A Future Timeline for Automobiles

The following article was taken from "The Futurist" (http://futurist.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/05/a_future_timeli.html)

Many streams of accelerating technological change, from energy to The Impact of Computing, will find themselves intersecting in one of the largest consumer product industries of all. Over 70 million automobiles were produced worldwide in 2006, with rapid market penetration underway in India and China. Indisputably, cars greatly affect the lives of consumers, the economies of nations, and the market forces of technological change.

I thus present a speculative timeline of technological and economic events that will happen for automobiles. This has numerous points of intersection with the Future Timeline for Energy.


2007 : The Tesla Roadster emerges to not only bring Silicon Valley change agents together to sow the seeds of disruption in the automotive industry, but also to immediately transform the image of electrical vehicles from 'punishment cars' to status symbols of dramatic sex appeal. Even at the price of $92,000, demand outstrips supply by an impressive margin.

2009 : The Automotive X-Prize of $25 Million (or more) is successfully claimed by a car designed to meet the 100 mpg/mass-producable goal set by the X Prize Foundation. Numerous companies spring forth out of prototypes tested in the contest.

2010 : Tesla Motors releases a fully electric 4-door family sedan for $50,000 to $70,000. With gasoline at $4/gallon, established automobile companies simultaneously release plug-in hybrid vehicles. Hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and fully electrical cars represent 5% of total new automobiles sold in the US, even if tax incentives have been a large stimulus. The habit of plugging in a car overnight to charge it starts to become routine for homeowners with such cars, but apartment dwellers are at a disadvantage in this regard, not having an outlet near their parking spot.

2011 : Two or more iPod ports, 10-inch flat-screen displays for back seat passengers, parking space detection technology, and embedded Wi-Fi adapters that wirelessly can transfer files into the vehicle's hard drive from up to 500 feet away are standard features for many new cars in the $40,000+ price tier.

2012 : Over 100 million new automobiles are produced in 2012, up from 70 million in 2006. All major auto manufacturers are racing to incorporate new nanomaterials that are lighter than aluminium yet stronger and more malleable than steel. The average weight of cars has dropped by about 5% from what it was for the equivalent style in 2007.

2013 : Tesla Motors releases a fully electric 4-door sedan that is available for under $40,000, which is only 33% more than the $30,000 that the typical fully-loaded gasoline-only V6 Accord or Camry sells for in 2013.

2014 : Self-driving cars are now available in the luxury tier (priced $100,000 or higher). A user simply enters in the destination, and the car charts out a path (similar to Google Maps) and proceeds on it, in compliance with traffic laws. However, a software malfunction results in a major traffic pile-up that garners national media attention for a week. Subsequently, self-driving technologies are shunned despite their superior statistical performance relative to human drivers.

2015 : As predicted in early 2006 on The Futurist, a 4-door sedan with a 240 hp engine, yet costing only 5 cents/mile to operate (the equivalent of 60 mpg of gasoline), is widely available for $35,000 (which is within the middle-class price band by 2015 under moderate assumptions for economic growth). This is the result of combined advances in energy, lighter nanomaterials, and computerized systems.

2016 : An odd change has occurred in the economics of car depreciation. Between 1980 and 2007, annual car depreciation rates decreased due to higher quality materials and better engine design, reaching as little as 12-16% a year for the first 5 years of ownership. Technology pushed back the forces of depreciation.

However, by 2016, 40% of a car's initial purchase price is comprised of electronics (up from under 20% in 2007 and just 5% in 1985), which depreciate at a rate of 25-40% a year. The entire value of the car is pulled along by the 40% of it that undergoes rapid price declines, and thus total car depreciation is now occuring at a faster rate of up to 20% a year for the first 5 years. This is a natural progression of The Impact of Computing, and wealthier consumers are increasingly buying new cars as 'upgrades' to replace models with obsolete technologies after 5-7 years, much as they would upgrade a game console, rather than waiting until mechanical failure occurs in their current car. Consumers also conduct their own upgrades of certain easily-replaced components, much as they would upgrade the memory or hard drive of a PC. Technology has thus accelerated the forces of depreciation.

