Yearly Archives: 2017


Some Thoughts on Meeting Your Heroes

There’s an old adage that you should never meet your heroes because you will inevitably be disappointed, or something to that effect. As I ponder the people I’ve come to know and in many cases befriend over the past decade, I’ve come to believe the core premise of that statement is fundamentally flawed. We are all after all simply human beings and without our inherent flaws and frailties, raising anyone to hero status diminishes that humanity.

In many ways, I’ve been incredibly fortunate in the course of my life and career. When I was young I spent countless hours pouring through car books and magazines wishing I could be the narrator or protagonist in those tales. After focusing on engine design and vehicle dynamics while studying mechanical engineering, my later work took me off in very different directions which would later prove be very valuable to me. However, throughout the first decade of my professional life, I never really imagined where my path would ultimately take me and who I would know today.

It was only the emergence of blogging and online journalism that opened new doorways that I was able to pass through. As a young reader and engineer I was aware of the many names on bylines and the characters they wrote about. Executives, designers, engineers, racers and writers. In some respects I saw some or many of them as personal heroes that I’d like to emulate.

Now however, as I’m well into middle age, having met many of these people, my view is more tempered. While I’ve obviously never met many of the people that are widely considered truly heroic like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela or Eleanor Roosevelt, we’ve all heard enough about other aspects of their respective lives to realize that above all else, humans.

This is not meant to denigrate the accomplishments or actions of any of those people. The accomplishments must be taken in context. The context of our limitations and flaws and humans and the environment in which we live. In some cases, that context will serve to further elevate while in others, we’ll find that the accomplishments came about by mistreating those around the person we might have admired.

I’ve been remarkably fortunate in that I feel like the balance in my life has been generally toward the positive people. Despite some of the personal struggles along the way, having the opportunity to know and befriend many of the people whose work has inspired, educated and entertained me over the 40-some years since I became interested in cars has been a wonderful experience and I’m eternally grateful to my amazing wife for supporting me along my path.

But there have been those that I now know enough about that I would never want to consider as friends despite still respecting what they achieved.

Ultimately though, I’ve come to believe that hero worship is not a positive thing and it should be discouraged. It would be better for society as a whole if we all looked at each other in the context of our lives. By elevating people excessively despite the decidedly not heroic aspects, we are dehumanizing them. In that, we lose the perspective that we are all capable of doing admirable things great and small and being better humans.


Throwback: Interview With Chrysler’s Lou Rhodes and Doug Quigley

Dodge Circuit EV Concept at 2008 Los Angeles Auto Show

Authors note: Back in 2009 when I was still the technical editor of the now defunct GreenFuelsForecast.com, I sat down for lunch with Lou Rhodes and Doug Quigley of Chrysler. At the time, Lou was president of the company’s ENVI divison and Doug was executive engineer for EVs. Over the prior 18 months, ENVI had shown off two sets of electrified concepts and was still hoping to get at least one into production. At the time of this conversation, Chrysler was struggling to survive and barely a month later, the company would go through bankruptcy reorganization before emerging as part of Fiat. While none of the concepts at the time, made it to production, lessons from the project were fed into the Fiat 500e and in 2017 a plug-in hybrid Chrysler minivan finally arrived as the Pacifica.

(Auburn Hills, MI, March 27, 2009) Over the last two years numerous automakers including Nissan, Renault, Mitsubishi and General Motors have garnered attention for efforts to develop commercially viable electric drive vehicles. More recently Chrysler has also publicly jumped into the fray with the creation of its ENVI division, unveiling of several prototypes and the announcement that at least one of those vehicles would go into production in 2010.

Lou Rhodes, President of ENVI and Doug Quigley, Executive engineer spoke with Green Fuels Forecast about Chrysler’s plans for electrification. When ENVI was publicly announced in September 2007, many saw it as a knee-jerk reaction to all the hype that General Motors was getting for the Chevrolet Volt. In fact, the work of ENVI began quietly in late 2005 when the Chrysler Group was still firmly ensconced within DaimlerChrysler. (more…)


Maps Transform into Long-Range Sensors for Cars

In My Day

When I was young, maps were printed on paper, either bound into atlases or large sheets that were a puzzle to refold. We plotted routes to get from where we were to where we wanted to be. In-car electronics were largely limited to the AM/FM radio and maybe a tape player.

