Researchers find backdoor on ZTE Android phones

The summary is that “Two mobile phones, developed by Chinese telecommunications device manufacturer ZTE, have been found to carry a hidden backdoor, which can be used to instantly gain root access with a password, that has been hard-coded into the software.”

We’re awfully dependent on foreign manufacturing. In the 1980s, the concern was “The Japan That Can Say No.” Now it’s Chinese manufacturing OEM/ODMs embedding rogue code in our cellphones, routers, and other electronic infrastructure.

I don’t always agree with Alexander Hamilton, but he got it right in his “Report on Manufactures” in 1791:

Not only the wealth, but the independence and security of a Country, appear to be materially connected with the prosperity of manufactures. Every nation, with a view to those great objects, ought to endeavour to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply. These comprise the means of Subsistence, habitation, clothing, and defence.

The possession of these is necessary to the perfection of the body politic; to the safety as well as to the welfare of the society; the want of either is the want of an important Organ of political life and Motion; and in the various crises which await a state, it must severely feel the effects of any such deficiency.

He was right 220 years ago, and he’s right today. I hope that learning this lesson again only costs us economic pain and not something worse.

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I’ve been invited to speak at the Atlanta Science Tavern on 13 June, 2012. I’ll be speaking on “Hydrogen Cars, Ethanol, Wind Farms, and other Silly Ideas.” You can sign up to attend here.

One of the triggers for this talk was a BMW advertisement promising a hydrogen engine that “produces near zero emissions. Which means the exhaust produces water vapor, not carbon dioxide. So it reduces pollution and greenhouse gases and lessens our dependence on imported oil.”

That’s just silly, and I’ll explain why.

There are more silly ideas out there, most of them referenced by this Scientific American cover article from September 2011 on “How to Get All Energy from Wind, Water, and Solar Power by 2030.”

This is a deeply flawed (and dangerous) vision, but it’s attractive to a lot of well-meaning environmentalists. We’ll explore why it won’t work.

Bio:

Stephen Fleming is Vice President of the Enterprise Innovation Institute at Georgia Tech, responsible for economic development and entrepreneurial support. He’s a GT graduate who has been a Bell Labs physicist, telecom exec, and successful venture capitalist before returning to Georgia Tech in 2005.

References:

http://www.businessweek.com/autos/content/may2006/bw20060505_260847.htm

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030

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First, we found him exploring the electric car corner of the auto show: two Volts, one Tesla Roadster, an original Honda Insight, four Nissan Leafs (Leaves?), and a Prius that has been hacked into becoming a plug-in hybrid. He posed next to Cissa’s brand-new Volt, and answered a few questions that we had (details below).

Later, we went indoors, where Bly spoke about the Chevy Volt. Micky is an experienced and accomplished speaker. He spoke for over half an hour with no notes, and I suspect he would have done just as well without his PowerPoint slides also.

Takeaways

Some possibly-incoherent notes typed on my iPhone while Bly was talking:

Bly leads a team of 3000 engineers; 1800 in Michigan, and 1200 around the world. The Volt, and its follow-ons, are a major investment by General Motors, and he claims that electrification is “redefining the automobile.” This isn’t a skunkworks or hobby project. This is GM’s major bet on transitioning to building cars that are not 100% dependent on petroleum.

Gasoline-powered cars have made a lot of progress. According to Bly, in the last 30 years, tailpipe emissions have been reduced by 99%, mileage has increased by 130%, and safety has increased by 70%. The average car today has 30 onboard computers to optimize performance. But there are political, technical, and economical reasons to move away from internal combustion and mechanical systems to electric and electronic systems. World petroleum demand would require bringing six new Saudi Arabias online by 2030, which isn’t going to happen.

General Motors is a big believer in the Volt architecture. Bly made a big point of emphasizing that the Volt is not a “plug-in hybrid”… it is an “extended range electric vehicle” (EREV). (Please have any religious wars over terminology elsewhere, not in my Comments section.)

Low-light photo of one of Bly's PowerPoint slides. Sorry about the quality.

Batteries are lousy. And “gasoline is an amazing substance.” The very complex, very heavy, very expensive, very state-of-the-art battery underpinning the Volt stores the equivalent energy of one gallon of gasoline. General Motors evaluated 155 suppliers and tested 60 different battery formulations before settling on their partnership with LG Chem. In his words, “There are liars, damned liars, and battery suppliers.”

To bring the battery pack into production, GM built the largest battery testing facility in the world. He showed some great pictures (which I didn’t capture well with my phone) of batteries being tested on fire, underwater, and when being rammed into concrete barriers. The Volt batteries aren’t perfect, but he claims they’re the best ever placed into a production vehicle.

He tackled the NHTSA issue head on. “255,000 cars catch on fire in this country every year. One Volt, after being intentionally crashed and then left for three weeks without following published safety procedures, caught on fire. If you had been trapped in that car for three weeks, you’d have died of starvation or thirst a long time before you were threatened by fire!”

The 1.4 liter engine in the Volt eliminates range anxiety. He used the example of driving 1300 miles from Detroit to West Palm Beach. In a Corvette (he has seen not only the next Corvette, but the next next Corvette!), it would take two days, with an overnight stop in North Carolina. In a Chevrolet Volt, it would take the same two days… the first 40 miles on battery power, then the remaining 1260 miles on gasoline. In a Nissan Leaf (or, to be fair, a Chevy Spark) pure electric, it would take about 18 days! “With the Volt, there’s no need to change your life around your car.”

