Our Inefficient Cars & The Poulsen Hybrid Solution

You may be surprised to learn how inefficient that shiny new car is that you drive to work everyday. Thankfully, there's a solution in sight.

I think a lot about cars and urban transport. I honestly believe that cars are unsustainable for a large number of reasons and that we must give them up in favor of walking, using the bicycle, two wheelers and public transport. In my personal life, I've taken the first step towards that by placing a moratorium on single and dual passenger car travel - will only take out the car when there are three or more people traveling (more on that later).

One of the reasons cars are unsustainable is their horrible inefficiency. I've mentioned this before but here's what Amory Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute has to say:

I've been thinking in background for 20 years about the physics of cars and why are they so inefficient that you know, your car's using a 100 times its weight in ancient plants everyday and yet only 0.3% of that energy ends up moving the driver. This didn't seem very good.

Of all the fuel energy you put into the car, 87% (seven eighths of it) never gets to the wheel. It's lost first in the engine, driveline, idling and accessories.

Of the 1/8^th of fuel energy that does reach the wheels, half of that either heats the air that the car pushes aside or heats the tires and roads. Only the last 6% of the fuel energy actually accelerates the car and then heats the brakes when you stop.

- Amory Lovins in Car of the Future

Not everyone is as inspired to give up their cars -- most people actually love theirs -- so we must live with them for some time. The only alternative then is to produce more efficient cars. But the auto industry has refused to budge so far, you say. Soooo... you get the independent auto makers to produce efficient cars. But how do you do that? It's not as simple as producing water bottles, you know. Well, give them an incentive. Announce a $10 million prize for a car that is over 3 times as efficient and sells in large numbers.

This is precisely what Auto X-Prize is all about.

I've been following Auto X-Prize development for almost two years. I think it's a great initiative though I feel they should have aimed higher -- 300 MPG instead of 100 (today's cars average about 29 MPG in US). We need to make a big leap to make up for the inefficiencies of the past century. Nevertheless, it's an exciting venture and I can't wait to find out who among the 64 contenders wins the X-Prize and what it does to the industry.

Popular Mechanics magazine just announced a list of the top 10 contenders according to them. They're all good but the one that has the greatest likelihood, in my opinion, isn't on anyone's radar. It doesn't feature in the list and it's never been mentioned on AutoBlogGreen or TreeHugger, two popular blogs covering green cars and low-impact living. Both of them have dozens of posts on other X-prize contenders.

The Solution

I'm talking about Poulsen Hybrid. A product of a European US company* called Alpha-Core, it's essentially a couple of rear wheel hub motors which can be installed in any conventional car to convert it into a plug-in hybrid, increasing its mileage significantly. So you get 2 hub motors, two controllers along with batteries and a charger which go in the trunk -- all for $3300. Give it a couple of hours and you car's now a plug-in electric hybrid!

(* Founder, Ulrik Poulsen has an unmistakable Scandinavian accent so I assumed it's a European firm but Alpha-Core website says they're based in Connecticut, US.)



I think it's an absolutely brilliant concept. Totally inexpensive, efficient, simple and it doesn't even mean getting a new car. If it works as promised, it should sell in huge numbers - many times more than any of the fancy cars in Popular Mechanics list. Converting an existing internal combustion engine car into a plug-in electric to get mileage in the range of 100 MPG without any substantial mechanical changes to the car and at such low cost is an unbeatable proposition.

More reasons why I like the Alpha-Core/ Poulsen Hybrid solution:

Retrofitting existing cars to make them more efficient is the most effective and sustainable way of tackling auto emissions. There are well over 600 million cars in the world. Any new new alternative automotive solution will take several decades to become mainstream provided it is cost effective and is available worldwide. While we need new technologies, the greatest impact will come from a technology that can improve the existing one running inside each of those 600 million cars.

Alpha-core has been in the manufacturing business since 1982. So unlike most other X-Prize contenders, it's not a startup - it doesn't need any funding to get going.

The product is ready for launch. There's no long development cycle in between by the end of which most companies discover their technology isn't yet ready or that it has a fatal flaw. In an audio interview, founder Ulrik Poulsen says it's expected to be available by June 2008. That's next month!

Go Poulsen Hybrid!


UPDATE 7-May-08: AutoblogGreen makes amend, writes about Poulsen Hybrid. Links to this post. Most people commenting are overwhelmingly positive about this.

Climate Change in Media: HT Reaches New Low

Two recent articles in Hindustan Times challenging human induced climate change raise questions about credibility of its reporting and integrity of its correspondent. It also raises a question for serious environmentalists on how to respond to such reports. (view updates)

Two days ago (Apr 1, 2008) Hindustan Times carried an article titled Climate change not as big a problem: report. Lest anyone should think it as an April Fool's joke, it was a completely serious piece based on real events. Today (Apr 3, 2008), the same correspondent published a report titled: 'Sun too causes global warming.'

Both articles are highly misleading, contain factual inaccuracies and at the very least deliberately hide widely known facts that counter its argument to paint a biased picture. In the following paragraphs, I will attempt to highlight the key issues raised by each of the stories.