Maps in the car now are a mass of bits and bytes. Increasingly, the car itself is reading that data directly to make control decisions without any direct input from us mere humans.

The Decline of Paper Maps

The transition from paper maps to in-vehicle digital navigation got rolling in the mid-1990s. Early atte


There Are No Self-Driving Cars for Sale Yet

Let’s be absolutely clear about something. As I write these words in October 2017, there are exactly zero self-driving vehicles available for consumers to purchase in America. In fact, Elon Musk’s proclamations and pre-sales of non-existent technology aside, it will likely be at least several more years before an individual can buy a self-driving vehicle. With that in mind, the media needs to stop using the term self-driving in the context of any production vehicle.

Misleading Headlines

In recent weeks, Cadillac has conducted a cross-country media preview of the 2018 CT6 sedan with the first production application of its Super Cruise system. From the event launch in Manhattan to its arrival in Los Angeles 2 weeks later, media outlets including NBC’s Today show, USA Today, Business Insider, and Fortune have referred to Super Cruise as self-driving. In doing so, they are doing a disservice to their own credibility, to consumers, to General Motors (GM), and to every engineer working on automated driving technology.

To its credit, GM itself never calls this self-driving or automated technology. Following the 2014 ignition switch recall, GM instituted new safety review procedures on new products and those changes are reflected in the capabilities and limitations of Super Cruise.

What Is the 2018 CT6 Super Cruise?

This is a very capable advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) similar in principle to Tesla Auto Pilot, Volvo Pilot Assist, and Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot. Navigant Research’s Automated Driving Vehicle Technology report projects that these types of systems—defined as Level 2 partial automation by SAE—will account for nearly 59 million sales annually by 2026.

I personally spent nearly 900 miles with the system over 2 days. Within its operating domain, it works very well. But the key is that operating domain or definition of where the system can work. This is a supervised partially automated assisted driving system. On divided highways where there are no intersections, cyclists, or pedestrians, Super Cruise can handle steering, acceleration, and braking with the driver taking their hands and feet off the steering wheel and pedals.

That doesn’t make it automated. As the Super Cruise branding implies, this is a more advanced adaptive cruise control. The driver must still watch the road and be ready to take over when the system encounters a situation it cannot handle such as a construction zone, lane merge, or faded lane markings.

A face tracking camera similar in principle to the Face ID system on the upcoming Apple iPhone X watches for facial and eye movements to ensure the driver is alert and attentive, something no other current ADAS does. Meanwhile, high definition navigation maps prevent inappropriate use on surface streets.

Misrepresentation Leads to Unrealistic Expectations

By continuing to call Super Cruise self-driving, media creates unjustified expectations of its capabilities with consumers. GM’s design approach should reduce the sort of misadventures we’ve seen from Tesla drivers on YouTube. However, customers that bought into the media hyperbole may be disappointed with the more cautious assisted driving technologies. Even as the technologies become more sophisticated, customers burned by misleading headlines today may remain skeptical and decide to hold off on future purchases, which damages the overall goal of improving safety on the road.

Patience

It’s one thing to take someone like Elon Musk at his word and assume he’s going to deliver what he promises (which he often eventually does, albeit over budget and months to years late). But by inaccurately portraying what a product can and more importantly cannot do, customer interest (and possibly safety) can be compromised. Truly automated vehicles will get here soon enough. Let’s not rush to mislabel.


Toyota Prius Prime Gets The Plug-in Hybrid Right, Now About That Design

2017 Toyota Prius Prime

Ok, let’s immediately deal with the elephant in the room. The Toyota Prius Prime is not an attractive vehicle. In fact, to my eyes, it’s quite homely. Now that we have that out of the way, I’ll leave the aesthetic judgements to your own tastes and move on to how Toyota’s sophomore effort at a plug-in version of its icon works. While the first-generation Prius PHV was a bit of a swing and a miss, the functionality this time is in most respects a home run.

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Who Would Have Thunk It? Great Customer Service From Google!

Google Nexus 6P and Pixel XL

One of the longest running jokes in the tech industry is that Google’s customer support system is nothing more than a python script (for those that aren’t techies, python is a programming language widely used by Google). Getting actual human help for problems with Google problems was long thought impossible. However, Google really came through for me recently.

