The Prius Juggernaut

Final update:

The Toyota Prius stuck pedal is a hoax - its official now with multiple news sites reporting it:

• Jalopnik
• CBS
• Forum posts
• Forbes
• Fox

...and many more.

Interestingly enough Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple has also owned up to his freaky stunt, saying that he too had been hoaxing, after being reported as having said his Prius had a stuck-accelerator.

Seems that TV reporters were all too keen to hear any story about Toyotas back then, and if you wanted to get on TV that was how to do it.

Further udpate:

This excellent video from edmunds.com - a US car review website - has a great demonstration of the all-weather car mat problem, and a very sane discussion of unintended acceleration.

If you really are interested in stopping so-called unintended acceleration then following the advice given in this video to put your car in neutral is the way to go.

For those that remain convinced that electronic gremlins in the fly-by-wire systems on cars is the cause, and that we should all go back to mechanical throttles because they were oh-so reliable I still await any evidence of this. The fact is that electronic throttles which cut out the engine when the brake is fully depressed, as the Prius does, are much safer than any mechanical linkage.

Update: a recent report of a collision with a wall after 56 year-old driver in New York state experiencing "unintended acceleration" in her Prius has been determined by the NHTSA to be a case of driver error. The NHTSA said

Information retrieved from the vehicle's onboard computer systems indicated there was no application of the brakes and the throttle was fully open.

What irritates me no end is that the original "breaking news" reports were stated in a way that conflated drive-by-wire with unintended acceleration. Now that the NHTSA have ruled it was driver error - the owner simply panicked and jumped on the wrong pedal - do you think there will be a breaking news retraction?

Meanwhile Prius has been rated the "Most Dependable Car" in a recent survey. But such stories don't compare for headline grabbing shock-horror value stories about out of control drive-by-wire that technophobes lap up with glee, even when they're proven to be completely bogus.

I'm on my third Prius. When an electric car becomes available here in Australia I'll buy that, but until then Prius is the lowest emissions option, with far better carbon footprint than any car in its class.

It's spacious - easily carrying 4-5 adults and baggage, has plenty of power, and an excellent standard of finish, and accessories.

When I got my first one - they were rare as hens teeth. I even joined a Prius car club. Seeing one on the road was cause for excitement. People at work marvelled at the LCD display, and the electronics under the hood.

Then over to the USA and my second Prius - they were a lot more popular there, especially so in California.

The image left is of that Prius, an 07 iTech with all the bells and whistles, sitting rather cheekily in the car park of the Tesla HQ in Silicon Valley.

Now in 2010 Prius is everywhere, even in backwater Brisbane, Australia. In my small work car park alone, there are 3-4; Prius taxis queue up behind each other in city cab ranks; and Prius drivers sail past each other on the roads without the slightest frisson of excitement or recognition.

It seems there is no stopping the juggernaut of Toyota's marvel car, as they struggle to keep up with demand, and win award after award with it.

Of course now that Prius is popular, that means a lot more people are driving them.

And guess what - that means idiots are also driving them.

Was just checking the news websites via Google news, and a number of mostly conservative news sites, like Fox news, are reporting a piece about the Police in San Diego helping a Prius driver with a stuck accelerator slow his vehicle. The piece was originated by the San Diego Tribune and syndicated by AP.

The article also comments that a Police officer was killed recently in a Toyota stuck accelerator incident, and that Toyota are involved in a recall at present.

These sorts of reports are often phrased in a way that to the casual reader sounds like all Toyota vehicles are death traps waiting to close around their next victim. The front page of the Economist has carried a recent story about Toyota slips up. Certainly seems like the world has got it in for Toyota.

Anyway - that "sudden acceleration".

Some additional facts are that the Police officer in that case was off duty, driving with his family; and the vehicle was a Toyota Lexus 4WD. The car also contained the driver's brother-in-law who phoned 911 during the incident.

The vehicle was a loaner car, while the driver's regular vehicle was being repaired. The fact that the vehicle was a loaner makes it more likely that the driver was unfamiliar with the engine on/off switch. There is no evidence that he attempted to put the car in neutral.

There was a recall last year for floor mats entrapping the accelerator pedal in some Toyotas - as far as I can tell this is what is being blamed for this 4 person fatal crash, in the preliminary reports.

The recall also involved packaging changes to instruct drivers in the proper installation of the all-weather floor mats which could slide forward if not fitted properly.

There is a Toyota current recall, but its only for some newer models, and relates to the braking of the car at very low speeds. Nothing to do with the accelerator.

There has to date been no investigation outcomes supporting any problems with the electronic throttle on Toyota vehicles as far as I know. However much of the hype out there is drumming up the notion that electronic throttles are to blame, and Prius electronics in general are faulty.

However Toyota have to manage possibilities, and also try to avoid problems that could make it easier for drivers to make errors. It has to manage perceptions, and if people experience things that they don't expect, and which could cause them to panic.

This is one of the reasons why our USA Prius had the EV switch removed - it was yet another thing that might "freak out" US drivers.

So.