He finished by saying “We’ve had some really crappy TV commercials” but that the current owners of Volts were almost bizarrely happy with their cars. In his summary, he stated without hesitation that “In ten years, all of us will be driving some sort of electrified vehicle: hybrid, EREV, or pure electric. All of us.”

Questions & Answers

Bly then went on to handle a surprisingly lengthy, detailed, and wide-ranging Q&A session. He obviously already knew about the March sales figures (which turned out to be a record-setting 2289 Volts sold, double February sales and nearly four times January’s disappointing 609 units), but he couldn’t talk about it before the formal announcement two days later.

Why doesn’t GM have a small diesel engine?
To meet current emissions requirements, you need a chemical factory strapped to the back of a diesel engine. Emission control adds about $10,000 to the cost of a diesel vehicle, and it just doesn’t make economic sense for small cars.

Will the Volt architecture be extended to other vehicles?
Absolutely. The Cadillac ELR is nearing production. GM has already shown a minivan based on the Volt platform in Shanghai, and other models are in development. But you probably won’t see a full-size SUV built on the Volt EREV architecture anytime soon. Doubling the battery pack would cost too much.

How much will it cost to replace the Volt battery in 10 years?
We don’t know. (Major points for honesty!) But lithium cells are driving down the cost curve much faster than we thought possible. In 2008, Li-Ion energy densities were $1000/kilowatt-hour. Now, it’s $500/kWh. And the Department of Energy projects $200/kWh by the year 2020. So, in ten years, your current Volt’s battery will be replaced with something better and 80% cheaper.

What happens when you put a Volt into a landfill?
GM is already working with “second responders” (a new phrase for me) to prepare for scrapping volts. One of the leaders is the unfortunately-named Toxco. (Seriously. Would you name a company “Toxco”?)

What’s it like to travel with a Volt?
Hotels are already advertising to attract EV owners with conveniently-placed electrical outlets for charging. A few are installing 240V “Level II” chargers. In response to a follow-up question, GM has no interest in subsidizing those Level II chargers. Micky believes in a free market, and figures that market demand will convince the hotels to do this themselves. “GM makes cars.”

Won’t the gasoline in the tank get stale?
The Volt went back to a sealed steel gas tank to prevent vapor escape of volatile fractions. Even if your driving stays within electric capacity, the engine will start every six weeks just for maintenance purposes, to burn off some gasoline and to keep the parts lubricated.

Does the Volt qualify for single-occupancy use of HOV lanes?
Yes. Indeed, it just got qualified for HOV use in California… and the Prius just got kicked out!

Why isn’t the body built of carbon fiber?
Carbon fiber works well for race cars. For a production car, it’s still terribly expensive. And the nature of carbon-fiber layup leaves you with 30-40 percent scrap material that cannot be recycled. Waiting for a breakthrough, but for now, they’re minimizing weight with metal, not composites.

What about the Better Place model of swapping fully-charged batteries?
It won’t work. “Shah Agassi (CEO and founder) is a friend of mine” and the idea sounds good, but it’s impossible to scale. The cellphone industry sells 500 million batteries a year, and no one has figured out how to make those interchangeable yet. Cars will take longer. The logistics and economics of warehouse-sized battery-swap facilities add up to a business case that just doesn’t work. (Smugly, I note that I came to exactly this conclusion in my blog post in October 2010.)

What ever happened to the hydrogen fuel-cell “skateboard” design?
The HyWire concept has a lot of promise, and Micky’s team “looked at it for the Volt, but went a different direction.” It’s great for weight distribution, not so great in crash protection. He’s very skeptical about hydrogen in an automotive environment. “We will not be shipping a car that uses cryogenic fuel.” (Ahem. More smugness here and here.)

Is there enough lithium in the world to build all these batteries?
Lithium is being be mined in Bolivia, Brazil, Afghanistan, Russia, China, India, North Dakota, and Canada. There are known supplies equivalent to building 50 million Volts… and we hope to have that problem! Those taking lithium medication have no need to worry.

Will all these plug-in cars shut down the national electric grid?
The grid can currently handle 100 million plug-in vehicles. Again, GM hopes to have that problem!

Upcoming Goodies

In sidebar conversations before and after the presentation, I learned a few more bits and pieces to look forward to in future Volts.

My biggest disappointment with the car is the lack of a sunroof. Bly said “Not in the 2012 models.” The clear implication is that we’ll see it in 2013 models…

Also in 2013, Volts will have body-colored roofs as an option instead of the all-black roofs today.

The USB port will provide a very slow trickle charge to an iPad, but not enough for the iPad to admit it, so the display says “Not Charging.” Later this summer, there’s a fix coming so that new cars will double their output current. Existing Volts will be able to get the new circuit as an upgrade.

He understands the frustration with requiring the stereo to be turned on if you want the nav, climate, or energy status displays. A fix is coming. Cissa also demonstrated how, with long fingernails, it’s necessary to rest your hand along the top row of buttons to get the angle right, so she’s always pressing “Climate” or “Auto” by accident. He agreed that there needs to be some sort of shelf or lip there.

We talked about having the center screen be a full AirPlay client (so that iPhones or iPads can mirror their display over Wi-Fi). They’ve made it work in the lab, but have serious concerns about driver distraction and safety.

Trivia

Turns out that after pressing the remote “Unlock” button twice (to unlock first the driver’s door, then all doors), holding down the button lowers all the windows. Nice for cooling off the car on a hot day. It’s probably in the manual, but I didn’t know it.

