Thoughts

The main talk around the automotive industry is to move away from the traditional combustion engine and more towards hybrid (half combustion, half electric) or full on electric vehicles (EV). We see this all over the industry, whether it’s LG teaming up with GM to build more EV vehicles, or Ford and Toyota teaming up to work on new hybrid systems for Trucks—clearly the industry that’s relied on its foundations in the old Model T are looking to the present for answers to the crisis—people want more fuel efficient cars and cleaner running cars. I look back to our own decision to go with the Toyota Prius after our Mazda CX-7. We wanted to reduce our fuel consumption because gasing up the CX-7 each week was terrible and we wanted to put less CO2 and other emissions into the air. These choices are fueling more and more American’s and I would venture people in general around the globe to look inward at their own behaviors and then turn to their respective local automotive vendors to provide answers to meet those needs.

Whether or not which technology is best goes back to the speculation between Blu-Ray and HDDVD or Beta Max and VHS. That isn’t the purpose of this post to argue the merits of each technology. But what is at the core is how EV will fit into our everyday lives.

Let’s take a look at a typical scenario. You live in one city and your friends live in another. Let’s say that there’s some distance in between, for the sake of this argument I’ll take the distance between Joliet, IL and Sun Prairie, WI as this is a trip we make a few times a year. The distance between the two location is 167 miles, or roughly 2 and a half hours driving. I would say this is pretty much the extent of how far someone would be willing to drive in one day as 5 hours driving (2 and a half up and the same back home) is quite a long time. Let’s assume for the sake of this scenario that your EV can make the trip one way, but will require a charge to get back home.

In the current context this scenario is fairly easy to digest. You’ll top off your car before you leave. When you get to where your going, presumably you are going to maximize the time you have with the people you are visiting and therefore will park your car at their home and when your ready to leave you will get back into your car, realize that you need some gas, and drive to the local gas station to fill up before your return trip home. Alternatively you could pull the handle on the slot machine and start heading back home hoping you’ll make it or rest on the belief that between the two locations you’ll find a gas station to your liking (we prefer to only gas at BP stations, so this makes it more difficult for us to pull off the gambling option). Pretty straight forward.

Let’s look at the same situation, but only approach it from an EV standpoint. Now most EV are going to have a limited range to begin with, so most likely your going to initially charge it before your trip, but when you get to where you’re going, you are going to need to charge again. This is where things get tricky. As it stands there is yet a nationwide EV charging infrastructure. There are a lot of discussions around evolutions of charging stations that you would presumably see around parking lots, traditional gas stations and other area’s that your car parks for any period of time. But that still assumes that your car will be there for 30-60 minutes time. This is a stark comparison to today’s 3-5 minutes that you would typically spend filling your car with gas. But also many homes are being outfitted with home ports in their garage that allows for EV charging on a 240 volt circuit vs the traditional 120 volt circuit. Many new cars that are coming out are extended range EV, meaning that they have a backup system to allow for extended range using more traditional combustion engines. The Chevy Volt is an example of this, as is the 2012 Toyota Prius EV. But nonetheless, your car is going to take between 3-8 hours to charge depending on the volts. But we also now need to take into consideration that while you have guests over to your home and you have to accommodate them by feeding, housing and possibly entertaining them, we must also pay to charge their EV. All indications seem to suggest that off-peak rates and the draw of approximately 1-1.5 kilowatts of power. This will certainly not be a deal breaker for most people, but what happens in situations that you are having a party and you have multiple or tens or hundreds of guests? What do you do?

If we look at the future picture a bit closer, the practicality of EV on a large scale seems to be missing a serious logistic component to how do we make everyday occurrences a reality? Will parking lots across our nation have a charging port for every space? Will they be metered or free? If we think about how fast new technology is adopted we don’t have to look that far into our history. For example, television was a major technological advancement of the last century and was commercially available since the 1920’s and was widely available for most by the 1970’s, so 50 years for mass adoption. The internet was available back in the 1980’s and was widely adopted by 2009, so that evolution only took 20 years. The iPhone was released back in 2007 and arguably started the mass cultural smartphone revolution that only took a few years to become widely adopted]annote=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iphone”]. Clearly the evidence shows that the time it is taking us to adopt to new technology as we become more and more proficient in these changes is dramatically decreasing. It is safe to argue that while we may think that EV adoption will take 50+ years, that the reality is people will gravitate towards these technologies to meet their growing needs and concerns.