I have been interested to discover what is behind all this publicity of stuck accelerator and failing brakes.

Any Police officer will tell you they are always suspicious of any reports made by drivers of vehicles, especially drivers who have been involved in collisions, or high-speed incidents. There can be some quite amazing behaviour and reports from drivers when they are on the face of it at fault in an collision; or when they suddenly notice that there is a "speed trap" and that they might have been detected by it.

I'm not saying at all that there are no valid reports - I'm just saying that reported incidents need to be carefully corroborated, using an evidence based approach.

In particular when serious incidents have occurred the cars are very very meticulously examined for mechanical and electronic/electrical faults by Police and Transport Authorities to determine if anything about the vehicle contributed to the collision. Where there is any corroboration at all from those examinations, or from examination of the scene and other eye-witnesses, then these reports need to be taken very seriously indeed.

A couple of other salient facts - there are a large number of lawsuits open at present for "Sudden Acceleration" - sites like http://suddenacceleration.com/ offer to find you good lawyers for your Sudden Acceleration Syndrome claim. This "Sudden Acceleration" syndrome has been around for 20 years now, and has become a nice little earner for lawyers.

If enough hype can be gathered about a particular vehicle, then there's plenty of instant whiplash victims donning their foam collars and ringing the local ambulance chasers to join the class action. For some this is better than working for a living apparently.

This wikipedia article is very interesting, and has a great history of the "sudden acceleration phenomena".

Basically after years of pursuing the Audi 5000 there was never any evidence for the claims of unintended acceleration - the class action lawsuit that was launched by several people reporting "Sudden Acceleration" was eventually lost after an expert who they called was involved with rigging an Audi to exhibit the fault for a television program.

The reports have been determined to be due to driver error such as hitting the accelerator pedal believing it to be the brake, or the pedal becoming stuck against some loose object in the footwell.

Note that in the case of the Audi there were recalls - to fit an accelerator pedal that was further away from the brake pedal. Its common apparently for sports cars to have the two close together for high-performance driving, but here the car was dumbed down for the american driver.

This article has a skeptical view of the Prius stuck accelerator reports.

My own view is that the vast number of these complaints are actually caused by cruise control. The reports in these incidents involve cruise control.

In this account:

I felt the vehicle [2008 Lexus ES 350] increasing in speed to about 90 mph, without depressing the accelerator. I had been on cruise control at about 73 mph... [A] passenger screamed at me to slow down. I was unable to do so, even after stepping forcefully on the brakes.

If the vehicle has been on a steady decline or level surface and encounters an incline, neighbouring vehicles not using cruise control will tend to slow down. However in a vehicle with the cruise control on, it will increase engine revs and in automatic cars drop to a lower gear.

A sudden call for extra power by the cruise control in this situation causes the motor to rev up quite dramatically. This should all be expected because you have asked the vehicle to maintain a high steady speed, and now on the incline much more power is required to acheive that. At the same time other vehicles in neighbouring lanes appear much slower by comparison.

If a driver has been at the wheel for a long time, in a steady stream of traffic, using cruise control, their alertness and attention to the road may wander. This is especially so if there are other distractions in the car. Suddenly the engine revs up, other vehicles out the window are going relatively slower - and a 10 km difference in speed versus the traffic will look like you are roaring along.

Now the driver who has had their feet away from the controls suddenly panics and tries to slow the vehicle - in this case it can be easy to misapply the controls, jamming the foot onto the accelerator, or getting both the brake and the accelerator.

I suspect a large number more of these reports are due to obstructions in the footwell of the car - like the improperly fitted floor mats in the Toyota cars. The remainder I would put down to driver error - fatigue, distraction and all the rest.

They go and jam their foot on the wrong pedal.

Whether its the cruise control thing, or footwell obstructions, putting the car in neutral and applying the brake always works.

There are I would say hundreds, thousands of drivers out there who have experienced problems from cruise control or footwell obstruction - they've put the vehicle in neutral and applied the brakes and all has been OK. However the ones who fail to control the vehicle - are they going to ever say there was something that they could have done? Nope, the damages - especially the more severe they are - are the fault of the vehicle manufacturer, the evil corporation.

The trouble with the litigious society is that it results in dumbing down of everything and poorer results for the rest of us that are able to drive and generally behave responsibly.

My view is that it is extremely unlikely that there are any valid actual incidents of something going wrong with the electronic throttle on any vehicles. You should start worrying about precautions for electronic throttles about the same time as you do for meteors falling on your head. The chance that that is true is far outweighed by the safety advantages of the electronic throttle, which for example automatically cuts out acceleration when you apply the brake (as mentioned in the allaboutprius article).

Here's yet another story about a woman who reported her Lexus going out of control. Her complaints were rejected by Toyota and also by the NHTSA - now here she is in a congressional hearing saying that the NHTSA aren't doing their job properly. The comments make for interesting reading.

I'm sure she experienced something horrible and frightening. However we need to get over the fact that not everything has to be someone else's fault.