Climate change not as big a problem: report [1]
by Chetan Chauhan | Page 14, HT New Delhi, Apr 1, 2008 | 353 words

Opening excerpt:

An international civil society report has debunked the claims of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying there is no evidence available to show loss of human life directly due to climate change.

The report of the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change [CSCCC], to be released in India on Tuesday, says there is no evidence to suggest climate change has caused an increase in diseases.

Highly Misleading

By pitting CSCCC [2] directly against IPCC [3], the article creates the impression that both organisations are of similar stature. Nothing could be further from the truth. IPCC is a Noble prize winning United Nations body made up of hundreds of scientists and governmental representatives while CSCCC is merely a coalition of so-called global "think tanks" - corporate lobbyists funded by big oil corporations, the likes of ExxonMobil, to further their interests.

The HT article makes no mention of the background of CSCCC - who comprises the coalition and how are they funded. Unlike IPCC, which was formed two decades ago, CSCCC was only organised a little more than an year back [4] by International Policy Network (IPN) which is a well known recipient of Exxon funding. IPN has received $390,000 from Exxon [5]. Several other members of the coalition have also been a beneficiary.

Paul Reiter, the expert cited in the article, for example, sits on the "Scientific and Economic Advisory Council" [6] of an organization called the "Annapolis Centre." What is Annapolis Centre? It's a US based "think tank" [7] that has pocketed $793,575 from ExxonMobil and has been very active in playing down the human contribution to global warming.

Reiter doesn't have anything too substantiative in his research papers [8] published in scientific peer reviewed journals to back his claims of lack of relationship between disease and climate change. It's unclear how many other claims of CSCCC report are backed by research in peer reviewed journals.

Yet, here's a newspaper that reaches out to a country of one billion, publishing unsubstantiated "research" of corporate lobbyists that have a direct financial interest in sensationalising their so-called findings; and pits them against a neutral, highly conservative group of scientists and government representatives whose work is completely based on pure scientific research published in peer-reviewed journals.

'Sun too causes global warming' [9]
by Chetan Chauhan | Page 17, HT New Delhi, Apr 3, 2008 | 327 words

Opening excerpt:

FRESH RESEARCH by Danish Space Research Centre can possibly give a new twist to the controversy whether Green House Gas emissions is the major contributor for global warming. The Center's research based on climate date [sic] of 150 years shows that varying activity of the Sun is the most systematic contributor to natural climate variations.

Completely Inaccurate

The article falsely states that new research claiming sun as the cause of global warming has now emerged and that it may alter the widely held belief in man-made global warming. Global warming skeptics have been arguing sun as the cause for several decades. In fact Danish Space Research Centre's (DNSC) Galactic Cosmic Ray theory itself is over 11 years old. [10] So it's absolutely false to imply that this is a new discovery that somehow challenges man made global warming.

Not only is it old research, it has also been debunked several times (see here, here, here, here and here). In July last year the prestigious Royal Society of UK published a study concluding that the Sun's output cannot be causing modern-day climate change. [11] To quote BBC News on it: Mike Lockwood's analysis appears to have put a large, probably fatal nail in this intriguing and elegant [Galactic Cosmic Ray] hypothesis. He said: "It might even have had a significant effect on pre-industrial climate; but you cannot apply it to what we're seeing now, because we're in a completely different ball game."

Mysteriously, the HT article quotes Deepak Lal, former Indian Foreign Service officer in support of the Galactic Cosmic Ray theory. How is Lal related with the Danish Space Research Centre is not mentioned in the article. I looked up his background. Among other things, Lal is the author of a little known book on globalisation called "In Praise of Empires." [12] More interestingly however, he is a Senior Fellow at the CATO institute. [13] What is CATO institute? You guessed it -- a US "think tank" funded by ExxonMobil. It has received $110,000 from Exxon. [14]

Questions about journalistic ethics and accountability

The two articles raise serious questions. Why did the Hindustan Times publish misleading, inaccurate, unsubstantiated and biased reports on climate change. Did the correspondent receive an incentive for publishing these from outside or is there an organisation wide effort to discredit opinion against climate change?

Those of us who understand the severity of this planetary emergency have watched every mention of this issue in mainstream Indian media with interest over the last year. Most of us can also recall a time prior to the release of the IPCC report when climate change was conspicuously absent from Indian media. The Stern report for example, which was hailed as a landmark event in UK (released at the end of Oct 2006), never found a mention in India's two main newspaper for months. This conspiracy of silence was broken only when the crescendo of international reporting on the issue reached mile-high by the time the IPCC report came out (Feb 2007).

Poor reporting is worse than no reporting. In this particular instance, it's hard to accept that this came out simply as a result of ignorance. Chetan Chauhan has been covering environmental issues for HT for some time and it's hard to imagine someone at that position being incapable of making a distinction between CSCCC and IPCC or being unable to conduct simple background checks through web searches prior to writing.

A bigger question for those of us who see through such reporting is: how do we address this problem. How do we respond to such reports to bring the truth to public attention. And how do we make the media accountable for what it writes or does not write.

