Henry Phish

So in part 1 of this article, I wrote about several car companies that were making the leap into the Plug-In Hybrid business with cars and SUV’s. In Part 2, I want to discuss the eventual results of these technological enhancements and how they may affect the world at large.

First, we’ll start by saying that the current infrastructure we have in the United States will not be enough to support future growth of the automotive sector.

Automobiles that require a plug-in jack will require electricity from power plants, and the added drain on the current power grid would most likely not leave enough electricity for everyone. Even today, many parts of the country have difficulty keeping up with demand for electricity, and the added strain on the system would most likely cause brown outs in many parts of the United States.

Ultimately, this means we need more power plants, and that electricity will become more expensive as demand increases. Coal and nuclear power are the two most likely utilities to be affected by this change, and it wouldn’t surprise to see a change in the pricing of these utilities even within the next few years.

The positive side of moving from gas power automobiles to coal and nuclear power plants is the resulting drop in carbon emissions. Air quality across much of the US will increase. Pollution caused by the power plants themselves will rise, but will only affect localized areas.

As paraphrased in an article by one author:

One criticism of plug-ins is that, by shifting fuel consumption from cars to electric utilities, they potentially concentrate particulates and other nasty emissions in certain geographical areas. The study mostly allays these concerns. A small number of areas do see an increase in pollutants, but the large majority of the U.S. will experience a meaningful improvement in air quality.

One final result of moving from a traditional gas engine to electric hybrid is the ability to build these vehicles with the idea of using non-traditional fuels such as ethanol blend or biodiesel, both of which are renewable resources and burn cleaner than traditional fuels.

As stated in the study above, adopting plug-in technology could result in about 10% of the carbon exhaust reductions we need to stabilize the climate.

I stumbled across another video on the creation of the Chevy Volt and how GM is beginning to release details of the car to prove the seriousness of their claims. Generally car makers are overly secretive about their unreleased products, but the Volt is different, and could ultimately be a game changer for the the struggling automotive industry.

Of specific note in this article is the reviewers comparison of the vehicles interior to an IPod, as well as the description of the new lithium-ion battery powering the car the size of which is nearly half of it’s first generation predecessor. It’s also good to see the renewed excitement coming out of GM these days, since the domestic car industry has taken a pounding in recent years for it’s low ratings in both mpg and hybrid technologies.

My first thought is wondering if GM will make a more economical version of the Volt in the Intel Celeron or IPod models, with a stripped down battery that would, for instance, only run 20 miles on a single charge as opposed to 40 as the Volt is currently spec’d. It would be an interesting idea, as no doubt concepts from the Volt will eventually be integrated across the GM line.

I also like the idea that the cars gas engine could run on biodiesal, which is a good move for the future of the brand, since renewable alternative fuel sources are a strong selling point for an economy overly dependent on oil; which is essentially the entire concept of the Volt in a nutshell.

It should be interesting to see how this progresses.

The Electric Car That Could Save GM

General Motors new concept, the highly touted and electric plug-in compatible Chevy Volt, has begun to ramp up it’s ad campaign in recent weeks. I’ve seen articles on the internet, television commercials, and a plethora of videos on youtube. The car is set to roll out full production by 2011.

I’ve written about Hybrid Plug In’s before in relation to my ethanol articles, but having read an article on the future of the industry, I thought it only safe to say I should address it again.

I’ve mentioned before in the article The Bad Side of Ethanol that a few third party companies have begun retrofitting cars to use a battery that can plug into a standard wall socket to recharge. Charging takes something along the lines of 9 hours with a traditional socket or less with an upgraded supercharger. Officially, these after market cars have never been officially sanctioned by the automotive industry, but now companies such as Chevrolet, Saturn, and Toyota are jumping into the mix with cars of their own.

Cars such as the Chevy Volt, Saturn Vue, Ford Escape, Ford Edge, Toyota Prius and 1/X Concept, Dodge Sprinter, and Jeep Renegade are leading the pack to bring this relatively recent technology into the mainstream. Of special note is the Chevy Volt, which in a departure from its predecessors, runs completely on electricity, a significant change that could inspire a whole generation of clones.