2018 : Among new cars sold, gasoline-only vehicles are now a minority. Millions of electricity-only vehicles are charged through solar panels on a daily basis, relieving those consumers of a fuel expenditure that was as high as $2000/year in 2007. Even when sunlight is obscured and the grid is used, some electrical vehicles cost as little as 1 cent/mile to operate.

2020 : New safety technologies that began to appear in mainstream cars around 2012, such as night vision, lane departure correction, and collision-avoiding cruise control, have replaced the existing fleet of older cars over the decade, and now US annual traffic fatalities have dropped to 25,000 in 2020 from 43,000 in 2005. Given the larger US population in 2020 (about 350 Million), this is a reduction in traffic deaths by half on a per-capita basis.

2024 : Self-driving cars have overcome the stigma of a decade prior, and are now widely used. But they still have not fully displaced manual driving, due to user preferences in this regard. Certain highways permit only self-driven cars, with common speed limits of 100 mph or more.

2025-30 : Electricity (indeed, clean electricity) now fuels nearly all passenger car miles driven in the US. There is no longer any significant fuel consumption cost associated with driving a car, although battery maintenance is a new aspect of car ownership. Many car bodies now include solar energy absorbant materials that charge a parked car during periods of sunlight. Leaving such cars out in the sun has supplanted the practice of parking in the shade or in covered parking.

Pervasive use of advanced nanomaterials has ensured that the average car weighs only 60% as much as a 2007 counterpart, but yet is over twice as resistant to dents.

Advances in Computer and Information Technology

The following article was taken from "Michigan Engineering" (http://www.engin.umich.edu/newscenter/pubs/engineer/04SS/achievements/advances.html)

Today's computers and software provide extraordinary computational abilities at low cost to people around the world -- even those without technical skills.

Engineers can launch satellites that manufacture life-saving medications which are impossible to make on earth. Doctors can examine and repair the inside of a beating heart. Students can attend class at universities on other continents -- without ever leaving home. "Smart machinery" can make manufacturing more efficient. Reporters can write stories in Australia and editors can read them just seconds later in New York. Artists can create images digitally. A child in France can send instant messages to a parent doing business in Mexico.

Advances in computer and information technology have created a revolution in science, medicine, education, business, the media, art and entertainment. Michigan Engineering alumni have played key roles in these developments.

Claude Shannon
In 1948, a young freethinker published "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." It was a landmark paper that posed a fundamentally new idea which propelled the world into the information age. Claude Shannon (BSE EE '36, BSE EM '36, ScD hon. '61) was a fresh, exciting voice at Bell Laboratories when he wrote that paper. Today, he's considered the father of information theory and has been compared to Einstein. His study of logic and Boolean algebra at the College of Engineering convinced him that both subjects had applications in relay switching circuits used in telephone exchanges. It became the subject of his MIT master's thesis, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits," one of the most important master's theses of the century. The National Medal of Science and the IEEE Medal of Honor are but two of his many awards.

Lee Boysel
Metal-oxide-semiconductor transistors (known as MOS chips) and large-scale integrated (LSI) semiconductor memory systems were the forerunners of today's microchip technology. Almost all of today's digital chips -- from the wrist-watch chip to the 3GHz Pentium chip -- are based on the MOS transistor. Lee Boysel (BSE EE '62, MSE EE '63) did pioneering work on these transistors and systems during his years at IBM, Fairchild Semiconductor and McDonnell (now McDonnell-Douglas) Aerospace Corporation. He went on to found Four-Phase Systems Inc., a company that produced the computer industry's first LSI semiconductor memory system and the first LSI central processing unit (CPU) and began shipping them in data terminals as early as 1969. Many believe the MOS chip to be the first microprocessor in a commercial system. After founding Four-Phase, Boysel served as president, CEO and chairman. Motorola Inc.purchased Four-Phase in 1982.