On my part I plan to follow this post with a formal complaint to the Press Council of India unless HT issues a well-placed corrective article in the following days.


Notes and Links

This entry is also posted on Green-India mailing list and copied to the following:

Chetan Chauhan, HT correspondent and writer of said articles
Vir Sanghvi, Editorial Director Hindustan Times
Dr Rajendra K Pachauri, Director-General TERI
Sunita Narain, Director Centre for Science and Environment
Malini Mehra, Founder & Director Centre for Social Markets

References:

1 HT April 1, 2008: Climate change not as big a problem: report

2 Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change [2] (CSCCC) website

3 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on Wikipedia

4 The CSCCC is organised by IPN according to this Wikipedia entry.

5 International Policy Network fact sheet on ExxonMobilSecrets.org

6 Paul Reiter on Science and Economic Advisory Council of The Annapolis Center

7 The Annapolis Center fact sheet on ExxonMobilSecrets.org

8 Reiter's research background on DeSmogBlog

9 HT, April 3, 2008: Sun too causes global warming

10 DNSC 1997 research papers on sun-Climate connection [PDF] and cosmic ray flux and global cloud cover [PDF]

11 BBC News on Royal Society study: 'No Sun link' to climate change

12 Deepak Lal's In Praise of Empires

13 Deepak Lal at CATO

14 CATO fact sheet on ExxonSecrets.org


UPDATE 5-Apr 2008: IPCC Chairman, Dr. R. K. Pachauri Writes Back

Words of encouragement and support have poured in from several quarters via various channels. Including one from Noble Laureate and IPCC chairman, Dr R. K. Pachauri himself. Dr Pachauri graciously took out time to reply to my email. My sincere thanks to everyone once again. I've compiled all responses - received via email or on Green-India group - as comments on this page. Read Dr. Pachauri's response. Note: timestamps on these comments may not be valid.


UPDATE 5-Apr 2008 [2]: CSM Issues Press Release

Centre for Social Markets (CSM) headed by Ms Malini Mehra, which last month served as adviser to Al Gore's climate project in India, has issued a press release against the climate change misinformation campaign in the media. It discusses the launch of "Civil Society Report on Climate Change" in India by deputy chairman of planning commission - Montek Singh Ahluwalia.


UPDATE 9-Apr 2008: TreeHugger picks up this story

TreeHugger.com - the US based popular green blog, which has a daily reach of around 200 million (that's as much as Hindustantimes.com), has published a detailed story based on this entry calling it a "complete, excruciatingly well-referenced analysis which elegantly dismantles the erroneous arguments put forth in both [HT] pieces." The TreeHugger post quotes widely from this blog and its author. Thank you TreeHugger!


UPDATE 1-May 2008: Malini Mehra writes in HT

Founder and CEO of Centre for Social Markets, Ms. Malini Mehra wrote an oped piece in Hindustan Times, published on Earth Day, flaying the two HT reports calling threat from climate change exaggerated and unfounded. an excerpt:

Having failed to win the argument in the West, the climate deniers are now moving into India and China. They see our country as a soft-touch for their propaganda and easy to hoodwink through arguments pitting poverty against development. What they do not realise is that there is a domestic movement brewing in India for positive action on climate change.

Complete article can be found here.


UPDATE 11-May 2008: Frontline Magazine writes on this issue

Well known political analyst, journalist and activist Praful Bidwai penned a column in Frontline magazine (Apr 26 - May 09) on this issue. Opening excerpt follows:

Falling back on pseudo-science?
Indian policymakers are clutching at straws to duck their responsibility to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.

AS Indian policymakers come under growing pressure from global scientific and political communities on climate change, they are increasingly resorting to disingenuous, devious or downright specious arguments to avoid taking purposive action to cap and reduce the country’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which are rising 3.5 times faster than the world average.

The detailed article calls the CSCCC report flimsy and "an exercise in charlatanry and sophistry." It also references this blog post as containing "some interesting facts" on the issue. Complete article can be read here.

Epicenter of Earthquake Was Delhi University: US Geological Survey

According to USGS, the epicentre of Delhi earthquake was just south of Delhi University near GT road, not Delhi-Haryana border as media reports have said. (See UPDATE 26-Nov, 4.15PM)

Delhi experienced what's being called a "moderate" earthquake this morning. It recorded 4.6 on Richter scale. I've felt earthquakes in the past and this was by far the strongest because its epicenter was right in Delhi.

However, there seems to be some confusion over where exactly lies the epicentre in or around Delhi. Media reports mention Delhi-Haryana border but the Delhi Haryana border is not a single location, it stretches for several kilometers. However, the latitude and longitude figures released by India's meteorological department does not match this.

Epicenter According to the Met Department

According to Indiainfo and ZeeNews,

The epicenter of the tremor was at the Delhi-Haryana border at 28.6 N latitude and 77.9 E longitude. Precisely it was centered around 10 kms from Bahadurgarh in Haryana.

