Pay attention please

As automotive IT continues to proliferate, so too do the sources of distraction for the innattentive driver. Thank heaven, then, for the likes of Oxford University academic Dr Charles Spence.

Spence's topic of interest is the science of attention: studying how the mind manages the information arriving from the five external senses, the sense of prioperception that allows us to gauge where our limbs are in relation to each other, plus the introspective urge to switch off the external world and daydream. In short, he studies how we decide what to think about.

It's worth a wander around his web site, and reading up the few recent reports about his findings.

Some of the info is intuitive: an audible warning of an impending rear-end impact is more effective if it appears to come from behind the driver, for example. And a suitable word such as "ahead" or "behind", used as an alert, is more likely to be correctly interpreted by the innattentive driver than the simulated sound of a horn from the front or rear speakers.

Other results are more intriguing. For example, a driver distracted by a phone call is more likely to be able to continue to concentrate on the road ahead if the speakerphone sound comes from dead ahead, because the driver's brain does not have to divide its attention in two physical directions.

As Spence suggests, something as simple as speakers built into the windscreen frame could save lives.

Vorsprung durch television

Optimists who feel that TV adverts are often more entertaining than the programmes they sandwich will be able to test their theory to the full, with the launch of the UK’s first channel dedicated to promoting a single commercial brand.

The Audi TV channel began full-time broadcasting earlier this week on Sky Digital channel 259.

Audi has persuaded UK regulator Ofcom to issue the first ever self-promotional licence to broadcast, “setting a precedent in broadcasting regulations”, according to Audi. The carmaker also owns the licence to broadcast another channel, called Technical TV, but this has a general entertainment licence.

The channel will not be one long advert, apparently:

It will of course showcase the company's ever increasing range through informative programming - there will be nine major product launches alone during the channel's first year - but it has also been designed to entertain with content that extends far beyond the cars themselves.

Viewers will have to make up their own minds about the content.

Audi adds that it plans to use the interactive functions of Sky’s TV system to duplicate some of the functions of its web site, such as locating a dealership, ordering a brochure or booking a test drive.

Two roads to an electric future

It’s interesting to compare the business plans of two US-based electric vehicle start-ups.
One, Commuter Cars, is trying the top-down approach with its Tango two-seat electric car.

• Stick with the US as the target market.
• Get a respected UK-based race car maker, Prodrive, to build your first generation cars from carbon-fibre.
• Sell these top-spec cars to rich people for $85,000 apiece.
• Use that income to help finance the engineering of later, cheaper models.

The other approach, used by the Reva company behind the G-Wiz, is the polar opposite, with a bottom-up approach.

• Look beyond the US for markets that suit the short journey/long recharge cycle, such as commuting in congested European cities.
• Build in India for cheap labour, and choose cheap materials.
• Price to compete with low-end hatchbacks and emphasise how little time the purchase will take to pay itself back.
• Aim to build volume by word of mouth, and refine the design as you go.

On the face of it, the bottom-up plan looks the most feasible.
But it would be great if both worked.

Electric cars become radio stars

Fans of electric cars should listen to yesterday’s edition of In Business, a show on BBC Radio 4. It includes some illuminating interviews with the US boffins behind the India-built G-Wiz electric noddy car, among others.
The show is available in streaming Real Audio format from the In Business home page, but can also be downloaded in MP3 format: click here.

Audi touch-screen lets fingers do the talking

The Audi TT shooting brake concept unveiled at the Tokyo motor show borrows from PDA technology to allow users to write with a fingertip on the centre-console touch-screen. Useful for inputting addresses into the sat-nav and, er, not much else. But we like it nonetheless.

Toyota's Fine-X spins on the spot

Mercedes won’t have the fuel cell concept silliness to itself in Tokyo, as Toyota will be showing off its Fine-X – or Fuel cell Innovation Emotion eXperiment.
Quite a lot less real-looking than the Hygenius, the Fine-X manages the current concept-car trick of turning around in its own length (like the Peugeot Moovie and Nissan Pivo, but utilising a different bag of tricks):

On-the-spot rotation, and the ability to easily perform parking and U-turns, is afforded by the combination of four-wheel independent drive, four-wheel independent steering and a large-steering-angle steering mechanism with electric in-wheel motors housed in each of the four wheels.

Mercedes to show off "Hygenius" fuel-cell testbed

Having tested the water with its A-Class based F-Cell vehicle, Mercedes-Benz is ready for phase two of its fuel-cell research project. At the upcoming Tokyo motor show it will be exhibiting a new, purpose-built fuel cell vehicle, the F 600 Hygenius.

The Hygenius’s fuel-cell delivers electrical oomph to an 85 kilowatt (115 hp) motor, allowing the MPVish Hygenius to travel 100km on just 2.9 litres of fuel, according to Mercedes. That's roughly 100 miles per gallon, if anyone measures hydrogen in gallons.

