Will Electric Vehicle be Cheaper?

Check this news:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/16/a123-systems-spinoff-24m-technologies-raises-16-million/

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Neuer-Energiespeicher-soll-Elektroautos-billiger-machen-1060954.html

A spin-off from ABC123 system, the lithium-ion battery maker for electric vehicles, will focus on new technology for cheaper energy storage.

If the new technology can cut off 85% of the cost of current energy storage device, which costs about $10,000 nowadays, what will happen then to the automotive industry?

Anyway, I am ready for the era of E-Car ;-)

Have fun!

Overview on U.S. IntelliDrive Project

Just today, I found a very nice overview article from Shelley J. Row about the U.S. IntelliDrive project: (So far, I have no permission granted from the U.S. DOT Federal Highway Administration’s “Public Roads”, where the article was originally published. But you can fine the full text through the following link):

IntelliDrive: Safer. Smarter. Greener.

Carnegie Mellon University: Experiments Helping to Understand the LOS Effect in VANET

By chance I discovered a very interesting web link from Rui Meireles, a PhD stundent from Carnegie Mellon Unisercity and University of Porto.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rmeirele/los/

It's about the experiments that Rui and his colleagues conducted to discover the effect of vehicles as obstacles in VANET. The results were obtained from field test in real traffic environments in downtown and highway. On the web page, vehicles' realtime position and Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) and Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) are shown through animation in together with the cam recording on the sender vehicle.

Following Rui's link I also discovered the research project "DRIVE-IN" at the Information and Communication Technologies Institute (ICTI) and the Carnegie Mellon University - Portugal Program (Carnegie Mellon|PORTUGAL) by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT).

The DRIVE-IN project focuses on developling geo-optimized VANET protocols, investigating distributed intelligent and collaborative car routing algorithms and exploring more application and services on the VANET platform. As research methodolgies highly efficient software simulation and a real VANET deployment consisting up to 500 texis in the city of Porto are planned.

Have fun! ;-)

U.S. DOT: Research on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Applications for the Environment: Real-Time Information Synthesis (AERIS)

20th July, 2010, the research program IntelliDrive of U.S. DOT issued a Request for Information (RFI) to obtain information from the public sector, private sector and academic communities, for planning purposes, on
- ITS application that can make use of IntelliDrive data and resource to improve environmental performance;
- capture and management of real-time IntelliDrive data relevant to environmental appliations development and performance measurement;
- evaluation techniques, performance measurement, and technologies to capture environmentally-relevant data.

The following link provides more details on this RFI:
FedBizOpps Request for Information Notice - Research on Applications for the Environment: Real-Time Information Synthesis (AERIS)

U.S. DOT : Request for Quotation - Development and Production of Dedicated Short Range Communications at 5.9 GHz: "Here I Am" Devices

16th July, 2010, a solicitation from Department of Transportation ot the U.S. (solicitatoin details on FedBizOpps website) reveals the activities of the IntelliDrive program on Safety Pilot.

From the technical Appendix, one can see the intended device is exclusively elabrated for transmitting "Here I am" message (the SAE 2735 Basic Safety Message). From the standardization point of view, the device has to comply with IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.11p, IEEE P1609.2, IEEE 1609.3, IEEE 1609.4, SAE J551, SAE J1211, SAE J2945-1 and SAE J2735-200911. To be noticed, the current technical requirements do not include any sentence regarding the positioning precision. However, there are quite stringent requirments on the PER and transmission range: "The overall device shall support vehicle-to-vehicle communication throughout a range of 1m to
500m with a maximum Packet Error Rate of 0.1%, in an open field."

Through this solicitation, the DOT would like to build up a Qualified Product List, which will be the exclusive vendor list that can participate in the procurement of the Safety Pilot.

The price of the initial devices response to the solicitation was limited to $50,000 each.

So far, there are three vendors listed on the FedBizOpps website as interested vendors. They are:
- Denso Internaltion America, INC.
- Bluemont Technilogy & Research, INC.
- Kapsch TrafficCom INC.

For the detailed information regarding the solicitation, please refer to the following links:
The official information page on the U.S. FedBizOpps website;