its profits in the U.S. to continue to invest, hire American workers and expand operations. In fact, Honda sales have been dropping in Japan for decades as the company relies more and more on foreign operations.
For the first quarter of 2009, Honda was the only automaker to turn a profit out of the Top 10 including Toyota, VW, GM, Ford, etc. They don't sell the most vehicles but have always made the most profit consistently, kept the money local, and invest more into R&D. For example, Honda has significant research facilities in the US while other companies have smaller or none.
Honda is one of the most diverse automakers because expertise in engine manufacturing took them into many industries! In addition to vehicles of all kinds, the lawnmower, airplanes, cars, trucks, power generators, robots, etc.; and you can find Honda in almost every situation used by almost any nationality or minority. The only area Honda lacks diversity would be in the Japanese companies and especially management. Abroad, Honda has expanded their customer service initiative, enhanced their approach of cooperative ventures with suppliers, ensures diversity in employment, encourages development in staff abilities, builds healthy working environments and enforces occupational health and safety.
Without starting its operations abroad, Honda would have never gone from a small Japanese company to a global international multinational powerhouse of 500 companies operating all over the world making more engines and moving machines that any other company!
6.0 Recommendations/Conclusion

Honda’s advantages definitely outweigh its few disadvantages. Since Honda took globalization seriously from the beginning, they have the ability to be the most flexible multinational in auto making. With local operations in each region, they are the best automaker at adjusting the amount of production. Exporters relying on a few factories cannot change things as quickly as Honda. So in the economic downturn, Honda was able to react faster and more local than all the other automakers. Therefore, Honda is more innovative and profitable than competitors, while delivery quality and value!

The price that Honda has paid is its reputation in a highly educated Japan. Without any formal education, Honda was an outcast and never taken seriously by Japan’s elite and upper class businessmen. Many customers in Japan prefer Toyota, Suzuki, Nissan, Mitsubishi and other brands over Honda. Honda was kind of the black sheep car company in Japan and after World War II; engineers would apply to Nissan and Toyota and if they didn’t get hired they would chose Honda as a last resort. Although things changed by the 80s, Honda has always had to fight for respect in Japan coming from an uneducated blue collar background. The disadvantage has led to a long decline in Japanese market share while the company grew abroad.

So in weighing the advantage of being one of the top global brands and multinationals in the world vs. a declining Japanese presence, it’s pretty obvious that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages because our modern world is becoming more and more global.

Honda’s mission is definitely global with a focus on providing quality to benefit societies around the world while saving customers money. To do so Honda sets up sales, R&D and factories in each region to provide goods and services locally. That’s much different than competitors who produce in one country and export to others. Honda seems to care more about adapting to foreign places and serving diverse customers than other Japanese companies. In fact, not only is Honda the first automaker to setup in America and build a factory, it’s really the only Japanese multinational that operates independently abroad and keeps those earnings in house to invest in each region. The result is that Honda’s benefit to society is more than just products. It’s a way of life providing jobs to Americans for example and reinvesting into each local community.

Clearly, Honda could NOT achieve its mission and goals if it stays in Japan and exports. It may have worked with the simple moped motorcycles, but starting with cars and other complicated products, customer tastes, regulations, rules, and of course costs would prohibit success. It might be possible for Honda to deliver quality from Japan, but they would not be able to achieve their philosophical goals and societal benefits including reasonable prices to customers without having setup in each region. Honda is really the only Japanese automaker that has let go of the importance of its home country’s sales to focus on worldwide success. Interestingly, it was Toyota that followed Honda to American with factories and products like hybrids. Since Honda’s disadvantage is its reputation and declining presence in Japan, the company could improve by investing more at home.

Therefore, some avenues might be an acquisition, such as taking a large position in an automaker like Mazda, or even buying another company outright. A good example might be buying a supplier like Sanyo, which is the world leader in batteries used for mobility. Honda could leverage this technology into its various operations around the world as a steady supply of batteries for products from robots to medical devices to hybrid vehicles—a good way for Honda to add Sanyo’s integrity, history and reputation to help Honda’s presence in Japan.

7.0 Bibliography

Honda Worldwide. 2009. Honda Motor Co., LTD. 4 May 2009 http://world.honda.com/about/

Honda. 2009. Wikipedia. Web.4 May 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda#Background

Honda. 2009. Wikipedia. Web.4 May 2009.
Honda Worldwide. 2009. Honda Motor Co., LTD. 4 May 2009 http://world.honda.com/profile/globaloperations/>.

Honda Worldwide. 2009. Honda Motor Co., LTD. 4 May 2009 http://world.honda.com/news/2003/c030421.html

CIA - The World Fact Book. 04232009. Japan. 4 May 2009 https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ja.html#Govt.

Phelps, Mark. "HondaJet Facing Delays; Deliveries Expected by Year End 2011." Article 433 of 444, Web.8 May 2009. http://www.flyingmag.com/news/1512/hondajet-facing-delays-deliveries-expected-by-year-end-2011.html

Sato, Masaaki. The Honda Myth: The Genius and His Wake. First American Edition. Random House, 2006. Print. (Sato 1-480)

Investing in Digital Automaking

2009-05-20T01:26:00.000-07:00

How can one invest in the future of the automobile
after over one hundred years of analogue development
during this cusp of a massive industry wide transition
to digital technologies from clean diesel to electrics???

Daimler just gave you the chance by swallowing 10% of Tesla.

As most digital automakers like Telsa are privately traded
you cannot buy their stock on the public markets so since
Daimler is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange
and owns 10% of Tesla as of the same day MPG and greenhouse
gas emissions standards started the American digital automaking
race you can research and invest in Daimler to place bets on
clean diesel luxury automaking along with Tesla power trains.

Investing $50M for almost 10% of Tesla roughly values
the leading electric sports car maker almost at half
a billion dollar company after only delivering
a hundred or two roadsters to customers, WOW!!!

Here's some helpful links for you:
NYSE: DAI on Google Finance or Yahoo Finance

Driving Digital's New Dawn

2009-05-18T13:14:00.000-07:00

The digital development of automaking will see a new dawn tomorrow
driven by new laws that deem dirty to average cars illegal!

"This is the single biggest step the American government has ever taken..."

What's the number one factor and
number one consumer benefit that
is driving digital automaking?

Many studies and most of the research over the past decade
shows that higher gas prices cause digital cars and trucks
to accelerate in sales as buyers seeks higher MPGs.

Starting tomorrow, the USA MPG bar will move significantly
higher than ever before in American history as
California's green digital screams turn into new laws
on capitol hill; the highest MPG state laws are being
studied to establish a new federal wide standard that
will force digital automaking unto all players
that want to continue to enjoy the most important
car and truck markets in the world.

CA and CAFE's millennial son could become the biggest
stick in the history of digital automaking and I'm
going to place my bets by buying Honda Motor Co., Ltd.
common stock traded on the American markets because
this digital automaker has the highest
mileage fleet being bought in the USA.

These companies also hire tens of thousands of American
workers that are working to make cars and trucks cleaner
so that our precious oil used for everything from shipping
everything you buy at every store to your toothpaste tube
to every toy to your entertainment center and computer
can last longer and we don't have to burn up the rest
running errands and waiting at stoplights.

Remember that all digital vehicles have the ability
to stop burning oil at stoplights and stop signs!!!

INVESTMENT ANALYSIS
Based on the assumption that a new race to 42 MPG
for automaker fleetwide average will take off tomorrow
the following analysis is based on Greenopia's MPG ratings
of 42 automakers from Ferrari at 12 MPG to Smart at 36 MPG
allthough the list does not include brands such as Tesla
that earn well over 100 MPG in gallon of gasoline equivalent
which doesn't matter anyway in terms of investment since we
cannot buy public stock in them. Also note that companies like
MINI or Smart are also not available as stand alone investments,
so the trick is to find the automaker that has the best MPG
AND has enough volume on a stock market to enjoy appreciation.

25 MPG BRANDS: there's only six brands
(Smart, Mini, Scion, Honda, Saturn, Toyota)
that get over 25 MPG and of those
only two are automakers (Honda and Toyota)
as Smart is Daimler, Mini is BMW (20.5) and Scion is Toyota.

How many brands at the bottom of the list are in bankruptcy?
Hummer (15.5 MPG), Cadillac (17.6), GMC (17.8), Jeep (19.1), Dodge (19.2)
and interestingly, none of these brands have launched a successful digital.

In summary, I have decided to buy shares of HMC (Honda Motor Co., Ltd.)
at market open price based on anticipation of the new federal digital race
towards 42 MPG and hope that my investment in the 500 companies that Honda
runs continue to provide us with benefits, utility and future value!!!

Digital Delivery

2009-04-22T00:25:00.001-07:00

Why burn up all Earth's liquid fuels
waiting at stoplights or running errands?

After all, almost everything you buy or rent
at probably every store or business you shop at
may have been transported by a truck...

Why not save our oil for transportation???

Fill erv Up with Digital Fuel

2009-04-20T03:51:00.000-07:00

Why does the last few meters of the World Wide Web
still run over analogue copper wires???

Could it be that a ubiquitous or commonly adopted standard
is just too embedded into society to change that quickly...

The European digital automaking world would disagree
in terms of the future of filling up on digital fuel.

Rather quickly and quietly, they have standardized
the future gas station as 3 prongs filling 400 volts.

That's kind of like gas station decades ago
deciding on the same size nozzle and octane.

For all you digital automaking enthusiasts out there,
start your 400V motors, controllers and transformers.

All those proprietary designs that R&D has spent billions on
over the past few decades will probably be replaced by a few
common ubiquitous simple yet heavy duty versions of the household plug.

Think twice before you install a special charger at home
like the ones designed for the EV-1, RAV4-EV, Honda EV, Think or Tesla.

Or who knows, maybe we'll see an alphabet soup of adapters,
cords, transformers and converters at the local Radio Shack
so you can plug in your collectible early model digital car
into the new standard just announced???

Here's the relative news links:
Agreement reached on common plug for electric cars
BERLIN (AFP) — Leading automotive and energy companies have reached agreement on a common "plug" to recharge electric cars, a spokeswoman for German energy ...

Car Companies Standardize Plug for Electric Vehicles
Caroline Reichert, a spokeswoman for the Germany energy company RWE, said leading automotive and energy companies have reached an agreement for a ...

E-car industry agrees on one plug to rule them all
Berlin - Electric car makers and power companies are to unveil this week a standard Europe-wide power plug to recharge the batteries of electric vehicles, ...

Digital Tires

2009-04-10T19:15:00.000-07:00

I went out to the truck the other day, and it looked pretty low on one side...

The front left tire was flat so I changed the tire and checked the odometer...

The Original Equipment (OE) tires were beyond their life at over
70,000 miles which meant that I drove very carefully and
constantly exceeded the EPA MPG rating...

Even though I didn't have the digital version of the vehicle.
In the gasoline Ranger rated at around 20 MPG avg,
I've been able to get 24 MPG around town and up to 38 MPG on the highway
which is almost doubling mileage or 40% OFF your $1,000 to $5,000 gas bill/yr.

For a higher mileage car,
doubling mileage would mean going from 30 to 60 MPG
or 40 to 80 MPG or even 50 to 100 MPG for advanced users.

In my last digital car with the tires pumped up on the highway behind a semi truck
it was easy to get mileage over 100 MPG for a few minutes at a time by lowering
resistance, both air and tire.

So let's take a look at digital tiremaking:

Some studies show tires eating up to 20% of your fuel energy!

One of the most expensive solutions is reported as Michelin's $43,000,000+
investment into the "Energy Saver" series of tire release in Europe
that for some unknown reason is being dumbed down as "Primacy" for the USA.

So here's a list of tires on digital vehicles installed by manufacturers
on to stock digital vehicles that were developed with mileage in mind.

"Bridgestones" - Toyota RAV-4 EV
Bridgestone Potenza - Honda Insight Hybrid USA
Continental ContiTrac EcoPlus - Ford Escape Hybrid USA
Dunlop SP31A - 2010 Honda Insight Revenge
Goodyear FuelMax (an extra mile) - 2011 Chevrolet Volt
Michelin Energy LX4 - 2007 Toyota Highlander Hybrid
Michelin Energy Saver - Toyota Prius EURO
Michelin HXV4 - Toyota Prius USA
Michelin MXV4 (215/60R 16 95H)- Honda FCX
Michelin Pilot HX MXM4 (215/45R17 87V) - 2010 Prius Hybrid USA
Michelin Proxima RR (175/65R14, self-sealing tires, tire pressure warning indicator) - Saturn EV-1
Yokohama ADVAN A10F (160/A/A) - Lexus GS450h
Yokohama ADVAN Neova - 2006 Tesla Roadster
Yokohama AVS E100 Radial (195/80R16 at 44 psi) - 1996 Toyota RAV-4 EV
Yokohama E105 (205/60R15 91H) - 2004-2007 Honda FCX Fuel Cell Vehicle

This list is a work in progress as OEM tire research
is much more difficult than expected.

Up to 106MPG for less???

2009-04-05T16:37:00.000-07:00

3 Digital Cars Cost $2,600,000,000???

2009-04-05T16:13:00.000-07:00

Going green is great but why is saving our oil so expensive?

Why do automakers claim it cost $1,000,000,000
to put digital vehicles into showrooms???

Is it the R&D, testing, regulation, insurance, etc?

Or is it overkill before getting to the showroom?

The first mainstream digital vehicle hit American roads
over 10 years ago but consumers didn't buy enough 70MPG...

Honda discontinued the digital Insight after several hundred million and five years of efforts. Toyota spent over a billion on the Prius and lost money for years until the technology went through generations of cost reductions. GM spent a billion on their infamous EV-1 and another billion on The Hybrid Development Center that led to hybrids like the Escalade.

In the heat of the Great Recession,
after borrowing over $15,000,000,000
from American tax payers,
GM has requested more money!!!

This time around, GM, the automaker born from Ford's 2nd business,
asked American tax payers to lend another $2,600,000,000 so that
Chevrolet could develop three version of the infamous Volt
that should get 100+ MPG.

Do you think a billion per new vehicle
is a feasible business model for the
new era of digital automaking???

Would you loan a digital automaker
$1,000,000,000
to develop a digtal automobile?

Based on the industry standard of
a few thousand in profits per vehicle
how many of those digital widgets
would your investee have to sell
to pay salaries run the factories
and pay you back?

There has to be a cheaper way
to get a digital vehicle on the road...

Ford's Digital Double Down

2009-04-05T16:00:00.000-07:00

Following Honda's Insight Digital Revenge and Prius Fighter,
Ford has announced some big digital numbers to look forward to:

170MPG!!!

Did you know that the Digital Insight and Prius
were rated in Japan at about 94MPG over 10 years ago???

So why are we driving cars and trucks in the 20MPG range???

Do you remember your first computer???

How much did it cost and how fast was the engine???

My first laptop cost over $3K with a Pentium 2 only 10 years ago
and today you can buy a faster better and bigger laptop for 1/5 the price.

So every few years we should expect either
1) twice as much mileage
or
2) half the price

So why have cars been going the wrong way???

Ford's Model T on a good day got over 30MPG,
what do you get today in your analogue car???

I'm guessing you paid 5 times Ford's game changer
AND you get LESS mileage...

Ford's Digital Double Down may finally change the
analogue game to digital because once we take
100MPG for granted we can start talking about
making oil last 200 years or more instead of
the century that is currently projected.

Unless we start taking numbers like Ford's 170MPG
we will burn up the rest of our oil in a short century.

Do you want to leave any oil for your great grand children???

Oil to make jet fuel and diesel
that delivers everything
you use and consume
from food to household items to clothes
to almost anything in every store...

Or should we burn it all up running errands and waiting at stoplights???

Even 170MPG won't leave enough for 7 generations
so write a letter and encourage digital automaking innovation
like Ford's bold step to leap frog the inevitable 100MPG goal line :)

Digital Insight & Revenge

2009-03-10T21:19:00.000-07:00

http://world.honda.com/Geneva2009/INSIGHT/video02/

Honda on the other hand, has Thought long and hard
about the most innovative digital release in automaking history,
that was unfortunately, followed by a gigantic business loss,
joining the EV-1, RAV-4 EV and Honda EV in terms of profits,
BUT the Honda engineers employed kaizen or continuous improvement
and will be releasing the Insight Revenge on Earth Day.

The 1st Generation Insight still holds the American Record for MPG at 70 miles per gallon for a mass-production vehicle, but in reality it was hand-built by Honda's best engineers and probably sold for half the build costs including all the engineering. Even so, only a few thousand of the world's best marathoner sold for the few short years that the Insight invited the Prius over from Japan to change automaking forever. The Insight project was shut down just like GM's EV-1, Toyota's Rav-4 EV and Honda's EV because the Insight business was bleeding to much.

