tingilinde

transportation sustainability

The US and Germany - an interesting paper by Buehler, Pucher, and Kunert just published by the Brookings Institute.

brand nascar

tie yoda indeed

The WSJ has a piece on Nascar.  

I admit that I can't figure out what the Nascar brand means and, by extension, the brands of most of the companies that support it.  A few decades ago it was stock car racing - standard American sedans that were tricked out and raced on a simple oval track. Rabid fans had near religious affiliations with the churches of Ford, Chrysler and GM and brands that won races tended to sell to this group.  Corporate sponsorship was a no-brainer.

In more recent years the cars have become homogenized and bear little resemblance to the cars of the companies that sponsor them.  They physically look the same and huge sums of money have made them exotic beasts with very little technology going back into the cars that normal people can buy.

One wonders where the value is - what is Nascar doing for a brand like Ford or "Tie yoda"?   If a car company spends $100M on a serious sponsorship do they get better than $100M in increased profit back?    Do they have rational methodologies to measure value, or is this decades old gut instinct?

This is a non-trivial question for the consumer.  If a company is losing money on the sponsorship it is coming from their profits.  Assuming they don't live on government bailouts forever this increases the cost of delivering a car to you if the sponsorship model doesn't break even.

A lot of sports sponsorship is like this - the connection between the sport and the value of the brand are nebulous.  The real reason may be a belief that hearing a brand name mentioned on TV or seeing a decal is somehow magical and of value.  Perhaps it takes a non-automotive companies to use Nascar to bring home the bacon.

Perhaps the sport should return to its roots.  Modified sedans that anyone could assemble if they wanted.  Perhaps it would be a good way to promote emerging technologies - modified plug-in hybrids for example.  The team costs could be reduced enormously and perhaps there would be brand value to the sponsor.

The idea of brand, value and sports sponsorships has been on my mind as a friend and I try to find likely small sponsorships.   It has been an interesting path and probably will result in a post or two once we are successful.  You definitely start to look at companies from a different angle.

bike sculpture

VELOCIPEDES (FINAL) from Jonathan Fegan on Vimeo.

well .... Dave ..?

learn more here

(thanks for the link Sara)

lawrence of arabia and girl's basketball

A neat Malcolm Gladwell essay in the May 11, 2009 issue of The NewYorker  -  the online version

recommended!

the best way to get green energy from plants?

If you are worried about transportation it may be to burn the plants and turn them into electricity for electric cars rather than to make ethanol.    An interesting thing to think about ...

snip

The new study shows that burning biomass to produce electricity rather than converting it to ethanol (made from corn kernels or the other parts of the plant, so-called cellulosic ethanol) delivers 81 percent more miles per acre of transportation in electric vehicles than ethanol burned in internal combustion, even taking into account the lifetime costs of the expensive batteries available today. "The input energy to produce an electric vehicle was 1.5 times the energy to produce an [internal combustion vehicle]," Campbell says. "The batteries currently require large energy inputs in the vehicle production component of our life cycle assessment."

On average, looking at a wide variety of source crops (corn kernels to switchgrass), ways to convert plants to energy, and vehicle sizes (ranging from compact cars to SUVs), bioelectricity delivered 56 percent more energy for transportation per acre, even including the fact that making ethanol produces other useful products, such as cattle feed. To take just one example: a small truck powered by bioelectricity could travel almost 15,000 city and highway miles (24,000 kilometers) compared with just 8,000 comparable miles (13,000 kilometers) for an internal combustion equivalent.

From the atmosphere's point of view, growing biomass to burn in a power plant and using the electricity to move a car avoids 10 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per acre, or 108 percent more emission offsets than ethanol. "One other aspect of the electricity pathway is that most emissions are concentrated in one location, which provides perhaps an opportunity for more control of the emissions," Campbell notes. "It also perhaps locates [other air pollution] emissions in a place where impacts might not be as harmful as where cars are driven today."

evolution, henslow, darwin and a garden

A nice piece on the Cambridge University Botanic Garden via the WSJ

more on bmw's project i

A radio report noted BMW and Bath University are working on city car concepts - probably one emerging growth areas available in the automobile world.  Small, efficient, cheap and (hopefully) safe and clean.

The photo is from the Clever Concept developed at Bath.  It is narrow, tilts for cornering, can carry a driver and a passenger and could take a variety of power sources. 

Potentially very interesting - four or five kWh of batteries might be just the ticket for city use articulated tricycle cars exist and can be interesting.

more music loses

This time at Warner Music.

I don't know if they do reasonable social research, but you think they would get a clue on the sort of things that won't work.  Finding things that will is more difficult, but these were tone deaf given how music is used.

dumb legislation

The "cash for clunkers"  program sounds good on the surface, but the compromise version shows that it is poorly thought-out and more of a freebie for the auto industry than a positive environmental move.

The idea is to remove very inefficient vehicles from the fleet and replace them with something better.  Sadly inefficient means 18 mpg and better is 22 mpg for cars, 18 mpg and 20 mpg for light trucks and SUVs, 15 mpg and 16 mpg for large light duty trucks and *any* pre 2002 work truck.

yikes!  Almost no improvement and a serious cash give away.

Its actually worse.  Making a new car creates a large amount of carbon emissions.  The time required to offset these small mileage improvements are on the order of the life of the new car.   At best this measure is carbon neutral and it is possible it will harm the environment.

Getting rid of inefficiency is important, but I would widen the mileage range.  Perhaps the old vehicle should be from the bottom ten percent of its type and the new vehicle in the top 90 percent.

working to make sure texan students can't compete

Barbara Cargill of the Texas Board of Education pushes for creationist astronomy. Hopefully clueful companies and parents will recognize the value of reality based education elsewhere