Another interesting side note is that most of these cars are actually SUV’s, which makes an interesting point: how do you continue to sell automobiles that have consistently had the worst gas mileage in the market? The other day I saw a documentary that stated that mpg for SUV’s has barely changed since the 80’s in comparison to the dramatic changes we’ve seen in cars over the last few years. With high interest in these continued markets, and the high rate of return for these big ticket items for the sellers, these items should continue to set a precedent over time.

Otherwise, the more or less traditional Toyota 1/X Concept and the Prius Hybrid come as no surprise but continue to support rising demand. Still, as technology changes, the future of the hybrid industry seems more and more to be in all electric cars such as the Volt, as opposed to the more traditional gas guzzling models of yesteryear.

So I guess my only questions are: how does this affect the power companies as they try to keep up with new demands for electricity? Also, how does this affect the fuel cell industry?

Just some things to think about.

Carmakers’ Plug-In Plans

So now we come to Toyota.

When it comes to socially ineffective, Toyota is not the first company that comes to mind. Quite the opposite in fact. With cars such as the number one selling Toyota Prius that runs predominantly on electricity and gets a gas mileage of 48 MPG city and 45 MPG highway, Toyota is paving the way in social conscienceness.

Even their less prestigious models such as the workhorse Toyota Corolla have excellent gas mileage and continue to have a high resale value even after five years of ownership. It’s this commitment to excellence that makes Toyota a great company and a major indicator of things happening in the global market.

From their initial creation and implementation of the Toyota Production System, a precursor to the Six Sigma concept, Toyota blew the lid off of the competition by making the workers own experiences the focal point of their company. The workers know what works, and they know what doesn’t, and each employee is given the power to make their own mark on the company and deliver the best possible quality product. Everyone from the line workers to management are accountable for the end result, and if one of the line workers sees an issue crop up with one of the cars, they have the power to stop the entire line operation with the push of a button until the issue is fixed. This kind of empowerment gives workers the ability to control outcomes, it also allows for a greater sense of satisfaction, and in turn better workforce engagement. With Prius leading the charge as the number one alternative fuel vehicle and the company positioned as the number one company in worldwide sales, Toyota is the best at what it does.

GM and Toyota — Who will be Number One?

This trend toward quality over quantity has been growing in the last few years. Companies like Toyota and Honda are recognizing the need to grow their brand, and to do so they’ve emphasized giving the people what they want, affordability, comfort, craftsmanship, and ultimately resale value.

As stated in one article by Jeff Zygmont:

“Recognizing the allure of low depreciation, Honda pursues a strategy aimed at maintaining high resale rates.

The pillars of that program include striving for high quality and durability so its models will remain desirable even after they rack up lots of miles. Honda avoids building more cars than it can sell and adjusts its factory output to match consumer demand, Naughton says. It also avoids selling to car-rental and commercial fleets. Both strategies prevent over-supplying the market, which depresses used-car prices. Balancing supply with demand also negates the need for sales incentives, which reduce used-car values by reducing new-car values.”

This method of marketing appeals to both new car buyers and used car buyers alike in that it is much less wasteful than many current marketing strategies. The cars themselves maintain a significantly higher value than many other automobiles, and this translates to higher values for used car dealers at the time of trade in as well. Further, you maintain brand loyalty for their next car, as well as a built in sales pitch for an up sell later on in life. A person buying a Toyota will most likely buy there again when shopping for the family sedan or SUV. Likewise, you may even be able to interest them in an Avalon or Lexus if luxury is more their style. But ultimately, the key idea to take away here is that customer demands have driven the market, and what the consumer wants is something that fits their lifestyle.

Other companies have joined this Solid State marketing revolution as well. Solid State meaning: giving consumers a product with a high sex appeal and less breakage. Apple Inc, for instance, maintains it’s prices by limiting operation issues and creating computers, phones, Ipods, etc that last longer and perform better than their competition. Resale on Apple products is far superior to its comparable PC counterparts. Another example is Pixar, now a division of Disney. Their production quality, always phenomenal, continues to bring audiences to the theater year after year. Likewise, Disney has had similar success in marketing the videos releases of these films, inflating the market by limiting the quantity; videos are released only every few years to high demand. Consumers continue to use the product until it’s eventual demise, and often pass these movies on to their children, continuing the consumer cycle. The high sentimental value of the brand lends itself to open other avenues of revenue as well, in the sale of toys, books, and games.

