Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The growing role of complex software in a wide range of products provides increased functionality and value for consumers. From gadgets to cars to the power industry, we’re seeing more industries embrace software that tailors products to our individual needs.

This is especially true in the auto industry as cars grow more reliant upon software to manage everything from advanced drivetrains to elaborate infotainment systems. The Chevrolet Volt offers an excellent case in point: The plug-in hybrid relies upon 10 million lines of code, which is 2 million more than you’ll find in the F-35 fighter jet.

Given the increasing prevalence of software, it’s no mystery why Toyota signed a deal with Microsoft to bring telematics to cars from the cloud. Microsoft worked with Ford on the groundbreaking Sync system.

Google, IBM and Cisco also are moving into the automotive space. According to one study, 90 percent of the innovation we’re seeing within the auto industry is driven by advancements in software and gadgetry.

“This is having a huge impact on every traditional area, because all the functionalities you might have in electronics or mechanical (systems) are being shifted to software,” Dominic Tavassoli, director of IBM Rational, said. His outfit helped assemble the code in the Volt. “There’s a lot of rethinking going on.”

Software is today the heart of many systems, and it will allow cars to do more than ever. Instead of being islands in a sea of traffic, cars will communicate with each other, with the road and even with the grid. Automakers realize this and are scrambling to develop unique systems that offer greater utility and convenience than their competitors.

“The competitive difference is today in the software, for cars just like for mobile phones,” Tavassoli said. “The difference (among phones) is no longer in the screen, or the battery, or the antenna. It’s in what sort of apps I can put on it…. It is no longer about the car itself but it’s about possibilities like remotely opening and closing doors or start the engine with an app.”

The big automakers get this. They are embracing smartphones and developing apps that allow drivers to do everything from lock their doors to program exactly when their electric car starts drawing power from the grid.

Some electrics and plug-in hybrids like the Chevrolet Volt have smartphone apps (shown above) that allow owners to monitor how much energy they have and manage when and how their cars begin drawing power from the grid.

Toyota believes effective communication between utilities and automobiles is one way to ensure fast, efficient charging. It sees a day when our cars, our homes and our phones communicate with each other, with charging stations and with the grid.

Increasing functionality means increasing complexity, a challenge for automakers. Automakers have to ensure the software is 100 percent reliable — you don’t want a critical system failing at 65 mph. And they must ensure 100 percent security so your car can’t be hacked by some script kiddie.

Researchers at UC-San Diego and the University of Washington have identified a handful of ways to break into a car, including through the audio system. This security issue requires designing systems robust enough to prevent our cars from being stolen with a laptop.

“At IBM Rational we’re increasing the number of tools to analyze the vulnerabilities, because software is not enough,” Tavassoli said. “It’s with system engineering that you’ll be able to track and control all the entry points and the interfaces.”

Modern cars already feature hundreds of sensors and more are coming to make our cars, and our roads, smarter. We’re seeing the development of autonomous cars, predictive, personalized traffic forecasts and even roads that analyze traffic data and share that information with drivers.

We’ll soon go beyond that as the cloud comes to cars, opening up avenues we haven’t even thought of. If German researchers can build a thought-controlled car and college students in Virginia can build a car the blind can drive, anything is possible.

“There’s also a social aspect of driving,” Tavassoli said. “What if your car could automatically inform you where is your favorite shop when arriving in a new city? Or connect to your social networking system and tell you where your friends are hanging out and provide driving directions to get there?”

Ford is among the automakers working on exactly that. It seems anything and everything is possible. The role of the driver is changing and it’s possible we might see the driver taken out of the equation entirely. Autonomous cars are coming, as are semi-autonomous “road trains” that make us little more than passengers in our own automobiles.

The presence of sophisticated infotainment systems raises the issue of distracted driving, but also brings us to a broader question about the rate of innovation versus the evolution of the society. Cars that talk to each other, or even drive themselves, may seem outlandish or even absurd. But 20 or 30 years from now we may wonder how we got along without them.