The 2nd Generation Insight (5 minute video avail at link above) will release to America on Earth day and has pre-sold out around the world. Initial production was targeted at 10x the 1st Generation Insight and if Honda sells over 100,000 of these digital Prius fighers, I would have to declare digital automaking beyond the start-up phase.

Think Digital Revenge

2009-03-10T21:09:00.000-07:00

Most digital automaking smaller busineses have gone through ownership changes and some have even survived extinction with emotional and political cries saving these treasures from terrible fates like America's most infamous car faced in the crushing of most all of GM's EV-1s.

Think's electric cars actually made it onto American roads and you can still see the first generation digital golf carts running around many college campuses in the West, manufactured during a time when Big 3 Brother Ford bought Think out too early for today's digital revolution.

Apparently, things went South during the Hummer and Explorer era, at which time an idea surfaced to crush, destroy and kill the Think brand... The public reacted fast, furious and in big enough numbers to save the brand, have the prisoners of trade war sent back to Norway, and a local grassroots rebirth sprouted back here in this video on the world stage.

It's great to see one survivor of the first generation of digital vehicles: GM's EV-1 managed by Saturn, Toyota's RAV-4 EV and Honda's EV flanked by Think and other smaller startups like GEM. EV-1s are worth a million if you can find them stock, RAV-4 EV's go for double original price on eBay used when and if the few celebrities and lucky consumers let them go and the Honda EV is like a unicorn, we've heard of it and seen pictures, but have never actually watched one drive on a public road.

Think of the other hand, has come back for revenge, and is still an edangered yet protected species. We can thank educational leaders and futurists for saving the few American Thinks still helping college workers provide American kids cleaner universities.

Mercedes Better Late than Never Digital

2009-03-07T01:29:00.000-08:00

For those of you into digital engineering, Daimler, who popularized the analogue explosion engine argues that the battery might be the trick. The interesting about digital automaking is that the first generation energy storage devices like this so-called "advanced" battery are still analogue. Do you think analogue storage devices like nickel or Lithium batteries or even flywheels will be enough to engineer the digital devices that will power the next centuries and millenia? I personally think that we're just at the beginning and may see tremendous advancement in energy storage as digital automaking takes off. Daimler started analogue automaking and better late than never going digital...

Hyundai Steps up to the Digital Plate

2009-03-07T01:20:00.000-08:00

It's hard to imagine that the Korean automakers only started a few decades ago and have achieved significant penetration into the Western American market. They've proven that affordability can propel a brand into a large stage. Is the HED a precursor for the low-cost strategy that only one automaker will employ in the analogue to digital conversion? According to Michael Porter, only one firm can succeed in producing products at a lower cost than others. The best example is Wal-Mart vs. bankrupt K-Mart. One focused on low prices and the other focused on moving a pallet of anything anywhere in the world cheaper than any other company on the planet. Who will be able to automake digital at the lowest cost? Probably not the automakers in your garage... Could this design go digital and affordable?

Affordable Simple Sexy Digital

2009-03-07T01:12:00.000-08:00

Everyone is coming to the digital party including suppliers who are creating vehicles to showcase Intellectual Property that has been marinating in back office garages for decades! It's about time someone sees that automaking will follow the same path as consumer electronics and computers. A few companies make the chassis and a few more design the package sold by a few more brands. Would you rather make the guts, motors or shell? Magna is offering to let your digital automaker focus on design and branding. Just like opening a Dell, Gateway, HP or Sony laptop and finding only one of two engines and almost identical chassis in several brands. Where did Acer and Asus come from? Maybe the same place Magna is proposing...

Nissan's Old School Analogue New School Digital Marraige

2009-03-07T01:00:00.000-08:00

Nissan shows one way to get to digital! WOW! Marry old school analogue diesel explosions to the next generation of smooth motors for a ride that can go forever... Diesels don't break and electric motors have two moving parts so expect this Infiniti to live up to it's name when a derivative shows up at your dealership next decade...

Edmunds Introduces Mistubishi's Digital Experiment

2009-03-07T00:57:00.000-08:00

Mitsubishi has quietly been digital automaking for decades and the iMev has the best shot at coming to a digital dealership to your next decade!!!

California Digital Geneva Debut

2009-03-07T00:47:00.000-08:00

Headquartered in California Fisker Shows it's Digital Flagship The Karma

GM's Digital Flagship Gets European Makeover

2009-03-02T23:36:00.000-08:00

The same leader is developing the Chevy Volt and Opel Ampera as GM's Flagship to lead the digital automotive revolution in power-train technology. These amazing and complicated cars are expensive. GM's 1st Digital Bet on the EV-1 cost an estimated billion ($1,000,000,000.00) or more to develop and the Volt doesn't look that far behind with the Ampera makeover costs. How many cars will we have to buy to help GM break even on this digital double-down?

Who Wants to Borrow $25,000,000,000 of Your Digital Tax Dollars???

2009-02-26T22:51:00.000-08:00

$25 Billion to Promote Electric Cars Is Untouched

The electric car battery war

Tesla CEO: Federal loan for electric-car plant could come soon

BusinessWeek ponders lithium ion market war

Loan sought for electric cars by Nissan

Peugeot Puts Analogue and Digital Together

2009-02-26T22:34:00.000-08:00

Start Your Analogue Engines and Digital Motors!!!

Digital NOS in Spanish

2009-02-26T22:24:00.000-08:00

FREE fueled NOS braking NOT included :)

BMW's PhD Perspective on Digital F1

2009-02-26T22:22:00.001-08:00

F1 Finally Goes Digital!!!

Kinetic Digital Flybrid Boost

2009-02-26T22:19:00.001-08:00

75% OFF Digital Hybrids 1/2 Half in Weight!!!

2009-02-26T22:11:00.000-08:00

Lithium-ion finally gets a startup rival
which basically boils down the digital
fuel race down to chemical vs mechanical powered digital powertrains!!!

Ferrari Finally Goes Digital

2009-02-26T21:30:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to Ferrari!!!
I've been wondering when you were going to go digital
and the wait was worth it!!! Flywheels are sexy enough to battle horsepower with Kilojewels!!! It's great to see a world-class powerhouse accelerate the digital race!!!

The Global Digital Race Accelerates

2009-02-19T12:57:00.000-08:00

California Digital Dreams

2009-02-17T01:44:00.000-08:00

Designed in California Customized in Silicon Valley

World's Most Expensive Digital Car Made in USA

2009-02-17T01:41:00.000-08:00

If you can find one of these consider it the rarest and potentially most valuable digital car ever made. Very few were manufactured and most of them were crushed. I'm guessing a valuation of an easy $1M in decent shape today and $5-10M when digital automobiles become the majority.

Tesla hires Detroit for Designed in USA

2009-02-17T01:31:00.000-08:00

Tesla led the way opening the door for digital domination but soon realized that industry expertise is key during the growth stage. Are digital automobiles finally out of the garage? If so, will the Western United States (which designs the majority of future automobiles) continue sucking auto industry talent from Detroit, the UK and other places? If so, California, Oregon, Nevada may set the new digital curve in automaking!

California beats Detroit

2009-02-17T01:26:00.000-08:00

tZero Jumpstarts Western Digital Automaking History (Tesla's DNA is BORN)

Quickest in the West

2009-02-17T01:23:00.000-08:00

Oregon is quietly racing out front of the digital pack. Just take a look at the list of Auto X Prize teams and the long electric drag racing history. Could the state that does more trade in used automobiles than any in America be the darkhouse in the digital race? I think so. If you are a smart auto exec serious about your future, you might want to setup a small shop in Oregon and build your own digital darkhorse in stealth mode. Start your motors!

Made in USA Digital Motors

2009-02-16T23:16:00.001-08:00

How many Made in USA digital automaking jobs are these pictures worth???

The Digital Race

2009-02-05T23:21:00.000-08:00

Ford, Porsche and most successful tinkerers turned automakers got their start in racing. Ford focused on explosion engines after Edison pounded his fist encouraging Ford to drive off his limited grid and Porsche started out with hybrids setting land speed records to get the attention of Mercedes Benz father who recruited him over to Daimler. They both sought speed years before they started some of the world's longest running automakers.

Believe it or not most everything we drive has roots in racing.

Looking forward, one can only imagine if these

digital designs and digital technologies will drive

the century of digital automaking dawning today?

One of the most intensive tests on any new racing technology

is a 24 hour race like the one this Gumpert Apollo Hybrid entered.

The future is looking efficient and fast!

How fast would Edison think?

2009-02-01T22:19:00.000-08:00

Before integrated circuits (ICs) and computer processing units (CPUs)...
computers filled buildings with glass tubes to punch holes in dead trees!

The era of analogue supercomputers also spawned the greatest American genre of automaking: "musclecars!"

Right before Silicon Valley delivered the first personal computer born in a wooden box to two hippies in the 60s (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak genius billionaires) Detroit's motor city was pumping out masterpiece after masterpiece: from the 1st through 3rd gen Camaros, Corvettes, Mustangs, Firebirds, Trans Ams, Barracudas, Challengers, Chargers
to those famous components like "six-pack" "double-barrel" "4 on the floor"
the 60s and 70s were arguable the pinnacle of
American Automaking genius!!!

Then came the the Oil Embargo (1973) followed by Jobs and Woz rocking our world with the Personal Computer (PC) on April Fools, 1976!

Analogue American Automaking had a stroke as the stork delivered Digital Computers changing life on Earth forever.

Since the mid-70s American Automaking has been falling and Digital Computermaking has skyrocketed into every industry including automaking which buys 10 times more
computers than Silicon Valley type companies and develops many more digital patents than computer geeks themselves.

CAN THE HORSEPOWER BUSINESS MODEL SURVIVE???

The obvious answer is "horsepower" or "horses" which has been the basic business model ever
since Edison pounded his fist on the desk of his electric company encouraging Ford to
develop his stinky loud 4 wheel bike because it could travel beyond the electric grid.

Yes, the world's most famous electrician was the root
responsible party for 100 years of internal combustion engine
development driven by the quest for more horsepower...

Well, looking back to those beautiful 60s and 70s American Masterpieces of analogue automaking
one couldn't blame them for demanding more and more oil to feed the horsepower business model.

Unfortunately, the model broke first in the 70s killing every world class American design
except maybe the Corvette and Mustang and the engine blew in the 2000s requiring
funny money intravenous injections!!!

Shelby Hitches Electric Horsepower to World's Fastest Coach!!!

Jerod Shelby (not Carol Shelby associated with Mustangs)
has brought the "horsepower" business model back from
the dead by attaching a major Defibrillator to
the "musclecars!"

"World's Fastest Production Car"
taking the cake over yesterday's kids
and even the automaking veteran Fisker.

NOT ONLY could Jerod's Digital Masterpiece
be "World's Fastest Digital Automobile"
thanks to Jobs and Wozniak and not Edison
blowing by Tesla challenging the old adage
of "first mover" with "faster mover"
enforcing that MADE IN USA DIGITAL AUTOMAKING
is accelerating world-class status leading the global mobility revolution!!!

Congratulations Jerod AeroEVMedia@sscautos.com
enjoy this moment in the quest to become one of the
few automakers who survives the analogue to digital energy shakeout...

Revolution Y

2009-01-31T21:16:00.000-08:00

What do you get when you cross FREE wind & FREE sun with $$$ super capacitors???

A sexy yet alternative racing future based on digital fuel, tanks and get up and go!!!

Who says digital automaking can't clean, green and fast???

One look at the RORRMaxx and one could say the Revolution Y,

in other words, the design, idea, research and development of

digital transportation ideas by the LARGEST Generation EVER

to be born into and come to power in the United States of Automobiles

(YES!!! Generation Y outnumber Baby Boomers by millions)

is off and running and has hole shot out of the station!!!

HANG ON FOR A NEW GENERATION OF CLEAN, GREEN & SEXY TORQUE!!!

WAY TO GO Rory and Maxx,

you just proved that a picture is worth a thousand words

and have earned what other generation took centuries to gain

in a few simply sexy designs!!!

It doesn't hurt to be connected though

and even Bill Gates who runs the majority

of every digital computer on this planet

also had a well connected father...

My expectations will be higher

but so far you have delivery the concept goods!!!

All the luck in implenting and KEEP UP THE GEN Y DIGITAL AUTOMAKING!!!

Fisker Karma: Sexy Green Luxury

2009-01-31T00:25:00.000-08:00

The world's most important auto show
just opened to the public in "motor city!"

As predicted, the most sexy,

attention grabbing, exciting

and watched world debuts

were the Lithium and other

digital world premieres.

Fisker's Karma proves that

digital automaking is moving

from the startup to growth stage

showing that real technology

can be ramped just as fast as

a .com can develop a website!

Fisker and Tesla are starting the

digital revolution and the big

automakers are losing marketshare.

GREAT JOB Henrik and good luck

in the quest to be the last 1 or 2

digital automakers standing at the

end of the Lithium bubble...

Hybrid Option on Every Toyota

2008-08-19T06:51:00.000-07:00

Was my hybrid master's thesis too early???

Stanford didn't seem to think it would fit their
new automotive research center focused on "rethinking the automobile"

while Chrysler and Toyota (some of the largest organizations in the world)
are planning to offer hybrids on EVERY future automobile.

Looks like my three years of hybrid research from 2003 through 2006
could have been ahead of it's time... According to the Wall Street Journal at
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121883067453545253.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Toyota will follow the words of Jim Press (Toyota's ex-American boss) below
and offer a hybrid option on every single vehicle before cheap oil runs out!

How can these world's largest business bet on hybrid technology???

Well that's pretty simple:

"hybrids" are compatible with all fuels including
gasoline, diesel, E85, electricity, plutonium, water, wood, natural gas, etc.

ALSO "hybrids" are also buildable in any configuration including:
car, bus, truck, train, ship, submarine, spaceship, etc.

AND "hybrids are already powering every part of our life including:

- most freight trains that run America are hybrid
- our washer dryers are hybrid
- our kitchens are hybrid
- restaurants are hybrid
- commercial real estate buildings are hybrid
- our apartments, houses and office are hybrid

- power plants are hybrids
- our cities are hybrids or more

- our power grids are hybrids or more

- our DNA is hybrid

- our spaceships and spacestations are hybrids or more

so should our daily transportation go hybrid
or jump straight to the inevitable next step - digital???

VIDEO: Every Car Will be a Hybrid by Jim Press

2008-03-08T00:02:00.000-08:00

"Within the next three or four generations
every Chrysler product will have a hybrid platform"

Chrysler President Sees Green

Jim Press is the ex-president of Toyota America
and worked his way up to a seat on the board
as the highest ranking position for a non-Japanese
for the world's number one automaker.

He now leads the challenge at Chrysler
after heading up the Prius Phenomenal
rise to ubiquity through the Hybrid!!!

Why are the different types (full, mid, and light) and brands (Toyota, Ford, General Motors, and Honda) so important and what contributes to that?

2008-03-04T21:57:00.000-08:00

Your question is a great technical question

that people tend to get very emotional about.

So again, the future depends on who and what

regular people buy.

Kind of like brands of clothes regardless if they are made from

organic cotton or chemicals,
brands and stores and prices usually mean more.

HOW DIGITAL IS YOUR HYBRID?

So now that you understand that our world's future

is becoming more digital and that we've powered

the industrial revolution with chemical power such

as coal, oil and gas, it's easy to see the difference

between the types of hybrids and brands.

The level of digitization depends on Research & Development

in the largest business in the world for the most amount.

For example, Toyota spends 10 times Apple on R&D,

but according to a recent survey in Tokyo among 20 years olds,

most don't want a car because they want iPods and digital things.

From light to full, there are R&D costs and technologies that

depend on patents. So if Toyota has 650 patents for the Prius

mostly on the transmission, tranaxle, generator, braker, powerplant

called the Hybrid Synergy Drive, it means that Ford for example

has to make a different hybrid OR pay Toyota for licensing.

Another example, is that oil companies have the R&D patents

on some high voltage digital batteries for cars so car companies

are rumored to have to pay oil companies when people buy hybrids.

Unfortunately, how digital (light, mild or full) depends on

- costs (R&D, patents, licensing, legal)

- what and how many patents you control

- who is working for you in terms of engineers

SUMMARY

The Hybrid Synergy Drive is VERY IMPORTANT to Toyota

because they paid billions to R&D it before everyone else,

so guess what, Toyota has the most FULL hybrids on the road.

Toyota had to build a $1,000,000,000.00 factory just to make

the computer that controls the electricity in the hybrid which

is about the same amount of R&D money that GM spent

on making and killing the now million dollar EV-1 digital car.