Bill Joy
Part of the magic of this digital age has been the ability to connect a number of computers in a network and share information. The first Internet - a vast web of computers - was clumsy and limited until 1984, when the University of California at Berkeley released a new version of UNIX (4.2BSD) that included a complete implementation of the TCP/IP networking protocols -- conventions that became the backbone of the modern Internet. Bill Joy (BSE CompE '75, D.Eng. hon. '04) designed that new version of UNIX. He went on to co-found Sun Microsystems where, years later in 1995, he unveiled Java, another programming language of his design. Java harnesses the power of the Internet and plays a major role in bringing the Web to life -- the program has been integral to the development of Internet business. Joy has 44 patents issued or in progress, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Computer Museum Industry Hall of Fame. In recognition of his outstanding contributions, Joy received the Computerworld Smithsonian Award for Innovation in 1999 and the PC Magazine 1999 Lifetime Achievement Award. Fortune magazine has called him the "Edison of the Internet." He received the College's Alumni Society Medal -- its highest honor -- in 2000.

Larry Page
The Internet became a rich source of information for research, manufacturing, education and many other areas of daily life. However, finding relevant information in this sea of available data was a significant problem. Larry Page (BSE CompE '95) and partner Sergey Brin solved that problem in 1998 with the creation of Google, which has become the world's most popular Internet search engine. Just 26 when he co-founded Google, Inc., Page went on to receive widespread recognition. In 2002, MIT's Technology Review magazine called him a "Young innovator who will create the future." Research and Development magazine named him its Innovator of the Year. He was the first recipient of the College's Alumni Society Recent Engineering Graduate Award. And the National Academy of Engineering elected him to its membership in 2004.


Kevin O'Connor
The more comfortable and productive people became in searching the Internet, the more potential it had for marketing and sales. But businesses needed efficient ways to reach people, and for those potential consumers to shop, browse, order, remit payments, and track orders. Not surprisingly, the details were overwhelming. Kevin O'Connor (BSE EE '83) made them manageable for business with the creation of DoubleClick Inc., a technology company that develops powerful tools which advertisers, direct marketers and Web publishers use to plan, execute and analyze marketing programs. O'Connor co-founded DoubleClick in 1996 in his basement with two people; the company soon grew into a global corporation. He's a co-chair of the College's Progress & Promise 150th Anniversary Campaign.


Tony Fadell
The Internet also showed its potential as a source of entertainment. However, Internet users created a crisis for the music industry and the legal system by downloading five billion songs from various sources -- without paying for them. The problem perplexed music executives, the brightest legal minds and most computer scientists. However, Tony Fadell (BSE CompE '91) developed a solution. He created the iPod, an inexpensive device that can play music in a digital format, and he led the development of an online site from which music buffs can download any of 200,000 singles for 99 cents each. It was a technological and marketing triumph.

Fadell, senior director of Apple Computer's iPod, iSight & Special Projects Group, has created three generations of the iPod and the iSight Camera, a video camera for conferencing over broadband.

What Exactly is a Blog, Anyway?

The following article was taken from "pbs.org" (http://www.pbs.org/teachers/learning.now/2006/05/what_exactly_is_a_blog_anyway.html)
By: Andy Carvin

If you don’t know what a blog is, you’re not alone; according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, nearly two-thirds of Internet users don’t have a good idea of the meaning of “blog.” In case you fall within this group, you’re in luck, though - you’re looking at a blog right now.

But this is just a website, right? Yeah, I get that a lot. On several occasions while doing workshops with both educators and non-educators, people have asked me if blogs are just websites. Yes, it’s true, blogs are a type of website, but there’s more to it than that. Perhaps I should offer a bit of Internet history to explain.

Back when the World Wide Web was young, more than a decade ago, creating websites wasn’t easy. There weren’t any tools that allowed you to design a site. Instead, you had to program a website just like you were writing a piece of software. Every website is made up of a coding language called HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language. Normally you don’t have to see this code when viewing a website, but if you check your Web browser’s menu you’ll probably find an item called something like “view page source,” which will let you see what this code looks like. HTML defines how every Web page looks and how it interacts with other pages. Without HTML, the World Wide Web wouldn’t function.

Unfortunately, knowing HTML isn’t for everyone. It’s not the most difficult coding language in the world, but there’s still a learning curve that’s a turn-off for lots of people. Because of this, websites designed in the mid-1990s tended to be created by people who were very tech-savvy. Even if you just wanted to have a simple website about yourself or your family, you first had to learn a lot about how the Web worked.