“I think we’ll have to evolve,” Tavassoli said. “Frankly, if I look back and wonder how I used to survive 20 years ago without a mobile phone or without the internet, I have no idea how i did it.”

Do you?

Maurizio Pesce is a consumer electronics and automotive staff writer and editor at Wired.it. Follow him on Twitter.

Photo 1: Jason Johnson, a Sync user interface design engineer, at work in the Ford lab. /Ford
Photo 2: An OnStar engineer demonstrates the telematics service’s smartphone app, which allows drivers to start or lock their car remotely and monitor the energy consumption of their plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt. /Steve Fecht/OnStar



Only two things matter when building a race car powered by the sun: maximizing efficiency and minimizing weight. Everything else is secondary when the goal is crossing a continent using just enough energy to power a hair dryer.

All the top teams in the esoteric sport of solar racing embrace this “less is more” ethos to a degree that would please Colin Chapman. But the University of Michigan, arguably America’s best team, has taken it to fanatical levels in a relentless drive to win the World Solar Challenge in October.

The biennial sprint across Australia is the oldest and most prestigious race of its kind, the Daytona 500 or Monaco Grand Prix of solar racing. No American team has won the 1,800-mile race since General Motors’ Sunraycer led the inaugural run in 1987. The University of Michigan Solar Car Team is determined to end the drought. It has spent more than $1 million building Quantum, its most advanced solar car ever.

“It’s the ultimate electric vehicle,” said Chris Hilger, a junior chemical-engineering major who is the team’s business manager. “At its heart, it’s an electric vehicle that uses top-of-the-line technology, from the batteries to the motor to the communications. It just happens to be solar.”

Quantum is the team’s 11th car since its inception in 1989. Construction started by stripping the previous car, Infinium, to the last bolt and weighing everything. Infinium brought U of M its third consecutive (and sixth overall) victory at the American Solar Challenge last year, but it weighed 500 pounds. The team set out to trim every extraneous ounce from Quantum.

To start, it used modeling software to determine how much stress the car and its components are subjected to. That brought a startling discovery.

“We were significantly over-engineering the car,” Hilger said.

Everything about Infinium was stronger and heavier than necessary. With that in mind, the team set about designing slimmer, lighter parts. No one will say just what Quantum weighs, but the target was 320 pounds.

“It’s very light,” is all Hilger would say.

Secrecy is common in solar racing, a highly competitive sport where a four-day race can come down to minutes. Top teams spend $1 million or more building their cars. U of M is gunning for the defending champions from Tokai University in Japan and the Nuon Solar Team of Delft University, the Dutch team that won the four previous races.

Given the intense competition, Hilger was equally coy discussing the three-wheeler’s drivetrain. Three wheels are the norm in solar racing because they offer less rolling resistance. A hub-mounted motor from the Australian firm CSIro drives the rear wheel, generates “a few horsepower” and is 98 percent efficient.

“It’s one of the most efficient motors in the world,” Hilger said.

Aaron Frantz, a sophomore mechanical-engineering student, helps Santosh Kumar get into Quantum. Kumar, a master’s student in aerospace engineering, is the team’s engineering director. Photo: Scott Soderberg/University of Michigan

The car is covered with 6 square meters 65 square feet of silicon solar cells, somewhere between 600 and 800 in all, and they generate “something less than 2 kilowatts of power,” Hilger said.

“We can cruise at 60 mph on less than 2 kilowatts,” he said.

The car features a lithium-polymer battery to keep things moving when the clouds roll in. Regenerative braking sends energy back to the pack. Hilger wouldn’t say how big a battery Quantum has, but said 5 kilowatt-hours is the norm in solar racing. Everything is bolted to a carbon-fiber monocoque and covered with carbon-fiber bodywork. Major components are aluminum or titanium.

The body was designed with help from Exa Corp., which provided the CFD needed to make the car as slick as possible. Hilger’s keeping mum on the car’s drag coefficient, but top-tier solar racers are in the super-efficient 0.07-to-0.1 range. To put that in perspective, the General Motors EV1 was 0.195, and the current-generation Toyota Prius is 0.25.