No way that I would have known this, but the first 1000 Volts have slightly different screen displays, including showing the VIN number on screen.

Conclusion

Micky Bly is clearly a helluva, helluva, helluva engineer, and I’m glad that Georgia Tech can claim him! I appreciate all the time he spent on campus, and his endless patience and good humor in answering our questions.

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After my post on the JOBS Act last night, I got an email from a friend with a good question. As I composed an answer, I realized it might be of general interest, so I’m putting it here.

My Friend Asks:

I’ve been sort of following the JOBS act over the past few months, and just saw your post. I’m trying to figure out how this will impact [redacted], and how to best align ourselves to benefit from the new law. One of David S. Rose‘s comments concerned me. He stated that several investors are of the opinion that going the crowdfunding route might make it harder to raise more traditional angel/VC money down the road, but he didn’t explain why. You know what he’s talking about?

The reason I ask is that when things are ready to actually push on [redacted], we’re likely going to need to raise $2-5M worth of investor money. However, being able to raise $50-150k in the near-term might make it a lot easier for us to get to that point (and also increase the odds that we’ll survive the ups-and-downs of the bootstrapping process). David’s a smart guy with a heck of a lot of experience, so if he’s making warnings like that I’d like to try and understand why he’s concerned, not just brush it off.

My Answer:

Looking at history, Rose is right. Traditionally, venture capitalists don’t want to invest in a company whose capital structure is cluttered up with a bunch of small individual investors. Having to get shareholder approval from dozens of Common stock shareholders is time-consuming and complicated.

But.

The passage of the JOBS Act means that thousands of startups are asking the same question you’re asking. I believe that norms will have to change.

I’m not a lawyer, but I think there’s a middle ground that would make both sides happy. Once the JOBS Act provisions take effect, round up the $50K-150K from individuals (including those who would not have passed the SEC’s “qualified investor” test). Take all of their investments and collect them into a single LLC with a single manager (not a company employee or close relative!) that everyone can trust. Move forward with building your business.

When the time comes to raise a Series A, the capital structure remains clean: founders, employees, and one LLC holding Common stock. You only need the signature of that LLC manager to issue new shares of Series A. I don’t think that’s going to turn away any venture investor who you’d want to have in your deal.

[Standard disclaimer about how this doesn't constitute legal advice and you should pay a good securities lawyer to set this up correctly.]

Now, you’ll have to protect those Common shareholders against cramdown and unnecessary dilution, but that’s not a new problem. And, again, as the JOBS Act ripples through the startup funding ecosystem, I hope that those norms change as well. VCs won’t ever grant full anti-dilution to these early Common investors, but I hope that some sort of reloading occurs… maybe something similar to what employees get, although perhaps at a lower ratio. There’s no sense in killing the geese that lay the golden eggs.

At the end of the day, the best way to prepare [redacted] for venture investment is to build great products and delight your customers. If that involves taking small individual investments… take the money.

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I was asked to write “a few sentences” about the JOBS Act for another website. Since I found myself with over 500 words, I decided to post it here.

In today’s political climate, it’s hard to believe that a major bipartisan reform has passed both houses of Congress and — as I type this on Wednesday night — is scheduled to be signed by the President tomorrow. The JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act is one of the first victories of a new class of politically-active entrepreneurs, angel investors, and venture capitalists. And, although no bill is perfect, the JOBS Act should lead to expansion opportunities for many small businesses… and, yes, to more jobs.

U.S. securities regulations are written for big companies. For successful ones, like GE and Apple. And for failed ones, like Enron and Worldcom. But little companies have to play by the same rules. That makes it incredibly difficult for small companies to raise capital, to reward their employees with equity instead of salary, and to build their businesses in the early years. The Kauffman Foundation has shown that all net new job growth since 1980 has come from companies less than five years old. The JOBS Act is aimed at helping precisely these companies.

Part of the act loosens some of the complex disclosure requirements which can be difficult for a fast-growing company to maintain when it exceeds 500 employees. It makes it legal for an entrepreneur to stand on stage and say “I’m trying to raise money” without violating SEC rules. These are good changes. It’s not appropriate to regulate a tiny company the same way we regulate GE.

Most controversially, the JOBS Act enables “crowdfunding.” Today, unless you meet the SEC’s “millionaire threshold,” you are forbidden to invest in private companies — that is, those companies who do not have their shares listed on a stock exchange like Nasdaq. Tomorrow, that will change. You will be able to invest up to 5 or 10% of your annual income (depending on income), up to $100,000/year, into a small private company.

And that doesn’t necessarily have to be a Georgia Tech startup creating a hot Internet security technology. It can be in your cousin’s landscaping business, or in the struggling Cuban restaurant down the street. The laws prohibiting these investments date back to 1933. It’s time to adapt them to current reality.

Will some people lose their investments? Absolutely. Will there be fraud? As surely as the sun rises in the east. But markets always involve risk (and, sadly, markets have always attracted a small number of fraudsters). I have a lot more faith in free markets that I do in SEC regulators trying to apply thousands of pages of regulations to small businesses that can’t afford platoons of lawyers on retainer.

Silicon Valley investors have played a big part in lobbying for the JOBS Act… but I think it will eventually have more of an impact on those of us who are happy to live in the rest of America. A startup in Silicon Valley can, eventually, always find money. That’s not true for a startup in Atlanta… or Albuquerque, or Alaska. Loosening the constraints and letting more Americans get involved in investment decisions will be a good step towards making more growth capital — and more growth — available to everyone.

