Cruising north on Interstate-5 in a Chevy Equinox hardly sounds like a reason to be excited, but I felt lighter than air yesterday. That may just be an effect of the hydrogen fueling the car, or perhaps just the giddy sensation that comes from driving the future of General Motors on the same day their future looks so uncertain. Whatever the cause, my heart was beating loudly as I drove the 40 miles or so from Ft. Lewis to Seattle in a caravan of other hydrogen fuel cell cars. My heart was definitely much louder than the practically inaudible sound of the fuel stack converting hydrogen to electricity and water.

The Equinox is a compact sport utility vehicle, sort of like a minivan for people who don’t want to drive minivans. This Equinox is one of eight hydrogen powered cars from Daimler, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai-Kia, Nissan, Toyota and Volkswagen traveling north from Chula Vista, CA to Vancouver, BC as part of the second annual Hydrogen Road tour. The cars, which left on May 26 and will finish their tour on June 3, are stopping at 28 cities along the way to give people a chance to try out the cars and learn about hydrogen fuel cells. To put it simply, hydrogen fuel cells work like batteries, with the hydrogen ionizing into electrons and protons. The electrons are forced through a circuit, creating an electric current. The waste products coming out the end of the tailpipe are just water and a little bit of heat—much cleaner than internal combustion exhaust.

One cell produces very little voltage, but stacked together they do quite well. The Equinox I drove could produce 94 kW, reach highway speeds of as much as 100 miles an hour (electronically regulated to prevent overtaxing the fuel cells), and go 150 miles on just 4.2 kilograms of compressed hydrogen.

I got the experience of what it’s like to drive one of these cars this morning, when I drove down to Fort Lewis near Tacoma, WA. Fort Lewis was chosen as one of the sites to stop at because the military is building a hydrogen fuel maker from a wastewater treatment plant and plans to have a shuttle bus and 19 forklifts that run on hydrogen gas sometime in the next couple of years.

Fort Lewis also currently is expanding its use of other alternate fuels such as biodiesel and ethanol. “We’re trying everything to see what’s best,” says Miriam Easley, sustainability outreach coordinator at Fort Lewis. With the military rather than civilians in charge, much can get done quickly, including testing different alternative fuels in a semi-closed economy. “If anybody can get it right, the military can get it right,” said Col. Cynthia Murphy, garrison commander at Fort Lewis.

Much of the future of alternate fuel vehicles depends on the infrastructure available to support them. If there were enough places for people to fuel hydrogen powered cars, people would be more willing to buy them. But to create demand for the fueling stations, the cars have to be already sold. “It’s a chicken and egg question,” said Dawn McKenzie, and assistant manager of product communications for GM and one of my passengers as I drove. This is a thorny problem for car manufacturers. Washington does not currently have any hydrogen stations, but it does offer other types of alternative fuel. After driving back to Seattle, we went to one of them, a Propel station providing both ethanol and biodiesel.

Compared to hybrid vehicles like the Prius this felt more like a gasoline powered car, albeit quieter. There’s no abrupt transition like in the Prius between the battery and gasoline engine. If it weren’t for a small indicator light, it would be hard to tell if the car was even on.

Perhaps the most important and most subtle aspect of driving a hydrogen car is that it really is not that different in feeling from driving a regular car. But it is quieter, more economical and decidedly more environmentally-friendly than standard gasoline engines. It’s easy to imagine a transition in America to these kinds of cars. It’s a hope that keeps me buoyant.

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A year ago this week, Cambridge, MA-based speech software company Vlingo released its first study of the texting-while-driving phenomenon, finding that 28 percent of all survey respondents admitted to sending text messages while behind the wheels of their cars. It’s a hazardous habits that, with the recent Green Line trolley accident in Boston (linked to alleged texting by the trolley’s driver), has been in the local news recently. The good news in Vlingo’s second annual study, released today, is that texting-while-driving is down slightly nationally: only 26 percent of drivers admitted to engaging in the behavior this year. The bad news is that drivers in Massachusetts are apparently texting more from their cars than last year (or are at least admitting to it more openly): the state ranked 23rd worst in the nation in the 2008 rankings, but advanced to the 11th worst slot this year, with 30 percent of respondents saying they text while driving.

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Seattle-based CarDomain, a social site for auto enthusiasts, said today it is merging with its chief rival, Los Angeles-based StreetFire. Financial terms of the deal were not announced, but StreetFire CEO Glenn Rogers will head the merged company and CarDomain founder Alex Algard will be its chairman. The news was first reported by TechCrunch and TechFlash. CarDomain laid off 16 workers in November, and its CEO and vice president of marketing left the firm in February.

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I had to check the calendar when I heard about this to make sure it wasn’t still April Fool’s Day. It appears that Bedford, NH-based Segway and Detroit-based General Motors (NYSE: GM) are joining forces to develop a new electric-powered, two-seater vehicle that, like the famous Segway Personal Transporter (PT), balances on two wheels. The idea is to get people around town quickly and cleanly; like the PT, the new vehicle will be far more maneuverable than a conventional automobile, with a very small turning radius.

Segway and GM unveiled their collaboration in a press release this morning in advance of the New York International Auto Show, which begins April 10. The companies have already been testing their prototype vehicle, called Project P.U.M.A. (for Personal Urban Mobility & Accessibility), around the streets of New York (see photos and video below). The prototype, which resembles a pedicab without the cyclist in front, can travel at speeds up to 35 miles per hour.

