May 13, 2008 by Rob.

Nissan played a gutsy card today (story on NPR) with an announcement to have a viable (if ugly) EV on the market by 2010, about 5 years ahead of other majors. I’m glad to hear the news, but am more surprised by their CEO’s motive:

According the the NPR story: Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn says. “The number of people buying cars around the world is increasing, while the need to reduce emissions is becoming more urgent. There is a perceived conflict between the demand for more cars and the demand for a cleaner planet — 10, 20 or 30 percent lower emissions cannot be the only answer. The goal should be 100 percent lower emissions.”

This supports one of my favorite themes: while the US lives high on the hog and is looking for incremental efficiency, the real markets for products is the developing world. Competition for energy will be ferocious in those markets while in the US we can “create” energy by just conserving what we waste (see MIT article on our enormous carbon footprint).

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May 13, 2008 by Rob.

Oh, I did. Here’s a link to an NPR story about monitoring drivers to improve their driving efficiency. It turns out that you can boost mileage 10-20% if you give people feedback about the cost of their bad habits.

As part of my thinking about EVs, I’d considered starting a company around this idea. It turns out that putting useful computers into people’s cars is both painful and expensive. You’d have to save a lot of gas to make this work. That doesn’t mean I’ve given up on it though…

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