This method of selling Solid State appeals to a wide variety of customers and raises the bar for other companies in their respective industries as well. Customers get a better product, and while they may pay more up front, they can hold on to the product longer. Unlike the disposable culture of the early 2000’s, where E-Machines were completely un-upgradeable, the Windows platform experienced the blue screen of death, and everyones favorite cell phone always seemed to fail at the most inappropriate of times, technology has advanced to the point where these items must work better than their predecessors and must have a consumer life cycle that assumes that the product can be reused or recycled; consumers demand it.

The moderate to low end solutions will always have a place in the market, but it’s the high end of technology that continues to advance the industry and paves the way to better, and less wasteful, consumerism.

I have an article coming up in a couple of weeks that touches briefly on the iPhone as well as other Apple products, so I’ve been looking around and doing some research, which just happens to coincide with the launch of the new iPhone G3. It looks like an interesting product, and like most Apple products these days, it tends to set the bar for products in it’s category.

Looking around at all the different reviews, it’s funny to see how negative most of them have been in the last few weeks leading up to the launch. On the whole, most of the reviewers seem to be looking for a completely new product, which doesn’t really fit with Apples traditional marketing plan; basically releasing a really cool product that everyone jumps on, then release the low cost dumbed down version as well as the up scale, though slightly cheaper alternative. Then, charge the heck out of the consumer with services. It’s something they’ve made a killing at with products such as iTunes and their Mac OS X. It’s a tried and true methodology that has worked for everyone from Intel to Pepsi and it isn’t going away any time soon.

Anyway, getting back to the iPhone G3 itself, to see a more well rounded review than the ones mentioned above, check out:

Newer, Faster, Cheaper iPhone 3G

So now we have a problem. Who are all these people?

Every day you interact with people. Over the phone, on television, email, and in person. Ideas, thoughts, philosophes, and problems are everywhere. There is so much information, and so many people telling it to you that it becomes impossible to make sense of it all.

As Ashton Kutcher is so fond of depicting in his socially provocative show “Beauty and the Geek,” peoples views of social hierarchy are often ruled more by their perception than any actual physical limitations.

So what are our perceptions?

The truth is, that this is a very large topic…much larger than I want to cover here…but on the whole, perceptions of sexuality, intelligence, cultural upbringing, and religion all carry with them a certain amount of archetypal belief model that is easily passed between people.

Everyone knows what a Catholic is, or a black person, or a gay person, or a geek, or a Mormon. Some of these archetypes are considered social norm, while others are considered social fringe. These belief systems can change from culture to culture and people group to people group, but within any given society there tends to be a social norm that most people can agree on.

So now, with the death of tech, we’ve had a fundamental change in the fabric of this social norm. Where once the term geek symbolized a social dysfunction, post tech boom, the geek lifestyle, as shown by its rise in popular culture: movies, literature, and television, has become the social norm.

So how does that change our perceptions?

The term geek affectively becomes meaningless.

This is a bit of a misnomer, since our definition hasn’t fundamentally changed, but the scope of how it is viewed by the general population has. If the term only covered five people with distinguishing characteristics before, it now covers fifty with several other, less definable characteristics. Effectively, we’ve watered down the terminology to fit a larger group of people.

So what does this mean?

People have become more aware of their environment and the people around them. Though with a less defined view of those they encounter on a daily basis. It makes the question, “Who are these people?” more difficult to answer, since the basis of our conclusions has taken on a more abstract context. In simplest terms, just because someone wears glasses doesn’t mean that he or she is a nerd… However, cause and effect relationships have become more important as our context broadens, since without our standard definitions to fall back on, people are forced to deal with their current situation as opposed to relying on preconceived notions. For instance, if I hurt someone physically or emotionally, how does that affect them? How does that effect me in return?

So what is the ultimate result of this shift in the world view?

Social affectedness.

In retrospect, the 90’s really was the defining point of the tech generation. With the advent of the Macintosh and the original Windows, for the first time since the dawn of computing, anyone with the will to do so and a pile of money could own and operate a computer. Parents bought them for their kids to do homework. Working adults bought them to work from home. And everyone wanted to talk tech.

By 1992, the first CD-Roms were just coming into common use. Floppy disks grew on trees and looked just like those little square data devices from Star Trek. RAM was $150 bucks for 4 megs, a far cry from the 1Gb for 60 bucks in todays economy. And Egghead Software was still a word used in common vernacular. Thus began the age of the personal computer.

