Why This Tesla Motors Co-founder Loves Electric Garbage Trucks

As reported by Xconomy: Ian Wright designed what may be one of the coolest street-legal cars of all time: the electric X1 looked like a Formula 1 racecar and went from zero to 60 in a breathtaking 2.9 seconds. Now, though, all Wright wants to talk about is trucks, especially the workaday delivery trucks and garbage trucks that ply city streets.

Why the excitement? Wright is the founder of Wrightspeed, a San Jose, CA-based startup that’s designed electric powertrains for medium- and heavy-duty trucks. “Garbage trucks are the perfect driving cycle for us: they get two or three miles per gallon, drive 130 miles a day with 1,000 hard stops that chew on the brakes. They’re just perfect,” he says.

Wright was among the founders of Tesla Motors. But despite his background in working on luxury performance cars, he’s come around to thinking that the biggest opportunity for electric vehicle disruption is where most of the fuel is burned—that is, big trucks. Cars may go through a few hundred gallons of gas a year but a commercial truck will burn through thousands of gallons or more. That means there’s a better financial incentive in terms of fuel savings to go electric.

The company sold two kits to retrofit FedEx delivery trucks to electric power and recently sold 25 more conversion kits, Wright says. It’s also in the process of putting electric powertrains on 17 garbage trucks in northern California, which will allow the fleet to comply with new air quality rules.

Within the month, Wright expects to raise a Series D round of growth capital, which will include a strategic supplier as an investor, to start building more of its electric powertrains. The company has already raised $16.5 million of venture capital in three rounds and received grants from the California Energy Commission to expand manufacturing. He hopes to take the company public in three years.

Befitting a man who designed the X1, the technology in Wrightspeed’s truck conversion kits is deep. There’s an electric motor on each of the truck’s drive wheels (it can be two or four depending on the vehicle) and an on-board generator to replenish batteries once their charge gets below about 20 percent. The generator can operate on natural gas or diesel.

Conversion costs under $100,000 for medium-duty trucks and under $200,000 for larger trucks, Wright says. For commercial customers, though, the return on investment is what drives buying decisions. By saving fuel and maintenance costs, converting to the extended-range electric powertrain can pay for itself in a reasonable time, Wright says. “At a three-year payback, everybody will do it,” he says.

Credit: Screen capture from Wrightspeed promotional video.

The transformation from glamorous, high-performance cars to the world of trucks came over time. Wright says he spent five years refining the business model after being shut down by investors on Sand Hill Road.

The key was homing in on a large market. A significant number of consumers are buying electric passenger cars, but because they’re more expensive than their gasoline counterparts, the market is limited to a few percent of the overall market, many analysts say.

By contrast, Wrightspeed is targeting fleet owners in metro areas where the regular stop-and-go traffic is an advantage: by braking or slowing down, the powertrain can recharge the battery, just as a hybrid car does.

“With my business model, it’s not a consumer decision—it’s a business-to-business decision. People don’t buy because it’s a fashion statement or because it’s cool. If the numbers line up, they’re going to do it,” he says.

In general, venture investors are skittish of investing in the auto industry over worries that large suppliers will crush smaller competitors or that margins are too small in heavy equipment, Wright says.

But the company does face some startup competition: Greenville, S.C-based Proterra, which is also headed by a former Tesla exec, in June raised another $30 million to manufacture its electric buses, which are aimed at municipalities. Boston-based XL Hybrids also sells a conversion kit to fleet owners, although it converts trucks and vans into more traditional hybrids.

Wright’s belief is that electric powertrain technology is fundamentally better—electric motors are very efficient and generally offer better driving performance. But it needs the right business model to truly become mainstream. “This is such cool stuff. It’s so much better than pistons and gears. But how do you make a difference in the auto industry? How do you get to disruption?” he says.

Brain’s Inner GPS Wins 3 Scientists Nobel Medicine Prize

As reported by Bloomberg: The discovery of cells in the brain that make up an internal global-positioning system won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for three scientists.

John O’Keefe, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London who holds U.S. and U.K. citizenship, and Norwegians May-Britt Moser, 51, and Edvard I. Moser, 52, will share the 8 million-krona ($1.1 million) prize, the Nobel Assembly said today in Stockholm. O’Keefe, 74, will receive half the amount, and the Mosers, the fifth married couple to win a Nobel Prize, will share the rest.

The scientists’ work in finding cells that create a map of the surrounding space and aid navigation may improve understanding of how these abilities deteriorate in people with Alzheimer’s disease. Their research has also illuminated other processes in the brain such as memory, thinking and planning, the Nobel Assembly said in a statement.