The car, which is 16 feet long, 3.5 feet tall and 6 feet wide, ran under its own power for the first time April 8. No one’s put the hammer down yet, but Hilger says Infinium could do 105 mph on a track. That’s well above the 50 to 60 mph the cars average in a race, but it speaks to the level of engineering involved.

Top-level cars like Quantum are exquisitely engineered. The team received help from some of the best engineering firms in the world. The list includes Ricardo, which worked with McLaren to develop the engine in the MP4-12C supercar, and Roush, which has a hand in everything from tuning to NASCAR racing. Each of the Big Three automakers is a sponsor, and they’re very interested in what the team is up to, because a solar car is simply a highly efficient electric vehicle.

“Through working with this team we have access to cutting-edge research that the team is employing, which helps us learn as we develop our own products,” Mark Fields, executive vice president of Ford, told Wired.com. “The technology that the team works with — the lithium-ion batteries, how you manage thermal energy — is hardwired into our electrification strategy going forward.”

The team finished the car months ahead of schedule, leaving plenty of time for fine-tuning. Quantum will compete in the Formula Sun Grand Prix at Indianapolis Motor Speedway next month, where it will be thoroughly shaken down before heading to Australia in October.

“We think we can refine and improve the car by going through it with a fine-tooth comb to shave more weight and find more efficiency,” Hilger said.

Competing Down Under will require more than getting in and mashing the accelerator. Solar races are a marathon, not a sprint, and the defending champs finished the 2009 race in 29 hours, 49 minutes at an average speed of 63 mph. There is a tremendous amount of strategy involved as teams manage their energy and keep an eye on the weather: Michigan’s team includes a meteorologist.

“Being able to predict cloud cover will give you a huge advantage, so you can plan ahead and manage your energy,” said Spencer Quong of of Quong & Associates, an advanced-automotive-engineering consultancy. He founded the UC-Berkeley Solar Vehicle Team in 1990. “But if you have enough sunlight and you can gather more sunlight than you can use, your foot is on the floor.”

You can bet the guy behind the wheel of Quantum will have his foot to the floor. The team is supremely confident of its chances, and determined to bring the trophy home in October.

“I think we have a better chance of winning that we’ve ever had in the past,” Hilger said.

Top photo: Team members AJ Trublowski, Cole Witte (yellow T-shirt), Chris Hilger and Caitlin Sadler (from left) install a temporary top on Quantum. (Scott Soderberg/University of Michigan.)

The team tests Quantum at General Motors’ Medford Proving Grounds. That’s Jonathan Meed with the computer. Driver Ryan Mazur and Gerald Chang (center) are testing the steering wheel. Photo: Scott Soderberg/University of Michigan



Long-term brands and relationships are built on alignment. Here are a few examples (“I” is the royal I, not me in particular):

A perfect relationship: I want your company to help me, and your company wants to help me. We’re both focused on helping the same person.

The Walmart relationship: I want the cheapest possible prices and Walmart wants to (actually works hard to) give me the cheapest possible prices. That’s why there’s little pushback about customer service or employee respect… the goals are aligned.

The Apple relationship: I want Apple to be cool. Apple wants to be cool. That’s why there’s little pushback on pricing or obsolence or disappointing developers.

The demagogue politician relationship: I will feel more powerful if you get elected and get your way. You will feel more powerful if you get elected and get your way.

The search engine relationship (when it’s working): I want to find what I’m looking for. You want me to find what I’m looking for, regardless of the short-term income possibilities.

The Mercedes (formerly Cadillac) relationship: I want a prestige product that reliably delivers an expensive label that’s unattainable to many. They want to reliably and consistently charge a lot for a car that sends a message to everyone else.

The farmer’s market relationship: I want to eat sustainable foods that make me feel good. You want to grow sustainable foods that make me feel good.

Compare these to the ultimately doomed relationships (if not doomed, then tense) in which goals don’t align, relationships where the brand took advantage of an opening but then grows out of the initial deal and wants to change it:

The Dell relationship: I want a cheap, boring, reliable computer. You want to make more profit.