The outstanding issue still is logistics, how do you bring this new technology to the market without adaquate infrastructure to support it? I go back to smartphones, if we relied on the old aging CDMA/TDMA networks that provided our traditional mobile phone conversations and dial-up speeds, the evolution of smartphones would most likely not have happened as people would not see the benefit of having a device that was slow. The same would apply to EV—if the infrastructure to make everyday life driving decisions is not supported and requires special adaptation, then adoption will take much longer. For instance, would the internet have taken a foothold if every home had to be specially wired with a T1? It probably would have, but the adoption would have taken many more years.

There are several possibilities to addressing these EV logistical issues. For example, roads are fundamental throughout the United States. One possibility would be to retrofit the roads with charging tracks that when driven over would over time recharge a vehicle. In essence, then the car would be in perpetual charging modes while being driven. Charging stations need to be improved to dramatically reduce the time at the charger to bring the charge time down to < 30 minutes. Additionally batteries need to be dramatically improved to both hold better charges so you can drive longer distances between charges, but also not be as dramatically impacted by changes, such as weather. If we look at the driving distances in an EV between mild (normal) climates and cold (winter) climates, we have to wonder what kind of adoption EV will have in states and countries that see the vast part of their year in tundra-like conditions. I’m not arguing that combustion engines don’t also face degraded performance in winter conditions, but the wide availability of fuel and fundamentally easier to maintain engines make for an easy argument to say that combustion engines in those types of climates will still dominate people’s preferences.

Just like how FDR laid down a nationwide foundation to have an interstate highway system to address the growing need to be able to traverse our country by gas or diesel powered vehicles, we need a similar program to provide the interstate accessibility to EV powered vehicles. Taking on this initiative would demonstrate our commitment to this technology and how prepared we are to integrate that into our day to day lives, but also provided the needed infrastructure to allow every-day American’s accessibility to this technology.

The site has just been online for a few days now with the CloudFlare service. So far things have been great, the pages are actually loading much faster now and I couldn’t be happier.

But an interesting thing came out. By and large, I was unaware how much of my content was being requested from abroad. CloudFlare has an interesting feature where they indicate which search engine the request is being crawled from, and a surprising trend surfaced:

OMG! Really? Google is only 36% of my traffic compared to Baidu?!?! Surprised can hardly explain things for me as I didn’t realize that the Great Firewall of China wanted to view my content but surprised nonetheless.

I’m what you would call a fanatic when it comes to computer hardware and accessories. Always looking for the next best thing and I’m certainly someone who likes to take the risk and find out for myself what a product is all about–at times this is a detriment!

I have had the Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000 for some time now. There are several things that I really enjoy about this mouse:

• Comfortable, one of the best feeling mouse I’ve used
• Battery life, great as long as you remember to turn it off
• Laser not optical

But the mouse has some issues with the Bluetooth stack or hardware on my laptop and periodically disconnects and reconnects. Kind of annoying.

It is because of the later issue that I sought to get a replacement. Mind you nothing was really wrong with this mouse, but I wanted to find something that had higher responsiveness, quieter mouse wheel scrolling, and less issues with Bluetooth and connectivity.

Bring in the Razer Orochi Gaming Mouse. Let me start out by staying what a cool looking device! Something right out of a science fiction movie, like a Cylon futuristic mouse of sorts.

Now this was a situation where I saw multiple purposes. Since the mouse is targeted as a gaming mouse, my initial thought was that I could use this for both my desktop gaming mouse (yes, thinking about World of Warcraft again!) as well as for my work laptop. Multi-purpose equals win!

Wrong. First off lets look at the positives.

• Smooth scrolling
• Detachable USB cord so you can game wired and also use it via Bluetooth
• Constantly connected, nice connectivity to current problematic Bluetooth hardware/stack.
• Adjustable speed controls
• Uses AA batteries vs AAA batteries
• Blue Laser works on more surfaces, better response

Now you would think that those would be worth the upgrade. I certainly initially thought the same. But after using it for awhile, one very large issue came to light–the mouse was REALLY REALLY uncomfortable to use for long periods of time and really did feel right when gaming.

From a gaming perspective, I’m comparing this to the Logitech G5, which if you know anything about the mouse is longer, wired, and weighted. These all make for comfortable use and in a 3 hour raid situation comfort is paramount! And while working with the mouse via Bluetooth, I found myself not getting a comfortable feel (this is all subjective mind you as others hands and use may be completely different) and would be literally painful to use for long periods of time.

All in all, I decided to go back to my trustworthy Microsoft Notebook 5000 mouse and ditch the Orochi. I find this to be a shame, but alas so is the risk with upgrading to the latest thing that has looks over function!