“Cash for clunkers” was wildly popular when the federal government instituted the vehicle trade-in program in the summer of 2009. Congress first earmarked $1 billion to lure drivers out of their old gas-guzzlers onto depressed car lots and into new fuel-efficient vehicles. Designed to run between late July and early November, the program burned through that money in a week. It ended less than a month later, after 678,359 new cars were purchased in exchange for $2.85 billion in government rebates. In the midst of the program, Barack Obama lauded the dealerships it was reviving, the fuel ... Read More
Vehicle-to-Grid: A New Spin on Car Payments
October 31, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Willett Kempton is an anthropologist. And an electrical engineer. On this winter morning at the University of Delaware, both skill sets come in handy as he courts two Japanese businessmen. They’ve traveled here from Tokyo to see how much progress he’s made toward a revolutionary idea: electric cars that will make several thousand dollars a year for their owners, and speed the switch to renewable energy sources. Observing Japanese business etiquette, Kempton presents his business card to the senior visitor, Makoto Horiguchi, then the two exchange bows. He repeats the ceremony with ... Read More
Slugging — The People’s Transit
March 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Workers who have come down from the surrounding high-rise offices begin to line up on a sidewalk in downtown Arlington, Va., across the Potomac from the nation's capital, about 3:30 in the afternoon. They stand in a perfect queue, iPods and newspapers in hand, and they look, by all indications, like they're waiting for the bus. Public transit never shows. But, eventually, a blue Chrysler Town & Country does. The woman behind the wheel rolls down her window and yells a kind of call-and-response. "Horner Road?" "Horner Road?" repeats the first woman in line. "Horner Road!" And ... Read More
Can China Avoid Getting Stuck in Traffic?
February 6, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The new Great Wall of China is the "Great Wall" of cars stuck in city traffic, researchers say, and it will take more than restrictions on new license plates and car registrations to break the gridlock. The problem is, there's barely enough space on the roads in China's largest cities for the 35 million cars that were bought during the past decade of frenzied consumerism, according to transportation experts at the University of California, Berkeley, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the ancient capital city of Xi'an, home of the buried armies of terracotta warriors, Lee ... Read More
Electric Cars Get a Jump-Start From Feds
October 26, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The early adopters of many new technologies — the calculator, the computer, the color TV and the hybrid car — could afford to be pioneers. In fact, technological trendsetters have long earned prestige as the lone owners on the block of the next big invention. But the latest wonder, poised to come on the market in America this winter, carries a different set of circumstances. If you're the only person in town who owns an electric vehicle, good for you. But you're not going to be able to drive it very far. The mass deployment of EVs requires more than just eager buyers. It requires a ... Read More
Baby Faces, Product Design and Evolutionary Theory
October 22, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Linda Miesler and Helmut Leder decided to put evolutionary theory to the test in the product design world. At the 7th International Design and Emotion Conference in Chicago, Miesler, a doctoral student, presented the lessons that she and Leder, a psychology professor, learned about baby faces and responses to designed objects. There's a body of research indicating that humans think human baby faces are cute and respond positively to them — this is where the evolutionary theory comes in. It's good for us to respond positively to our young. Baby faces share certain attributes — relatively ... Read More
Gas Mileage Labels Get Sophisticated
September 3, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation this week released plans to update the label on the windshield of your next new car. The new tags would replace existing labels found throughout new car lots, which prominently display estimated city and highway miles-per-gallon averages. The updated look, which offers considerably more information, is a bet on the part of government that more people will buy fuel-efficient cars if the accompanying sticker simply does a better, in-your-face job of explaining just how valuable they are — to the environment and your ... Read More
The Yellow Light Conundrum
June 10, 2010 • By • 3 Comments
Even before attending a driver's education class, most would-be drivers know how traffic signals work: green means go, red means stop and yellow means slow down. Or does it? Real-world experience suggests that for many drivers, yellow is a cue to speed up, an indication that if you want to make it through the intersection, you'd better gun it. What dictates whether a driver hits the brakes at a yellow light or races through it? A new study by University of Cincinnati doctoral student Zhixia Li identifies factors influencing the split-second decision that follows what he refers to as ... Read More
Cash for Clunkers, Visualized
March 5, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Data from the U.S. Department of Transportation's Cash for Clunkers program is displayed below as a directed network that represents the flow of car ownership, from the trade-in of "gas guzzlers" toward the purchase of new, supposedly more efficient auto makes. Each node represents a make of car and is scaled in size according to the total number of units traded in and purchased new. Node color varies according to the number of units traded in versus purchased new: The brightest red nodes represent car makes that were more frequently purchased new; the bluest nodes indicate makes more often ... Read More
Making the Case for Carpool Lanes
March 4, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
Do carpool lanes reduce traffic, or are they a waste of space — space that would be more efficiently used if it were accessible to all drivers and not just the ones who are carpooling, driving hybrids or riding motorcycles? There are plenty of commuters arguing for and against carpool lanes, and now both sides have research to back up their arguments. An earlier Miller-McCune.com article suggested that four general-purpose lanes on a freeway carry more people and vehicles per hour and than a freeway with one high-occupancy vehicle (HOV), or carpool, lane and three unrestricted lanes. The ... Read More