The emotional part of R&D is pride!

Honda engineers are never allowed to work for another automaker,

so if Toyota comes up with a full hybrid, Honda will try to pursue

another idea in R&D.

WHO PAYS FOR THE RACE?

Think of types of hybrids and brands like a race

where everybody wants to wear a different color

and drive a different type of technology.

Unfortunately, the consumer has to pay

for all these different choices, failures,

and dirty secrets that costs billions.

Why or why not?

2008-03-04T21:42:00.000-08:00

From the same student below: Why or why not?

This part of the question has to do with

how the global variables will change over time.

FUTURE ENERGY

An extreme case would be oil running out.

Many people are working on this problem

because many experts believe that oil will

be gone in cheap large amounts in a century.

So some companies are making synthetic oil,

oil from plants, oil from gases and other things.

HYBRID FLEXIBILITY

The interesting thing about hybrids is that they

are compatible with any kind of chemical fuel:

- biodiesel hybrids (buses and semi trucks)

- diesel eletric hybrids (many trains)

- gasoline electric hybrids (most cars)

- air electric hybrids (trains and cars)

- hydrogen electric hybrids (e.g. Honda clarity)

- natural gas electric hybrids (buildings, houses, washing machines)

- nuclear electric hybrids (most advanced submarines)

- natural gas steam (water) hybrids (most power generation)

and I could go on and on because hybrids can
DIGITIZE any chemical technology and make
it BETTER, FASTER and/or MORE EFFICIENT!

CHEMICAL OR DIGITAL SOCIETY

So if oil runs out and we maintain a chemical society

and do not convert to a purely digital society powered

by futuristic technologies like crystals and string theory,

hybrids will always be more efficient than chemical engines.

HYBRID CONS

The down side is additional costs, although those costs

are going down everyday, while the chemical (gas-powered)

costs of building an engine have dropped about as far as

they can go for now. So hybrids will continue to threaten
chemical technologies if consumers pay the small extra.

SUMMARY
The hybrid is compatible with every gas-powered technology,

costs a bit more, and is in between the chemical and digital world.

If we choose a digital future, hybrids could overtake gas-powered

and then electrics overtake hybrids as our chemicals run out.

If we choose a chemical future, we'll continue to have wars

over natural resources and we may just end civilization

before we can burn up all the things we dig up.

Hybrids are compatible with
BOTH
a chemical and/or digital society!

Do you think that hybrid car levels will ever meet or exceed the number of gas-powered ones?

2008-03-04T21:27:00.000-08:00

Kids are getting smarter and doing research reports earlier and earlier.
From the 7th grade, I received the following question about hybrids:

Q) Do you think that hybrid car levels will ever meet or exceed the number of gas-powered ones?

First of all, let's discuss the UNITED STATES market for NEW automobiles.

U.S. COMPARED TO WORLDWIDE

Globally, NEW car and light truck sales usually run about 60 million units,

with 16 to 20 in the U.S. with the rest almost equally divided between

Asia and Europe. Because U.S. consumers (customers) are the most

high profile in the world, the U.S. market is the world's most important.

U.S. CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

There are many things that have changed the U.S. consumer recently.

2008 is forecasted to be one of the worst years in a long time due to

several factors including problems on Wall St, gasoline prices and

of course, a looming recession. These are huge factors that have

nothing to do with the kind of automotive technologies avail,

and according to February data, almost every automaker except

Honda had a drop in sales. Almost all large vehicles were down,

and only the sub-compacts like the Honda Fit spiked upward.

WHAT DRIVES SALES?

There is one variable that appears to be more correlated with

hybrid sales than the others: gasoline prices. Now remember

that the rest of the world uses liters and we use gallons.

So MPG is the consumer side of the equation and U.S. hybrids tend

to look very strong compared to miles per liter or liters per 100km.

HYBRID SALES

Toyota dominates hybrid sales and over the past 10 years

hybrids have followed the typical bell curve upwards.

From 1999 to 2007 hybrids sales grew from 17 to about 350,000.

In my 174 page master's thesis researched from 2004 to 2007,

I identified 100s of hybrids being prepared for showrooms

and forecasted the hybrid market. Experts ranged from

20% to 80% of the overal NEW car market by 2012 to 2020.

FORECAST

My forecast was based on plotting the first several years of U.S. hybrid sales

against Geoffrey Moore's Technology Adoption Life Cycle in Crossing the Chasm.

It's a bell curve and what really drives a technology from something new to

the mainstream is the average buyers. Those that may not understand the

details of how hybrids work and just want a car that gets better mileage.

Under the assumption that the first nine years made up 16% of the area under

Moore's curve, I forecasted that there was 84% of the curve left for Prius and

current generation hybrids. Simple math resulted in a 2.5 million unit market

and at $20,000 per car, it's a $50 billion or $50,000,000,000.00 opportunity.

SUMMARY

To forecast "car levels" we need to look at more than just new car sales

and the current generation of hybrids. How do we count electric cars,

plug-in hybrids, alternative fuel vehicles, etc? If you define "gas-powered ones"

as all the cars like diesel, biodiesel, E85, gasoline-hybrids, flex-hybrids, hydrogen hybrids,

then I would say that hybrids cannot exceed the number of "gas-powered ones."

There are millions of older cars on the road and when and how they are recycled

is up to other factors, usually smog laws driven by politics that has nothing to

do with hybrids being 90% cleaner than most cars.

What I can say for sure is that digital car levels

WILL exceed gas-powered cars in the longer term future.

In the short-term, fuel efficient cars will increase the most

and in the mid-term, hybrids, plug-ins and alternatives

and in the long-term vehicle that have powertrains

controlled by computers. Gas-powered cars have

computer controlled engines, but not

digital transmissions for hybrids, plug-ins and electrics.

CLOSING

The future will converge towards digital just like

the LP became the digital CD that died for the iPod

the tube became the digital transistor that enabled personal computers and flat screens, etc.

According to Jim Press who ran Toyota America to the top,

the automobile industry is the world's biggest and buys

more computers than the computer industry.

What is Detroit's Strategy?

2008-02-27T22:33:00.000-08:00

One of the world's leading automotive journalists just wrote a piece titled,
"Shooting For Last Place" at Forbes http://www.forbes.com/2008/02/25/detroit-autos-carmakers-oped-cz_jf_0226flint.html
that talks about strategy.

It's an excellent discussion of the tactics pursued by the Bid 3 in early 2008, but I argue below that "tactics" are not "strategy."

Jerry, very courageous in tackling one of the most important yet misunderstood business concepts that plagues the auto industry today: strategy.

In simple terms, the strategic problem is how to get from analogue to digital.

DIGITAL DILEMMAS
Kodak struggled with this from film to digital cameras. Hollywood and New York struggled with this from Napster to iTunes while Apple became one of the most powerful in the world. All the computer manufacturers struggled with this from IBM all the way to Dell. Even your industry Jerry, media, has struggled with the print news to YouTube's dominance. What's the common theme???

Cost cutting tactics such as laying off the most expense part of running a business or lowering the cost of sales channels like Dell did with the highly doubted www.dell.com in the computer maker shakeout are simply tactics.

Strategy is almost always confused with tactics. Detroit is focused on tactics while strategies ebb in and out with various technologies, such as hydrogen hype, hybrid phenomenon to plug-in doubts. Employees and technology comes and goes, strategy is like a ship's keel.

The bottom line is that tactics are worthless without a solid strategy.

Did Dell pursue laying off or cost cutting as a strategy? No, Dell pursued the toughest strategy, a combination of two of Porter's generics: 1) cost leadership (the ONE automaker that can make cars cheapest not cheaper) 2) differentiation (something special customers pay more for) to sell directly to the customer and 3) focus or niche (dominating a small piece of the market).

Dell's goal from Michael's (from dorm room to #9 richest American in 2007) autobiography, was to lower customer costs and increase service. This is sometimes referred to as, "best cost," and often misunderstood. Toyota just about has it, but any loss of service of cost of building any car will hurt. Dell succeeded even though the service subsided over the years.

COST LEADERSHIP
The key is that you've got to build cars as cheap or cheaper than anyone else. Dell was able to get days inventory down from weeks to eight days in his book, and it's probably lower today. This is often misunderstood as the lowest prices. An example would be Wal-Mart vs. K-Mart. Wal-Mart can move and track a pallet of anything cheaper and BETTER than any other supply chain in the world! That's cost leadership, just like Toyota executives that eat ramen instead of sushi on international business trips!

What are average days inventory for the auto industry?

Most businessmen know that a day's inventory can
translate into millions of dollars of cost savings.

Compared to Dell at 8 days, I've heard 20 to 40 is good
and during the rise of the Prius, it went negative as people
placed orders, just like shopping at www.dell.com and waited
for their hybrids to be delivered to the local dealership.

DIFFERENTIATION FOCUS NICHE
The lock is that your quality is also above industry standards because you are delivering 2) and/or 3). For Dell, that was not only the products, but the 24/7 real-time advantage of www.dell.com linked to a supply chain that ran just in time and cost accounting that only purchased things when they were already sold. In short, "build to order" or "direct."

Could you imagine if an automaker pursued the impossible "best cost" strategy with the goal of lowering the cost for the customer while delivering the BEST quality and service.

The Big 3 did this once. After Ford invented the assembly line just as Dell invented direct, Ford held costs down to help the masses open up American roads. The goal was social change and not just hiring more people or creating more dealerships. Those were tactics behind the philosophy distilled into a very clear strategy: "best cost."

Jerry, you are absolutely right in that any automaker "caught in the middle" of strategies is doomed for last place. Porter confirms this happening in industry after industry shakeout. Especially when technology matures and a new curve comes along. Firing people or closing dealership WILL NOT get an automaker to a strategy.

Stuck in the middle strategy is pursuing tactics with no strategy. For example, thinking you can be the ONLY automaker with the LOWEST (NOT LOWER OR LOW) costs and NOT LOWEST PRICES!!! Word of advice to Detroit, forget about COST LEADERSHIP and 1), leave that up to Toyota, India, China, Korea, etc.

DETROIT'S OPTIONS
What about strategy 2) and 3). This is a different story! We know that American quality is higher than expected; this is a business ace! You can build a strategy around "something special" such as high quality large trucks, BUT EVERYTHING has to be special, not just the truck. The employees need to feel special, the factory has to ooze special, the suppliers top of the heap, and in the end the price, yes it's high, but customers are happy with special products backed by special service. So the dealership in this case, would only service trucks, and do it better than Toyota, Nissan and anyone else.

What about 3) focus or niche. Porsche is a good example of differentiation strategy, very clear culture, goal and DNA, and guess what, tactics like human resources and dealerships becomes a no-brainer tactic. Small market, proud world-class employees and R&D, high prices, and lots and lots of profits. Enough to try and buy out the 5th largest company in the biggest business in the world. This would be like Tesla buying Chrysler and not the other way around. How can this be??? A clear strategy setup by Porsche decades ago.

DETROIT'S TACTICS
1) chopping heads

This tactic only supports low costs if you can replace those heads with people that can build cars cheaper than ANY OTHER automaker in the world. Otherwise, the new employees better know how to make something special or have specialized knowledge of a market niche, let's say electric vehicles.

2) closing dealerships

This tactic only supports low costs ONLY if you can run dealerships CHEAPER THAN EVERY OTHER AUTOMAKER. As far as differentiation, maybe if you're the first to be able to develop the direct model for cars, but are customers ready? Toyota did sell half a million Prius without a test drive sight unseen... How about niche? Closing dealerships MIGHT WORK if they are consolidated and moved into specialized markets. For example, shut 80% of the dealerships leaving only those in electric vehicle markets open to become the industry's top service provider for maintenance and repair of ALL electric vehicles from Golf Carts to Teslas to Volts.

FINISH LINE
When Detroit finally gives up its quest for revenues and is forced to focus on profits, there is only ONE WAY TO SURVIVE = A VERY CLEAR AND SIMPLE STRATEGY that everyone from the line worker to the greeter at the dealership can understand and take to heart everyday!

Making cars cheaper than everyone else, making special cars and making cars for a specific market are the only generic strategies available according to Porter. Only the brave can dream of mixing these into best costs and those stuck in the middle will die in the digitization of the world's largest business!

All About Electric & Hybrid Cars Nugget

2008-02-24T18:54:00.000-08:00

This post is one in a series where I capture
"nuggets" of information from books
that we can also use for our references
or to back up our arguments.

In All About Electric & Hybrid Cars by Robert J. Traister
Copyright 1982 by TAB BOOKS, INC, Blue Ridge Summit, PA

on pages 82-88 discusses controlling the speed of electric motors.

This is a very expensive and important topic
and was actually the bottleneck for Toyota
in developing the 80 G21 designs into the
Hybrid Synergy Drive that came may failures
and years later. The most expensive was the
decision to start a factory to manufacturer
power controllers because they could not source them.

Traister writes from an engineering perspective
and explains how the "gas pedal" works in electrics and hybrids:

PULSING TECHNIQUE
Rather than controlling the amount of air that enters a gasoline engine,
turning off and on the electricity to the motor depending on where the
gas pedal is describes pulsing or controlling the motor so you can drive.

SCR
Traister cites silicon-controlled rectifiers (SCRs) as the best devices
because they are highly efficient (95%). Compare that with burning
gasoline one of every four strokes (25%). Remember that electric
motors and batteries have been described as 90% efficient in my
interview with a Tesla Motors VP.

PROS = Secret Black Box
Although the SCR has no moving parts, it can clearly be wired
or programmed to perform differently. I believe that nearby is
where you will find billions of dollars of R&D monies invested
over the next 100 years of digital car development.

Probably in the system controllers that tell the SCR
WHEN, which way and what to do,
both in terms of hardware and software.

CONS = Cost
In 1982 dollars, Traister quoted SCR choppers for 400 amps
for the do-it-yourself electric or hybrid vehicle builder at
$750 to $3000 each.

Even back in the day, Traister agreeed with my silver bullet R&D hypothesis
of controllers over batteries by closing the chapter with,
"Much research and development is presently underway by various companies in the motor controller field. A listing of some of these manufacturers can be found in the appendices of this book."

The list was long 25 years ago and I've taken the time to list the names of organizations from Traister's 1983 Appendix E here ON CONTROLLERS: Brewer Associates, Cableform, Inc., Curtis Instruments, Dart Controls, Inc., EHB Systems, Inc., Electric Motion Control Corp., Electric Regulator, EVC Inc., Fengler Controls, FMC Corporation, General Electric Company, General Power Corporation, H.B. Electrical Mfg. Co., Inc., Propel Inc., RH Electronics, Robert Borsche Corporation, Ross Engineering Corporation, Sevcon, Siskiyou Energy Systems, Soleq Corporation, Uniparts Inc. and Unitron Corp.

Now that's a much lower profile yet arguably more important
list than what you see today, and Secret Black Boxes are
just as hidden even though the end product has blossomed.

The list has grown much larger into many different lists today
and one of my favorite is the Automotive X Prize Teams.

It's amazing to see so many digital auto entrepreneurs
with so few patents and hard core controller understanding.
If I was getting into the digital auto game, I would make sure
my team knew about every controller patent out there as
well as every competitor using a controller to drive a car,
then only then, could I successfully plot the tactics to win.

WHY?
Because if Toyota has a $1,000,000,000.00+ head start on SCR and controller R&D,
what company in their right mind could ever catch up. It doesn't matter if we're
talking about the next great battery, electric cars, hybrids or digital cars,
if you don't have hundreds of patents in your Secret Black Box,
you had better get a license or buy a company fast!!!

THANK YOU Traister for
spending several pages laying out a basic explanation for
tomorrow's "gas pedal" in a world accelerating the use of electrons.

TAKEAWAY
So the next time you pick a stock or judge an electric car company,
criticize a hybrid or start up your own digital automaker,
take a good hard look under the hood of the Secret Black Box.

HINT
It's the big black or silver looking thing under every hood
in plain sight with special words like Hybrid Synergy Drive
hiding billions of dollars, thousands of paychecks, hundred of patents
and the basics of what will drive the digital automotive revolution for years to come!

Which Business Score Counts???

2008-02-22T23:42:00.000-08:00

at Martin's Tesla Founders Blo g
there is a very lively debate
on how to keep score of a business.

Most of the businesses are automakers
and the products are usually cars.

The majority camp believes that products are what matter
and the minority camp (that myself and Martin subscribe to)
value business systems as more important than business products.

In Built to Last by two Stanford Professors,
the argument is deepened further,
akin to "clock building" vs "time telling."

