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Flash analysis: the Fisker debacle and its implications on investing, innovation, and government incentives

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 03 May 2013 06:55:07 +0000

Electric car startup Fisker Automotive, along with its plug-in sports car, is turning out to be one of the worst venture capital bets of all time. We asked GigaOM readers a variety of questions about what they think will happen to Fisker and what they think will be the broader implications of and lessons learned from Fisker’s high-profile crash and burn. Here are the results.

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Oxford researchers modify Nissan Leaf for cheaper autonomous car

David Meyer — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 16:08:19 +0000

Is the future of the self-driving car one of full autonomy, or, as car manufacturers such as Ford have suggested, one of part-time autonomy? In the near-term, the latter option seems far saner, and it’s the approach that underpins new research being shown off by academics at the University of Oxford.

The RobotCar U.K. project is using a modified Nissan Leaf, an all-electric vehicle, which is fitted with around £5,000 ($7,750) worth of prototype navigation equipment. That system includes a controller PC in the trunk — which can control every function of the car — as well as cameras in the front, lasers discreetly tucked under the front and rear bumpers, and an iPad for the user interface up front.

In time, the researchers hope to develop an autonomous navigation system that costs just £100.

“We are working on a low-cost ‘auto drive’ navigation system, that doesn’t depend on GPS, done with discreet sensors that are getting cheaper all the time. It’s easy to imagine that this kind of technology could be in a car you could buy,” Professor Paul Newman, the project’s co-leader, said in a statement.

Mapping and learning

The system doesn’t use GPS because the satellite-based system is not accurate enough for the researchers’ needs. Instead, twin cameras keep an eye on the road ahead for pedestrians and so on, while the lasers create a three-dimensional map of the world around the car — this is a similar approach to that taken by Google in its autonomous vehicle research, except far cheaper (Google’s LIDAR unit alone costs $70,000) and less conspicuous.

This is where the car’s part-time autonomy comes in — at least in city environments. As Newman put it:

“Our approach is made possible because of advances in 3D laser mapping that enable an affordable car-based robotic system to rapidly build up a detailed picture of its surroundings. Because our cities don’t change very quickly robotic vehicles will know and look out for familiar structures as they pass by so that they can ask a human driver, ‘I know this route, do you want me to drive?’, and the driver can choose to let the technology take over.”

It’s really a matter of machine learning, the science of probability and good guesswork; and the data the researchers are using comes from the cameras and lasers, but also from road plans, aerial photographs and internet queries. The car needs to learn its environment before it can, metaphorically speaking, take the wheel. (The driver can always take back control by tapping the brakes.)

Check out this video showing car driving through a gradually-updating “semantic prior map” — in other words, all the fixed stuff such as road markings, curb locations and so on, with dynamic objects being mapped along the way:

As for next steps, the team will try to get the system to understand traffic flows and learn how to evaluate best routes.

“Whilst our technology won’t be in a car showroom near you any time soon, and there’s lots more work to do, it shows the potential for this kind of affordable robotic system that could make our car journeys safer, more efficient, and more pleasant for drivers,” Newman said.

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The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 08:12:23 +0000

The fourth quarter in cleantech saw attention paid to two prominent and publicly traded companies: EV maker Tesla and newly minted public listing SolarCity. It remains a transitional period for the sector as investment declines and investors look for value investments and give money to those companies able to scale with little additional capital.

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Electric vehicle outlook: 2012–2017

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 17:06:18 +0000

In the future, plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) will be offered in a variety of vehicle segments, with the vast majority on the road being small cars. Overall, between 2012 and 2017, more than 900,000 light-duty PEVs will be sold in the United States. This report predicts the growth and diversity of the electric vehicle (EV) market over the next five years. In addition to forecasting the market and its different segments, the report also examines car-sharing programs like Car2Go and smart transportation systems that, along with EVs, promise to change the nature of transportation in the 21st century.

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Forget the E-Bugster, Here’s the original electric VW Bug

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:49:25 +0000

At the Beijing Auto Show this week, Volkswagen is showing off a concept car called the E-Bugster, which basically looks like an electric Bug. But as our Green Overdrive watchers know, this isn’t the first electric Bug to hit the roads. Entrepreneur Al Bullock electrified his classic VW and has been driving it around the streets of Livermore, California for the past several years. For $18,000 Bullock created a stylin’ EV that costs less than a Nissan LEAF and has the same battery range.

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

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Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 06:55:41 +0000

The year 2012 may be remembered in the cleantech space as one of both hope and disappointment. Electric vehicles from the plug-in Prius to the Mitsubishi i to the long-awaited Tesla Model S rolled out, but disappointing sales mean the market may not have caught up to innovation. Acquisitions and investments chugged along in the smart-grid market, with Landis+Gyr’s acquisition of Ecologic Analytics and the anticipation of a Silver Spring Networks IPO that has not yet materialized. Meanwhile the quest for the low-power server continued in the green data-center space with AMD’s purchase of SeaMicro for $334 million. We examine these events and others in this report, which also provides a near-term outlook of trends and companies that will be important to watch in 2012.

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How electric vehicles lead to better telematics

Adam Lesser — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:00:12 +0000

This is the year of the electric vehicle rollout. Offerings in the EV space will explode with everything from a long-awaited plug-in Prius to the first all-electric SUV, from Tesla. And the most innovative aspect of this flurry may not be that the vehicles are electric but that they are ushering in the era of the connected car and an entirely new relationship between a driver and his vehicle.

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Green IT 2012: looking for bright spots amid the clouds

Adam Lesser — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:01:09 +0000

As we look toward the next year, the cleantech sector faces many challenges, which we examine in detail in this 2012 outlook. Renewable energy generators encounter an increasingly difficult subsidy environment, and key cleantech innovations like electric vehicles face an uphill climb in terms of connecting with a larger market. The effort to build cleaner data centers continues. Meanwhile, low-power chips will get a shot at creating further energy savings at the server level. There remains, however, something of a silver lining, with companies like Nest poised to innovate in the home energy management space and Silver Spring Network’s potentially successful IPO offering a shot in the arm for the smart grid. Additional companies mentioned in this report include ARM, Calxeda, Getaround and Solyndra. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Waiting for the EV market to materialize

Adam Lesser — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 01:39:20 +0000

It was a tough week for electric cars, with Chevy Volt’s sales falling short and Aptera’s filing for bankruptcy. The barriers to EV adoption are widely known but center around a few major issues, including range anxiety, charging time and initial cost. Range anxiety and unease about charging time will decline as consumers get more comfortable with the product. That leaves the real long-term issue: initial cost.

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Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:01:08 +0000

Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically.

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