This does not make any sense because those figures are for a location in U.P nowhere close to Delhi or Haryana. Enter 28.6°N, 77.9°E in Google Maps and you get this.


(Scale: 20km)

As you can see, the epicenter according to the met department is not consistent with the statement that it's on Delhi-Haryana border. It's actually about 100km East of the point where Bahadurgarh is. (see UPDATE below)

Epicenter According to U.S. Geological Survey

The National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC), part of U.S Geological Survey maintains a database of earthquakes around the world. According to their data, the epicenter location was actually right in the middle of North Delhi just south of Delhi University.



Enter 28.677°N, 77.204°E in Google Maps and you get this.


(Scale: 2km)


(Scale: 500m)

The figures released by USGS have a location uncertainty of +/- 18km but that still doesn't put it anywhere close to the figures provided by the met department.

I will update this post when I have more info but if you know a more reliable source of the epicenter location, please leave a comment.

UPDATE 4.15PM: Correct Met Dept Location Now Confirmed

It seems the media reports picked up wrong Longitude figure released by the Met department. Met Department's list of earthquakes in November available on its website (scroll down to 25) puts the Longitude at 77.0E instead of 77.9E as reported in news reports mentioned above.

This puts their stated location at Delhi-Haryana border near Najafgarh or about 10km from Bahadurgarh. View location on Google Maps.


(Scale: 10km)

The Amateur Seismic Centre (ASC), an independent centre based in Pune, continues to go with the USGS data source and puts the epicenter at Malka Ganj-Kamla Nagar in Delhi University area, as mentioned above.

Note that both USGS and Met department locations are from their preliminary reports.

UPDATE 8.00PM: I wrote to ASC's Stacey Martin to find out which data is more credible. Stacey kindly wrote back that eventually India Meteorological Department (IMD) figures will be more accurate since its monitoring station is in Delhi itself while USGS/NEIC's closest monitoring station is in Kabul. However, as of right now, the latter has provided figures up to three decimal places so at the moment ASC is going with NEIC's epicenter in North Delhi.

Since this is only preliminary data, it's likely to be corrected and the final IMD location will only be available in the public domain in 18-months due to CTBT constraints.

Past Earthquakes in Delhi Region

Here is some historical information on earthquakes in Delhi, taken from ASC report of today's quake.

This is one of the strongest earthquakes in the Delhi region since 2001 and the biggest since 1960. Prior to this latest earthquake, the strongest local earthquakes to have originated within the Delhi metropolitan area since the 1960 Gurgaon earthquake was a Mb=4.3 earthquake in the Dwarka-Najafgarh area on 28 April 2001 that caused minor damage & widespread panic. The strongest known earthquakes in the Delhi region include the M6.0 Khurja-Bulandshahr earthquake on 10 October 1956, the M6.0 Gurgaon earthquake on 27 August 1960 and the Mb=5.6 Moradabad earthquake on 15 August 1966. Historically, the 15 July 1720 earthquake in the Delhi region caused the greatest damage in the city causing many deaths and widespread damage including knocking down large parts of the Shaharepanah (city wall) in Old Delhi from Kabuli Gate to Lal Darwaza and the battlements of the Fatehpuri Masjid.

Ron Paul On Climate Change

How can a presidential candidate so right about almost every other issue be so mistaken about climate change?

I've just spent the last three hours learning about Ron Paul, a U.S presidential candidate I knew nothing about earlier and one who has recently experienced an unusually strong upsurge of support surprising many. TIME is calling it "The Ron Paul Revolution." CNN went nuts when Ron's online campaign collected a record sum in a day. The Washington Post just did a story trying to make sense of the revolution.

People are excited for good reason. Watch him speak and it wouldn't take you long to say to yourself: "Wow, I love this guy!" His speeches call for an end to "the U.S. empire" - words you'd expect from an activist, not a presidential hopeful. He also frequently mentions the "military industrial complex" - when was the last time you heard a presidential candidate admit its existence since Eisenhower coined the term. He talks of abolishing the IRS and the federal reserve, getting troops back from Iraq immediately, following a dramatically modest foreign policy than any past presidents, he's for freedom of the internet, in favor of same sex marriages and says the biggest threat to our privacy is the government. Ron Paul wants to drastically limit the government's ability to play big brother.

In fact, all his suggested policy measures are radical. And this is the most striking thing about him. As the TIME story notes, Ron is the most anti-establishment of all candidates. He has the courage to admit big policy mistakes of the past and the vision of a radically different future based on a few simple principles he's been known to hold for decades. You can't get a better candidate than this. Or so I thought.

Until I Googled his position on climate change and found that he thinks this issue is overblown. His website doesn't even mention the term and in this clip from a visit to Google in July this year, Ron says "there are two sides of the (global warming) argument." In another video from August when asked whether increasing carbon dioxide in atmosphere is an important issue, he answers that it's debatable.