Clock building is focusing on things in your company's DNA,
like for Toyota, kaizen, or values like frugality that help
employees on business trips order ramen instead of sushi.

Telling time is like making a MP3 player because everyone else is.

The hybrid and electric vehicle is much like the iPod for the world'
largest business and companies are all over the place in searching
for strategies: some are product based and few are systems based.

IF I WAS TO STARTUP AN AUTOMAKER SYSTEM...
I WOULD START WITH ? ENTITIES...
but let's save that for another blog, sorry...

BACK TO TESLA FOUNDERS BLOG AND MY RESPONSE TO A BLOGGER KINDLY ANSWERING MY QUESTIONS ABOUT PATENTS AND MARTIN'S RESPONSE

One of the most lively debates appears under Martin's posts on Kaizen.

In response to my question," How many patents does the Tesla Roadster have compared to the Prius?"

TEG wrote:
"Here are some examples:" and proceeded to list some important details that obviously costs his voluntary time!

FIRST OF ALL TEG, I would really like to say THANK YOU for going out of your way to do some research and answer my question. That is very kind of you!

You have taught some of the value of a blog (as I'm new to this system, although I've been scribbling for decades)...

Back to the question about patents related to the topic of kaizen.

COMPANY OR CAR???
As Martin and I try to hit home over and over, it's about the business system and much less about the product.

Kaizen is simply one example, and it DOES NOT mean that anything Toyota touches is golden. Anyway, that system had roots in Deming's work, who had also worked with Ford. So, yes you need a team AND a system, but I argue, system first, most argue team first...

Martin said:

"A lot of you seem to miss my point. Kaizen applies to the way you run a factory, work with suppliers, negotiate contracts, structure the company, etc. The whole point is to encourage evolution so that your business gets better over time and learns from its mistakes.

I am talking about evolution of business processes."

THIS IS PROFOUND AND PROVED IN BUILT TO LAST!!!

SO IF WE ARE COMPARING companies and technologies under the system approach, how do we keep score???

Traditionally, we measure sales, or consumer acceptance. That to me only measures the products, half the battle. After all, a company is a collection of resources working in a unique system.

What about measuring the system???

PATENT SCOREBOARD
I would argue that the patent trade war is a good place to start.

What is a patent anyway???

Well, is it not the result of several failures???

Trial and error inside of a business system.

If so, than the number of patents is a great metric for evaluating business systems (companies), especially startups that don't have customers yet.

BACK TO TEG's hard work on Tesla vs. Toyota patents. FIRST OF ALL, it's unfair to compare these two business systems, Toyota is a collection of hundreds of businesses and thousands of suppliers and tens of thousands of employees, while Tesla is a startup.

BUT, I was very curious to see if anyone out there knew that the G21 project that failed through 80 car designs to accidentally land on the Prius and filed 650 PATENTS ALONG THE WAY!!!

The bottleneck for the most successful digital automobile every produced was the high voltage controller. Even Silicon Valley knows little (has far fewer patents on than lo voltages) about high voltage.

Toyota plowed $1 billion into a secret factory head up by an engineer that started his career scrubbing catalytic converters 30 years prior, churning through the system of Kaizen, where failure in R&D is acceptable. Up in Northern Nagoya, the guy built the brains that became the Hybrid Snergy Drive. The product WAS NOT the goal, it was a system to run the first Prius because no supplier could come up with enough high quality controllers.

AGAIN THAT WAS A POTENTIAL $1,000,000,000.00 FAILURE (IRONICALLY THE SAME PRICE AS THE EV-1) WITH MANY SMALL FAILURES ALONG THE WAY THAT BECAME PATENTS (IRONICALLY HOW MANY GM EV-1 PATENTS ARE ON THE SCOREBOARD?).

So the reason I keep bringing the Prius into the picture is that VERY FEW people understand how many failures occured and how the Toyota system worked through those with a rush deadline for the Kyoto Protocol. The managers and engineers hated each other on the project.

The other misunderstanding is that people calculate the $1 billion dollar factory into just the Prius and don't realize it's a system that will probably last until Toyota's last day.

SO WHAT IS THE SCORE???

Toyota ($1 billion high voltage controller secret factory and 650 patents that became the Hybrid Synergy Drive)
GM's how many patents on E-Flex
Tesla's how many patents on energy management
Mitsubishi's how many patents on in-wheel electrics
Ford's (300+ related to the Escape hybrid) how many plug-in controller patents

Where we can get a scoreboard of patents on the high voltage race to the digital automobile???

PS I'm not asking for patent search help, as this is not an engineering scoreboard, think ESPN that reports the score on each of the sports systems running. Just the area of patents and number by company.

Supply and Demand for Automotive Talent

2008-02-19T16:44:00.000-08:00

Here is a quick Literature review for a project I'm working on that will survey the landscape for doctoral students in America studying advanced automotive technologies. This is to test a hypothesis that exacerbated demand by consumer behavior, energy, environment and other macro-forces will NOT be met by the pace of researchers coming out of schools qualified to work on systems engineering to design tomorrow's digital vehicles. Geography will play a major role, including nationalism. In the war between Detroit and imports, Japan is pursuing an in-house strategy while the Big 3 follow an out-sourcing strategy. If the automobile industry moves towards a built to order direct model, such as Dell assembling computers after they are sold, the R&D strategies for the world's largest business may become the most influential key success factors.

Automotive Education at the Doctoral Level

Running Head: DOCTORAL AUTOMOTIVE

A Survey of Automotive Education at the Doctoral Level in American Universities

John E. Acheson

Community College of Southern Nevada

A Survey of Automotive Education at the Doctoral Level in American Universities

Automotive research is the world’s largest Research and Development (R&D) effort. In Natural Capitalism, Hawken and Lovins (1999) emphasized that automotive transportation is the world’s largest industry. In a Washington D.C. speech at a National Press Club Luncheon, Jim Press (2006), the highest ranking non-Japanese executive to ever earn a seat on Toyota’s Board of Directors, added

It’s the largest manufacturing industry in the nation…responsible for one out of every 10 American jobs and generates nearly 4% of the nation’s GDP. The U.S. auto industry spends more than $15 billion ($22.7 million per day) on Research & Development, more than any other manufacturing industry. We buy more metals, plastics, rubber and textiles than any other business including more computer chips than even the computer industry!

American doctoral students researching automotive technologies are studied in this paper. It is hypothesized that the supply of this primary R&D input, human resources, will be strained in coming decades. As macro-forces including consumer behaviors, governmental policies, energy economics and environmental issues exacerbate demand for automotive R&D, the author investigates if the number of graduates will keep up. The following literature review reveals geography as a key variable in the location, direction and careers of RnD doctoral graduates.

Where does the manpower come from? It’s widely known that college graduates supply the majority of human resources for R&D efforts. According to Landis & Svestka (1983), engineers are an important national resource in which the supply and demand of manpower ensures economic growth: demand is driven by economics, supply is simply linked to an appropriate number of graduates.

In an article that researched American higher education, Folger (1972) studied the relationship between the supply of college graduates and manpower. He concluded that shortages and surpluses occur frequently in America and found weak links between the number of graduates and job openings. In other words, supply rarely responds to demand. Folger’s work supports the hypothesis that there could be a growing shortage of automotive engineering graduates because demand is increasing while supply grows slowly.

One of the gaps in supply and demand is geography. Cassola (2007) believes that graduates choose to stay in the same states as their schools even though the advanced manufacturing degrees he studied were “hot commodities.” M.E. (2007) described geographical ties at Clemson: the proximity of industry and academia is an important part of Clemson University’s International Center for Automotive Research’s vision to be “the premier automotive and motorsports research and educational facility in the world”. It’s no surprise that the center is located 45 minutes away from campus, centered in one of America’s leading automotive industry research clusters. Michelin’s donation of tire machinery is a concrete example of the importance of geography (M.E., 2007). In a study testing the hypothesis of American workplace attitudes at a Ford’s River Rouge Plant, Southworth & Stepan-Norris (2003) found that “geographic separation shaped class-based identity.”

In the auto industry, national identity appears to be an instrumental R&D variable. The national origin of the R&D armies in the trade war between Detroit and Japan could play a very significant role in business survival. According to author Hughes (2006), automaker supply chains are highly nationalistic. The majority of American automakers rely on thousands of supply chains linked to R&D centers based in the United States. In other words, R&D efforts are often outsourced to suppliers.

Acheson’s (2006) research shows that leading Japanese automakers maintain advanced R&D facilities in their home countries. Unlike American rivals, Toyota performs R&D in-house usually in Japan. To help build the electronic brain that controls electricity for the one million Toyota hybrids on the road like the iconic Prius, Toyota invested $1 billion a secret factory tucked into the hills North of Nagoya. Takeshi Yaegashi known as the “father of the hybrid” stayed with a single automaker from college grad to industry changing technology. His work cleaning up smog devices started decades before his ground-breaking hybrid R&D (Fairley, 2004). 30 year careers at the same company, may give Japanese automakers a competitive advantage in advanced automotive technologies. At Honda, Sato (2006) made clear that all Honda employees were hired for life: forbidden to work for any other automaker, even after retirement.

The literature review reveals that geography could be one of the most important variables in studying the supply and demand of human resources for the world’s largest R&D effort. These findings suggest that the study could evolve into a model that predicts a gap in the supply of doctoral graduates vs. demand for automotive R&D manpower.

References

Acheson, J. (2006). The Hybrid Phenomenon. Copyrighted masters thesis, San Francisco State University, San Francisco.

Cassola, J. (2007). More than spinning their wheels. Techniques: Connecting education and careers. 66, 16-18.

Southworth, C. & Stepan-Norris, J. (2003), The geography of class in an industrial American city: Connections between workplace and neighborhood politics. Social Problems, 50, 319-348.

Folger, J.K. (1972). The job market for college graduates. The Journal of Higher Education, 43, 203-222.

Hawken, P. & Lovins A. & Lovins, L.H. (1999), Natural Capitalism (Boston, New York, London: Little Brown and Company), 22.

Hughes, K.H. (2006), Are the wheels coming off the American auto industry? Chronicle of Higher Education. 52.

Landis, F. & Svestka, J.A. (1983). The demand for engineers –- projections through 1987. Management Science Quarterly, 29, 455-464.

M.E. (2007). Parking garage at Clemson’s University’s automotive research center. University Business. 10, 20.

Press, J. (2006). Toyota North American Press Room: Speeches, July 18, 2006, retrieved from http://pressroom.toyota.com/Releases/View?id=TYT2006071879732, accessed August 15, 2006.

Sato, M. (2006). The Honda Myth, New York: Vertical, Inc.

Who will win the Lithium race?

2008-02-13T00:31:00.000-08:00

Automakers spend more on R&D than any other industry. For example, Toyota spends 10 times more dollars than Apple. Getting to the Prius cost $1 billion and getting to the next digital transportation breakthrough is costing more.

The race to marry Lithium with automobiles is attracting top talent, global money powering new technologies with promising futures.

Just as entrepreneurs and corporate American filled the analogue to digital wake that Napster left in the music industry, venture capitalist and the largest organizations in the world are racing to R&D the iPod for the auto industry.

I wonder who will sell me the automobile that can drive across the digital divide and set the standard to accelerate away from the competition...

Start your Lithium teams and then engines (ranked in random order)!!!

Team Toyota: 2006 $7.7B Toyota R&D incl. 300 engineers studying Lithium chemistry vs $6.6B GM R&D's 0 in-house engineers

Team Volt: Sequoia, GM, A123

Team VW: 360 million euros to develop Li-ion batteries by Bosch, Evonic Degssa, Li-Tec, STEAG Saar Egnergie including 60 million euros from the German govt. (Automotive Engineer, Dec 2007, Vol. 32 Issue 11, p 47)

Team Nissan: NEC Lamilion Energy, A123, SAP AG

Venrock Associates, Granite Global Ventures and Gabriel Venture Partners led by Oak Investment Partners/$68MT-$40MR3 Boston-Power

New Enterprise Associates, BlueRun Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and DFJ

Element/$7.5mR1-$15MR2 Deeya Energy

Team Ford: GE, $30 million R1, $40 million R2 for A123, Sanyo

Team Phoenix: Al Yousaf, Altair

Team GM: Cobasts, Johnson

Vincent Bollore/EDF/$52.8M BatScap/Continental AG/BMW/Pininfarina/BlueCar

Team Mitsubishi: GS Yuasu, Lithium Energy Japan, MiEV

Team Tesla: $37M Musk/VantagePoint Venture Partners, Technology Partners, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson/$105M Tesla

Team Fisker: $10M Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers/Quantum

Team Zenn: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers/EEEstor/$25M Zenn/Lockheed

Israel Corp., Morgan Stanley, VantagePoint Venture Partners/Renault Nissan/Israel's Ofer Shipping Holdings/$200 million R1 for Project Better Place

Who's making Lithium batteries?

2008-02-13T00:19:00.000-08:00

This is probably the next biggest question out there. There are basically two tactics: research and develop in house or play suppliers against each other. Toyota has assembled hundreds of engineers to work on Lithium in house while GM has pit two battery-makers against each other to race the 2010 deadline.

This list will change often so feel free to suggest any additions or changes!!!

Li Batterymakers
A123
Advanced Battery Tech
Altair
Autotech
BASF
Bolloré
Bosch
Boston-Power
BYD
Concorde
Contental AG
Cobasys
Danionics (iPod)
Deeya Energy
EEStor ($2.5M Zenn + Kleiner etc.)
Ener Del
Johnson Controls
KW Energy
Li-Tec
Lithium Energy Japan
Lithium Technology Corp.
Maxwell Technologies
Odyne
Panasonic
Phostech Lithium
Nissan-NEC Lamilion Energy
Quantum
Sanyo Energy
Tesla Energy Group
Toshiba
Valence
ZAP

Who's making Lithium autos?

2008-02-13T00:07:00.000-08:00

I've been putting together this list of automakers for quite awhile now. When possible I like to link directly to an automaker's Lithium technology that's on or closest to the road, but if not available, I provide a link to some news about the technology.

Also, there's a possibility of having to go to an overseas website, like Toyota for example, that has been selling small Lithium light hybrids in Tokyo for quite awhile now. Those are called Vitz aka Yaris hatchbacks with options called the Intelligent Package. These are marketed at urban women and Toyota has quietly been selling about 10 Lithium autos per month to be the first automaker on the road.

Li Automakers

AC Propulsion
Azure Dynamics
Aptera
BYD Auto
Chrylser
Commuter Cars
Daimler
Electrovaya
Falcon
Fisker
Ford
Fuji
GM
Honda
Hybrid Technolgies
JR East
Lightening Car
Loremo AG
Miles
Mitsubishi
Phoenix
Pininfarina
Nissan
Renault
Roth Motors
Saturn
Segway
Subaru
Think
Toyota
Universal
Velozzi
Venturi
Venture Vehicles
Visionary Vehicles
Volvo
VW
Wrightspeed
Zenn
ZAP

How to study Lithium?

2008-02-10T13:05:00.000-08:00

To Patrick, Assistant Editor
The Futurist by the World Future Society

LITHIUM STUDIES
I have a hard time finding out anything about the back end of Lithium
and am pretty much following the breakthroughs in applications,
such as Stanford's Dr. Cui using silicon to 10x Lithium potential.

To me, I believe that driving is the most expensive,
dirtiest and dangerous choice we make everyday
and the potential to clean up our accelerating fleet
outweighs any mining issues.

BUT a holistic full-cycle article from mining
to electric car battery including dust to dust
well to wheel and environmental impact
is the only way to argue one over another.

I do support Lithium applications for making mobility more efficient,
but in the end, it will be up to the consumer to choose the iPod
for the automotive industry struggling with a digital future,
John

Dear Director of Stanford's Global Climate & Energy Project

2008-02-09T15:52:00.000-08:00

John

Acheson, MBA

9353 W Twain Ave, Las Vegas, NV 89147 | (415) 290-7767 | (702) 476-3293

johnmba@sbcglobal.net | http://johnacheson.blogspot.com/ | http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmba

February 9, 2008

Prof. Lynn Orr, Ph.D., Project Director

Global Climate & Energy Project (GCEP)

Jerry Yang & Akiko Yamazaki Environment & Energy Building — 4230
473 Via Ortega
Stanford, CA 94305

Dear Dr. Orr:

Thank you for the email announcing your Five-year Anniversary Special Event. Congratulations on such relevant and timely research. I am very interested in attending the event, but have relocated to Nevada from San Francisco and won’t be able to make it.

I’m writing to thank you for your publically available information, and ask a few questions. At your GCEP website under [Research], I am grateful for the reports “Advanced Transportation” and “Batteries for Electric Vehicles” as well as at the Presentations available at the Advanced Transportation Workshop summary under [Events].

