About 11 months ago, I joined Method, a brand experience firm with a strong focus on design and technology that has built an excellent reputation over the last 10 years of delivering sometimes beautiful, sometimes innovative print, web, and other interactive projects for a wide-ranging client base. As I mentioned a few posts back, Method has launched our new website:
What is exciting about this? First, that an Indian company (albeit a massive conglomerate) has developed a solution for the needs of the Indian market, in terms of cost, features, and fit to the physically crowded Indian urban landscape. Second, the opportunity for increased mobility that this provides the expanding middle class in India. The introduction of the automobile to the middle class fundamentally changed American culture. What will be the impact in India? Third, the commitment (if Tata's claims are true) to building a vehicle which takes environmental and basic safety concerns into consideration, not just cost:Over the past year, Tata has been building hype for a car that would cost a mere 100,000 rupees (roughly $2,500) and bring automotive transportation to the mainstream Indian population. It has been nicknamed the “People’s Car.” Over the course of the New Delhi Auto Expo, which began this week, anticipation had grown to fever pitch.
With the theme from “2001: A Space Odyssey” playing, Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Motors drove the small white bubble car onto Tata’s show stage, where it joined two others.
“They are not concept cars, they are not prototypes,” Mr. Tata announced when he got out of the car. “They are the production cars that will roll out of the Singur plant later this year.”The four-door Nano is a little over 10 feet long and nearly 5 feet wide. It is powered by a 623cc two-cylinder engine at the back of the car. With 33 horsepower, the Nano is capable of 65 miles an hour. Its four small wheels are at the absolute corners of the car to improve handling. There is a small trunk, big enough for a duffel bag.
“Today, we indeed have a People’s Car, which is affordable and yet built to meet safety requirements and emission norms, to be fuel efficient and low on emissions,” Mr. Tata added. “We are happy to present the People’s Car to India and we hope it brings the joy, pride and utility of owning a car to many families who need personal mobility.
"the 33hp engine meets current Euro 4 emissions standards and is cleaner than most of the scooters running around on Indian streets right now.” They also claim that the Nano can achieve 54 mpg (U.S.) and has passed frontal and side impact tests"What is worrying about this? I make the assumption that, with or without this vehicle, there would be an explosion of personal-use vehicles by the rapidly expanding (in number and wealth) middle class in India. Still, the prospect of another million vehicles on the Indian roadways is deeply concerning -- for the local environment, in terms of smog and congestion, for the global environment, in terms of climate change and other atmospheric emissions, for public safety, of both the drivers of these tiny little death traps, and the massive number of Indian urbanites who use other means of transportation (pedestrians, bicyclists, rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, scooters, motorcycles) on Indian city streets, and to the political will that Indian governments will have to building public transportation infrastructure at the expense of more roads, widened roads, and highways. Perhaps not quite the head-on collision of anti-poverty versus environment that Slate suggests, but some interesting dilemmas will arrive if the Tata Nano takes off. And I bet it will.
CES has no shortage of displays. And when MAKE offered us some TV-B-Gone clickers to bring to the show, we pretty much couldn't help ourselves. We shut off a TV. And then another. And then a wall of TVs. And we just couldn't stop. (And Panasonic, you're so lucky that 150-incher didn't have an active IR port.) It was too much fun, but watching this video, we realize it probably made some people's jobs harder, and I don't agree with that (Especially Motorola). We're sorry.Take a look.
On my jaunt out to San Diego last week, I picked up a copy of Seed Magazine, which takes stylistic cues from Wired and other culture magazines, and applies them to the world of science, producing a sort of hipster-Scientific American, I guess. I've read the magazine a few times, and have generally found it to be decent. In the June 2007 issue, I was specifically drawn to the cover story, "The China Experiment," promising a detailed look into technology initiatives native to China focused on improving the environment. While the article contained a couple of interesting facts (15 of the top 20 cities on the World Bank's assessment of "most polluted cities" are in China), a number of quoted platitudes ("It's historic," says Kishan Khoday, head of the UNDP's energy and environment program in China. "It's going to take efforts on all angles of the issue to get it done"), by and far the most interesting parts were the anecdotes of specific initiatives that have been undertaken to green China, sometimes in unique ways. For example:"For the Olympics, a designated weather modifciation office will reduce air and ground pollution before the Games by shooting rockets filled with silver iodide into the sky to make rain. Beijing's Science and Technology Department has been experimenting with hormone therapy and cross-breeding to produce flowers that can withstand a Beiging August. "I'm sure that during those three weeks it will be crystal-clear in Beijing," energy analyst [Jim] Brock says. "They're playing with all sorts of things."
Google said Tuesday it is getting in on the development of electric vehicles, awarding $1 million in grants and inviting applicants to bid for another $10 million in funding to develop plug-in hybrid electric vehicles capable of getting 70 to 100 miles per gallon.The project, called the RechargeIT initiative and run from Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org, aims to further the development of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles - cars or trucks that have both a gasoline engine and advanced batteries that recharge by plugging into the nation's electric grid.
"Since most Americans drive less than 35 miles per day, you easily could drive mostly on electricity with the gas tank as a safety net," Dan Reicher, director of Climate and Energy Initiatives for Google.org, wrote on the organization's Web site. "In preliminary results from our test fleet, on average the plug-in hybrid gas mileage was 30-plus mpg higher than that of the regular hybrids."
The project also aims to develop vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, allowing cars to sell their stored power back to the nation's electricity grid during times of peak demand.
Well, ENW sends me an interesting link this morning to techPresident, "a new group blog that covers how the 2008 presidential candidates are using the web, and vice versa, how content generated by voters is affecting the campaign."
"Among cultural intellectuals, pessimism is the style," he says with a tinge of scorn. "You're not a paid-up member unless you're gloomy." But when it comes to climate change, he finds (quoting the Italian revolutionary Gramsci) that scientists can combine "pessimism of the intellect" with "optimism of the will". "Science is an intrinsically optimistic project. You can't be curious and depressed. Curiosity is itself a sure stake in life. And science is often quite conscious of intellectual pleasure, in a way that the humanities are not."
In other news about villains with unfair reputations, apparently in 1972 Richard Nixon insisted that if American ingenuity could transport three men 200,000 miles to the moon, it could also find a better way to transport 200,000 men three miles to work.
Amen, Mr. Nixon.GOOD is for people whoe give a damn. It's an entertaining magazine about things that matterIt's a stylishly-laid out magazine, with a fairly strong design-influence, that brings to light lots of cool initiatives going on around the world - from innovative, locally focused solutions to public health issues in sub-Saharan Africa, to high-concept culture-jamming efforts in the New York art-circuit. The features feel lightweight and rambly, and the whole design-chic aesthetic, well, I guess you can make of that what you will. But the magazine is worth a look.