The car is actually a fuel cell/battery hybrid, with the fuel cell charging the batteries when the car is not accelerating, and the battery then augmenting the fuel cell to give maximum shove when required.

As with petrol/electric hybrids, the Hygenius can run on batteries alone at low speed, and can use regenerative braking to reclaim energy that would otherwise be wasted warming up the braking system.

Mercedes hopes to have a “full production maturity” design in place between 2012 and 2015 – a fairly aggressive schedule according to industry insiders.

Unlike the F-Cell, the Hygenius is also a rolling testbed for other future technologies, both inside and outside the vehicle. These innovations range from electrically heated and cooled cupholders, to cameras that keep a computerised watch on the world outside and stop you opening the door in the path of maniac city-centre cyclists, for example.

It also has a clever head-up display system designed to minimise the effort the driver’s eyeball has to put in, switching focus from the road ahead to dashboard distance:

The images on both high-resolution colour displays in the dashboard are diverted by means of two mirrors before being projected to appear at a point 1.40 metres in front of the driver. This leading-edge virtual display technology from Mercedes-Benz represents a key improvement to driver-fitness safety as it shortens the time required for drivers to switch their gaze from what's taking place on the road far ahead to the close-up instrument cluster display. Scientific studies have confirmed that, with this technology, the driver's eyes do not have to constantly adjust between close and long range so they do not tire as quickly.

Filed under cars and computers

AOL snaps up Autoblog

Weblogs Inc, owner of the popular Autoblog, has agreed to be bought by everyone’s favourite clueless online dinosaur, AOL.

Autoblog itself doesn’t yet seem to have commented on this meeting of minds.

According to AOL, Weblogs will be left to its own devices and run as a wholly-owned subsidiary, once the deal is confirmed by AOL shareholders. Big clunky companies often say this when they buy a small and more fashionable company. It doesn’t tend to work out that way in the long or even medium term, of course.

Filed under cars and computers

Wider web for cars

An earlier blog posting about the Japanese Advanced Safety Vehicle project gave a little too much credit to Honda. The work is part of a government-coordinated effort in Japan, and Nissan has since wheeled out its implementation of the ASV version 3 specifications.

The ASV project – designed to foster automatic vehicle-to-vehicle communication to detect impending danger – will hold a lot more promise if the number of auto makers involved is maximised, so the inclusive Japanese initiative is to be applauded.

The car-to-car comms parameters can be thrashed out and agreed by everybody, and then the individual carmakers can go away and compete, differentiating themselves in the way that they implement the system. Some makers may choose highly automated intervention systems, while others may prefer to leave control in the hands of humans and instead concentrate on giving the driver better information on which to act.

Filed under cars and computers

Fuel-cell visions

The display of fuel cell vehicles in London’s Trafalgar Square on Monday managed to attract a fair amount of enthusiasm from passing tourists and the odd TV crew, despite the display highlights – such as the Mercedes F-Cell pictured – being on the static side. Sadly the bods from Intelligent Energy didn’t seem keen to zip through the crowds on the ENV fuel-cell bike. Perhaps it isn’t as good to ride as it is to look at?

Next day at the Grove Fuel Cell Symposium, Werner Tillmetz of the Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research in Ulm, Germany, summed up the state of the art in fuel cell vehicles. Of the 350 vehicles produced to date worldwide, more than 100 are currently in daily use. Together, these cars, trucks and buses have clocked up more than a million kilometres, he noted, and have “defined the requirements” for the next generation of vehicles. There are about 100 hydrogen filling stations worldwide, he added, and the prototype vehicles are helping to establish what purity of hydrogen they need to operate reliably in the long term.

An often overlooked area is maintenance. “How many mechanics are experienced in handling 400- to 600-volt cars?” Tillmetz asked, explaining that servicing skills will need to be built up before fuel cell vehicles can be offered to the general public.

Having said the above, he predicted that fuel-cell passenger cars are just 10 years – or two model development cycles – from the mass market. Japan expects to have 50,000 fuel cell vehicles in service by 2010, and five million by 2020.

The big carmakers are likely to be beaten to market by startups concentrating on niche products such as scooters, Tillmetz added. These might be fuelled using hydrogen split from water using domestic electricity.

The big unknown, of course, is what role governments will take. With global warming accelerating – the UK government’s chief scientific advisor Professor Sir David King opened the conference with some dire projections – it would be good to see some incentives to accelerate the pace of improvement in carbon-neutral technologies.

R&D tax breaks for research, zero duty or even tax rebates on hydrogen fuel, exemption from road tax and the like could dramatically alter the financial equations and speed up adoption of cleaner and more efficient alternatives to the internal combustion engine.