Nonetheless, this didn’t deter a number of people who saw the Web as a potential medium for sharing stories about themselves. They started to publish online diaries, using HTML to code websites about their daily lives. It was like keeping a personal journal, but sharing it with the world. Back in 1996, for example, I started publishing travel diaries, writing first-person stories about my personal vacation adventures. Web diaries were sometimes referred to as “Web logs,” not unlike the way a ship captain would keep a log of all events that took place at sea.
In the late 1990s, programmers began exploring ways of making these Web logs easier to publish. Soon, tools like Open Diary and LiveJournal popped up. These tools allowed you to publish a Web log simply by filling out a form. The software would have a blank field for the title and body of each journal entry. Rather than having to code each page by hand, a user would write anything they want, then press a button. The software would do the rest.
After a few more years, these journals started to spread like wildfire. Thousands and thousands of Internet users began publishing on their Web logs, or “blogs” for short. The software also became more sophisticated, allowing people to publish complex websites. What used to take a lot of money and manpower could be done by one person. All of us could become publishers.

Fast forward to 2006…. While no one’s exactly sure how many blogs there are, estimates often range from 30 to 100 million of them, all over the world. Check out a website like Global Voices and you can get a taste for the global reach of blogging, or the blogosphere, as it’s often known.

Even you can start a blog. Right now. I’m serious. There are many blogging tools available online, including free ones. For example, take a look at Blogger.com, one of the most popular blogging platforms. Blogger is a website that lets you set up a free account and create your own blogs - as many as you want. The site has basic step-by-step instructions, taking you through the process of setting up your account, naming your blog and choosing a design template. Then it’s just a matter of filling out a form and pressing a button. The online software does all the hard work, while you get to focus on the fun part - being creative and saying whatever it is you have to say.

Of course, there’s a bigger question - why would you, as a teacher, want to create your own blog? The answer to that is going to vary from person to person, but here are a few common answers I hear from educators who’ve taken the blogging plunge.

Communicate with parents. Some teachers see blogging as an outreach tool for interacting with parents. It’s not always possible to have the kind of hands-on interaction with parents, especially with large class sizes and busy schedules. A blog allows a teacher to summarize what’s going on in the classroom and share it with parents that have Internet access. (But it’s worth noting that not all parents will have access - something we’ll talk about more another day.) And most blogging tools allow readers to comment on what’s been posted, so parents are able to respond to different blog entries and have an online conversation with the teacher.

Communicate with your peers. Lots of educators blog so they can have a professional dialogue with their colleagues. Everyone can benefit from discussing the various challenges we all face in our work, and blogs serve as a mechanism for sharing those ideas. Some educational bloggers like Will Richardson and David Warlick have developed quite a following because of their eloquence and creativity. In many ways, blogs like these serve the same purpose that email discussion lists have served for more than a decade - they become a platform for discussing topics of interest to a large group of people. Blogging is different, though, in that it’s more personal and intimate, tailored to your professional interests and needs.

Showcase student work There’s nothing like seeing a teacher beam with pride because of the success of their students. Blogs can be used as a platform for highlighting the best work of your students, showcasing their talent to an audience that goes beyond the classroom.

And who’s to say that teachers are the only ones who should blog? More and more educators are exploring blogging as a student activity in itself. Blogging takes writing assignments into the real world, giving students the chance to receive feedback from each other, as well as other online mentors. While some teachers prefer that blogs only feature their students’ polished work, others see blogging as a platform where students can share early drafts of a writing assignment, using online feedback to improve each version. Blogging becomes an interactive form of peer review.

Student blogging does raise certain concerns, though. How much information do you reveal about a student? Do you accept comments from the general public, or only a select group of trusted individuals? Are students staying on topic, or are they getting too personal or inappropriate in some other way? There’s no one answer to these questions, and classroom blogging is still a relatively knew phenomenon. But that’s why educational blogs are important - they can serve as a place where teachers can debate these topics among their peers and work out answers that are appropriate for their classrooms and communities.