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But I also read “Car Guys vs. Bean Counters” by Bob Lutz, who knows more about the automobile business than anyone alive… and who proudly declares himself to be the father of the Chevy Volt. And I read his defenses of the Volt against right-wing smears here and here and here.

And I saw that the NHTSA ended its Volt safety investigation by stating that “no discernible defect trend exists.”

And I saw that the Volt (under its European badging as the Opel Ampera) just won European Car of the Year… the first American car ever to do so.

And, as an engineer, I like the idea of plug-in hybrids. As I’ve stated elsewhere on this blog, I don’t think pure electric vehicles make sense for most people. Not now. Maybe not ever. But plug-in hybrids eliminate “range anxiety” while letting you run 100% electric for short trips around town.

So I was rooting for this awkward underdog of a car, but wasn’t really involved. But, through an odd series of circumstances, we found ourselves with a Chevy Volt as a loaner car last week while Cissa’s car was being repaired.

It’s a great car.

Not “It’s a great car, considering it’s electric.”

Or “It’s a great car, if you’re an environmentalist.”

Or “It’s a great car, if you want something to put your Obama bumper sticker on.”

Just… “It’s a great car.”

First Impressions

First, it’s a real car. Not a golf cart, not a wannabe like the egg-shaped fiberglass GEMs that are best used for parking enforcement, not a barely-satisfactory vehicle like the General Motors EV1 of “Who Killed the Electric Car?” fame. (I rode in an EV1. Trust me, you didn’t want one.)

From the outside, the Volt looks a lot like the Chevrolet Cruze. There’s less of a family resemblance in the interior, but the American-designed Volt inherits the Cruze’s headroom and legroom. I’m 6’4″, and I’m completely comfortable sitting in it; I can even cross my legs in the passenger seat. By comparison, I cannot sit in a Prius, even a Prius V, for any length of time… my head pushes against the roof, and my knees are up against the dashboard.

The Volt dashboard is a bit overwhelming at first. There are two iPad-sized screens; one in front of the driver, and one in the middle stack. Even though the middle one is touch-sensitive, it perches atop 38 hardware buttons (maybe to avoid comparison with BMW’s much-reviled iDrive). It all takes a little getting used to. Knowing that normal humans are not going to read a 424-page owner’s manual (plus a 108-page navigation supplement), Chevy thoughtfully tucks a 16-page summary into the glove box. You should read that; you’ll learn some things.

(I read the big books. But I don’t claim to be a normal human.)

Driving the Volt

The Volt comes with wireless keys and pushbutton start, which I personally think is a solution in search of a problem, but all the cool kids are doing it, so….

But when you punch the big blue button, the dashboard breaks out into a kaleidoscope of images, the stereo makes a Star Trek “powering up” sound… and then SILENCE. The car is ready to drive, but the engine hasn’t started. And, unlike the Prius, where the engine starts by the time you’ve merged into traffic, the Volt’s engine won’t start for 30 or 40 miles.

Originally, the Volt was positioned as a series hybrid (as opposed to the Prius, which is a parallel hybrid). Series hybrids are a logically-simpler architecture, where the drive wheels are driven by an electric motor, and an internal combustion engine is used only as a generator to charge the batteries. (And the electric motor can “run backwards” to charge the batteries when braking or coasting.)

Series hybrids aren’t new… every diesel locomotive is designed this way. Ferdinand Porsche built series-hybrid automobiles over 100 years ago. But it’s hard to get all the pieces working right in a package smaller than a locomotive… so hard that even GM relented and settled for a mixed design where the gasoline engine helps drive the wheels at highway speeds. (But, from personal experience, I can testify that the Volt will happily cruise above 80 mph with the gasoline engine off. Um, I think I just used a public forum to confess to breaking the law. Oops.) But, even so, the architecture of a series hybrid is so much simpler that I have to believe they’ll dominate hybrid cars in the future. (Here are some other plug-in hybrids: a gaggle of Fisker Karmas. They cost more.)

Separately, the Volt is the first mass-produced plug-in hybrid. That means exactly what it sounds like: you can plug it into the wall socket to charge the batteries. A Prius gets all its power from burning gasoline in its own engine; it just does so more efficiently than many other vehicles of similar size and weight. The Chevy Volt can do that too, but it can also get power from your local utility… meaning you don’t spend money on gasoline.

In our first week of driving the Volt, we travelled 221 miles and burned half a gallon of gasoline.

Of course, we had to pay for electricity. But Georgia Power can generate electricity a lot cheaper than your Prius can. In fact, you can sign up for a time-of-day pricing plan where you pay 1.25¢ per kilowatt-hour. “Your mileage will vary” but the Volt gets about 5 miles per kWh, meaning you’re paying Georgia Power 0.25¢/mile. (Read that carefully. Not 25 cents per mile. A quarter of a cent per mile.) Looked at another way, ten cents of electricity at cheap overnight rates will run your Volt for 40 miles.

At today’s prices, ten cents of gasoline will run your comparably-sized 36-mpg Chevrolet Cruze about one mile.

40:1 ratios get my attention.

So why aren’t we all driving electric cars? Because we still don’t have decent batteries, even after billions (and billions and billions) of dollars of R&D. The very best pure-electric cars have only 100-mile range, even under optimum conditions. And when your battery is dead, your car is dead. And it’s dead for a long time. You can’t just hitch a ride to the corner gas station and trot back with a five-gallon jug. You’re in for a close encounter with a tow truck, then a long charging period at the nearest charging station, wherever that may be. Which is why pure-electrics like the Nissan Leaf, the Tesla Roadster, and others are just oddities. Range anxiety.