Back in 2010, when Google launched it’s first smartphone, the Nexus One, it was seen as a commercial failure in part because Google had no real infrastructure for providing sales and technical support. While Google still has issues on the sales side with trying to purchase their most popular phones the tech side has dramatically improved.

In January 2016, I bought a Nexus 6P as a replacement for the last in a long series of Motorola phones going back to an original 2009 Droid. I’ve really liked the 6P in the time I’ve owned it, especially the camera. When we took a family vacation to Puerto Rico last year, for the first time, I didn’t take a big SLR with me, relying only on phones and while there are some shots I would have liked to get with a longer lens, I wasn’t disappointed with the image quality.

In recent months however, the battery life has severely degraded and running the AccuBattery app it estimated that the battery had less than half its original capacity. Since like most modern phones, the battery is sealed into the case, I decided to reach out to Google to see if they had a battery replacement program like the one offered by Apple.

If you happen to follow any Android news feeds, you may have seen a bunch of stories in recent days about Google replacing defective Nexus 6P smartphones with newer Pixel XLs. I actually contacted Google before these stories started appearing and was fully prepared to pay for a battery replacement.

Google store support actually offers several ways to contact them, email, live chat or by phone (you enter your number and they will call back in a few minutes). I opted for the chat and after explaining the diagnostics I had gone through including a factory reset, I was informed that they would replace my phone, free of charge. Since the Nexus 6P has been out of production for some time, they didn’t have any stock left for replacements.

Instead Google offered to send me a new Pixel XL. The 6P was offered in 32, 64 and 128 GB sizes but the Pixel is only available in 32 and 128 GBs so Google is actually giving the larger 128 GB for customers that have 64 GB 6Ps. I received an email with a link to order my replacement and two days later I had a brand new phone! I didn’t even have to sit around an Apple store for a couple of hours for a genius bar appointment.


2017 Acura NSX – Vaporware No More

2017 Acura NSX

For a time from late in the last decade through the first half of this one, it seemed like a second generation Acura NSX would become the automotive equivalent of Duke Nukem Forever. Starting in 2003, every few years Honda would reveal a new concept that seemed to preview a new supercar but for some reason or other, the project just never came to fruition. At least not until the spring of 2016 when Honda’s newly christened Performance Manufacturing Center in Marysville, Ohio started turning out a handful of cars per day.

Read the rest of the review at Forbes


2018 Mercedes-AMG GLA45 – It’s Hot But Don’t Call It An SUV

2018 Mercedes-AMG GLA45

In 2017, do vehicle segment labels even have any meaning anymore? Back in the dark ages of the 1970s we knew what a sport utility vehicle was. It was essentially a shortened body-on-frame pickup truck with an enclosed, but often removable rear body. But then in 1984, Jeep introduced the XJ Cherokee and it all began to change. Now a utility vehicle can be whatever an automaker’s marketing department deems it to be including a high-performance compact, hot hatch like the Mercedes-AMG GLA45.

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If You Are In Detroit August 6, Join the 2nd Hespen Rally

http://hespenrally.com/

If you are in the Detroit area on August 6, 2017, please come join the Hespen Rally to honor the memory of Patrick Hespen and help raise funds for research into a cure for cholangiocarcinoma , the rare cancer that took Patrick’s life way too soon. There were will be lots of cool cars and Patrick’s friends, family and colleagues. Register at http://hespenrally.com/


2017 Buick LaCrosse Premium AWD

It’s not unreasonable to think of Buick as the original near-luxury brand. It was the first of the many brands that Billy Durant acquired as he began building up General Motors more than a century ago. Later as Alfred Sloan organized GM’s marketing efforts and brands into a stair step from Chevrolet at the entry level to Cadillac at the pinnacle, Buick was slotted in just below the top as the “doctor’s car.” A few decades ago, a big sedan like the LaCrosse would have been the brand flagship, the model an up and coming professional would be driving on their way to eventually having a Cadillac. Today, the recently introduced third-generation LaCrosse is almost an afterthought for customers as they rush to buy crossovers like the sub-compact Encore and full-size Enclave.

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