It’s great to see interdisciplinary research bringing together energy and transportation. Are you integrating the ground-breaking research over at Terman? Have you considered Dr. Yi Cui’s recent breakthrough in Lithium? How will the new CarLab’s mission to “radically rethink the automobile” fit into your GCEP vision?

The reason I’m asking these questions, is because I cited your center (see Statement of Purpose) as a research example of the many projects that have taken place between automakers and Stanford over the years. Toyota’s massive contribution to GCEP intrigues me and I’m very curious about their expectations and research requests from GCEP.

I have been so impressed with the timely world-class automotive related research at Stanford’s that I recently applied to the Management Science & Engineering’s doctoral program to pursue the dream to continue my Master’s research.

I would like to thank you again for your team’s hard work and inspiration!

Sincerely,

John Acheson

Enclosure Stanford Statement of Purpose

Future Drive Nugget

2008-02-08T13:29:00.000-08:00

This post starts a new series where I will
capture "nuggets" of information from books
that we can also use for our references
or to back up our arguments.

In Future Drive by Daniel Sperling
Copyright 1995 by Island Press, Washington DC
on pages 53, 54...

Professor Sperling of UC Davis,
advanced automotive transportation expert states,
"The most advanced batteries of the future will probably
never exceed 4 percent of the energy density of gasoline.
This does not mean that electric vehicles are inherently inferior, though."
"First, the 4 percent figure overstates the difference,
because electric vehicles are likely to be at least
four times as energy efficient as comparable ICE vehicles.
Thus future batteries will be closer to 16 percent
of the energy density of gasoline."

Dr. Sperling makes an excellent point in that
comparing technologies should be done holistically.
After all, a battery is more comparable to a gas tank,
and gasoline is more comparable to let's say the type
of battery, such as Lithium or Nickel.

So to compare apples to apples, we have to consider
at least tank to wheel, which measure energy loss
from filling up to turning the wheels.

From that perspective, Dr. Sperling's future prediction
just got outdated by Stanford's Dr. Cui's work on Lithium
at the nano-level. By looking at tiny fibers of Lithium
many times smaller than a human hair, Dr. Cui found that
as we charge and use our Lithium batteries, the Lithium
fiber starts cracking. Imagine your head of hair getting
more brittle by the day and finally unable to hold a charge.

So if Dr. Cui's work is the beginning of a quantum leap forward
in Lithium energy density, Dr. Sperling's prediction drastically
underestimated the energy density potential of batteries.

But his point in incorporating the efficiency of the electric motor
to the apples to apples comparison is VERY important. One cannot
compare gasoline to batteries or even the chemistry without considering
that a typical gasoline four-stroke engine can only produce power
with one stroke for a theoretical maximum of 25%. Electric motors
are far superior, and I interviewed the VP at Tesla who firmly
answered that his motor was at or near 90%.

So I absolutely support Dr. Sperling's metric above of "four times."
From a tank to wheel analysis, if the electric motor is four times
more efficient as the internal combustion engine, then to compare
apples to apples in terms of fuel, the electric fuel only needs
to be 1/4 as powerful as gasoline for the same performance.

Of course we are ignoring things like electric cars can be lighter
with high voltage safety equipment like repelling bumpers,
and that the current electric grid is terribly inefficient,
BUT FROM STRICTLY A TANK TO WHEEL analysis,
if we add Dr. Cui's work of 10x on the Lithium side
to the four times in Dr. Sperling's Future Drive,
we come up with 40% times four which is a SUPERIOR TECHNOLOGY!

In other words, from an apples to apples comparison,
only looking at two similar cars, one Nano-Lithium electric
and the other high-octane gasoline,
the electric actually has more energy.

This result goes against almost any article,
comment, analysis or comments you'll see
anywhere in media, on the internet and from the mouth.

If Dr. Cui's nano-Lithium is brought to market,
there is theoretically more muscle in his electric car
than almost any of the muscle cars built over all time!

Thank you again Dr. Cui and Dr. Sperling
for your world-changing work, after all,
I believe that owning and driving our
cars and trucks is the most expensive,
dangerous and dirtiest choice we make
everyday!

John Acheson
jacheson@gmail.com

Line Graph and Pie Chart

2008-02-06T00:03:00.000-08:00

Figure 3.1 Auto Theft in America

Source: Department of Justice, 2000

Figure 3.2 Diversity in American Colleges

Source: Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics, 1997

Technical Communications 1

Hybrid Showers

2008-02-05T22:55:00.001-08:00

In response to my father's passion for
lo technologies accomplishing high functions,
I responded to Jay Leno's article on the
last and most cleanest steam hybrids titled,
"Jay Leno's Garage: A Case For Steam"
at http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/jay_leno_garage/1302916.html?page=2

HOTTER SHOWERS

This brings to mind the small boilers that run Japan vs. the large water heaters that sit around America. There's billions of these hybrid devices powering every modern home providing hot water for showers, washing dishes, clothes, brushing your teeth, etc.

My Japanese wife complains every Winter night (we live in Las Vegas) because she takes showers late (in Japan most everyone bathes at night and washes their hair in the morning) and the incoming water into the heater is so cold, the equilibrium is lost within a minute or so. Very inefficient, but in America, natural gas has been relatively dirt cheap until recently...

In Japan, they run Doble designs everywhere, from showers to washing the dishes, the power plant is a small backpack sized steamer that can burn your hair off. It's either on the wall right above the sink, or right behind the bathroom pipes. Very different from the huge tanks that require a separate room in most American applications of this old world wasteful technology.

The downside for American usage of this more efficient technology, is that the company would get sued to many times from non-precise consumers and there's not enough volume to satisfy our big lifestyle.

On the other hand Jay, you might be right about the emissions and impact issue. With steam or even super steam (the technology that powered WWI and the industrial revolution) we might be able to digitize Doble's idea and run a car more efficiently AND cleaner.

I'm wondering how the efficiencies compare to the 20% ICE and 40% diesel or gasoline hybrid?

How efficient is the Doble? Is it cleaner than a Prius?

Start Your Digital Engines!!!

2008-01-31T00:20:00.000-08:00

Influenced by the founder of Tesla's story here:
http://teslafounders.wordpress.com/about/#comment-1030
I wrote this short piece about why the digital car
and not the electric or gasoline or diesel is what matters:

RE About Tesla's Founder
This is a beautiful story in progress, but I would like to politely disagree with one thing.

There have been many theories about why the electric car failed. But did it?

Through the period of the car's invention and growth, the electric and steam hybrids dominated the analogue market. Kind of like AOL dominating the .com boom over copper wires.

What happened?

The internet went digital (broadband) just like record became CDs quickly replaced by the digital iPod that really took off when Jobs lowered the price of flash memory for the world in one deal (nano).

Now imagine if some startup halved the price of Lithium or nano-Lithium or crystal Lithium batteries with one order.

Why would they be making that order?

Because the car went digital, not electric!

Why did it take 10 years from CD to iPod or dial-up to broadband or Walkman to Zune or Tube to Flat Screen or book to Kindle?

Because in between the industrial age (analogue) and the information age (digital), there has to be a analogue to digital converter for the masses.

A dial-up compatible website to plug into your Kindle or TV Guide to run your device or a free cable box for broad band or free iTunes software compatible with any computer OR a hybrid compatible with any gas station.

There has to be an analogue bridge for what I estimate a 10 year period followed by a swift takeover of the analogue industry, it's players and technologies.

The electric car was never killed or came back to life!!! The analogue cars, ie steam hybrids, jet powered, hover crafts, air hybrids, fuel and tube powered electrics have been dying for 110 years.

The analogue car is dying a long awaited slow death and the digital car is accelerating out of the information revolution's garage.

The digital conversion requires a critical mass as well as followers than can safely have one foot in the analogue world and one foot in the digital world.

With 1,000,000,000 million hybrid-electrics (each of these has 300-650 digital patents involved) owners having paid extra to straddle this digital divide, the time is now for several digital organizations to fight to become the standard (like Apple and iPod) as well as many analogue giants to fall (like Zenith at worst or Pixar owning Disney at best).

Start your digital engines!!!

Kaizen = Change to Good

2008-01-30T23:47:00.000-08:00

The founder of Tesla wrote a piece on his blog at
http://teslafounders.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/kaizan/#comment-1029
that really got my creative juices flowing after playing to my
Japanese and Caucasian heart strings in love the automobile.

Reading Martin's post suddenly made me realize why I respect
Toyota and Ford, although, I've never been excited by actually
driving or using their products. It's because those founders
have actually pioneered processes and not flashy products!!!

Toyota founded, "kaizen" and Ford invented the "assembly line."

Those two management science principles power almost everything
in the digital world and challenge what's left in the industrial
world of industry and business everyday.

Kaizen
First of all, I'll borrow two quotes, "better late than never," and "failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently." This comment is a month too late, I'm sorry for your experience Martin, only time will heal, and as far as Ford, it's not about what kind of product a Ford car or truck is, but about the man that invented the assembly line.

He also failed twice because shareholders wanted an expensive car, he just wanted to race and build another one for the masses. One of his failures became Cadillac, who's focus was the highest profit margins.

Compare that to Toyota's first entry, an ugly underpowered car, that couldn't get on the freeway. Almost identical to the Prius released 50 years later that has gone on to sell one million units at $20,000,000,000 or more along with saving hundreds of thousand of gallons of gasoline.

So if Ford invented the assembly line and Mr. Toyoda studied it, were they engineers or management scientists? Well, one might argue, just as two Stanford professors do in Built to Last, that a company's true value is it's organization, grounded in permanent DNA that never goes away, but any innovative technology that goes through the system can be innovative. Building a clock vs. telling time.

The time is now for building the digital automobile and Toyota started with the Prius foreshadowed by decades of experience in processes grown from looms grounded in Kaizen.

I asked my Japanese wife to simply define this, and she has no automotive or engineering or business background.

She said, "just a moment..." then drew on a scratch piece of paper, some Kanji (Chinese characters imported by a Buddhist monk who achieved enlightenment by walking around Japan's smallest island for months on a trek people still follow today called something like 88 temples) that she thinks reads...

Searching for Kaizen
"aratameru" for the first one and
and she wasn't sure of the reading when standing alone but very clear on the meaning, "yoi."

So what does Kai from China or aratemeru in Japanese really mean? According to a quick internet search, "change, alter, improve, remodel." I would think that change and alter are Eastern and improve and remodel are modern.

Basically, we're talking about change, NOT make better, or run lean... Now take a look at every Toyota or Toyoda product from cars to houses to controllers. The Prius came from 1,000 engineers THROWING out 80 designs to get to 650 patents replaced by the 2nd generation that Hollywood bought to be made obsolete by plug-ins.

I'm not sure about better, but change is 100% correct.

So what about "zen" and not this is not the zen you are thinking about, remember, the Japanese language is the 2nd most difficult language in the world because of three alphabets and multiple meanings. My wife says that in the Kaizen combination, "zen" means yoi.

Well even I know this word. It's good, but it's a very rare way to say good. Normally, one would say, ii. For example, I'm good (full) or good job. Yoi is a different good.

It seems to carry more respect, as if something difficult or important was achieved, almost as if it's more used in the past tense as opposed to have a good day, maybe, "Wow, that was a good effort" no matter what the result was.

There's no question that you made a "yoi" effort at Tesla Martin, and the only constant in the world's biggest business is change.

So putting the two together, I come up with "change good."

NOTICE THAT THIS KAIZEN HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH LEAN or the Western definition, "continuous improvement" which was taught in my MBA coursework.

This has to do with a different perspective. Whereas the East looks at the process, the West looks at the result. Japanese doctor's don't tell patients that they have cancer and focus on the process of what got there and beyond. We want to cut it out, like firing someone who makes a mistake.

But what if mistakes are part of the "kaizen" process, or change to good as opposed to good change. What if Toyota stopped at the 2nd, 5th, 52nd or 79th G21 (Prius) failure?

We might not have a digital benchmark to beat today...

So as you build your next company, I encourage you to focus half of your early efforts on DNA that relates to the process, not the technology. DNA that make an organization, "lean" not matter what kind of transmission or controller goes through the assembly line. And maybe most important, DNA that applauds failure as another chance to start again more good!

Innovation Hacker Stanford Golfers?

2008-01-30T12:36:00.000-08:00

I couldn't help but praise the gifted
Gary Hamel
on his piece at Harvard Business titled
Innovation Hacker

http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/hamel/2008/01/innovation_hacker.html

A few days later, I walked into my office and discovered an elongated box propped up in one corner. “Oh crap,” were the first words out of my mouth when a shiny set of Wilson irons tumbled out of the package. Nevertheless, within a few days I was down at the Stanford University driving range with a bucket of balls at my feet and a 7-iron in my hand. My first swing slammed into the ground a foot behind the ball, sending an electric shock up my arms. Another hideous spasm and the golf ball was whizzing sideways, provoking startled stares from my fellow range rats. “Dear-mother-of-all-things-absurdly-difficult,” I thought, “this is hard.” And then, ten, or twenty, or fifty lunges later, I connected—and with a whizzing sound sweeter than the air intake on a Ferrari F430, that little white orb started to soar. Up it went, suspended in the sparkling autumn sky. And then, 160-yards downrange, it returned to earth, bouncing softly on the grass...

Gary,
You are an amazing gifted and entertaining while enriching writer! The business community is lucky to have you and American is unfortunate to have lost you... Keep up the great work and maybe I'll see on the Stanford links. If I get into a PhD program I applied for, you've inspired me to get my grandfather's golf bag out of the closet and hit up the driving range a 9 iron away from CarLab the center of innovation in the world's largest business that I hope will jump start the automotive industry's struggle to transform from an analogue based to digital industry.

Digital Doom and 0 Days Inventory

2008-01-29T20:19:00.000-08:00

In reponse to

Backseat Driver
Riders Of The Storm
Jerry Flint 01.29.08, 6:00 AM ET

In this industry, preparing for bad times means reducing inventories of unsold cars and trucks and cutting production. If manufacturers are not overstocked, they can ride out the bad months without losing as much money in sales incentives to lower those stocks. Having fewer cars and trucks to sell when business falls is that "ounce of prevention" mother used to talk about.

Overall stocks are lower for some automakers, and not in bad shape for a few others.

The days’ supply number is the inventory divided by the daily sales rate from the previous month. When things are worrisome, lower is better. As a rule, manufacturers don't fret too much about inventories if the supply on a vehicle is 60 days or lower.

I left the following post at Forbes.com

Comments for Comments 1-2 of 2
Riders Of The Storm
Jerry Flint
When a hurricane comes, we board up the windows and batten down the hatches. The same goes for Detroit.

Posted by johnmba | 01/29/08 11:16 PM EST

Excellent metric to focus in on Flint! In fact, most digital industries have thrown out inventory all together. Think of oil LPs vs. plastic CDs vs. bits on an iPod with a waiting list and no inventory. As the auto industry struggles just like every other industry (consumer electronics, TVs, radios, media, music, etc.) facing a digital transformation, inventory will continue to go away as JIT or the Dell or should we say Prius or Tesla pre-order model takes place. How much profits are earned from 0 days of inventory?

I've read that Dell has its supplier's trucks backed up to it's warehouse and almost through the door and then sells you a computer and finally puts things like the CPU into inventory for only during the assembly process. Now if the auto industry can narrow things down to a commuter car and light truck platform just like a desktop and laptop plastic case with everything inside customized for the end user, the digital transformation will finally turn pain into profits.

The bottom line is, "did Hollywood save music and movies with an iPod?" Nope, a hi-tech company from a related industry...

In other words, "will the digital iPod for the auto industry come out of Detroit's hurricane?" Probably not... I imagine after many startups and failures, we might see the digital car with the new interface come out of the West and/or Asia.

Detroit might want to study the demise of companies like Zenith in TVs and the slew of bankruptcy in Hollywood as music and movies went digital...

at

http://rate.forbes.com/comments/CommentServlet?op=cpage&sourcename=story&StoryURI=2008/01/24/autos-inventory-vehicles-oped-cx_jf_0129flint.html

Fired: Analogue Algae to Digital Lithium Crystals

2008-01-23T02:10:00.000-08:00

In response to
Separating the Vaporous from the Real in Electric Cars
at http://blog.wired.com/cars/2007/09/separating-the-.html
By Marty Jerome

I left the following comment...

According to Forbes, 9 of the Top 10 Global 500 were oil or car companies last year. None of the oil companies are in the electricity business and only one of the car companies had ever put an EV in a showroom. Each of these companies ALONE brings in more money than half the world's countries.