“The ability to know where we are and find our way are essential to our existence,” Ole Kiehn, a professor of neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, said at a press conference in the Swedish capital. “O’Keefe’s discovery of place cells showed that specialized nerve cells can compute abstract higher brain functions. His finding had a dramatic impact on the study of how the brain creates behavior.”

Place Cells
O’Keefe found in 1971 that a type of nerve cell in the hippocampus area of the brain was always activated when a rat was at a certain place in a room, the Nobel Assembly said. Other cells were active when the rat was in a different place, he found. He dubbed the cells “place cells,” the assembly said.

The finding was controversial as the prevailing wisdom at the time was to approach spatial perception from receptors like the eyes and progress through to the cells that receive information from them, O’Keefe told reporters in London today.

Colleagues “thought it was an act of sheer hubris to think that you could go to this part of the brain, which was as far away as you could get from the periphery and sensory inputs,” he said. “They were surprised and there was a lot of resistance.”

More than three decades later, after working with O’Keefe in London as visiting scientists, the Mosers discovered another component of the positioning system, nerve cells that generate a coordinate system and make precise positioning possible, according to the statement.

Nobel Shock
Edvard Moser is a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in Trondheim, Norway. May-Britt Moser is also a professor at the university and director of the Centre for Neural Computation.

“It is such a shock,” May-Britt Moser, the 11th woman to win the medicine prize, said by telephone from Trondheim. When she received the call about the prize, her husband was on a flight to Munich and she couldn’t share the news with him, she said. They’ve been collaborating on research since 1983 and established their laboratory in Trondheim in 1996, she said. “This is a prize for the whole community.”

O’Keefe was working at home revising a grant proposal when he received the news, he said. His “checkered youth” included studying classics in high school and engineering and philosophy as a college student in New York, he said. There, he was seduced by philosophical questions around consciousness and how to solve the mind-body problem, leading him to seek out answers through the field of neuroscience, he said.

Breakfast Meetings
O’Keefe advised the Mosers on how to go about their research in 1995 before they established their lab, May-Britt Moser said in an interview with NobelPrize.org. Asked about the advantages of being a husband-and-wife team, May-Britt said, “we can have breakfast meetings almost every day.” The last married couple to win the same Nobel award were Carl and Gerty Cori, who shared the 1947 medicine prize with Bernardo Houssay.

The scientists’ work is relevant for research in Alzheimer’s as the progress of the disease can be followed and observed in place cells, O’Keefe said. That, in turn, informs how interventions can attack the ailment, he said.

As much of their work has been in rats, O’Keefe expressed concern that regulations on animal research may become too restrictive. The U.S.-born scientist also said immigration rules are posing “large obstacles” to attracting talented scientists to the U.K.

Cell’s Transporters
Last year’s Nobel prize for medicine was awarded to three U.S. scientists -- James Rothman, Randy Schekman and Thomas C. Suedhof -- for detailing how a cell’s transporters navigate and drop off hormones and other molecules, opening avenues of research into treatments for diabetes as well as neurological and immune disorders.

Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. The Nobel Foundation was established in 1900 and the prizes were first handed out the following year.

An economics prize was created almost seven decades later in memory of Nobel by the Swedish central bank. Only the peace prize is awarded outside Sweden, by the five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo.

The Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced tomorrow.

U.S. Navy Tests Robot Boat Swarm to Overwhelm Enemies

As reported by IEEE Spectrum: A fleet of U.S. Navy boats approached an enemy vessel like sharks circling their prey. The scene might not seem so remarkable compared to any of the Navy's usual patrol activities, but in this case, part of an exercise conducted by the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR), the boats operated without any direct human control: they acted as a robot boat swarm.

The tests on Virginia's James River this past summer represented the first large-scale military demonstration of a swarm of autonomous boats designed to overwhelm enemies. This capability points to a future where the U.S. Navy and other militaries may deploy underwater, surface, and flying robotic vehicles to defend themselves or attack a hostile force.

"What's new about the James River test was having five USVs [unmanned surface vessels] operating together with no humans on board," said Robert Brizzolara, an ONR program manager.

In the test, five robot boats practiced an escort mission that involved protecting a main ship against possible attackers. To command the boats, the Navy use a system called the Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing (CARACaS). The system not only steered the autonomous boats but also coordinated its actions with other vehicles—a larger group of manned and remotely-controlled vessels.

Brizzolara said the CARACaS system evolved from hardware and software originally used in NASA's Mars rover program starting 11 years ago. Each robot boat transmits its radar views to the others so the group shares the same situational awareness. They're also continually computing their own paths to navigate around obstacles and act in a cooperatively manner.

Navy researchers installed the system on regular 7-foot and 11-foot boats and put them through a series of exercises designed to test behaviors such as escort and swarming attack. The boats escorted a manned Navy ship before breaking off to encircle a vessel acting as a possible intruder. The five autonomous boats then formed a protective line between the intruder and the ship they were protecting.