Plug-in hybrids eliminate range anxiety. If we want to drive to Savannah, we’ll drive to Savannah, and buy some gasoline along the way. When we get home, we’ll plug it back into the wall, and go back to electric-only commutes around town. Right now, we’re using the regular 110v charger that comes with the vehicle. That takes 10 hours to charge the battery, so it’s basically an overnight operation, which works fine for us. For additional geek points, I’m thinking of installing the optional 240v charger. That runs off the same sized circuit as your electric clothes dryer, and that charges the vehicle in 4 hours. I can’t actually think of many circumstances in which that would make a meaningful difference in my life, but…. “MORE POWER!”

And, yes, I’m perfectly aware that, in Georgia Power’s service territory, I’m driving a coal-powered car. Two-thirds of the electrons pumping through that cable came from burning the fuel of Satan. But 21% of that power came from nice clean nuclear plants, and that percentage will rise when the Plant Vogtle expansion comes online. In sane countries like France (and I can’t believe I just typed that phrase), 80% of electric generation comes from nuclear power, which means things like cleaner air and prettier countrysides. In the meantime, don’t fool yourself into believing that any electric vehicle will do a lot about CO2 emissions. (Electric cars will reduce particulate emissions, since Georgia Power can afford expensive stack scrubbers that won’t fit on your car.)

Back to the Volt: in one of those unsung-but-painful behind-the-scenes advances, most major electric vehicle manufacturers (including BMW, Chrysler, Ford, GM, Honda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Renault, Tesla, and Toyota) have signed onto the SAE J1772-2009 standard, meaning you can have a single cable that fits into every one of those cars. Imagine if public charging stations had to have GM plugs and Toyota plugs and Tesla plugs, and… ouch. The Volt even puts a nice LED flashlight into their plug so you can easily connect the cable in the dark. One of those nice touches which convinced me that a bunch of smart engineers in Detroit finally got the chance to build a car the right way, not just the cheap way.

Other Impressions

What all the specs don’t convey is the spooky silence of driving the Volt. Since the engine doesn’t kick in until you’ve driven forty miles (which, for Midtown denizens like us, can mean days and days of electric-only operation), you get used to wafting down the road in complete silence. There’s even a funky “Pedestrian Friendly Alert” on the turn signal, just to let people know you’re there. (I’ve always thought cars should have two horns: one to say “Hi, here I am!” and another to say “YOU IDIOT!” The Volt, finally, does.)

Unfortunately, you can’t enjoy this silence with the windows down. Anywhere above neighborhood speeds, lowering a window creates a weird fluttering pressure variation that makes you feel like a helicopter is hovering overhead. I guess that, after all those wind tunnel studies, it was a tradeoff that GM decided was worth making. Disappoints me, but I’m a fresh-air fiend in my car.

And you certainly can’t enjoy the silence with the sunroof open… because there is no sunroof. This is my biggest complaint about the car, actually. I guess the mileage zealots decided that having a sunroof open would play hell with fuel efficiency… but couldn’t they have put in an immobile glass panel? (With a sunshade, of course.) Wouldn’t have weighed more, wouldn’t have affected aerodynamic drag at all, and would have made the interior seem much airier. Two model years after introduction, Chevy shows no interest in a sunroof. Maybe they’re still planning to pave the roof with solar cells, but I haven’t seen that, either. Sigh.

The center stack system demonstrates a lot of development effort. The touchscreen navigation and climate control are far superior to the Toyota interface (we cross-shopped multiple Toyota and Lexus models). It comes with a trial subscription to a traffic information service that worked well in Atlanta; no guarantees about rural Saskatchewan.

Ditto for the well-thought-out iPod/iPhone interface… which lets you play your tunes, charge your phone, and access other apps, all at the same time. (By comparison, the Toyota iPod interface just freezes the iPhone screen… and scrolling through your playlists requires dozens of pokes at the dashboard touchscreen instead of the Volt’s fluid scrolling with a physical dial.) You can record 30 gigabytes of CD music to the built-in hard disk, which is nice. It even lets you pause live radio (just like TiVo) with a 20-minute buffer. That’s cool.

Bluetooth integration with your iPhone is flawless.

The only weirdness is that GM’s engineers apparently decided that, if you ever want to have any center-screen function on, you also want to have the stereo on. So if you just want to silently watch power flow from your battery to your wheels and back again through regenerative braking, you have to twist the volume knob to zero. That’s silly. (Maybe I should put an MP3 of John Cage on repeat.)

And, bizarrely, the thing plays DVDs. Only while you’re parked. Apparently, this is a big feature in Japan and Europe (where you can play them while driving). Here in the U.S., I can’t imagine a circumstance where I’d say “Hey! We’re home! Let’s pop in a DVD and watch a movie here in the garage rather than walking fourteen steps to our big-screen TV!” Ah, well, it doesn’t hurt anything.

The backseat is… habitable. It’s definitely a four-seater car, because the ginormous battery tunnel runs down the center of the car. No way to put a fifth person in back, even in a child seat. Great cupholders, though.

The hatchback is big enough for a trip to Costco, not big enough to move all your worldly possessions. (Unless you’re Andrew Hyde, but he’s nuts.)