Some more developments on the case of the "runaway Prius":

Turns out that

• Toyota are stating that what he reports - that brakes were applied but the car kept accelerating - is not possible, and this was confirmed by tests both by Toyota and the NHTSA, while an observer from the congressional hearing was in attendance
• The CHP - both the officer following the vehicle and the 911 operator - told him to put it in neutral over the course of the 27 minutes incident - he did not
• Sikes, the driver of the Prius in the reported "sudden acceleration" case is a bankrupt, has a large debt, and has retained a lawyer

Commentators on blogs are comparing the thing to the "Balloon Boy" incident - where the news gets hold of something happening in "real time", but it turns out to be all faked.

Here is a guy who finds his car accelerating out of control, so he calls 911?? You're driving an out of control vehicle so you get on the phone?

But you don't try to put the vehicle in neutral, or press the engine off switch? You don't even have to move your hand from the wheel to put the car in neutral on the Prius - the stalk is right there on the dash.

I'm afraid my bullsh*t detector just tripped up into the red zone....

Lilypond - music notation hard core

GarageBand for MacOSX comes with some great free music lessons.

I've been working my way through the piano ones, and they're excellent for keeping up the focus and motivation by giving some quick results, and in the "Play" section rewarding you with an accompaniment for your efforts that makes even an average performance sound pretty good.

Trouble is, when you have a minute or two with the keyboard and just want to practice some of what you've learned going back to GarageBand and firing up the lesson, scrolling to the part you're having trouble with is quite a pain.

It would be really handy to have some way to print out the score - but there isn't.

Well there is a tool that makes it pretty easy to code up musical scores, especially ones that have lots of repititive sections like the GarageBand lessons.

Its called Lilypond, and although it requires some command-line fu, to get it to do your bidding the results are nothing short of spectacular.

The first step is to go to the Lilypond site and download the version for your computer.

When you first run Lilypond it will show a sample file with a short scale. The section with "Welcome to Lilypond" is bracketed with %{ and }, so its treated as a comment - the rest of the sample file is lilypond music notation!

Choose select all, and delete the contents of the sample file, and replace it with your own notation.

Get started quickly by picking one of their templates that is close to the result you want, and modifying it rather than starting with a blank slate.

The notation may look a bit daunting at first, but its actually pretty simple and you can learn just enough to achieve your goals by following the excellent documentation.

I laid out my notation with the treble staff first, and then the bass - all with one measure to a line. That allowed me to quickly find the measure I had made a mistake on (since lilypond conveniently numbers your measures).

Once you have your text file prepared, you run the "Typeset file" command from the "Compile" menu and the PDF of your music appears.

Here's a screenshot of the final result.

To start working really effectively with Lilypond, you should understand that at its heart its a simple command line tool, designed for one job - taking Lilypond files, called something like "my-music.ly", processing them, and producing musical score as a result.

Here's how to run Lilypond from the command line, assuming its installed in MacOSX's /Applications folder:

/Applications/LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/bin/lilypond -o "~/Documents" "~/my-music.ly"

The ~/Documents is the folder where the resulting files will be dropped.

Given that Lilypond is really a command line application the GUI program that you get on MacOSX or Windows is kind of tacked on and really isn't needed - in fact the editor that comes with Lilypond is really meant to be a "get you past first base" kind of thing.

I personally use the VIM editor, which is hard core - not for everyone. If you're a fan of vim however, you can find a set of indentation and colouration files inside the application:

LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/vim

Copy those into your .vim directory to get nicely indented and syntax highlighted editing inside vim.

To work with lilypond from the command line, on MacOSX download a handy script, and run it from the terminal. The script has the above lilypond invocation inside, and will wait for you to pass the path of your file to it, and then present you with the result. You then get the option to either run lilypond again on your file (presumably after you've made some edits) or to quit.

Good luck with your next great score!

Hot, Flat and Upgefscked

A day or two ago I donated to GetUp's campaign to fund billboards on Abbot's "business as usual" climate policy.

I hope the campaign is successful not just in shaming the coalition into action, but also in waking up our elected representatives; currently making a hash of their only marginally better policy on climate change.

The opposition keep name-calling, hoping that their slinging of the dread word "tax" will stick to Rudd's cap-and-trade policy.

The irony is that a tax would be the best policy of the lot - David Victor, Stanford University Professor and expert on international coal markets:

I think we have vastly oversold the role of the market in the solution to this problem...

As Dr Victor grudgingly admits, ETS schemes are failing and only a tax would be a strong and clear signal - fixed and away from the vagaries of the market, so that Australian clean technology entrepreneurs, as well as all other green innovations and measures are actually economically viable.

Why would you catch a clean green bus, when your car is cheap to run on petrol? Why would you pay much more for an electric vehicle, when your gas guzzler is so cheap to buy and register by comparison?

This is 2010 - the year of the electric car, but we won't see any of them in numbers Australia because our governments are completely failing to create policies to make it attractive to manufacturers to ship them here. In the UK tax on new cars is figured based on their emissions ratings and thus EV's are very attractive there - zero emissions vehicles finally competing on a level playing field. In the USA tax credits are available for zero emissions vehicles - for example resulting in a $7500 saving on the Chevy Volt.