Photo: John F. Williams/U.S. Navy

An unmanned boat operates autonomously during an Office of Naval Research demonstration of swarm boat technology on the James River in Newport News, Va.

Such robotic swarm technology could transform modern warfare for the U.S. Navy and the rest of the U.S. military by reducing the risk to human personnel. Smart robots and drones that don't require close supervision could also act as a "force multiplier" consisting of relatively cheap and disposable forces—engaging more enemy targets and presenting more targets for enemies to worry about.

"Numbers may once again matter in warfare in a way they have not since World War II, when the U.S. and its allies overwhelmed the Axis powers through greater mass," wrote Paul Scharre, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington, D.C., in an upcoming report titled "Robotics on the Battlefield Part II: The Coming Swarm."

"Qualitative superiority will still be important, but may not be sufficient alone to guarantee victory," Scharre wrote. "Uninhabited systems in particular have the potential to bring mass back to the fight in a significant way by enabling the development of swarms of low-cost platforms."  

The Navy does not have a firm timeline for when such robot swarms could become operational. For now, ONR researchers hope to improve the autonomous system in terms of its ability to "see" its surroundings using different sensing technologies. They also want to improve how the boats navigate autonomously around obstacles, even in the most unexpected situations that human programmers haven't envisioned. But the decision to have such robot boats open fire upon enemy targets will still rest with human sailors.

Future Smartphones Won’t Necessarily Need Cell Towers to Connect

Qualcomm, Facebook, and other tech companies are experimenting
with technology that lets smartphones use their LTE radio to
connect directly to other devices up to 500 meters away. 

As reported by MIT Technology Review: A new feature being added to the LTE protocol that smartphones use to communicate with cellular towers will make it possible to bypass those towers altogether. Phones will be able to “talk” directly to other mobile devices and to beacons located in shops and other businesses.

Known as LTE Direct, the wireless technology has a range of up to 500 meters, far more than either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. It is included in update to the LTE standard slated for approval this year, and devices capable of LTE Direct could appear as soon as late 2015.

LTE Direct has been pioneered by Qualcomm, which has been working on the technology for around seven years. At the mobile chip manufacturer’s Uplinq conference in San Francisco this month, it announced that it’s helping partners including Facebook and Yahoo experiment with the technology. 

Researchers are, for example, testing LTE Direct as a way to allow smartphones to automatically discover nearby people, businesses, and other information. Some see the technology as a potential new channel for targeted promotions or advertising.

Despite its long range, LTE Direct uses relatively little power, so a phone could be constantly looking for nearby devices without significantly draining its battery life. A device with LTE Direct active might discover other phones using the technology or communicate with beacons—fixed devices installed in businesses or integrated into the infrastructure of an airport or train station.

“You can think of LTE Direct as a sixth sense that is always aware of the environment around you,” said Mahesh Makhijani, technical marketing director at Qualcomm, at a session on the technology. “The world around you is full of information, and the phone can use that to predict and to help you in your everyday life.”

Beacons using LTE Direct could broadcast useful information as well as special offers. A beacon installed in an airline check-in desk, for instance, might offer information on delays to people nearby who are booked on an affected flight.

Facebook is exploring how the technology could be used with its mobile app. “LTE Direct would allow us to create user experiences around serendipitous interactions with a local business or a friend nearby,” said Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure engineering. “You could find out about events or do impromptu meet-ups.”

LTE Direct can be used much like the iBeacons announced by Apple last year, which retailers including Macy’s are testing as a way to track and connect with shoppers’ mobile devices. However, iBeacon devices use the Bluetooth protocol, which has a much shorter range, and which not everyone leaves switched on.

Yahoo has also begun developing apps that use LTE Direct, says Beverly Harrison, a principal scientist at Yahoo Labs. One is a kind of digital tour guide. If you tell the app how long you have to spare, from 10 minutes to two hours, it will suggest a route past nearby points of interest, drawing on online information about places detected using LTE Direct. Harrison says Yahoo plans to start testing the app in January.

LTE Direct could also help smooth out the network glitches that occur when large numbers of users are trying to connect to the same cell tower. R/GA, an ad agency in New York whose clients include Nike and Beats, is designing a system that would use LTE Direct to serve up to a million people in or around Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Roman Kalantari, a creative director at RG/A, says LTE Direct is the only wireless technology that could keep devices online under such conditions.

RG/A and another ad agency, Control Group, are also interested in using LTE Direct to serve targeted promotions. A smartphone could use LTE Direct to signal to nearby businesses what types of foods or products a customer is interested in so that it can offer customized deals, says Kalantari. “The idea that every retailer could be observing purchase intent is extraordinary valuable,” he says.  

