The other great change is in automotive technology. Rapid advances in engine and vehicle design also threaten oil’s dominance. Foremost is the efficiency of the internal-combustion engine itself. Petrol and diesel engines are becoming ever more frugal. The materials used to make cars are getting lighter and stronger. The growing popularity of electric and hybrid cars, as well as vehicles powered by natural gas or hydrogen fuel cells, will also have an effect on demand for oil.
Analysts at Citi, a bank, calculate that if the fuel-efficiency of cars and trucks improves by an average of 2.5% a year it will be enough to constrain oil demand; they predict that a peak of less than 92m b/d will come in the next few years. Ricardo, a big automotive engineer, has come to a similar conclusion.
Not surprisingly, the oil “supermajors” and the IEA disagree. They point out that most of the emerging world has a long way to go before it owns as many cars, or drives as many miles per head, as America.
But it would be foolish to extrapolate from the rich world’s past to booming Asia’s future. The sort of environmental policies that are reducing the thirst for fuel in Europe and America by imposing ever-tougher fuel-efficiency standards on vehicles are also being adopted in the emerging economies. China recently introduced its own set of fuel-economy measures. If, as a result of its determination to reduce its dependence on imported oil, the regime imposes policies designed to “leapfrog” the country’s transport system to hybrids, oil demand will come under even more pressure.
Hacking Driverless Cars
Unmanned vehicles rely on a number of sensors to be able to move without hitting anything. These include the GPS, laser range finders (LIDAR), cameras, inertial measurement units (IMU), wheel sensors, and more. But these sensors can be tricked to run your driverless car off the road, into walls, and, in the case of one van, over highway medians.
These hacks are scary when you consider how advanced Google’s driverless cars are. Many believe these are the future; that they’ll take us from place to place without our intervention. But if you can hack into the computers that exist in cars today, the extensive systems of unmanned cars will be ripe for “experimentation.”
The types of attacks that can derail the sensors vary but aren’t always very sophisticated. For example, LIDAR sensors use a rotating mirror to check for potential obstacles and weather changes in the area. It scans the area with a laser, and anything that reflects that laser is then picked up by the mirror. The sensor analyzes that data and decides what is in front of it.
Asymcar Podcast 2: Is Tesla Disruptive? Also Segway, Multiair, Winglet, Organ Donors & Regulation Über Alles
We discuss the odds of disrupting the present automotive club via Tesla. We further dive into the regulatory and cultural environment that sustains the current players, while reflecting a bit on Segway, Toyota’s Winglet, organ donors and the Fiat “multiair” engine. Finally, we preview a larger discussion on apps in and around the car.
Not a car, not a bike: They call it an ELF
Mark Stewart turns quite a few heads as he zips through the streets on his neon green ELF bike. With each pedal, his feet take turns sticking out from the bottom while a gentle motor hums in the background.
What he’s driving looks like a cross between a bicycle and a car, the closest thing yet to Fred Flintstone’s footmobile, only with solar panels and a futuristic shape.
It’s a “green” option for today’s commuters.
Stewart, a 65-year-old family therapist and school psychologist from Cambridge, Mass., took the summer off in order to drive his new ELF bike more than 1,200 miles on trails and roads using the East Coast Greenway, a bike and pedestrian trail that runs from Canada to Key West.
He began his journey by flying down to Durham, N.C., on July 15, and estimates that the entire trip will take about a month. He covered the first leg, from Durham, N.C. to Reston, Va., over roughly five days, 60 miles at a time.
Living room TV is ‘making a comeback’, says Ofcom
UK families are more likely to watch TV together now than they have been in over a decade, according to a study.
Communications regulator Ofcom said 91% of adults watched their main TV set once a week – up from 88% in 2002 – but their attention may be distracted.
It said the popularity of smartphones and tablets was taking teens out of bedrooms back into family rooms.
Most family members now multi-tasked while sitting in front of the TV, the survey of 3,700 over 16s found.
Pop Bang Colour, Ian Cook’s amazing artwork
Have you heard of Pop Bang Colour and the incredible artist behind the work, Ian Cook?
If you haven’t heard of him before now then you are in for a surprise when you see his artwork and realise that all of his paintings are created using toy car wheels, large tyres and remote controlled cars. He is really taking art into the modern world and creating paintings that are so fantastic that you wouldn’t believe that he never even uses a paintbrush. Being trained in fine art at university, he has always had a passion for art and grew up as a car enthusiast, an inspiration and influence of his was his uncle who worked in the car industry all his life.
It wasn’t until his ex-ex girlfriend gave him a radio controlled lightening Mcqueen from the film cars, the red “95” one, for his Christmas present that he found a unique skill and started actually painting with toy cars. In his own words “I did colour wheels and abstract pieces and then moved on to images which included logos, portraits and cars…. cars with cars seemed the most effective.”
Motorists left baffled by modern dashboards
If women can’t read maps and men always lose their keys, there is at least one aspect about driving that unites the sexes: neither has a clue when it comes to identifying dashboard warning lights.
Nearly all motorists who were asked to identify the huge display of warning lights that can now be found in many of the country’s most popular new vehicles struggled to work out what they meant.
Tyre pressure, engine emission and fog light indicators were the most confusing with 98 per cent of drivers failing to correctly identify all of them.
When shown images of the 16 most common dashboard symbols, 71 per cent of motorists do not recognise a tyre pressure warning light with one in twenty thinking it is something to do with the oil or brakes. And more than a third (35 per cent) of drivers did not recognise an airbag warning symbol with 27 per cent mistaking it for a seatbelt warning, according to the survey by Britannia Rescue.
How French secretly filmed prison camp life in WWII
One of the most extraordinary episodes involving Allied prisoners during World War II was recently remembered in Paris.
They had been defeated in the Battle of France and marched to the furthest reaches of the Reich. In 1940, Oflag 17a must have felt a bleak, unforgiving place for the 5,000 French officers who were now prisoners-of-war.
The Austrian camp, close to the border with Czechoslovakia, was originally built for troops taking part in military exercises.
There were 40 barracks, 20 each side of a central aisle. The land was bound by two lines of barbed wire, the perimeter illuminated by floodlights.
The new 21st century house call
Keeping track of health measurements at home is pretty simple: Step onto a scale in the bathroom, take a glucose measurement on the way out the door, or strap on a blood pressure cuff while watching television.
Now, doctors increasingly want access to those at-home measurements in an effort to keep patients healthier and reduce health care costs.
Boston’s Partners HealthCare last month launched a system that allows patients to upload information from their medical devices, often wirelessly, directly into their electronic records in doctors’ offices. Patients can use glucometers, blood pressure cuffs, bathroom scales, and pulse oximeters (which measure blood oxygen levels) at home, to take regular measurements and send them to their doctors.
Partners is among the first health care systems to integrate such at-home devices into the electronic health record, said Dr. John Halamka, chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who is not involved with the Partners technology.