Now imagine that you ran an operation that was 100,000,000 times larger than your paycheck. Would you shut the whole thing down and give away your paychecks for life for a new technology that displaces everything from the multi billion dollar oil businessES to the many auto and transportation industrieS?

Do you have any idea how many jobs, houses and bank account you're talking about?

An estimated 2 in 10 households rely on oil to survive and 5 of 6 people on the planet have never bought a car.

Do you think 9 of the 10 biggest companies in the world and 5 billion first time car buyers can afford anything on this list?

Posted by: John Acheson | Sep 29, 2007 2:41:50 AM

...received the following feedback...

John Acheson: the loss of jobs is no reason not to change what kinds of cars one makes. That's called disruption... that's what happened when car makers started building their cars with robots, and the factories did not even need lighting because robots don't need to see, the car companies didn't have to spend as much on labor, lighting, insurance and other stuff... people lost their jobs, but they did not stay unemployed for the rest of their lives. They got new jobs, they moved on, and society was better for it.

Wherever there is a cheaper way to make something, or to use less material, or use fewer laborers, that's the smart thing to do, that reduces the overall cost of living, and society is better for it.

Posted by: Bill Dale | Oct 2, 2007 2:39:17 PM

...and closed with:

RE: Bill Dale
Have you visited an auto factory? Have you seen the robots? The ones I saw at the NUMMI tour of the only plant in the West were hidden in one small area on the line. We're talking about the joint venture between Toyota and GM, the two largest and innovative companies. Robots only do a small part of the work.

I agree that thousands of auto industry jobs will be lost to the analogue (ICE, oil, gas, diesel, hybrid) to digital (EV) conversion.

BUT, you can't ignore a pool of first-time buyers coming online that is 3 TIMES LARGER than all the people in the world that currently have cars.

So let's say we need 3 TIMES MORE oil or 3 TIMES MORE electricity AND we'll (all the drivers in the world) produce 3 TIMES MORE SMOG (three million people each year get injured or die early because of cars and trucks), what main technologies (such as the LP dying for the CD dying for the iPod) can answer this crisis?

I'm thinking analogue algae diesel in recycling loops powering ICEs on the low end and perpetual Lithium crystal energy storage devices on the high end...

How about you?

Posted by: John Acheson | Jan 23, 2008 2:10:17 AM
A

It's DIGITAL Product, Smart Guys!

2008-01-23T01:40:00.000-08:00

In response to It Is The Product, Smart Guys!
by Jerry Flint at Forbes
http://rate.forbes.com/comments/CommentServlet?op=save&sourcename=story&StoryURI=2008/01/18/chrysler-dodge-jeep-biz-cz_jf_0122flint.html

I wrote the following comment that parallels
today's auto industry struggle to the music
industry as it went from LP to CD to iPod.

In other words, a analogue to digital conversion
that kills SEVERAL companies, creates mergers,
and only the BEST digital leaders rule!!!

Posted by johnmba | 01/23/08 04:39 AM EST
Jerry, another brutally honest article backed by behind the scenes people problems! Great work aiming the problems at management, you're right! More head will probably roll and there might not be enough heads that make sense to take the last of the Big 3 to the digital frontier. Every car company is facing the same thing the movie and music companies faced when Napster and the iPod came along. Analogue Vinyl records (made from oil) might foreshadow today's Hemi V-8s. Analogue diesels and analogue-electric hybrids might be yesterday's CDs and CD players. The question is who's gonna make the digital iPod for the world's largest business? Remember that Apple failed years ago with the digital Newton and even after Napster gathered more customers than have bought the world's #1 selling car and truck, it went belly up! Do you see any cheap MP3 players (ie Chinese electric cars from Dr. Seuss) on the market? On the other hand, is Fisker and Tesla working on the iPod? It's gonna take a lot of failed products and something really special (a digital car with new interface) to create that iPod for the auto industry. And who was responsible for the iPod? One of the greatest digital leaders and managers of all time. In fact, he pulled off a digital over analgoue conversion by becoming the largest shareholder of the holy grail of music and media (Disney) in a $7.5B so called merger and suddenly the manager is the most hallowed media company's largest stockholder. This would be similar to a great digital automobile manager and technology firm merging with GM, Ford or Chrysler to become the majority shareholder. Now which manager could pull that off? Tiny profitable Porsche will be the first to try as it takes over VW, that company that invented the 45 record.
Tags: digital automobile

Stanford Statement of Purpose

2007-12-21T15:41:00.000-08:00

This statement of purpose headlined an extensive application to
Stanford's Management Science & Engineering doctoral program
that's reported to accept half of all applicants and half of those
are international students.

I come from the lowest socioeconomic quartile and submitted
a 174 page master's thesis, several transcripts including a
3.60 overall MBA GPA as well as long VITA and published
article title The Hybrid Phenomenon!

In my gut, this application ranked in the top half of all
and definitely in the top quartile of American applicants
from the lower socioeconomic quartile that don't have
the resources to buy or attend test prep courses and
materials and have to work part time jobs while earning
GPAs that may appear lower than rival upper class applicants.

This is one of the best pieces I've written in 20 years,
full of passion, research, facts, qualifications and specific
doctoral research interests that fit the MS&E program.

Statement of Purpose by John Acheson

CarLab changed everything! We were still anxious about the thought of leaving the West Coast to continue my master’s research. Over a year ago, I had to decline an interview from McKinsey’s auto research group out of Chicago because my wife and I couldn’t relocate. Two months ago, after sending my thesis to the only Automotive Engineering PhD program in the United States, I was flattered and surprised to get an email back from the faculty at Clemson. “Please, go ahead and apply.” It was completely unexpected because I didn’t have an engineering degree…

After mulling it over, I politely declined due to geography and was about to put the three year doctoral search on the shelf again... But my wife urged, “Your thesis topic is in season right now!” She reminded me that I had gotten published this year and next year would be too late. She was right, and I continued to search for the right program…

There were only a few other labs in the country, mostly around motor city. But Detroit was still studying the century long run of the internal combustion engine, and most replies I got back from professors described research on improving yesteryear’s technologies. Who was studying the automobile’s future, particularly out West?

UC Davis pioneered plug-in hybrids but lacked any doctoral offering in management. I had heard about a UCLA professor doing a hybrid engine project, a master’s racing lab in Colorado and a teacher tinkering on hybrids in Washington but I couldn’t find any groundbreaking research here in the West. Research like Dr. Cui’s recent Lithium breakthrough that will revolutionize hybrid and electric car batteries! [[1]]

I had looked at both MS&E and the GSB a few years ago. But coming from the lowest socioeconomic quartile, I’ve always assumed Stanford was out of reach. When Stanford announced plans to build a “state-of-the-art facility for vehicle research on campus,” [[2]] I couldn’t believe it! I took another look, visited the campus again, and realized that the future was happening right now in the Bay Area. With CleanTech booming in the valley, it dawned on me that Stanford could help jump start the next-generation automobile. So I started digging and was pleasantly surprised to find several automotive and related research projects (see Why Stanford?). Wow! Here was a place for my master’s research and MS&E fit my MBA major and specialty.

That’s when the news about Terman announcing CarLab hit me! Like an epiphany, I felt like a first-time home buyer that walks into that perfect house: the one you dream about for years. For me, it was the address “Quonset Hut.” [[3]] Suddenly, it seemed like I had found a place. CarLab’s research mission tapped into my passion and changed my thoughts of Stanford from an ivory tower to friendly lab. SOE now felt like a dream home: world-class multidisciplinary research, perfect geography and a family home.

I’m writing this statement to apply to the doctoral program in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford’s Terman School. My areas of interest (automotive technology, entrepreneurship, strategy, energy economics) build on my master’s research. My thesis (see The Hybrid Phenomenon master’s project)[[4]] studied oil/fuels, environment, culture, markets, consumers, technology and global impact on the automotive industry.

Why Stanford?

Joining the Stanford automotive network and CleanTech community are the most important purposes. Terman brings together vibrant innovative research that studies the future. Collaboration with Volkswagen to form CarLab is a perfect example.

Stanford’s CarLab will be the only automotive research lab in an American university poised to lead the digital future of the automobile. There’s no competition. I’ve contacted research faculty at Clemson and several schools in Michigan. I’ve visited Claremont, UCLA, USC, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, Santa Clara and Cal; U.C. Davis has an excellent transportation program but lacks business, entrepreneurship, management and strategy. I’ve collected brochures from MIT, Yale and other East Coast doctoral programs, just in case I had to replace the automotive dream with a research name.

CarLab is both. Professor Chris Gerdes explains "The mission of CarLab is to radically rethink the automobile.” CarLab “will engage the Stanford community and generate research and teaching opportunities.”[[5]]

Dean Jim Plummer is looking “forward to the state-of-the-art facility for vehicle research, where students can help develop the next several generations of automotive transportation” with an “initial focus on vehicle safety and environmental performance.”[[6]]

Stanford’s long history of auto industry research backs up the CarLab mission:

· Volkswagen and CarLab are creating a $5.75 automotive research and teaching program[[7]]

· General Motors (GM) R&D established a major Collaborative Research Lab in Work Systems with Stanford University.[[8]] Along with the NSF, GM and MS&E’s Center for Work, Technology & Organization collaborate on auto industry research for two of MS&E’s main research projects & grants.[[9]] GM is also a partner of the SOE’s Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing[[10]] as well as being one of the current MS&E industry affiliates[[11]]

· GM, Honda R&D, Nissan and Toyota are members and supporters of the Stanford Global Supply Management Forum, another MS&E research group[[12]]

· BMW, Daimler, Ford, GM, Honda, Nissan, Volkswagen, Volvo have all been design affiliates and members of the ME Design Industrial Affiliates Teaching Program[[13]]

· Over 25 years ago, Toyota hired Stanford Research Institute for a feasibility study to look into building its first United States factory.[[14]] Today Toyota runs 15 factories in North America while investing $50 million into Stanford’s Global Climate & Energy Project[[15]]

I would like to join Stanford, Terman and MS&E to “radically rethink the automobile.” The desire to study how the auto industry and its global users can overcome a climate, economic and energy crisis defines my purpose.

Dissertation Interests

Conducting research at Stanford’s world-class auto network is an opportunity to study big interdisciplinary problems. As the impact of transportation challenges mankind on a global level across our largest systems, digital is the common theme. Stanford’s position in software and innovation makes Terman researchers poised to lead a potential CleanTech automotive revolution. I want to help model this scenario.

The auto industry is America’s largest manufacturing industry. The business hires more than 1 in 10 employees in our economy. Automakers spend more on R&D than any other company. Worldwide, the most powerful industrialized countries all rely on car-making for global economic success. Cars and trucks enable growth and success while driving the largest infrastructure man has ever built.[[16]]

But the impact of the fleet is massive. Millions are injured or die each year from accidents and smog related deaths alone. Running the fleet consumes more than half of the world’s oil and produces over 50% of the emissions in many large cities. Alternative fuels are exacerbating the demand for feed stocks. With billions of first time buyers coming online in the next decades, the fleet is projected to grow two or three times: straining economics, energy, health, infrastructure and the environment.[[17]]

Our global fleet (all the world’s cars & trucks) is accelerating towards the end of our non-renewable resources while increasing societal costs and global emissions.

I would like to learn how to model the fleet and some of its systems, to measure costs and impact, while studying the digitization of the automobile as the leading answer to this global challenge. I applaud CarLab’s mission to “radically rethink the automobile” and would immediately take this challenge to heart!

Research and Passion

My master’s culminating experience best summarizes my academic excellence and teaching potential (see CV), research potential (see thesis), intellectual independence and vitality (see thesis Preface), ability to communicate research (see The Hybrid Phenomenon article) and passion for automotive technology:

During a three year period that included moving four times, a 700 mile commute, a graduate assistantship, volunteering and more, my research abilities blossomed. I…

· drove, rode, attended, talked, watched, listened and participated

· analyzed, interviewed, read, researched, wrote and edited 1,000+ pages

· distilled a 174 page MBA research project that included 186 footnotes, 24 references, seven tables, 24 figures and four appendices that summarized events, captured ten primary interviews and listed hundreds of hybrids

· earned an A+ and co-published a derivative article after graduation

I also worked part-time, ran businesses, joined academic honor societies and gave back to my alma mater’s community. Driven by curiosity and passion, three years of multiple drafts changed me from grad student to researcher to writer.

My passion for mobility started on a Big Wheel; I’ve been interested in transportation technology every since. From trikes to bikes to go-karts to mini-bikes to motorcycles to automobiles to hybrids including life without a car, I’ve gone from driver to owner to thinker to researcher to concerned citizen about the impact of mobility on mankind.

Accepting my application to the doctoral program in Management Science and Engineering can let my master’s research bloom as Stanford’s CarLab takes root. There has never been a better time and place to learn the multidisciplinary research skills and technical knowledge required to study a “brighter future”[[18]] for the automobile at MS&E’s “interface of engineering, business and public policy.”[[19]]

[[1]] Stanford Report, “Stanford’s nanowire battery holds ten times the charge of existing ones,” Stanford News Service, December 18, 2007. Available: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/nanowire-010908.html.

[[2]] S. Keyes, “Volkswagen to Contribute $5.75 million to Stanford University,” Volkswagen of America, Inc. Official Online Newsroom, November 15, 2007. Available: http://www.media.vw.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=10248.

[[3]] Stanford Report, “Stanford, Volkswagen team up to create automotive research lab,” Stanford News Service, November 28, 2007. Available: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/november28/volks-112807.html.

[[4]] J. Acheson, “The Hybrid Phenomenon.” M.B.A. thesis San Francisco State University, 2006.

[[5]] See Footnote 1.

[[6]] See Footnote 1.

[[7]] See Footnote 1 and 3.

[[8]] Stanford University, “MS&E | about us: Graduate Student Handbook 2007 - 2008,” Department of Management Science & Engineering, pg. 7. Available: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/MSandE/academics/phd.html.

[[9]] E. Pate-Cornell and Y. Ye, “MS&E | corporate: Industry Affiliates Program - PPT presentation,” Department of Management Science & Engineering. Available: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/MSandE/affiliates/index.html.

[[10]] Stanford University, “MS&E | Industry Partners,” Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing. Available: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/MSandE/affiliates/members.html.

[[11]] Stanford University, “MS&E | corporate,” Department of Management Science & Engineering. Available: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/MSandE/affiliates/members.html.

[[12]] Stanford University, “Global Supply Chain Management Forum - Members & Affiliates,” Graduate School of Business. Available: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/scforum/members/index.html.

[[13]] K. Burns, “Design Industrial Affiliates Teaching Program - A Sampling of Design Affiliates, Past and Present,” Stanford University Department of Mechanical Engineering. Available: http://design.stanford.edu/industrial.html.

[[14]] Sato, Masaaki, The Honda Myth, New York: Vertical, Inc., 2006, pg. 252.

[[15]] Stanford University, “About Us - Sponsors,” Global Climate and Energy Project. Available: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/MSandE/affiliates/members.html.

[[16]] See Footnote 2.

[[17]] See Footnote 2.

[[18]] Stanford University, “Stanford Engineering - Imagine a brighter future,” School of Engineering. Available: http://soe.stanford.edu/about/index.html.

[[19]] Stanford University, “MS&E | about us,” Department of Management Science & Engineering. Available: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/MSandE/about/vision-mission.html.

nano Lithium

2007-12-20T23:50:00.000-08:00

http://www.hybridcars.com/technology-stories/lithium-ion-batteries.html

Raw blogged response to
Lithium Ion Batteries
at hybridcars.com

nano Lithium
By John Acheson on 2007-12-21 02:50:02The breakthrough that Stanford's Dr. Cui changes everything! This could be the breakthrough that everyone's been searching for. The main problem with Lithium batteries is that the small hairs or fibers that hold the electricity have to expand everytime they are charged and then contract everytime used. That's why you don't want to recharge you batteries often and rather let them go down all the way. The reason is that the small fibers start cracking after too many reps. This phenomenon works great in weight lifting because additional fibers grow after the muscle is torn and overall the unit gets stronger. For batteries it's just the opposite. The more charge cycle, them more cracks, and pretty soon you need a new cell phone, etc. Dr. Cui found a way to use nano fibers that I interpret as a much denser sponge with many more reps. So the result is a battery that can last 10 times longer. Why is that so important? Because automaking is capital intensive and automakers have to provide 100,000 mile warrranties these days. For them, that means making batteries that last 150,000 or 200,000 so there are no bad apples that pull a Pinto or Corvair black eye on the technology. So Dr. Cui's work will revolutionize the Lithium we have now, but cause another problem. The search and mining of new Lithium deposits to keep up the tremendous demand. Fortunately for the U.S., the Americas hold an estimated half of the world's Lithium.