In theory, LTE Direct could be used to create communication apps that route all data from device to device. Some chat apps can already use Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to link up nearby phones (see “The Latest Chat App for iPhone Needs No Internet Connection”), but LTE Direct could offer extended range and better performance. However, carriers will control which devices on their networks can use LTE Direct because it uses the same radio spectrum as conventional cellular links. Wireless carriers might even gain a new stream of revenue by charging companies that want to offer services or apps using the technology, Qualcomm says. 

Virtual Repo Men - Miss a Payment? Your Car Could Stop Running

As reported by SlashDot: Auto loans to borrowers considered subprime, those with credit scores at or below 640, have spiked in the last five years with roughly 25 percent of all new auto loans made last year subprime, a volume of $145 billion in the first three months of this year.

Now the NYT reports that before they can drive off the lot, many subprime borrowers must have their car outfitted with a so-called starter interrupt device, which allows lenders to remotely disable the ignition. By simply clicking a mouse or tapping a smartphone, lenders retain the ultimate control. Borrowers must stay current with their payments, or lose access to their vehicle and a leading device maker, PassTime of Littleton, Colo., says its technology has reduced late payments to roughly 7 percent from nearly 29 percent. "The devices are reshaping the dynamics of auto lending by making timely payments as vital to driving a car as gasoline."

Mary Bolender, who lives in Las Vegas, needed to get her daughter to an emergency room, but her 2005 Chrysler van would not start. Bolender was three days behind on her monthly car payment. Her lender remotely activated a device in her car's dashboard that prevented her car from starting. 

Before she could get back on the road, she had to pay more than $389, money she did not have that morning in March. "I felt absolutely helpless," said Bolender, a single mother who stopped working to care for her daughter. Some borrowers say their cars were disabled when they were only a few days behind on their payments, leaving them stranded in dangerous neighborhoods. 

Others said their cars were shut down while idling at stoplights. Some described how they could not take their children to school or to doctor's appointments. One woman in Nevada said her car was shut down while she was driving on the freeway. 

Attorney Robert Swearingen says there's an old common law principle that a lender can't "breach the peace" in a repossession. That means they can't put a person in harm's way. To Swearingen, that would mean "turning off a car in a bad neighborhood, or for a single female at night."

Woman Bound in Trunk Uses Phone, GPS to Summon Rescuers

As reported by the NY Post: A woman bound in the trunk of her car in the Los Angeles area managed to call emergency responders on a cell phone to say she had been kidnapped, and was rescued with the help of a GPS tracker, an official said on Tuesday.

California Highway Patrol officers located the car on an off-ramp from Interstate 10 freeway in Pomona, a short time after the woman made the call on Monday night, said Highway Patrol spokesman Officer Juan Galvan.

The officers opened the trunk and found the woman with her hands and feet tied, Galvan said. No one else was found around the vehicle, and the Highway Patrol turned over the probe to the major crimes bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

The woman, whose identity was not made public, was taken to a hospital with minor scrapes, according to the Highway Patrol. Sheriff’s officials said they could not immediately provide information on the case.

A Highway Patrol report on the incident said the woman had reported she was kidnapped when she called emergency responders. She used the GPS setting on her phone to provide dispatchers with her location so officers could find her, the report said.

Los Angeles area television station KNBC reported that police had said the woman knew her attackers, but Galvan could not confirm that or provide any details about how she ended up in the trunk of the car.

Iridium's Next Generation Satellite Network will Search for Missing Planes at No-Charge

As reported by GigaOM: When Iridium’s new satellites will start blasting into orbit next year on top of SpaceX and Dnepr rockets, they’ll be carrying a special payload: an aircraft tracking system that will be able to locate a plane anywhere in the world once Iridium’s 66-satellite constellation is fully operational in 2017.

The service is run by Aireon, a joint venture between Iridium and government aviation agencies in Canada and Europe, and it plans on charging airlines for its core flight monitoring services. But Aireon said it would open the network up gratis to international rescue agencies during emergencies, allowing them to home in on missing aircraft.

In the case of Malaysia Airlines 370, which disappeared in March, the emergency service could have helped in locating and the possible rescue of the still-missing flight by plotting its exact GPS coordinates every few seconds. The technology behind it is called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), and transponders using it are being installed in new and old commercial aircraft.

Iridium birds won’t be the only ones listening for ADS-B signals either, both Inmarsat and Globalstar are putting the locator tech on their aircraft and will be offering competing flight monitoring services. Iridium, however, has the slight advantage of offering pole-to-pole coverage, which given the artic great circle routes taken by many transcontinental flights, would be very handy.