Other nits: No rear-window wiper. Definitely noticeable during pollen season. I assume it was nixed for aerodynamic reasons. There’s a very low air dam in the front bumper which scrapes our driveway. Aerodynamics again. No spare tire (although there’s a sealer/inflation pump). Weight savings. All engineering tradeoffs that I’m sure were vociferously debated in the GM Design Center. I might have made different decisions, but I’m sure these weren’t made casually. The car is too well thought out.

Finally, the Volt lease comes with free OnStar… and a nifty iPhone app that lets you remotely monitor the battery, gas tank, tire pressure, and even lock/unlock the doors and honk the horn. Major geek points. Why can’t all cars do this?

Financial Terms

In general, I don’t like leasing unless you can write it off on your taxes. I don’t even like making car payments. I buy cars for cash. But, with the Volt, things are just too fuzzy. First, the car costs too damned much. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but $45,000 for a four-door sedan that doesn’t have a Maserati or Bentley badge just bugs me.

From a PR standpoint, the misreporting of the NHTSA tests has been a nightmare. And, politically, the GOP attacks aren’t helping. GM just stopped the production lines for five weeks due to weak demand. (Way to kill off American jobs, guys! Proud of yourselves?) If the worst happens and GM pulls the plug on the Volt, what’s a used one worth in five years? Zero?

Technically, no one knows what years of heavy use will do to these lithium-ion batteries. We know they’ll lose capacity; the only question is “How much?” And there is happy handwaving about repurposing used Volt batteries for electric-grid power balancing, but that may or may not happen. So what’s the residual value of a car that’s half battery when the battery is half-depleted? I don’t know.

So there are just too many uncertainties for me to write a check for this car. Luckily, GM is way ahead of me, and is offering a heavily-subsidized leasing option. It’s widely advertised as “$2500 down, $350/month.” Of course, that’s for a stripper model without the fancy nav system and backup camera and all the other toys that you really want. And it doesn’t include taxes and all the silly fees that the U.S. dealer network insists on charging. But it’s still a great deal, and I wish more people knew about it.

Taking the Plunge

After a week, our loaner car needed to go back home… and we realized that we would miss it. Cissa’s 2003 Pontiac was getting a bit tired after years of noble service, and it was time for a new car. We spent a few evenings shopping the competition, and finally decided that a Volt needed to live in our garage. Our loaner had over 4000 miles on it, and black leather seats. (Chevy really pushes the black leather. Apparently, none of their engineers have visited Georgia in the summer.) But we found a white car with beige leather seats and all the toys at Superior Chevrolet in Decatur… where the Internet sales manager happens to be a friend of mine from high school! To his credit, he’d noticed some of my Twitter posts about the Volt and emailed me pictures of the one on his lot… which led directly to the sale. (Daniel Hudson, (770) 595-5624. Tell him I said hi!)

(Yes, the huge stickers on the side are removable.)

We got a good deal, and we get a warm fuzzy feeling from supporting not only all the assembly line workers, but all the engineers and marketers and corporate managers who have put their butts on the line for this car. I think it’s a major step forward, and I’m proud that Cissa is going to be driving one. I hope you can look past the jokes and consider buying leasing one for your family as well.

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There’s amazing footage of storms off Cape Horn, as well as less stressful footage of daily life on board one of the last commercial sailing ships: no engines, no electricity, no hydraulics, no GPS, no radio (except, probably, a short range Morse-code rig). Oil lamps and a hand-cranked foghorn. Over an acre of sails were controlled by a crew of dozens of young men swarming up and down her four masts, up to 170 feet above the sea. Four hours on, four hours off, for a hundred days. Lousy food and worse sanitation.

All this within living memory. Of course, my first reaction was admiration for the strength and endurance of the crew. But then I began to think about all the skills required by the underlying technology base that permitted three dozen men to transport three tons of cargo around the world using wind, muscle power, and ingenuity. How almost every item and every task on board would have been instantly familiar to Lord Nelson after Trafalgar in 1805.

And about how all of those skills have been lost within one human lifetime.

I’m exaggerating. I suppose the skills aren’t really “lost.” There are plenty of books, and journals, and even courses on the Age of Sail. But these are intellectual curiosities. We no longer have an industrial base whereby thousands of sailors, and tens of thousands of at-shore workers, rely on commercial sailing ships. So, of course, as far as the job market is concerned, the skills have been lost.

It’s true in every field. No one other than historical re-enactors knows how to make a buggy whip. Or a suit of armor. Or a flint knife. Heck, just ask any office worker of a certain age for a sheet of carbon paper! (My mom typed the board minutes of the Trust Company of Georgia, now SunTrust, every month. Twelve copies, eleven sheets of carbon paper. As you can imagine, she learned to type very accurately without touching the backspace key!)

Those aren’t commercially-useful skills anymore. So we don’t learn them, and we don’t teach them.

What do we teach? Look at the last resume that crossed your desk. It probably has a line saying something like “Proficient in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.” You can get a degree from Harvard with your sole “quantitative reasoning” class being “Practical Math,” which appears to be a review of basic arithmetic plus tips for using Microsoft Excel.

Does anyone really believe that Microsoft Excel will be a core skill set in forty years? Twenty years? It’d be like telling the first mate on a modern merchant marine ship that you know how to repair a canvas sail by hand.

But, like sailing a barque around Cape Horn by hand, what have we lost? I used to know how to do basic car maintenance. Changed my own oil. Changed fan belts. Changed plugs, points, and condensers. This isn’t special; probably every American male born in the Fifties and early Sixties learned the same. Now, I open the hood of a modern automobile and am baffled by the complexity. So I take it to the dealer, who has $15,000 worth of computer equipment to diagnose its ills. We’re probably not far from the day when, like your iPhone, your car requires special tools just to open the hood.