5,000,000,000 people dreaming of buying their 1st cars or trucks…

2007-12-15T02:27:00.000-08:00

September 14, 2007, 8:05 am
Frankfurt Motor Show: A Look Back at Tomorrow’s Engine Technology

By Nick Kurczewski with comment by John Acheson

1 comment so far...

When you compare the Internal Explosion Engine’s 122 years of evolution to other innovations it lags far behind. 1 power stroke per 4 for a theoretical max efficiency of 25% is that same as today’s cars slinging 8 of every 10 gallons of gasoline into the atmosphere as heat or smog.

Other innovations like the battery powered (several generations of chemical engines to Lithium today) mobile phone or computer (two generations of engines from vacuum tubes to transistors) or even the typical hybrid washer/dryer (from hanging things outside to natural gas-electric hybrids in almost every home) have leapt ahead in efficiency? Why? Electricity is cheaper than gasoline…

Could it be that the largest business in the world makes more money the less efficient our cars are???

It may not even matter, because even after 122 years of flat development, we only have a billion vehicles on Earth running the same theoretical engine as Mr. Benz’s patent.

I wonder what the other 5 of 6 human beings that have never bought a car will be driving next???

Do you remember what your 1st car was and how much it cost???

There’s still 5,000,000,000 people dreaming of buying their 1st cars or trucks…

— Posted by John Acheson

Why was the Prius designed?

2007-12-15T02:22:00.000-08:00

In response to
RE this car was designed mainly for congested city streets and stop/start driving
at http://www.newcarpark.com/blog/?p=59

Correction: this car was designed under the G21 project for Global 21st Century. The vision was about energy and environment. The mission was to double the mileage of a concept in R&D. The manager in charge of the 1,000 engineers demanded doubling the mileage so the team had to throw out 80 designs to get to the funky little car that became the Prius. It was designed to get twice the mileage of a standard Toyota compact to unveil right around the Kyoto Protocol. It was being driven as a visionary concept, not as a city car. It became that type of car after the popularity exceeding everyone’s expectations after celebrities bought them and the American version were modified. Did you know that Japanese version has an electric only switch? I imagine it would create lawsuits by hard users in America that would burn up the SynergyDrive 650 patents, so they left a blank spot on the dash. The Prius design was very simple, double kilometers per liter.

Hummer vs. Prius

2007-12-12T00:40:00.001-08:00

This topic goes on and on, so it's about time to post something on it.

In response to
Hummer vs. Prius
Have you heard the one about the Hummer that's greener than a Prius?

So have we, and Sierra magazine's Mr. Green has done the math to settle the question once and for all.

I sent the following email to Mr. Green at the Sierra Club:

Mr. Green,
Excellent energy analysis in the Hummer vs. Prius,
but although I'm a big hybrid supporter and spent
3 years waving the flag captured in The Hybrid Phenomenon,
there is some truth to a dust to dust analysis.

You only looked at fuel energy, and did not take into consideration
the energy to manufacturer, distribute and assemble each product.

The key difference in the Hummer vs. Prius
is Made in USA vs. Made in Japan.

Cars and trucks have what 2 to 3,000 moving parts
from around the world,
all transported by btus you didn't count.

Whether or not components are recycled,
there is still a transportation cost
both in energy AND carbon AND economics
that is rarely brought together in the same study.

How much energy is required to mine the nickel,
ship it to China, process it, then on to Japan,
then into a battery, then into a car, then onto a ship,
and then back to Los Angeles, and then onto a truck,
and then to a dealership, etc?

I heard its 500,000 gallons of heavy oil one way
for about what 2,000 cars?

Great analysis for btus on one component of 2,000
but you left out transportation and carbon impact.

It might be more green to buy local,
and fill up with the closest grease...

What if green depends on where more than what???
John

Hybrids vs. Electrics

2007-12-06T03:16:00.000-08:00

This is the most recent interview in response to The Hybrid Phenomenon.

I'm quite impressed with her deep questions
for a research paper of her choice in a
College English course as a high school student!!!

It's good to see the next generation of drivers
think before they buy that first jalopy!

Questions

1. Why choose hybrid electric vehicles over the other options- especially over fuel cells, a favorite option of the Bush administration?

According to several studies and interviews with hybrid owners, the main reasons to buy hybrid electric vehicles (hybrid) are
1) mileage
2) statement or image

The research was mostly American, where cars and trucks represent two major parts of our persons:
1) the most expensive household purchase and expense
2) fashion that we sometimes wear everyday

Choosing hybrids allows people to be selfish and giving at the same time.

In terms of technology, most hybrid buyers I talked to were not aware of the details of types of hybrids or benefits over fuel cell vehicles, which in my opinion, are all hybrids as well. Those are what I call hydrogen-electric hybrids because all fuel cell vehicles need batteries or capacitors and electric motors to work, just like gasoline-electric hybrids.

The main reason to choose gasoline-electric hybrids over hydrogen-electric hybrids is cost. Cost has several components including down payment, financing, leasing, insurance, fees, tolls, registration, maintenance, fuel, oil, etc. Convenience is the other major reason. Gasoline is everywhere, but hydrogen is very hard to find and much more expensive than gasoline. Could you imagine the insurance costs if you got in an accident with a million dollar fuel cell vehicle?

Politically, the reasons are quite different. Since carbon has become a top issue, new vehicle regulations have becoming more important. Both types of hybrids are very clean, and in fact, cleaner than most of the vehicles we have every produced. But hydrogen looks cleaner at the tailpipe.

Unfortunately, few are using overall cleanliness of the entire fuel to vehicle cycle to compare technologies.
So, hybrids are still addicted to oil, and to make hydrogen requires turning electricity into hydrogen and back into electricity.

In other words, hybrids are the best of the best in terms of efficiency,
but along the way, energy is always lost. So the reason to choose
hybrids is to save energy for the next generation.

2. Could you explain more clearly the section in your paper titled, 'Efficiency: "Well-to-Wheel" Analysis'? I was confused by the percentage values for efficiency and some of the statements, such as this one: "So for every 10 barrels of oil extracted from the earth, one to five are lost along the way to the gas station or electric outlet."

I'm not sure if it's possible to explain well to wheel clearly. It's a very complicated topic. It's kind of like explaining where the lead came from in a dangerous toy or following mercury in an unborn fetus in Oregon from a mother that ate a fish that had ingested mercury from acid rain over the ocean that might have originated in another part of the world at one of thousands factories that were powered by equipment from another part of the world and ingredients mined from some other part of the world. Every step of the way, something bad happened, but most of us just think the fish is bad...

The concise version is that there are hundreds of steps to make a car go down the road.
Since energy can never be made, at each step, energy is lost. Usually to heat.
Someone has to pay for that loss, both in terms of economics and the environment.

Well to wheel attempts to measure the loss in a holistic or full cycle way with things we can relate to,
such as efficiency, or the amount of carbon being released causing global warming. Carbon is created from heat.
Most of the 800 millions cars and trucks driving Earth have a well to wheel rating of 15%.
In other words, we pump and pay for 100 barrels of oil, and in the end,
the equivalent of 1.5 barrels turn the wheels in the last vehicle.

But what happens in between the well to the last wheel?

Helicopters, planes, heavy equipment, pumps, electricity, trucks, trains, ships, pipes, more pumps, cars, trucks and more!!!

All those things are counted in the price of gas we pay, but we don't see them.
Well to wheel wants to see them and measure them and compare the options.

Let's look at some of those steps...

According to physics, energy cannot be made. It can only transfer from one form to another. But at every transfer, there is a loss of energy someone has to pay for. It's usually heat that are lost on the way to a gas station or let's say your TV. Feel the back of your TV. It's warm or hot because it's converting electricity to video and losing energy in the form of heat. Fortunately, your TV is much more efficient that your car.

Heat represents the loss or the cost of making the electricity in a sense.
Just as heat is how your car loses most of all the gasoline you pour in.

Gasoline and fuels are exploded, thousands of times per minute,
so that you can drive your car. Explosions turn fuel into up and down motion
and then circular motion that can turn your wheels. Every step along the way,
more energy is lost. So your car's engine loses or wastes 8 of 10 gallons you
pay for and the last 2 get turned into motion. Of those last two, more gets
lost in the transmission and other parts before the wheels turn.

We didn't even count the pump that pumped the oil, the truck that transported it,
the refinery that burns it, the other trucks that deliver it again, or ships,
and all the other energy losses before you fill up at the gas station.

According to the oil expert Amory Lovins, only 1% of the energy from the beginning of the process
actually moves the drivers body (not counting the weight of the car) down the road in the end.
The rest is wasted or paid for by consumers. We pay for losses.

Now that we see well to wheel is an apples to apples way to compare,
how do the most popular cars and trucks fair?

Rough well to wheel estimates in ultimate conditions:

Gasoline powered = 15%
Diesel powered = 20%
Hybrids = 30%
Diesel hybrids = 40%

Electrics depend on how the electricity is made,
and unfortunately the electrical grid is only 50% efficient.

3. How high do you think the fuel economy standards could be if the fleet was made up of all hybrids as opposed to being all conventional vehicles?

I'm not sure because of the several articles I've read, the rules for measuring the average of the fleet are changing.

For example, the economy standards for light trucks is not the same as heavy trucks.

So I think the economy standards depend more on vehicle class,
and in America we have different classes than abroad,
so our standards will probably be the lowest in the world.

I would like to see a restructuring of the car classes more along the lines of the rest of the world.

The Honda Insight was rated at 70 MPG and many plug-in hybrids are getting 100 MPG.
But there are few heavy or large vehicles in the world getting more than 20 MPG.
Wal-Mart is trying to convert their fleet to hybrids because semi-trucks get very poor mileage.

So for the smallest class of cars, the standards could be 100 MPG using hybrid technology.

But as you move up in weight, it takes more energy loss,
and a semi truck that goes from 10 MPG to 20 MPG
is like a hybrid Prius going from 50 MPG to 100 MPG.

It's impossible to set an average with a political number such as 35,
without a breakdown analysis of the entire 230 million cars and trucks
how many in each class, and the current hybrid technologies in each area.

Even so, I feel that price is much more important than mileage,
because there are billions of first time car buyers entering the global market.

Of the 100s of hybrid owners I've talked to, none of them were first time buyers.

In fact, most hybrids owners have owned several cars and come from the middle or upper class.

A fuel economy standard without classes is like one flat tax rate for all...

4. Many people don’t believe hybrids truly get better mileage than say, diesel engines with other efficiency features often found on hybrids. How would you respond to this kind of statement?

This is an illusion caused by ignorance or a numerical illusion.
All cars and trucks get plus or minus about 20% around EPA.
The reason hybrids stick out, is that 20% of high mileage like 50 MPG is 10 MPG.
Compare that to a semi-truck going from 6 MPG to 7.2 MPG.

When an unskilled driver gets -20% down to 40 MPG,
we tend to think it means more than a truck going from 10 MPG to 8 MPG.

In fact, driving and numbers are often misunderstood.
The ignorance stems from the fact that very few people in the world
know how to drive to maximize gas mileage. Everyone knows how to
drive to maximize horsepower or from a physics standpoint, energy loss.

Theoretically, we'll have to go back to the pump to wheel part of well to wheel.
That is, everything from the fuel pump to turning of the wheels.
The explosions, heat, idling, waste, starting, stopping
and all the parts like transmission, drive shafts, wheels, etc.

In apples to apples, full hybrids are more efficient than diesels,
but diesels are more efficient than gasoline engines.

Put them together, and hybrid-diesels are the most efficient,
disregarding issues like deadly particles, environment, etc.

If we are just talking about gas mileage and gas mileage only,
and not concerned with how we make the electricity,
electrics and hybrids are at the top because they recycle energy.

Most of the other 800 million vehicles shoot energy right out the tailpipe,
and don't recycle any of it, aside from the few turbos.

In summary there are hundreds of ways to get better mileage, just increase efficiency:

Here is a list of some examples any vehicle could use,
but every hybrid has already decided to use:

- turn the engine off when the wheels aren't turning
- use electric steering, air conditioning, etc.
- better tires, higher pressure
- more slippery bodies

Diesel-hybrids would be the best of both worlds,
but generally, cars are like fashion, and you don't
see rival groups coming together.

5. I’d like to borrow one question from the interview you linked:
Is the hybrid vehicle an intermediate step to gasoline free vehicles, or will future vehicles always require some gas? If you could first answer the exact question and then add any further or new thoughts, that would be great.

Hybrid vehicles are compatible with any fuel: gasoline, diesels, E85 and biofuels, propane, natural gas, electricity, hydrogen, air, water, and more...

But hybrids are more expensive.

So in terms of which step from a science standpoint,
they are in between fuel engines and electric motors.

Assuming that gasoline free vehicles are electric vehicles,
then hybrids are a natural technological step because all
the high voltage components in a hybrid are theoretically
the same as an electric, but simply less powerful.

But humans are emotional and the best technology doesn't usually win.

Some prefer luxury, image, speed, horsepower, prestige, price, and other things over hybrids.

Others may want cheap, small, reliable, easy to see and drive, not complicated and simple.

What I'm getting at, is that cars are fashion, and demographics matter!
From socioeconomics to race to gender,
steps in the evolution of vehicles
is much more emotional than logical.

There are hundreds of thousands baby boomers and elderly that
have bought hybrids as their last step, but remember, they have
money and wanted to make a point.

My thoughts are that the upper classes will only buy hybrids for image,
maybe a 20th car.

The middle class that wants to save money and wants a green image,
might buy a hybrid as a last step.

The billions of first time car buyers coming into the marketplace from the lower classes,
cannot afford to buy hybrids.

The consumers that can afford a hybrid are using it as a last step.
They will always buy hybrids again, according to the interviews I've done.

Hybrids owners do not go back to regular vehicles,
so you can generalize that hybrids are a last step
for the people who have already bought them.

Otherwise, it depends on image and price.

6. Also- are hybrids just an intermediate step specifically towards completely electric vehicles? (as opposed to gasoline free cars that are not purely electric)

See above answer.

Do you think the 500,000 people in the world that bought hybrids
are planning to trade them in for electric cars???

Do you think the 2,000,000,000 people that want their first car,
can afford to even think about a hybrid or electric car???

It would also be helpful for me to know your credentials as an expert in this field- so if you could, list the ways you are involved with this topic and your background in it.

My main credential is the fuel for the article you read.

A California State University Master of Business Administration

culminating experience and research project that came out of

1,000 pages of research, dozens of interviews, dozens of events,

dozens of hybrids driven, three years of data collection, several drafts,

and much more in the 183 pages with hundreds of sources I could provide...

It's copyrighted and covers oil, fuels, environment, politics, pop culture, technology and the auto industry.

From a personal standpoint, I have worked on and studied cars for over 20 years,

have owned and driven and car shared and rode more than a dozen hybrids and electrics,

and am currently studying in an auto technology program that has three hybrids to study.

Academics: CSU MBA Management, UC BA Statistics

Hope this helps and let me know if you need anything else.

If you would like to share your results, I would be happy

to post them to my blog for you.

John

Oil and Lithium Reserves

2007-12-06T00:16:00.000-08:00

Our oil civilization is facing its doom. Where did oil come from? The sun right... But why can't we agree on how much oil and Lithium are left? As for oil, it doesn't matter because the demand will exceed any amount of supply, due to overpopulation of the world's cars and trucks. But for Lithium, it's WAY TOO EARLY to make any estimates on global reserves. That would be like counting the world's oil when Texas ruled the global oil supply and thought it would never run out. Very few people if any, know how much oil and Lithium are left...

We have barely scratched the surface of the oceans and other planets in our solar system.

Oil vs. Alternative Fuels

2007-12-05T00:40:00.000-08:00

Another student is writing a research paper. Here is our interview on alternative fuel vs. oil published straight up from the email:

Kenneth,
WOW!!! We've got a deadline so here it goes:

1. why is still gasoline is the first choice for motor vehicle?
It's cheap, widely available and powerful (high energy content).

It generates more money for companies and government (through taxes)
than well over half the world countries make each year.

There are quite a few business reasons,
so how about looking at this question from different perspectives:
automobile company, oil or gasoline company, consumer, airline industry

Automaker
If you are an automobile company, make a non-gasoline engine is a huge financial risk. Your customer base drops from 2 billion potential drivers down to a few million with access to alternatives. It does not make short-term financial sense to design and manufacture a non-gasoline vehicle because of the investment and time it takes to bring a car or truck to the showroom.