Why are electric vehicle entrepreneurs in Australia struggling to get off the ground?

Because here we just dig stuff out of the ground and ship it over seas. That's what we do, that's our plan for the future.

The Smart State? The lucky country? Nope, we're the Idiocracy. If it wasn't bad enough that we have Senator Fielding, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and Attorney-General Michael Atkinson. Now we have Abbot and his ludicrous non-policy.

The problem for Australia with regards to climate change is that we've completely failed to realize the urgency, and the Abbott's of this nation are just lowering the average climate intelligence quotient right across Australia.

The heatwave conditions in Feb 2009 which filled the morgue in Victoria and spread wildfires were the pre-saging of more to come, according to the Australian Bureau of Meterology, thanks to climate change.

But more heatwaves when they come will not be our biggest problem here in Australia.

I've just read (on pg 80 of) Thomas L Friedman's "Hot, Flat & Crowded" (2009 edition) that the Sigma Xi group, commissioned by the UN to report on climate change, said in their February 2007 document "Confronting Climate Change" that the relatively small increase of 0.8 degrees C since 1750 has been "accompanied by significant increases in the incidence of floods, droughts, heat waves and wildfires".

But more fires and droughts when they come will not be our biggest problem here in Australia either.

Our bigger problem is that when the effects of climate change hit the countries most vulnerable to its effects, when their crops fail and disease spreads and generally things are looking like the four horsemen of the apocalypse have moved in for good: where do you think those refugees are going to go?

Here is where they'll go: the lucky country. While we battle bushfires, and raging ignorance, and compete to see how far we can stick our heads in the sand, desperate refugees will be arriving here in force. At the same time, our armed forces will be called on for international relief efforts, much as they were for the tsunami disaster in Banda Aceh in 2004.

While we turn up our air-conditioners, and argue that climate change is bogus because of some emails from East Anglia, the evidence of climate change will be arriving on our doorstep in ever-increasing numbers.

Oh, and Tony, good luck reanimating some the policies of our old dark lords with a return to "turn back the boats" policies - these people will have no country to go back to.

Apart from refugees, the other problem dwarfing fires, drought and heat that climate change will bring for Australia is that if we keep being as backward as we are regarding clean technologies is that soon no-one will want the stuff we're digging out of the ground.

China is investing massively in clean technologies, and indeed some of our top talent in solar technologies have gone there - others to the USA - due to the clear state commitment to controlling climate change with high-tech solutions, especially compared to the dismal picture here.

When these large Chinese plants come on line in the next 5 to 10 years their own local reserves of coal will be more than adequate to meet the needs of their dwindling coal plants.

By then it will be too late for Australia to turn around and beg those scientists to come back and start trying to foster a clean tech industry - we'll be sitting on a pile of worthless black dirt that no-one wants, and lagging so far behind the technology race that we don't have a hope of catching up.

Swamped with refugees and becoming a backward third-world country. That's not what I want for my Australia.

Come on K Rudd - show Abbot what a real forward thinking climate policy looks like, and make us the lucky country once again.

Gloves come off as Copenhagen nears

Computer files were delivered to a climate change sceptic, BBC weather personality Paul Hudson. These files - it was claimed - are evidence of malfeasance by scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit.

For example in one of the files the writer, allegedly a CRU scientist, talks about using a "trick" and also refers to "hiding" some values.

The story first unfolded on Hudson's blog where he says he can confirm that some of the files are actual East Anglia CRU emails, because he was involved in those email conversations.

Although he received the files on the 12th of October, suddenly with Copenhagen around the corner the apocryphal files have been beaten up in the last 48 hours, into a smoking gun, 11th hour expose by this tawdry conspiracy anorak Hudson and a handful of other journalists who ought to have known better.

Hudsons involvement and the provenance of these files reeks. Any ethical journalist would not have touched the affair with a barge pole.

Note that these are not paper documents, they're electronic files. Already if one follows the link from Hudson's blog to the small sample of the alleged emails it can be seen that the emails have been altered by replacing the authors email addresses with xxxxxxx.

Clearly any of the text of the alleged emails could easily have been altered in subtle ways to make the contents appear suspect. Certainly East Anglia University has not verified that the alleged emails are true and correct, and without alteration.

What makes this appalling lack of journalistic rigour by those promoting this beat-up even worse is that there is no global warming conspiracy in these emails, even if they were true.

As the RealClimate web forum puts it:

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, ... no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords.

These files are not even close to any smoking gun, and just amount to the same back-and-forth that you'd find in the email servers of any professional organisation.

As RealClimate points out - a trick does not mean something underhand. If you're a professional in any sphere, a handy technique that quickly gets the job done but produces valid and ethically sound results can be called a "trick" - a valuable nugget of experience.

Everyone from surgeons to auto-electricians have handy tricks they use to get their job done, without any implication of malfeasance.

Certainly cherry-picking the computer files for phrases that could imply anything is meaningless without reading all the files in context.