---

There are good people who are in politics, in both parties, who hold this [issue] at arm's length because if they acknowledge it and recognize it then the moral imperative to make big changes is inescapable.
- Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth

---

It's incredible for someone to say this in 2007. Although none of the presidential candidates have been known to completely grasp the severity of climate change problem, yet for a candidate to say that it is an overblown issue is frankly quite outrageous. To hear these statements after IPCC fourth assessment, after Stern report and dozens of independent scientific institutions have raised alarm over climate change, is...well, I've run out of adjectives. I don't know what to call it.

Needless to say, there is no debate, no other side. Global warming and other effects of climate change are a scientifically proven certainty. I can't imagine what ratio of denial, ignorance and bias would have combined to make Ron hold those opinions. It's very disheartening. On the one hand, I'd love to see him in the oval office - his term could really have a revolutionary impact on U.S politics and its relationship with the rest of the world.

But on the other, the world can't afford another five years of inaction on the issue after ten years of the worst environment and energy policy from Washington. It could be very dangerous to have a global warming skeptic as the U.S. president when we're in the midst of what Al Gore rightly calls a planetary emergency. There may be hope though. In the Google interview he also admits that he doesn't know enough about this issue. I hope he finds out soon because he'd putting a lot of votes at stake otherwise.

iPhone's $200 Price Cut = $2 Billion Customer Handout

Steve Jobs just handed out $1.92 billion to past and future iPhone customers. What does it mean for Apple and why did they do it? Orange Hues blog unveils the mystery behind the move.

On September 5, Steve Jobs confirmed the massive margins of iPhone when he announced an unprecedented $200 price cut on the device within 10 weeks of its introduction. It's been justified as a trend in the technology industry but I think the real reason runs deeper than that. Just consider that the reduction is 33% of original price ($599) and a whopping 50% of the new price ($399). Such cuts have *never* been seen in the industry for a mass produced consumer product.

If that wasn't enough, Jobs even announced that Apple will pay back $100 to every iPhone owner so far, after several Apple loyalists revolted saying that they have been duped for being Apple fans. While much is being written about Apple's generous gesture and what it means for Apple as a brand, nobody seems to have done the numbers to calculate the financial cost to the company.


What Does It Mean: Unprecedented Profit Margins

So here's an attempt to see what it means to take $200 off, what is now, a $400 product. Over 800,000 people have purchased an iPhone so far (from Apple's estimate of 1 million sales by end of September) out of its 10 million target by end of next year. That translates to Apple handing out more than $80 million to iPhone customers now ($100 x 800,000) and $1.84 billion over the next 16 months ($200 x 9.2 million).

Irrespective of the reasons, one thing that's abundantly clear from Steve Job's $1.92 billion handout is that Apple's profit margins for the device are way beyond anything ever seen in the industry.

When Jobs first introduced the iPhone on January 10th, I wrote a few hours later that it's poised to become Apple's most profitable product in its entire history. I based that on the simple premise that even with a two year contract, the phone is still not subsidised as is the industry norm. So naturally there's a sum that AT&T is passing to Apple for every sale of the mandatory contract. A few weeks later, details emerged that it's even better than that - Apple also has a share in monthly payments that AT&T receives from iPhone owners.

We don't know if it's a one time cash deal or AT&T shares revenue on some other basis. Lets assume that Apple gets $300 for every iPhone sold (@$399) and $10 from each month's bill. If Apple achieves its target of 10 million phones by end of 2008 (18 months from its release), that's an earning of whopping $8.8 billion. A very small part of which is the actual hardware cost.

Compare iPhone's profit with the puny margins in gaming consoles or the PC industry. It's well known, for example, that both Microsoft and Sony sell their consoles for loss in hope of making it up over sales of games. This is in a market that sold just 26 million units last year. On the other hand, there were 957 million mobile phones sold the same year.

Clearly, Apple hit a jackpot with iPhone. There is no other category of mass produced consumer product that makes that kind of margin on those kind of numbers.


Real Reason Behind Price Cut: Preempt Competition

There's little doubt therefore that iPhone will make a windfall of money to Apple's bank balance. But why did Jobs have to give such a large cash handout? No matter how high the margins, no company likes to part with such a sizable amount. Apple isn't known for increasing value by reducing price. They do it by giving more at the same price with regular product revisions. So what has changed since Jobs announced the price in January?

The stock market which drove Apple's stock down at the news thinks it's poor sales behind the move. Nothing could be further from the truth. A number of analysts have pointed out that there's no way that could be the reason. There is no "fatal flaw" with the phone either. In fact, several customer surveys say iPhone buyers have overwhelming voted in the favor of the device.

There may be truth to the argument that it's merely because Apple wants to hit economies of scale. Yes, but is it a planned move on the lines that - milk the first few months of crazy iPhone madness and then reduce price to expand the market - I doubt it. Before Jobs announced the price in January, nobody could have predicted the media frenzy that followed at the time and then again at iPhone's launch. Somehow I can't justify that Apple had planned a $200 cut from the start.

What seems much more likely is that this a reaction to Google Phone and other competitors planning to enter the market. The much talked about Google device which was just fiction a few months ago has now become an almost certainty. A number of people have cited inside sources to claim that the Google Phone is real. The latest revelations come from a Boston Globe article from three days before Apple's announcement that cite a number of people having seen the phone.