From the dawning of the personal computer was born a new dialect. Conversations about ones hard drive or how many Mhz their computer could go were just sex to anyone within earshot of the water cooler. The internet livened things up even more, introducing: chat, email, online dating, movies, games and porn to a generation of men and women looking for an instant fix, opening the way to a “cool” lifestyle. Online gaming such as Quake, Everquest, and eventually World of Warcraft brought people closer together, even as they got farther apart. Gaming addiction and porn were claimed to lead to decreased social interaction, eating disorders, and an increase in the failure of the institution of marriage. Video games were cited as causing anti-social behavior, just as books and music had done before them. The ultimate example of which took place at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, where a group of anti-social teenagers killed several of their classmates in a style reminiscent of a first person shooter. All in all, peoples lives became more and more intermingled with technology, and technology in turn ruled their environment.

As time went by, computers became more portable; wireless networks became all the rage to the modern college student and working adult looking to use their computer in an increasing variety of venues. Restaurants, bars, movie theaters, and hotels began to integrate wi-fi into their business models. Further, computers and cell phones were smaller and lighter than ever before and could process more information than a super computer from a decade earlier; plus, they were beginning to be disposable…when you were done with it, you could throw it away.

By the end of the 90’s and the beginning of the 2000’s, prices had dropped, and computers were available to everyone, not just middle class adults. Computer tech was getting cheaper to produce and was appearing everywhere from your wrist watch, to kids toys, to your blender. This paved the way for broader acceptance, and ultimately America had a computer in every household mentality. Everything was easier, faster, cheaper, better…and to reiterate the point again…it was disposable, disposable, disposable…

Okay, so once technology became disposable, it simply stopped. Not stopped exactly, but it became so much a part of the pop culture; it became so iconoclastic, that technology ceased to exist as a separate entity and just became…well, “it.”

It could go anywhere, it could do anything. It could swing polls, start and end wars, send a kid off to college or open a restaurant to rave reviews. With “it,” you were negotiating with social credit, and not just tech. This was a step in the right direction, because “it” was what ultimately brought people back together. Now it was about the interaction and how people could bump into one another. From this idea, Internet 2.0 was created. With sites such as Ebay, Wikipedia, Second Life, MySpace, and Youtube, the users could control the content and others could interact with it.

For the first time, people could go anywhere, be with people, surf the net, have complete control over their environment, and completely ignore technology all at the same time.

Having just read about McCain’s attempt to jump start the economy with the new Ebay model, I simply had to give my two bits on the subject.

While I can honestly see his point about promoting small businesses, since the popularity and personal benefits of these jobs have become an important part of the economy in recent years, it seems kind of crazy to ignore the importance of products and services as staples of the modern United States. We had the same problem with the tech boom of the 90’s. For Yahoo and Google to make their money it took years of tweaking and problem solving to establish a viable business model, and while Ebay is an exemplary example of a large scale liquidation company and can optimistically work as an online web presence for legitimate enterprises, it seems hard pressed to call it an end all be all solution for a slumping economy. While I agree that information is critical to continued success in business, and small businesses in general should be supported, it just seems kind of stupid to put all our eggs in one Ebay shaped basket. The great thing about this country has always been its diversity, and it’s important to support this or risk stifling innovation…innovation being the backbone of the modern independent business.

Well, it’s legitimit. Cell phone are no longer allowed during flight…not that they ever were. Still, I’d always heard the rumors of why cell phones were banned during flight, and now at least I can back it up in writing.

According to the Associated Press:

“Existing rules require cellular phones to be turned off once an aircraft leaves the ground in order to avoid interfering with cellular network systems on the ground. The agency began examining the issue in December 2004.

Federal Aviation Administration regulations also restrict the use of cellular phones and other portable electronic devices onboard aircraft to ensure against interference with the aircraft’s navigation and communication systems.”

Of course that still doesn’t prove anything since the FCC statement concluded that “there was “insufficient technical information” available on whether airborne cell phone calls would jam networks on the ground.”

I for one feel cheated by this article seeing as I would gladly risk death at 30,000 feet, as well as messing with other peoples cell phone signals in order to prove them wrong…the latter would probably be fun, the former…might hurt a little. I really hope you know I’m being sarcastic.