I write software for a living and there are often vigorous disagreements both within our company and between members of the software engineering community and our own engineers about the quality of code, the viability of our approaches and a range of other topics. But none of this detracts from the fact that we produce the deliverables, and the results are well engineered and professionally sound.

Just the IPCC report - the work of several hundred scientists from all over the world - is sound and so and the science behind it and other peer reviewed studies which reach the same conclusions.

A few dozen emails out of months and months of correspondence of one research center and all they could come up with is a "trick" being used?

Don't worry - there will be more dirty tricks from the right wing media and their mud slinging brigade in the lead up to Copenhagen.

The Future of Energy

In a very timely conjunction, I went to a great panel discusssion of five experts, all of whom were speakers at the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering 32nd Symposium held just recently in Brisbane. The title of the symposium was Future-Proofing Australia - Rising to the Challenge of Climate Change.

I say timely because the panel discussion was a face-to-face demonstration of a real conviction in the scientific and engineering community that ways are immediately available to move forward into cleaner energy for Australia.

Perhaps for me one of the most surprising moments in the proceedings were when a straw poll was taken of the audience on whether they would support nuclear power generation in Australia: the result was a resounding "yes".

Myself I'm used to being in the minority especially amongst my greenier friends when I advocate for nuclear power.

After the event I talked to one of the panelists, Peter Meurs, about his Blade EV which Peter charges from a very impressive solar array at his home. A real world example of zero emissions EV driving.

Of course if you have read my previous posts, a future of greener power generation has great implications in electric vehicles. If EV's have only relatively small takeup - and optimistic projections say 20% by 2030, then the impact on the grids emissions will likely be negligible.

But with clean power we can look to a future with close to 100% EV penetration in the national fleet - with all the zero tailpipe emissions that that would entail - without having a coincident increase in emissions from coal fired power plants.

Why this is critical is that many EV manufacturers are only going to deliver their limited EV production to countries that provide decent governmental support, with infrastructure spending if possible, but also with taxes or other incentives that make the EV's competitive with petrol powered cars. And governments will do that if they know that EV's will definitely reduce greenhouse gases.

While at the panel discussion I also spoke to another of the experts, John Loughhead of the UK Energy Research Center, who told me about the UK system of incentives and programmes for low-emissions vehicles in the UK. John told me about the UK excise on vehicles that have higher emissions of greenhouse gases, which as an example usage of the VED calculator places a duty of 405GBP (around $730 Australian) on the 4.2l V8 Ranger Rover for its 376 g/km.

When vehicle buyers are paying for their polluting ICE vehicles at a rate that reflects their actual cost to the environment it makes the extra upfront costs of zero emission EV's and low emissions PHEV's comparable on a level playing field.

The aim of the long tailpipe crowd is to spread confusion and disinformation in order to derail that message and kill off the electric car by making ICE's stay at their artificially cheap current day prices.

I'm seeing a lot of activity around the "long tailpipe" issue at present. Of course there is the E&T report which I critiqued in my last post, and before that the GAO report in June. I dismissed that report at the time as it made no negative findings about EV's.

However it was quoted in a number of articles since under headlines like "GAO: Electric Cars Won't Reduce Carbon Emissions". This is a bit of a stretch from what the report actually says which is that electric vehicles charged from coal fired power will only be 4-5% better.

Update: I contacted Mark Gaffigan (Director of the Natural Resources and Environment Team at the GAO, and lead author of the report) for comment:

The bottom line regarding your questions, per our report, is that plug in electric vehicles could result in reduced emissions of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants but the environmental benefits depend upon whether the electricity used to power plug ins emits fewer greenhouse gases and pollutants than the fuel it replaces.

What Mr Gaffigan is carefully saying is that EV's could result in reduced emissions - not that they definitely won't - and that whether they do or not depends on the grid.

I am at a loss to understand the cynicism of attacks on the EV, which wilfully misquote reports and studies, and use other dirty tricks.

Do these people really believe that we can just keep driving in petrol powered cars?

We should have fixed this 30 years ago when the first oil shock occurred, when we realised the dangers of being hooked on oil and beholden to its curators, a who's who of enemies of reason and western democracy.

Here is some good science that provides yet another example of how personal management of EV charging provides the opportunity for great reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. There is no such opportunity with petrol powered cars, including conventional hybrids.

Its great to see some real science and engineering working on getting solution that work now rolled out for the benefit of all our futures.

EVs Speed Climate Change? WTF??

Now that climate change is firmly on every country's agenda, lobby groups and think tanks everywhere are jumping on the band-wagon.

It seems like there are million of these wise-ass organizations trumpeting green advice for public consumption, and producing policy statements and reports for government.

A very common factor in many of these statements and reports is the well-to-wheel analysis which talks about electric vehicles producing greenhouse gases. Below I go into a detailed discussion of why this type of analysis and its conclusion (EV's produce greenhouse gases) are just plain wrong.

But first a prime example of how misleading this type of "report" can be.