In his address at Moscone center and later in interviews, Steve Jobs repeatedly said he wants to be "even more aggressive." But hey, aggressive with what? Apple truly doesn't have any competition! Sales figures for the month of July suggest that iPhone is the only smart phone out there selling like that and despite the prohibitive price, it's already equaling sales of much lesser price phones.

So where's the need to be aggressive? Clearly this is not about today but about future competition. Usually Apple has competitors petty much in knots as to how and where to strike at Apple's offerings. But this time things went a little differently. Remember that Apple, which loves to keep their products secret until the very last moment, was forced to announce iPhone six months in advance of the launch because of FCC disclosure. This essentially gave the Nokias and the Googles a generous lead of half a year to plan their offerings.

Things have changed since Apple's announcement in January. Google isn't the only one entering the market. Microsoft, which had previously ruled out a Zune phone, now admits the idea is "not unreasonable." I'm sure RIM, Palm, Nokia and other cell phone makers are prepping up launch of their own "iPhone killers" as the media would call them. Although I've little doubt that Apple will maintain its lead, the company isn't leaving anything on chance. With the price cut, Apple has clearly made a preemptive strike to ensure they have a smooth run.

And this is absolutely the right time to strike. If they had made such a large reduction after the announcement of Google Phone or another competitive product, their stock would have really taken a beating. Besides, it would reflect very poorly on the brand. Apple has never been known to indulge in price wars with a competitor.

I don't know if Steve jobs plays chess, but if he does, he must excel at it. You have to credit this man's vision for anticipating moves of future competitors and disarming them before they even enter the battlefield. It takes courage to give away $2 billion.

Related links

MSNBC reports on the Apple's $200 price cut and $100 rollback
CNBC video on Apple's inexplicable price cut
IT Wire: US iPhone sales go ballistic in July
Boston Globe article: Introducing the Google Phone
Gizmodo: Microsoft Admits Zune Phone Not Unreasonable

Past iPhone posts from Orange Hues blog

Jan 10, 2007: First to identify Apple's large profit margins behind iPhone
Jan 10, 2007: First to identify real reason behind iPhone's future success
Jan 12, 2007: First to identify another cell phone using multi-touch

Quote: On Working Hard

Seth Godin nails it...

It's hard work to make difficult emotional decisions, such as quitting a job and setting out on your own. It's hard work to invent a new system, service, or process that's remarkable. It's hard work to tell your boss that he's being intellectually and emotionally lazy. It's easier to stand by and watch the company fade into oblivion. It's hard work to tell senior management to abandon something that it has been doing for a long time in favor of a new and apparently risky alternative. It's hard work to make good decisions with less than all of the data. [...]

Richard Branson doesn't work more hours than you do. Neither does Steve Ballmer or Carly Fiorina. Robyn Waters, the woman who revolutionized what Target sells -- and helped the company trounce Kmart -- probably worked fewer hours than you do in an average week.

None of the people who are racking up amazing success stories and creating cool stuff are doing it just by working more hours than you are. And I hate to say it, but they're not smarter than you either. They're succeeding by doing hard work. [...]

Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you'd rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And, after you've done that, to do it again the next day.

The big insight: The riskier your (smart) coworker's hard work appears to be, the safer it really is. It's the people having difficult conversations, inventing remarkable products, and pushing the envelope (and, perhaps, still going home at 5 PM) who are building a recession-proof future for themselves.

-- Seth Godin in Labor Day

Quote: On Bicycle

I always knew the bicycle was the most energy efficient vehicle but this is just amazing...

Pound for pound, a person on a bicycle expends less energy than any creature or machine covering the same distance. A human walking spends about three times as much energy per pound; even a salmon swimming spends about twice as much.

From the book Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things

(found via TreeHugger)

Update 28 Aug: Excellent post on "How to Ride Your Bike to Work".

Scott Adams Stole My Carpool Idea!

I came up with the idea of an efficient carpool network that really works. While I sat over it for an year or so and did nothing about it, by an amazing stroke of co-incidence Scott Adams comes up with something almost identical.

In Palam Vihar, Gurgaon where I live (an otherwise fine place), one long standing problem has been the woefully inadequate public transport. Most residents somehow manage with their cars, however, since single car families are most prevalent - one car is never sufficient. Thinking about this problem over a year and half ago and mulling over the then recently introduced "Centrex" feature by our phone company (call any other resident for free), I came up with an idea that went beyond the needs of Palam Vihar residents.

A massive carpool network that works on a system of credits. Lets say person X doesn't have a car today and wants to go from point A to point B. So he places a call to a toll-free number and enters the locations. Now person Y has a car, is going the same location but doesn't know person X. He calls up the automated voice network, learns about person X, looks up his profile and finding him OK offers him a lift. Person Y just earned a credit sold by X.

To really understand the implications of this, you need to follow a link I'll add later in the post. But at that time I mulled over it for weeks together and developed it in quite detail. I thought Google would be the ideal company to launch something like this. Around the same time, I entered the following brief notes about the concept in my "ideas" spreadsheet as idea #4:

Description:
Call to book available rides to your destination from your location in the next 15 minutes. Only registered license holders allowed anonymously.