I’m pretty much the opposite of a Luddite. I think that, in general, new technology makes our lives better… and that when technology has unpleasant consequences (like pollution), the answer is usually more technology, not less. But watching this video, my mind filled in a Jimmy Buffett soundtrack… “Watched the men who rode you switch from sails to steam.” And I wonder if we’ve lost something worth keeping?

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Car and Driver is the latest enthusiast rag to hop onto the hydrogen bandwagon with their article “What the H?” in this month’s issue. I wrote this letter to the editor but, since I doubt it will be printed, I’m reproducing it here.

Editors,

I’m sorry to see that you’ve bought into the hydrogen hype (“What the H”, Jan 2012). Hydrogen fuel cells make for nice demonstration projects, but will never be a meaningful part of the national transportation infrastructure.

Why? First, there are no hydrogen wells. You have to create it, whether from water electrolysis, biomass gasification, or natural gas reformation. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that’s always going to take significantly more energy than you get out of burning it in a fuel cell. In this sense, hydrogen is just a bulky, expensive, and occasionally-dangerous battery.

Second, hydrogen is incredibly hard to work with. It can’t be transported or stored easily. Standard tools, fittings, tanks, and materials become brittle or leaky. Yes, aerospace companies have solved these problems for rocket engines, but not with parts you can buy at Pep Boys.

Finally, hydrogen is the opposite of dense. Whether as a liquid or a pressurized gas, a hydrogen tank contains only a fraction of the potential energy represented by an equal-size tank filled with liquid hydrocarbons. That’s a fundamental physical limit, and can’t be improved by smart engineering.

If you want to burn hydrogen in your car, the best way is to attach your hydrogen atoms to carbon atoms… and make gasoline.

Thanks for the otherwise-great issue!

Stephen

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Last Tuesday, September 20th, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) and Numerex invited me to address the Second International M2M Standardization Meeting as the keynote speaker for their dinner at the Carter Center. I didn’t know anything about M2M, but that’s never stopped me from speaking before! So I started doing a little research, and this was the result.

Thanks for having me here tonight. I was asked to come speak about M2M communications. My first reaction was “what’s M2M”? I hadn’t heard the acronym before…

But once Alain educated me, I realized I’d actually been working on M2M for a long time.

I’ve had a few careers, but I started out in the telecommunications business… originally at Bell Laboratories, back when that meant something, and then at Nortel, back when that was a great company. In about 1985, I was teaching classes to Illinois Bell in something called “TBOS”. Anybody here ever heard of it?

Nope.

TBOS: Telemetry Byte Oriented Serial. It was a primitive method for taking contact closure alarms — relays — and remoting them to a centralized monitoring center. It was invented by the old Bell System, and Nortel implemented it in our optical fiber systems. So here I was, 23 years old, in a classroom in Chicago, teaching a class to a bunch of old phone company guys.

And here I am teaching them about TBOS. This is Illinois, so they were heavily unionized. And they’re not looking too excited.

I finally asked one of them what the problem was. He replied: “You’re saying how amazing this technology is, and how you’re able to centralize alarm monitoring at one location, and how we won’t need to have individual technicians at each office to monitor alarms. Well, that’s MY job, and you’re saying they won’t need me anymore.”

Ouch.

So way back in the dawn of time, I not only tripped over M2M, I tripped over some of the business and financial and personal impacts of M2M.

So then I went off and joined a startup company that turned out to be in the M2M space, even though we didn’t call it that… We were building something called SCADA… Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition. We sold that into the electrical power utilities, giving them telemetry and telecomm capabilities over optical fibers strung along the power cables. That replaced a fault-monitoring system which consisted of guys driving around with radios and, literally, dropping quarters into pay phones. Wound up selling that to Westinghouse, and the basic technology is still being used today.

I kicked around the telecomm business for a while, then got into the venture capital business. One of the companies I funded was an operational system layer for fiber optic networks… allowing the optical equipment to negotiate in realtime without human intervention. The idea was that the machines themselves would identify optimum routes as traffic requirements changed as well as routing around failures from cable breaks or other equipment problems. Combination of sensors, telemetry, and some centralized intelligence: that was M2M.

Good idea. We got a beta test with a well-funded startup telecom operator called… Global Crossing. In 2001. Ouch.

So we said no more messing around with these fly-by-night telecom operators. We pulled out all the stops and got a beta test with the second-biggest network in the country. A company named… Worldcom.

Yep, Bernie Ebbers company. We were in their lab when everything fell apart in early 2002. Double ouch.

So we were a bit early with that particular implementation of M2M. Companies like Cisco and Ciena do it today, so the basic idea was a good one, just ahead of its time.

Now, ten years later, I’m running the economic development group at Georgia Tech, and I’m seeing M2M wherever I go. It’s a subset of what Kevin Ashton labelled “The Internet of Things”… what happens when every physical device has sensing capability and telemetry connections to the wider world?

At Georgia Tech, we have an amazing technical depth in sensors of all types. A lot of that started with our work for the military, but a lot of it is now moving into the commercial sector. We have sensors for just about everything. Optical, microwave, acoustical, chemical, mechanical… you name it, if you can detect it or measure it, Georgia Tech probably has worked a sensor for it.