The hip designer relationship: I want the new thing no one else has yet. You want to be around for years.

The search engine relationship (when it doesn’t work): I want to find what I’m looking for. You want to distract me and take money to send me places I actually don’t want to go.

The reluctant purchaser relationship: I don’t want to waste money on something I didn’t know I wanted. You want to make a commission.

The troll relationship: I want to laugh at a buffoon who doesn’t realize he’s making a fool of himself. You want to be respected by the mainstream.

The young actor relationship: I want the fresh-faced young movie star. You want a career that lasts more than a year.

The typical media relationship: I want to see the shows, you want to interrupt with ads.

Alignment isn’t something you say. It’s something you do. Alignment is demonstrated when you make the tough calls, when you see if the thing that matters the most to you is also the thing that matters the most to the other person.

The tension that comes from misalignment can work for a while, but it’s when alignment kicks in that the enterprise really scales.

Grandma doesn’t know it yet, but she wants a Kodak Pulse digital picture frame. Kodak just began shipping Pulse version 2.0, adding interactive capabilities that’ll let her respond to the pictures you send to it via email. We put it to the test, finding it to be simple enough for even the most technically averse moms, dads or grandparents to use.On Easter or Passover, maybe you enjoyed visiting with your older relatives, and the conversation might have turned to staying in touch with each other, and maybe even social networking. They might not be ready for social networking (you tried to talk them into it, didn’t you?), but this Kodak Pulse will solve the problem of staying in touch with each other.

Easy as pie. If those loved ones have a wireless network, all they have to do is plug in the Kodak Pulse picture frame, and its touchscreen leads them through an easy set of menus, getting the frame to the point where you can set it up remotely using a browser-based interface. Once you’ve chosen an email address specifically for the picture frame and entered its secret number, you can email pictures to grandma’s picture frame, or configure it to receive pictures from your Facebook account.

Emailing a pic to grandma’s picture frame is nothing new, though. That capability has been available from Kodak and others for a while now, included in the first version of this Kodak Pulse picture frame. In fact, that emailing capability first appeared four years ago in the relatively primitive eStarling picture frame that I reviewed here. But digital picture frames have come a long way since then, and this Kodak Pulse takes the concept the furthest yet with its ability to let users respond to pictures they’ve received.

Going social. Even if grandma is not involved in social networking at all, she can get an elementary taste of it when you email pictures to the Kodak Pulse. Its new interface (see it up close in the gallery below) offers “quick comments,” a dozen abbreviated responses to received pictures, including “Nice picture,” “Fun!” “Strange,” and “Congrats,” and some grandma might not understand at first, such as “LOL” and “OMG.” With a quick touch, it’s easy to fire off one of those canned responses. There’s no keyboard capability, but in the case of those technologically challenged individuals who might own such a frame, perhaps an on-screen keyboard would be more of a detriment than an advantage.

So what else is new? Besides that response capability, Kodak has upgraded the hardware with an activity sensor that conserves power when no one’s around. Cool idea. More good news for Kodak picture frame users: That “quick comment” capability, as well as the ability to create a playlist and rotate pictures on the device’s touchscreen will also be available to version 1.0 users in a firmware update.

Available in 7-inch ($130, we’ve seen its predecessor discounted to below $100) and 10-inch ($200) sizes (Kodak lent us the 7-inch unit for our review here), its 800×600 screen has the same aspect ratio as photos from most digital cameras. The screen is sharp and bright, and while its viewing angle is slightly shallower than I would like, it’s just good enough. And its capacitive touchscreen is nicely responsive, much more so than the resistive touchscreen on the Chumby I reviewed a couple of weeks ago.

After spending some time with this Kodak Pulse digital picture frame, it’s obvious that Kodak understands the market for this device. There can’t be anything complicated about it, and it has to just work. Kodak has accomplished that, creating a quality product at a reasonable price. That new ability to respond to pictures adds an extra dimension to a digital picture frame. If you’re looking for a gift for a technologically uninterested mom, dad or your grandparents, a digital picture frame might do the trick, and this one’s the best I’ve seen.