Notes:
Buyer-seller market much like eBay. Credibility feedback plays important role. Needs scale to work. VOIP hosted application to take calls. Algorithms determine who gets matched with whom.

So last month when I come across a post in which Dilbert creator Scott Adams describes an almost identical idea, I couldn't believe my eyes. It was like he scanned my brain while I was asleep! The similarities were uncanny.

More seriously though, this is actually a pretty awesome idea. As Scott says, the biggest problem with carpooling is inconvenience. An all-pervasive carpool network solves this problem. There are only two large differences between Scott's idea and mine. One, I think GPS will make it more effective but I don't think it's absolutely necessary. Second, I conceived it around eBay like feedback by buyers and sellers. I think that would make the system very credible.

P.S: How does the network provider makes money from this? Scott hasn't thought of that. I did. Since I thought Google should provide this service, they make money the same way they always have - from advertising. Since they know where people are going, they can serve pre-registered ads from retailers and companies along the route. If you don't like to get ads / text messages then pay Google a small sum to get an ad-free ride.

The China and India Argument

The western media is making increasingly shrill noises about the growing threat of emissions from China and India while completely ignoring the scale of emission that goes on in their own backyard.

In an increasingly environmentally aware world China and India are becoming the new villains. Every other day there's a news report highlighting the growing might of the two countries and the harm they are set to unleash on the environment.

Lets take this post, as an example. Made by our friends at AutoblogGreen, it announces that "Low cost Indian cars could be environmental disaster." What caught my attention is not that it ignores India's adoption of tough Euro emission norms which are more stringent than EPA standards of US. Nor that it disregards that Tata's upcoming air car will emit anywhere from 25% to less than 1% of CO2 per km compared to an internal combustion engine gasoline car (more on that in next post). What I find most interesting is that there's no acknowledgment of the environmental harm done by cars in the west today while pointing to the future "environmental disaster" to be caused by Indian cars.

The problem with the China and India argument is that it's disproportionate. It's made to move people's attention away from far greater environmental crimes that are being perpetrated in the west. Here is an apt example from automotive industry itself which is representative of total emissions. In 2005, the United States produced around 12 million cars. India, on the other hand, produced just 1.6 million. In other words, the U.S. with less than 1/3rd population of India, produced 7.5 times the number of cars. If we adjust the figure by population, US is around 23 times worse than India!

I should mention here that these are production figures, not sales (see source PDF). India's share should actually be less than this since some of the cars were for exports. We export more cars than China, whereas US doesn't do much car exports if I'm correct. I'm not even going to compare the size of Indian cars (an estimated 80% of our cars are small cars compared to 15% in US) or their efficiency (estimated around 50% higher than US) or the historical automotive production (more than 100 years in US vs. 25 in India). Let's just say that it will take a long time for us to catch up to the level of "disaster" US cars are unleashing over the environment right now.

This is not to say that India should not do all it can to avoid reaching that scale. The point is, emissions on a much larger scale are caused in U.S. today and therefore it should be the last country to point a finger at China and India. Climate change is a global problem and all emissions are bad regardless of where they are caused. What the world needs from the U.S. is leadership in cutting down dramatically on emissions, not finger pointing.

I've covered the India and China argument in the past on this blog without directly referring to it. The George Monbiot interview I pointed out recently touched upon it when Monbiot attacked the interviewer's contention that China is a big problem by saying:

For us to turn to the Chinese and point the finger at them and say they are the problem, we have to become hypocrites on a scale that's almost unprecedented. I mean, the Chinese at the moment produce 2.7 tons of carbon per year. Canadians produce 19 and the Americans 20.

Don Brown, a U.S. scientist at IPCC, who has worked on the moral and ethical dimensions of climate change holds a similar view:

What are the other issues. Well, the issue of no country has to do anything until everyone else [India and China] does something, okay. That's the third excuse, unfortunately my country has been using for twenty years. We don't have to do anything until everyone else does something. That's a moral issue. Can a co-criminal decide that they don't have to stop their crime because the other co-criminals haven't stopped doing it? As a matter of moral and ethics, we believe that that excuse is also morally bankrupt.

UPDATE 13-Jul: Autobloggreen added a response to this post a few days ago. It admitted that decision made by US in the past were unsustainable but the author still did not recognise the difference between the *scale* of emissions caused in US vs. China or India.

A new post made yesterday finally demonstrates the scale that I was talking about.

Looking at this shocking graph with US on the left and a bunch of countries on right, no one can argue that China and India pose an "environmental disaster" in the near future.

At least not without first acknowledging the environmental disaster that US is today.

UPDATE 15-Jul: Sunita Narain, noted environmentalist, editor 'Down to Earth' magazine and head of Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), shares similar thoughts in her magazine editorial from May-31:

"Currently, two things are happening. One, China and India are being projected as the new villains—they pollute; they will increase emissions; they don’t want legally binding commitments and are, therefore, blocking global negotiations."