One of the most practical sounds silly, but it’s important. We have a startup company that’s putting ammonia sensors in big industrial chicken coops to control their ventilation fans. It turns out that ammonia buildup is a huge problem, and they currently solve it by having guys drive around in pickup trucks and sniff the air. If they smell ammonia, they flip on a fan for a while. Some sensor work done out of GTRI will let chicken producers do that from a central location.

I’m detecting an echo here.. here I am, putting middle-aged guys out of work again…

Then we have our work with energy harvesting. If you start planning on scattering wireless sensors hither and yon, you quickly run into the problem of powering them.

Batteries are cheap, but changing batteries isn’t.

So we have G.K. Chang working on using flexible nanomaterials to create a tiny amount of electric current, just from flexing. Which means they could be powered by wind, or HVAC airflow, or even blood circulation. That means you could instrument an entire building for temperature, or an entire oil refinery for pressure, without miles of wiring or thousands of batteries.

And I mentioned blood circulation… It turns out that putting sensors inside the human body is a huge opportunity. One of our startup companies is named CardioMEMS. You might have heard of them; they did a deal with St. Judes that values the company at about $450 million. It’s an interesting story.

Mark Allen, a professor in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, was funded by the Air Force to invent pressure sensors that could work inside a jet engine. That turns out to be a really hard problem, since you can’t exactly run wires to them, since the wires would melt. So Mark got that working… but, at the same time, a physician at the Cleveland Clinic was looking for ways to measure blood pressure inside the heart and the major cardiac arteries.

There are a whole class of situations where arteries can rupture and cause immense damage. For patients at risk, it’d be great to have constant monitoring of their pressure and detect trouble before it starts. You can’t expect them to trot into the clinic for a CT scan every day. And if you implant a traditional sensor, you’d have the problem of changing batteries. Do you know anyone with a pacemaker? Changing that battery costs $10,000.

But Jay and Mark together were able to invent a sensor that can be remotely powered by low levels of microwave energy, so you can fit the whole thing into a little chip that gets implanted through a cardiac catheter, without surgery. So you have an outpatient procedure, then you can go home, measure your pressure daily when you brush your teeth, then have it sent over phone lines to your doctor’s office. It turns out to reduce emergency hospitalizations by 38% per year.

That’s a big deal. And that’s M2M.

At the other extreme, I met with a company last week that’s automating those huge sprinkler pivot systems you see in South Georgia. Each one of them put out about a million gallons of water per day. If you’ve been following the news in Georgia, we’ve had recent years of drought conditions, and we’re in the midst of a water war with a couple of neighboring states, because we’ve grown so fast and don’t have enough reservoir capacity.

It turns out that 80% of the water consumed in Georgia goes to agriculture, and about half of that is wasted. By building a network of moisture sensors and targeting which spots need moisture versus which ones don’t, you can greatly reduce the amount of water you need for irrigation. And one of their examples is a farmer who is farming 20,000 acres across six counties. He’ll be able to manage all those irrigation systems from one computer. That’s M2M.

One more example: vehicle-to-vehicle communication. This is something we’re working with in the Georgia Tech Research Institute, again as a spin-out of military technologies. Civilian applications mean that your car will talk to every other car on the road. If there’s a slowdown up ahead, your car will adjust your speed by applying the brakes just a bit in advance. So you’re saving gas, reducing the chance of accidents, and smoothing out the flow of traffic, all at the same time. And if you’ve ever encountered Atlanta traffic, every bit of smoothing can help.

Take it a little further, and every car on the road will start negotiating with every other, so your GPS will start giving you alternate routes based on realtime events and traffic situations. And, eventually, the cars will just drive themselves, so you can read the paper or catch up on email during your commute. That sounds pretty good to me. And that’s M2M.

So… healthcare, water usage, and traffic. That’s three of the biggest challenges facing Georgia. And M2M is going to play a key role in solving all of them. Like I said, at Georgia Tech, we’re seeing M2M technology wherever we turn. It’s a great time for the industry, and I hope you’ve had a productive day talking about it.

With that… thanks very much for having me here tonight, and back to dinner!

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Once again, I’m honored to have been asked to speak in the Space and Science tracks at Dragon*Con.

Dragon takes over downtown Atlanta during Labor Day weekend. It’s enormous. All the public reports of attendance are wrong… they admit to “40,000+” but that’s low-balled to avoid fire code problems.

But for those of you who don’t know, there is a wing of the Hilton reserved for the few hundred attendees who are too geeky for DragonCon… and that’s where the Space and Science tracks are. (Plus a couple of others, like Skeptics, EFF, and Podcasting.) Yes, when most normal humans would be going in search of Princess Leia bikini models, we’re learning about astrophysics and nuclear power plants…

Anyhow, I’m on three times this year:

What’s in the Labs at Georgia Tech?
Friday, 2:30 pm, Science track

Enter the Commercial Space Age
Sunday, 7:00 pm, Space track
with Michael Mealling

NASA Goes Commercial
Monday, 11:30 am, Space track
with Michael Mealling, John Bradford, A.C. Charania

I hope those of you attending can drag yourself away from the (admittedly incredible) entertainment programming and cross the pedestrian bridge from the Marriott to join us in the Hilton. My sessions are during family-friendly hours (i.e., not Saturday night), so bring your kids. Have a great con!

PS, for those who asked: My incredibly popular and thought-provoking talk on alternative energy (“Hydrogen Cars, Ethanol, Wind Farms, and other Silly Ideas“) was apparently vetoed by Science track management this year as being insufficiently respectful to prevailing opinions, even though I filled the room last year, and there are empty slots on the schedule. C’est la guerre.

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