Clean vehicle website Autoblog green is carrying a press release from the Environmental Transport Association, quoting from a new report by a group called Transport & Environment stating that:

Switching to electric cars could speed climate change

There are other groups such as the National Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Law and Policy Center saying:

Plug-in cars could actually increase air pollution

Wait!! Oh, my God!!

You mean my electric car, which I thought was definitely clean and green, could actually bring on climate change? Panic! Hold the presses!!

Could, might? Its lurking down there in my garage, and on the toss of a coin, the roll of a dice, it might decide to start spewing greenhouse gases into the environment! There's a chance??

No?

So what the hell are they talking about then?

Are these guys some sort of oil industry goons, talking down EV's?

No, they're mostly not - but they're also not scientists (like the IPCC) or governmental agencies (like the US Department of Energy). They have their own particular hobby-horses to ride.

The ETA for example is a company that makes its living in the United Kingdom by selling green transport services, like insurance and roadside assistance. Its name - Environmental Transport Association makes it sound official, but its a commercial organisation, and it has to pay the rent just like any commercial organisation. Every EV owner who believes that their vehicle generates no emissions is one less customer for ETA's carbon offset service.

NRDC does not like coal, and - rightly so - is keen to jump on any chance to point out that increasing dependence on electricity in states that depend on coal has to be coupled with a corresponding commitment to reducing the use of coal in its power generation mix. As the NRDC rightly points out so-called carbon capture and sequestration is not a "technology" it is a branch of science fiction, and is not to be relied apon to clean up coal-fired power generation.

And of course since most of the states in the mid-west rely on coal for power generation (see table A1 in the DOE's figures), the ELPC (a mid-west specific environmental organisation) is keen to see that the new-found governmental interest in EV's does not push aside concerns about pollution from coal fired power generation.

There is a completely valid point to be made here that coal fired power generation is an environmental hazard, and that clean power generation has to be a top priority in the fight against climate change.

What is not valid is to connect uptake of EV's to an increase in coal fired power generation.

Let's unpack this Plug-in cars could actually increase air pollution statement.

See the could here, is not that there is some chance or possibility. Green EV's are not suddenly going to start producing greenhouse gases on some percentage outcome.

Electric Vehicles never ever produce greenhouse gases.

All of this confusing scare mongering is just another repackaging of the good old long tailpipe argument that we've heard so many times before.

Let me just say this again slowly.

Some power plants produce greenhouse gases. Not EV's - power plants.

An EV is not a power plant, and EV's don't have tail pipes at all, or chimneys, or in fact any way at all to produce smoke or pollution.

Well-to-wheels - in depth discussion

How this mischief has come about is that the good ol' boys that we love for coming up with the "Hummer is more economical than the Prius" and other great "analyses" and "reports", just could not except that EV's produced no pollutants. They said "You have to look at the big picture - you have to do a well-to-wheel analysis".

As a result the EPA and also european equivalent organizations have come up with measures based on gCO2e - which means in English grams of CO2 equivalent, used to analyse things like the total impact of renewable fuels. Stretch that analysis over vehicles and you have gCO2e/km, which results in completely bizarre statements like the GM claim of 230 miles per gallon for the Volt PHEV.

Don't get me wrong - the Volt is a great design and will be a great vehicle for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But 230mpg is rubbish - its meaningless. Why? Because equivalents just do not work when you start powering vehicles with electricity.

How you drive, when you drive, when you charge, how you charge - all of these things are drastic game changers for the sums behind the report that the ETA is quoting from.

I contacted the ETA's press officer and on request was promptly given a copy of the 51 page report. The report is actually written not by the ETA, but by the European Federation for Transport and Environment. Yet another official sounding group, T&E is actually an industry organisation representing around 50 different bodies mostly with a environmental focus. The report is not new facts - it is an analysis of existing studies and of yet more reports. The main focus of the report is on the European Emissions Trading Scheme and the impact of European government taxation schemes on electricity generation for EVs.

The T&E group wants stronger government action to tighten taxes and legislative incentives to produce cleaner power - something we all should wholeheartedly support. But since EV's are so high on the agenda of governments, T&E is hitching their message about cleaner power to EV's by saying EV's could "produce more emissions" unless power is cleaned up first.

This is where T&E stretches the friendship, by making claims that there is no science to support.

So what does T&E base its claim on, if its so wrong?

Well, the sound bite that heads up ETA's press release, and which is trumpeted in the introduction to T&E's report is referenced (on pg 27) to a study by Kromer & Heywood. In fact several large portions of the T&E report are verbatim from Kromer & Heywood's study.

Take note before going on, that the plugins could speed climate change statement has actually lost some context as it appears in the sound bite: the Kromer study is actually saying that if power is coming from coal, PHEV's like the Chevy Volt will be marginally more emissive than a hybrid vehicle like the Prius.

I think you'll agree that this is far from saying that EV's will increase climate change, but its still wrong, and its potential for misquoting means that it must not be left to stand.

The Kromer study was funded by companies including Shell, and the Ford Motor company. The latter via yet another research group called the Alliance for Global Sustainability. It is wonderful that Shell and Ford are getting involved in funding research into sustainability, and not for a minute do I suggest anything but the highest standard of intellectual rigour in the methods of Kromer's study but again it is not new science. The methodology is to take existing figures and using a computer model develop a number of scenarios to predict future figures.

