More than 250,000 Californians have now received a financial Clean Fuel Reward at the point of sale when they purchased or leased a plug-in electric vehicle. This is an important milestone for the program after only 18 months since it began, the California Air Resources Board said today. It’s the latest example of the power of government working with awakened businesses and industry to spur positive change.
CARB and car dealers wanted a program to help support the sale of plug-in cars that made funds immediately available at the dealership, as opposed to other incentive programs that require applications and a waiting period to receive them. Continue reading
Driverless Cars – People Less Positive Than You Might Assume
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If you’re like most auto enthusiasts, likely you are comfortable with the progress of technology from manual chokes to feed-back carburetors to port and then direct fuel-injection. When looked at through the windshield of a sports car, electronic shifting and brake by wire via computer controls are just part of the evolving automotive landscape. Driver assistance safety systems and autonomous vehicles are just the latest technical trends made possible by the relentless pace of Automobility funded by the huge transportation universe of designing, testing, manufacturing, marketing and globally selling ~90 million machines each year.
However, aggregated research from Pew* indicates that these technologies raise critical questions about work, the autonomy of human beings and the ethics of a universe dominated by the latter day avatars of Alan Turning’s machines, aka computers. Continue reading →