She goes on to raise some important points and concludes that the developing world must force rich nations to make the necessary reductions in emissions.

Ford to World: "We Promise Global Warming, Melting Glaciers and Dead Polar Bears"

An ad campaign launched today by Ford India seems to be making a mockery of worldwide resistance to global warming. It shows an iceberg apparently destroyed by the SUV and a couple of polar bears stranded on a thin ice sheet.



Top: Close-up view of their ad. Click to see complete background of the ad. The image was downloaded from Ford's site and was available here (ZIP file) at the time of posting.

Left: The complete full-page ad from The Hindustan Times, June 25, 2007.

I woke up this morning to find this shocking full-page ad in the newspaper. My first thought: "Could they be any more INSENSITIVE?" What were they thinking by placing a large honking SUV in front of an iceberg that seems to have been destroyed by it? What are they trying to say? That the "beastly power" (their term used in the ad) of the new 4X4 Ford Endeavour is capable of destruction beyond the roads? If so, then that would be spot on.

Or were they trying to laugh at those of us who are concerned about global warming? Are they, by any chance, celebrating the recent decision of US Automobile standards organisation (CAFE) that gave US Automakers 13 more years to improve vehicle efficiency to a level that we should be getting today? I wonder if it was Al Gore that's the butt of their joke whose hit documentary last year showed increasing cases of drowning polar bears as they can't find any ice to latch on to because of global warming caused by automobiles, among other reasons.

Sarcasm apart, it's probably the work of an ignorant graphic designer approved by some equally dim executives at Ford. That said, this is height of ignorance. No topic has attracted as much media coverage worldwide in recent months as climate change. Papers have devoted special supplements, magazine after magazine continues to come out with special "Green" issues and talk show hosts have gone hoarse talking about the topic. Heck, even 5-year old kids know that polar bears are dying because of global warming...



India, which woke up late (around Feb 2007 after the first IPCC report) to the issue of climate change has now witnessed enough media coverage for it to be quite well known. Arvind Mathew, president and MD of Ford India, would have to be living in a cave to not see the connection with the depiction in this ad.

One thing is clear though, this would never have happened in the U.S. If this ad is released there today, Ford would be lynched. Despite their sorry environmental record, all U.S. automakers have been under tremendous public pressure recently to appear green. Ford U.S. has even been running pro-green ad-campaigns, which incidentally, have also featured polar bears but there they are shown as protected and with care "to ensure that the images are anatomically and scientifically correct".

Ford, in U.S. has also been touting its top-10 green credentials, which at #1 includes, not improved efficiency, but, hold-your-breath: seat covers made of recycled fabric!

Thanks to AutoblogGreen for all the coverage of green issues in the U.S. auto industry. I wonder if our friends there (Sebatian, Mike, Sam?) can ask Ford U.S. for a comment.

UPDATE: If you're just as outraged at this as I am, write to Ford and demand an explanation.

UPDATE 2: Am I over blowing it?

Some of you may think I'm fussing over something trivial. Maybe I overstated it in the heat of things, but there are a bunch of things here that pushed me over the edge...

SUVs

• SUVs represent everything that's wrong with the auto industry.
  
• They are less safe than the regular cars and on top of that they give the illusion of greater safety.
  
• SUVs are also less fuel efficient than regular cars which themselves are far less efficient to begin with.
  
• They have far too much space than what's needed or used for city travel.

U.S. Automakers

• The U.S. auto industry is one of the biggest reasons we are in this mess today.
  
• They've had over 100 years to look for alternatives.
  
• They've had these alternative technologies for decades.
  
• They conspired to destroy mass transit in the middle of last century.
  
• They have a history of suppression of new technology.
  
• In a more just world, the U.S. automakers would be prosecuted in court. Maybe one day they would be.

Internal Combustion Engine

• It's a disgrace that the predominant mode of personal travel in the 21st century is still the massively inefficient internal combustion engine.
  
• At just around 20% mechanical engine efficiency, they are the most inefficient modes of transport.
  
• At less than 1% of well-to-wheel efficiency they waste 99% energy which should be a criminal offense.
  
• Yet they are sold to public as high-technology, a panacea.

(I can substantiate each of the above statements if anyone wants me to, but I think there's nothing new here. All of this is quite well known. The problem is, we're so surrounded by mediocrity and inefficiency that we learn to ignore it.)

So my contempt for the internal combustion engine, the U.S. automakers and SUVs, together with my concern for global warming combined to lead to an outburst when I saw that ad.

Notes and links

Ford-India microsite for Endeavour 4X4. Find the picture in downloads section.
News coverage of the launch of the new Endeavour
New CAFE standards announced for US automakers
Official website of Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth
Pro-green ad campaigns run by Ford in U.S.
Top-10 Green achievements of Ford

Polar bear trivia: Bush administration, which has long been denying that global warming is dangerous, first conceded it late last year when they called for protection of polar bears. Later, in March 2007 however, Bush barred scientists travelling abroad from talking on polar bears or climate change.