All of these scenarios are based on the idea that CO2 equivalents can be fairly calculated for the electricity used to charge EV's. In fact the methodology uses a straight energy content calculation, and goes further by doing such things as adjusting to allow for transmission losses via the grid, comparing these to the plant-to-tank costs for transporting conventional fuels.

These foundation assumptions for the well-to-wheel (WTW) methodology employed are just plain wrong. WTW is the long tailpipe argument in academic guise. The methodology comes from an existing energy sector that is clinging to its existing structure with oil refineries as central points of distribution.

But notice that while no company, save the oil companies, can currently refine their own petroleum to drive their cars, everyone has the potential to generate their own power to power EV's.

This is the first breakdown in the WTW assumption. Electric grids world wide are right now being transformed by local power generation from a vast number of solar panel installations. Solar panels are going on rooftops all over the world.

While I was working at Google last year, the many electric vehicles on the campus were being charged from the solar array on the Google rooftop. Here in Australia houses all over are sporting solar rooftops thanks to the governments incentives.

There are zero transmission losses here - the power is generated right where it is used, and that power is 100% clean.

Oh, but wait - those amounts of power are still tiny compared with total electricity consumption!

Yes - but so are the amounts of power being used by electric vehicles! EV's require very small amounts of power to run, and we have so few EV's that the process of renovation of the grid is more than keeping pace with EV uptake.

While many of these environmental reports are talking about "technologies" such as carbon capture which are right now just science fiction, EV's and local power generation is here and now. Its already working.

Along with local power generation from solar panels, there is also a large amount of activity in co-generation, demand side response and active power market participation.

When I was at the AEVA Electric Vehicle Festival in October I met and talked with Dean Spaccavento, Enabling Technology Manager with Energy Response. Their service involves enabling companies to take an active part in the National Energy Market, by responding to energy demand as reflected in real-time updates of energy costs via DSR. The software and hardware systems that Dean is involved in building go into Australian industries and reduces their total energy bill, whilst at the same time reducing the impact on total energy generation capacity requirements and the environment.

Companies that produce energy as a by-product of their operations can generate electricity on site, to both provide their onsite electricity requirements, and also sell back into the grid. There are a increasing number of co-generation sites in Australia right now, such as Coopers Brewery in South Australia. Power companies are getting into the act, enabling and welcoming co-generation as a way to reduce load on power generation capacity and also reduce environmental impact. Using software like that produced by Dean Spaccavento's company they can benefit financially by responding to the local market with their co-generation capacity.

This is working, right here, right now. Zero transmission losses with power being used on site, and with EV's in that companies fleet parking lot their charging is not reflected at all in any central coal fired power station.

The future for co-generation has much greater promise, with waste products being used for domestic level power generation instead of going into landfill. South Australian company Micro-Cogen have developed a small scale cogen unit suitable for the basement of your house which they say will be shipping in 2010.

Smart grid technologies also have matured and will form an integral part of the EV take-up phenomenon. As we see our grid as mentioned above becoming cleaner, it will also become smarter with software and hardware from a whole range of companies, including industry giants IBM, and other new startups competing to provide the best savings in electricity generation capacity.

EV's are inextricably bound up with this future since they are ideally situated to be charged at times when it is cheapest for their owners, and also lowest impact on the grids generation capacity.

When the dinosaurs of the energy world, the oil companies threw up their hands in horror at being compared to EV's they were right to be afraid. Their well-to-wheel analysis tries to portray a negative impact via the long tailpipe argument for EV's on the basis that a "whole lifecycle" model is the only fair way to compare EV's with internal combustion engines (ICE's).

But we have had 100 years of internal combustion engines, and now the landscape is covered with petrol stations, pipelines and petrol tankers - the infrastructure to support the plant-to-tank mentality that the dinosaurs are still clinging to.

The only fair way to compare EV's to ICE's is to look at what the energy distribution network will look like with these real current technologies - smart grids, solar, co-gen and local power generation - feeding into the EV picture.

Forget about gCO2 equivalents which assume the moment you plug your EV into the wall, a power station somewhere is instantly going to produce smoke directly in proportion to the energy used at the socket.

Those analyses were bogus when the oil companies first proposed them, and they are bogus now, even though many producers of reports who ought to know better have swallowed their marketing story.

But surely all these smart grids and co-generation are going to take time to ramp up, and in the meantime if every body goes out and buys EV's isn't that going to put pressure on the existing electrical grid causing more pollution from coal fired power stations?

But the reality is EV uptake is going to be slow. It will take years for early adopters to convince the middle of the normal curve that a switch to an EV is a good idea. Even with Nissan producing its new Leaf EV in production volumes next year, going forward EV's as a percentage of the national fleet will by even the most optimistic of projections still be down at %15 by 2030.

And the good news is that our existing grid infrastructure can easily accommodate the loads generated by these levels of demand without generating any new pollution at all. The charging can be done out of surplus capacity, meaning that even in places where coal is being used for generation, no extra generation will be done as a result of the EV's plugging in.