Take the innovative EV-1 for example. It was a great car, people loved it, it didn't use any gasoline and if you had one today, it would be worth a million dollars. But why didn't it work from the standpoint of being an automaker. That's pretty simple, there were only a few hundred customers, compared to the 230 million Americans driving cars and trucks, and it lost GM more money that you can imagine. Try over $1,000,000,000.00 invested with more than 1,000 leased for hundreds each month, it lost millions each month. GM only brought in a million or so so it's easy to say that they lost a billion or so dollars, including an expensive black eye from the public, which leads me to the 2nd reason...

Until recently, making a non-gasoline vehicle was not cool, kosher, politically correct, etc. This is changing fast! Toyota is a great example. They developed the multi billion dollar Prius for the long-run. But they could afford to lose a billion for the first 10 years before they made any profits. Even today, rivals accuse Toyota of selling the Prius for below cost. This may be partially true, as the 650 patents in the hybrid drive cost an arm and a leg (1,000 engineers, lawyers, MBAs, multiple countries, etc.) but Toyota can afford to lose money for now.

So if you're an automaker, let's say like NUMMI over in the East Bay that has to pay PG&E $1,000,000.00 each month for electricity, do you think you can afford to take a chance on a non-gasoline vehicle? How would you keep the lights on?

Tesla does, and found $50,000,000.00 in free money to try and get a license plate on the first car in a few years. Incidentally, the battery pack has over 6,000 batteries and is estimated at $40,000 vs. a typical gasoline engine at hundreds times cheaper. Which would you build?

Oil or Gasoline Company
These companies are just the opposite of automakers in a way. They make all kinds of products from crude oil. Everything from the roads we drive on to plastics we use everyday to jet fuel that delivers the majority of our perishable foods to areas that don't grow it. They have no shortage of customers, unlike automaker. Why don't they make less gasoline?

Probably money and costs. Gasoline brings in plenty of profits, satisfies Wall Street with record profits for any company for all time, and the cost of making gasoline, distributing it, with thousands of gas stations ready to buy more without additional R&D, is like owning a gold mine and shutting it down to start mining for silver somewhere else. Why stop the money coming in?

Why should oil companies lose money to make less gasoline? Why do oil companies invest so little of their profits?

Maybe they would like to maximize the investment they've made, just like any other person or company.
Maybe oil will run out so far in the future, that it really doesn't matter on Wall Street (all the majors are publicly traded held by insurance companies and other financial houses that do thing like pay for our grandparents retirement) which tends to be very short sighted focused on quarterly earnings.

The proof is in the pudding. Most all biofuel, Ethanol, Biodiesel, and alternative fuel companies are losing money so far.

Alternatives will take off when they are cheaper
and at that moment, oil and gasoline companies
will probably start heavier investing...

PS An oil company owns the patents on hybrid batteries
so for every hybrid that sells, some money goes back
to an oil or gasoline company...

Consumer
Again, it's all about the money, well mostly. There are a few drivers that will pay extra to make a statement, such as those driving $40,000 hybrids or flex-fuel vehicles, but the bottom line is that consumers can't afford to pay more for non-gasoline.

That could change QUICKLY!!! In fact, with E85 was first released it was more than 20% less than gasoline (the break even price point because E85 is 20% less powerful than gasoline = 20% less miles per gallon). But, with so many farmers selling corn to biofuel plants instead of tortilla factories, Coca Cola and soft drink corn syrup suppliers, beef, pork and chicken producers, etc. the price of corn has gone up... So has the price of food from corn chips to steaks!

So unfortunately, E85 is an example that looked really good at first, but the price has come up higher than gasoline on an equivalent energy content comparison. Right up the street from my apartment, the gas station always sells E85 for only 10 cents less than gasoline, even though both prices change everyday. If you use simple math and take the 10 cent difference and divide by the 20% less energy, the break even point at my local gas station is 50 cents per gallon. So if gasoline was 50 cents per gallon and E85 was 40 cents per gallon, they would be the same price.

Anything more than 20% price premium is too expensive for the consumer. What's more, the price is being held low by politicians giving our tax dollars to farmers and biofuel plant operators. So in theory, E85 on the West Coast is much much more expensive than gasoline.

So why would a consumer or driver or customer buy non-gasoline?
To pay more to make a statement.
Otherwise, gasoline is the first choice!

Airline Industry
Although other transportation industries such as trucking can switch over to bio-diesel (and will so long as it's cheaper), the airline industry can't. There are no planes that run on lower octane alternatives. Planes last much longer than vehicles; it's easy to find a 50s plane at any airport in perfect condition. Planes are also owned by the upper class. Millionaires aside from green celebrities can afford to buy gasoline until the end.

The good news is that visionary entrepreneurial millionaires like Richard Branson care and see biofuels in a different light. Just like the Indy 500 guys and girls filling up every race with moonshine. Why, because it's powerful and they have to buy the gasoline anyway. So again, it's attempt to reduce major costs with a feel good fringe benefit.

We can stop driving but the airlines HAVE TO keep delivering
us, our mail, our food, our goods, etc.

I'm not an expert on jet fuel, but I know it's one of the most expensive components of running an airline and there are no alternatives today!

Gasoline may the first choice until the end of the oil or airlines.

Where does a barrel of oil go?
Half to gasoline for now,
the cheapest, most available,
easy to transport and powerful fuel...

Nothing can replace gasoline!!!

We will have to be shocked into using something else
when gasoline gets up around $10 per gallon and airplane flights are triple.

If our oil civilization collapses,
let's save the gasoline for delivering
food to parts of the world that can't afford oil anymore...

2. why do we need an alternative source of energy?

I will say this twice or three times because it's not what you read elsewhere:

because the daily demand for oil is accelerating at the same time the daily supply is flattening
in other words we will soon not be able to pump enough oil every day,
in more words, the potential growing gap between DAILY supply and demand is
a MUCH BIGGER problem than global warming or cheap electricity getting less cheap.

Why? We can barely keep up today with only 800 miliion cars and trucks
or about 1 in 15 people on the planet. The number or cars and trucks
is growing daily, 2,000 new ones hit the streets of Beijing EVERYDAY!!!

Imagine 2,000 new cars and trucks in your city tomorrow,
and then 4,000 the next day, and then 12,000 on Day 3,
we're talking about as many cars and trucks in the world
that took 100 years to get to, getting rolled out into our
streets for the first time in history, all over the next few decades!!!

That's why traffic cops die in their 40s in Beijing
and everyone on the street is wearing a mask.

The worldwide fleet is expected to double and then triple soon!!!

How much oil will we need everyday, if there are a few billion cars or trucks???

There might be enough in the ground, such as the Canadian oil sands,
but those are like having a million dollars in the bank and only being
able to go to the ATM everyday and withdraw a 20 dollar bill.

Many argue that there's plenty of oil, but does it matter?

I don't think so, does 10 extra or 20 extra years matter?

Not in terms of the shock point: when the daily demand
accelerates away from the daily supply!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We need an alternative source of energy that can reduce the
DAILY DEMAND for oil. A source that can accelerate fast,
like plugging in 100 million cars at night to a socket and saving
millions of gallons of gasoline every day of the week we are not
allowed to buy gas, like in the 70's, not experimental cars that
cost millions and can only serve a few millionaires here and there.

We will not run out suddenly, we will have to ration suddenly,
and society will slow down, so alternatives are required
if we expect to continue the growth path we're on...

We need to find alternatives because of fundamental flaws in economic theory.

Under the assumption that all suns supernova
and humans will still be living here until it does:

Free trade is not free, i.e. solar energy (slow energy) is finite and NOT renewable.
All resources approach zero as time goes to infinity.
i.e., there are no renewable energy sources.
Economic growth assumes resources do not approach zero,
so economic growth will also approach zero
and wealth, money and everything tied to the
economy will also have to correct to zero.

Bottom line, without energy, there will be no economies.
If oil is finite, we need alternatives to keep an economy.
Without oil or alternatives, there will be no economy.

3. What are some ways for hydrogen to compete with oil in global market?

Hydrogen is not the same thing as oil. Oil is banked energy just sitting there.
Oil has a high energy content and more importantly we can make hundreds or
even thousands of products from oil.

What can hydrogen make? Expensive electricity
Where is it sitting? Compare drilling to catching ghosts

Physics tells us that energy can never be made and can only be transferred.
Every transfer costs energy in the form of heat or friction.

An example, natural gas and tremendous electricity and water
transfers into hydrogen while losing 50% on the electrical transmission lines
and a lot of heat into the water. So we lost a lot to get to hydrogen.

Then we have to turn the hydrogen back into electrical energy
because MOST ALL hydrogen vehicles are HYBRID-ELECTRICS!!!

Why did we change the electricity two times???

So the only way for hydrogen to compete is efficiency
which will bring the costs down.

Hydrogen transportation will have to become more efficient than oil and fuels.
Hydrogen distribution will have to become more efficient than gasoline and diesel.
The fuel cell or engine will have to become more efficient than above!

If the infrastructure beats the estimated
85% gasoline and 80% efficient diesel supply chains,
hydrogen has a chance.

But take Arizona public fleet for an example:

the natural gas starts in Canada to form hydrogen
then liquified using tremendous electricity
then filled in large tanker cars and finally shipped to Arizona
then it awaits filling into buses a minus hundreds of degrees...

Compare that with the gasoline pipeline from Long Beach harbor (one of the biggest ports in the world with oil tankers avail everyday)
to Las Vegas that feeds just about every gasoline station and fueling company. Just pump the gasoline and out it comes 350 miles away.

The hydrogen infrastructure will have to get to 90% efficient,
and that is not possible without pipelines and slow energy.

What taxpayers and companies will pay the billions for that?
California has been trying for 10 years and there's only a few pumps and a few trucks
out of tens of thousands of gasoline pumps and 230 million cars and trucks in America!

4. what can government do to convince to buy hyfrogen powered vehicle?

Government taxes us and spends the money in exchange for politician votes or support.

So they could use tax dollars to make hydrogen vehicles look cheaper.
Maybe if it increased votes or lobby dollars,
but I doubt hydrogen can become sexy like hybrids.

We're trying to convince people to buy E85
and it looked cheaper because we all paid for the corn and stills.

Hybrids are a good and bad example.

They were made cheaper with tax credits, free parking, free commuting lanes, free bridge tolls, etc.
in other words, us tax payers paid for hybrid driver benefits...

Did politicians make a difference?

According to my research, of the dozens of hybrids buyers I studied,
two main reasons came up over and over:
1) mileage
2) image

Saving on taxes or free parking or free tolls was NEVER a PRIMARY REASON
for buying a hybrid, even after the govt convinced us the breaks mattered.

So for hydrogen, there would have to first be main reasons such as
1) mileage or cost
2) image
then with those in place, govt could stimulate additional sales through incentives...

There's no sense in spending tax dollars
to lower the price of a HYDROGEN VEHICLE
from $1,000,000 to $900K with tax breaks is there?

The wild card might be govt getting into the grey areas of conversions,
such as plug-in hybrids or hydrogen conversions on regular gasoline cars and trucks...

But in the end it won't really make a dent in the 230 million vehicles America is in love with!

5. How important do you think it is for U.S. to reduce its dependence on foreign oil?

That's a loaded question because it focuses on the U.S.
as if the U.S. is the only customer for foreign oil.

Take Japan for example, it's been importing 99% of its oil for decades,
and runs an estimated 40% nuclear. France runs 70% plutonium I believe...

Everyone is dependent on foreign oil in the industrialized world.

Brazil and Iceland are outliers that I don't have time to talk about,
but it can be done, much like a addict goes on medication.
For Brazil it's destroying the rain forest for sugar cane Ethanol
and for Iceland I believe there's natural geothermal accelerating
due to global warming, which is basically geographical luck,
like the Middle East sitting on the largest free bank accounts
in the history of our civilization!

So if we are focusing JUST ON THE U.S. then we have to think about
the U.S. in terms of geopolitical terms. We have a lot of natural gas,
we make half our electricity from coal, we have less than 1% overall
solar and wind after 25 years of welfare and development, etc. etc.

We also have 230 thirsty addicted cars and trucks than need
gasoline or diesel EVERY DAY, TODAY, TOMORROW, DAY AFTER,
NEXT MONTH, ETC. that's about 3 of 10 cars and trucks in the world.

So we've got one of the largest fleets in the world,
one of the largest demands for electricity in the world
and we have the largest military in the world.

We also have the world's most powerful economy.

If you believe in survival of the fittest,
the U.S. will be the last country that
will be able to control and consume
foreign oil. Who will stop us?

How important is that? Depends if your American or not...

So reducing our dependence is more of a political show right now,
and you've got politicians mistakingly placing global warming above oil.
That's like cutting out a lung cancer and smoking a pack through the hole in your throat.

I'm saying the problem is the GLOBAL daily supply and demand,
the cigarettes, not the sick lungs...

It's like there's one milk to go around for each school lunch,
but suddenly, there are twice then three times more students,
as one to two billion worldwide and global citizens buy their
first TVs, VCRs, PCs and they plug in... Then they buy their
first cars and trucks and go down the gas station and fill up...

The U.S. is the biggest bully in the cafeteria,
we pay the cheapest price for gasoline in the industrialized world,
so why should we reduce our oil dependency,
when we pay the least and spend the most?

When it becomes a moral issue!

If our oil dependency kills people, in other words if you believe
that deaths in IRAQ or asthma deaths in Long Beach from
kids breathing the ports and trucks emissions is related to
our foreign oil dependence, then we have to do something!

I think it's VERY IMPORTANT to reduce our oil dependency
if it's directly related to killing human beings.

As far as global warming and other reasons,
are polar bears more important than American kids
dying early from lung problems due to breathing foreign oil byproducts?

Death is a very important reason to reduce dependency on foreign oil.

6. is it possible for U .s. to be free from oil?

It's more possible for the U.S. than other countries.
We have more money and more power and more guns.

If there was something out there more valuable than oil,
let's say the diamond planet they discovered larger than Earth
as a fun example, the U.S. would probably get there 1st,
if diamonds could fill up our gas tanks that is...

9 of the Top 10 Global Fortune 500 companies ranked in terms
of money coming in every year are either oil or car companies.
The 10th is Wal-Mart which has the largest truck fleet around.

These companies make much more money than more than half the countries in the world.

If you made as much money as a country,
would you give that away to corn or hydrogen?

We are very lucky to have the cheapest gasoline prices in the modern world,
and in fact, I believe that is why we maintain the strongest economy in the world.

The only way to free ourselves from oil is to find a co-addiction,
something either cheaper and worse than oil
or better and more expensive.

Could it be Back to the Future space ships powered by
banana peel reactors and Lithium batteries?????????

Probably not in our life times, so we should probably focus
on the one or two billion cars and trucks coming online soon
as most first time buyers can't afford non-gasoline vehicles
and want the same things we have, a car and a mobile phone.

A cheap clean vehicle for every grandchild
is just as important as leveling off our oil demand.

In fact, if we don't start making cheap alternative fuel vehicles,
even if we manage to get off half the oil, we're going to need
three times as much for the rest of the world anyway...

One thing is for sure,
electricity is making a run for oil.
Look at Tokyo for a glimpse of the future,
99% imported oil, don't need a car or truck,
electric trains are connected to everything,
but 40% nuclear and bad air and water...

Oil is too powerful and too cheap to be replaced,
only shock treatments can change our behavior now.

We (U.S.) will start to slowly move away from oil at 10 dollars per gallon,
but the one or two billion people that are buying their first car or truck
can't really be stopped from buying a cheap gasoline vehicle
unless we "radically rethink the automobile!"
by Prof. Gerdes at Stanford's CarLab.

I say focus on the new cars and trucks NOW,
remember that hybrids have already saved
500,000,000 gallons of gasoline already!

How much oil have hydrogen or electrics saved?

Running out of oil is probably the only way to be completely free of it as a civilization,
as I said before, airplanes may never be free from oil.

We can work together to
free parts of our society,
certain communities
interested in freedom from oil.

I heard cars and trucks maybe be banned
in some large cities around the world soon...

Sincerely
John

How Much Lithium or Oil is there?

2007-11-13T02:25:00.000-08:00

How Much Lithium or Oil is there?
in response to
The Road to Lithium Car Batteries
Avail at http://www.hybridcars.com/news2/road-to-lithium-car-batteries.html

By John Acheson on 2007-11-13 02:25:05

Our oil civilization is facing its doom. Where did oil come from? The sun right... But why can't we agree on how much oil and Lithium are left? As for oil, it doesn't matter because the demand will exceed any amount of supply, due to overpopulation of the world's cars and trucks. But for Lithium, it's WAY TOO EARLY to make any estimates on global reserves. That would be like counting the world's oil when Texas ruled the global oil supply and thought it would never run out. Very few people if any, know how much oil and Lithium are left...