A study in 2007 by the Pacific National Northwest Laboratory found that surplus generation capacity in the USA could support 43% market penetration of electric vehicles, based on charging being done during the night. Interestingly this same information is actually quoted by Kromer, and Kromers quote is produced verbatim in T&E's report, yet they both fail to draw the obvious conclusion that projected levels of EV uptake are not going to have an impact on power generation. The PNNL report mentions a case study of San Diego where night time charging would allow up to 60% of the San Diegan's becoming EV drivers before any generation impact was felt.

Of course the T&E report claims (page 30 and 31) that as EV ownership increases, quick-recharging facilities are demanded and

"...substantial daytime charging will also occur..."

however they offer no support whatsoever for the claim of substantial daytime charging. Whereas the PNNL study examines night time charging as the obvious mode, there is no support in any actual studies for T&E's claim.

Does it make sense then? Will people charge during the day rather than at night?

You can only charge a battery if it is empty, or partly empty. And EV's are always plugging in where-ever they go. You arrive home from work in the evening, plug into the wall socket, and during the night the battery is topped up to full on cheap night-time rates.

Then during the day you head out to work, and maybe your employer has a charge point to plug into. If you're an EV owner you definitely have a charge point at home, but maybe your employer has one for the EV owners on staff. Then on the way home you stop at the supermarket for 30 minutes, and maybe there is a charge point in their car park.

And of course since the majority of drivers make relatively short trips, their EV's are going to be nowhere near empty when they plug in during the day.

Also day time charge points are going to be supplied by a company like Better Place, and will involve a charge via your credit card. Even if its like iTunes, where you make micro-payments for the small amounts of electricity topped up into your EV's its going to be much more attractive for most consumers to get their power from the socket at home where it just appears on their power bill. Or doesn't appear, if they have a solar panel or co-gen.

So these day time charges are going to happen, but due to:

• cheaper night time rates
• ubiquity of home chargers
• slower rollout of charging points at other locations
• small trips by driving majority meaning day time battery levels are high
• charging account costs with daytime power compared to home charging

all meaning that the claim that daytime charging is going to be substantial does not make sense.

I am sure daytime charging at Better Place style charge points will be a very important part of the EV landscape, especially when EV ownership levels are as high as 20%, but even then daytime charging will not represent a substantial amount of kilowatt/hours put into EV batteries.

Instead daytime charging will be a part of the modality of EV usage, that you top up in small amounts so that you never have to worry about being low on juice.

Conclusions - EV's (still) do not "produce" greenhouse gases

Current levels of EV usage do not impact at all on coal fired power generation, and so EV's being charged today, are thus not generating any additional greenhouse gases.

By the time the EV landscape has progressed to 30% ownership, for the range of reasons discussed above, power generation will have changed how electricity delivery takes place to the point that EVs will still not require any additional power generation from coal fired or other centralised power generation sources associated with greenhouse gases.

GarageBand Lessons missing sounds

Music is fun - and Garageband can make it especially so.

That is, when it plays fair and doesn't give crazy "Audio file Piano!@#$%!@#$!.caf Not Found" error messages.

Here's the whole story.

I've been using Garageband 09's new Lessons to teach myself to play my new Yamaha e413 keyboard (right, set up next to my trusty MacBook Pro). The lesson contents are great and I love how once the lesson content has sunk in, you can switch to "Open this Lesson in Garageband" mode to record the basic plinking-and-plonking alongside a pro backing track.

Besides having the feature that the instructors playing does not intrude (or give you a crutch), in "Open this Lesson in Garageband" mode you can check that lesson off as done, or give yourself a critical assessment by listening to your recording.

Trouble is I started getting these crazy errors. I resorted back to my desktop machine - an 09 iMac that had started out with Leopard before going to Snow Leopard and iLife 09 back when it came out. No errors!

Another weird issue was that I got similar error messages when I was trying to record our band at work using the laptop and my mixer - more missing caf files, from some earlier project I was working on.

So, how to fix the MacBook pro!

I found a useful post on teh Interwebs but while seeming to be exactly my issue, the suggested fix did not supply a cure.

But it got me thinking - maybe the MBP, which had a life (with Tiger) before Leopard, has some issues with the format of these working copy and cache directories that the post had mentioned. If so, nuking and reinstalling might just fix it.

And it did. Woot!

So my fix was:

• 1) Back up the MBP to an external drive (Time Machine will do this)
• 2) Put in my original Leopard DVD (not the Snow Leopard) and reboot the MBP with the "C" key held down - this will cause it to boot from the DVD
• 3) Click "Customize" on the install target screen and tell it to reformat the hard-drive (I chose journalled, non-case-sensitive).
• 4) Proceed with the installation.
• 5) Once done, insert your Snow Leopard install disk and install as normal.
• 6) Reinstate your files from the backups

Note that you can reformat with Snow Leopard's disk utility as described in another post but the above worked for me.

Now no more Garageband Lesson glitches!