The 300-pound vehicle runs on a lithium-ion battery that lasts up to 35 miles between rechargings, GM says. It tilts on its wheelbase, balancing on two wheels using “dynamic stabilization” technology similar to that developed for the Segway PT. (Technically the vehicle has six wheels, including two additional “landing-gear” wheels in front and two in back to catch it when it’s not moving.) The “keys” and dashboard controls for the P.U.M.A. apparently reside in an iPhone-like removable wireless device.

“We are excited to be working together to demonstrate a dramatically different approach to urban mobility,” Segway CEO Jim Norrod said in the joint announcement. “The Project P.U.M.A. prototype vehicle embodies this through the combination of advanced technologies that Segway and GM bring to the table to complete the connection between the rider, environment, and others.”

Of course, Detroit has a decades-long history of announcing concept vehicles that never make it into production, and it is not at all clear from today’s announcement—which full of language about “capabilities” and “demonstrations”—that GM and Segway actually intend to manufacture the P.U.M.A. as a consumer product. A cynic might be excused for commenting that today’s news is an attempt by GM, which is in desperate need of a new image, to clothe itself in the aura of innovation that surrounds Segway, the company built by iconic New Hampshire inventor Dean Kamen (an Xconomist).

This is the second Detroit-New England collaboration announced in as many days. Yesterday Chrysler and A123Systems said that Chrysler will use A123’s nanophosphate lithium ion batteries in its new ENVI line of electric vehicles. But both the Segway and A123 projects are dependent on the continued survival of the two car companies, which are hemorrhaging cash and have been targeted for major restructuring and possible bankruptcy by the Obama Administration.

P.U.M.A. video:

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If struggling automaker Chrysler survives its current financial crisis, it will likely come out the other end with a different owner (the Obama Administration wants it to link up with Italy’s Fiat) and a different lineup of vehicles. In fact, it’s already working on a line of electric-only automobiles, including five Dodge, Jeep, and Chrysler models displayed at the 2009 North American International Auto Show in Detroit in January. And today the Auburn Hills, MI-based carmaker announced that A123Systems of Watertown, MA, will supply advanced lithium ion batteries for the vehicles, the first of which is expected to hit the market next year.

Under the agreement announced today, A123 will build a plant in Michigan to manufacture its nanophosphate lithium ion battery cells, which can be combined into battery packs large or small enough to suit the size of each vehicle. Using the same battery cells in all of its upcoming electric-drive vehicles, Chrysler says, will reduce development time and system costs and help increase production volumes. The cells will end up inside the company’s so-called “ENVI” line, which includes the Dodge Circuit EV, the Jeep Wrangler EV, the Jeep Patriot EV, the Chrysler Town & Country EV, and the Chrysler 200C EV concept car (see photo; click for a larger version).

“We’re very proud to have been selected to supply advanced battery systems for Chrysler’s family of ENVI electric-drive vehicles,” David Vieau, A123’s president and CEO, said in a statement issued by Chrysler. “This bold move by Chrysler changes the game and greatly improves our country’s ability to modernize our transportation fleet. We’re confident that our collaboration with Chrysler will serve as proof that American innovation is alive and well and ready to lead the new global market for fuel-efficient electric vehicles.”

Chrysler says the deal with A123 will help it respond to calls from government and the public for a new generation of cars that create fewer greenhouse gas emissions and that reduce the nation’s dependence on petroleum. Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm welcomed the news, saying the Chrysler-A123 alliance “will create new jobs in the state, deliver benefits to consumers and contribute significantly to bringing more environmentally friendly vehicles to market.”

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SAIC Motor Corporation, a state-owned carmaker in Shanghai, China, plans to use iron-phosphate-based lithium ion batteries from Watertown, MA-based A123 Systems for a new gasoline-electric hybrid car that could be available in China by 2010, according to a report yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. The Journal said A123 executives would not confirm the report, but the company has published a headline about the agreement on its website.

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Battery manufacturer A123 Systems of Watertown, MA, said yesterday that it has applied to the Department of Energy for $1.84 billion in federal loans under the department’s “green car” program. A123 says it wants to use the money to build a factory in southeastern Michigan that will manufacture lithium ion batteries for up to 5 million hybrid vehicles per year, or 500,000 plug-in electric vehicles per year, by 2013. Executives at Chrysler and GM, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, Senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow, and Representative John Dingell, as well as Massachusetts Senator John Kerry all voiced their support for A123’s application under the DoE’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Incentive Program.

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While capitalist systems are, in theory, open to any entrepreneur with an idea for a better mousetrap, most investors are pragmatists. They aren’t likely to pony up for a garage tinkerer with a way to build passenger jets better than Boeing’s or supercomputers better than Cray’s. The reality, in other words, is that certain high-tech industries are essentially closed to small businesses—and that includes the American automobile industry, as the litany of failed rebel carmakers, from Tucker to Delorean, attests.

So how were Jay Rogers and his nine employees at Local Motors, a tiny startup in Wareham, MA, able to raise $4 million to test the idea that car design can be crowdsourced to Web-based communities and that consumers will want $50,000 “mass-customized” vehicles built in small batches at a network of micro-factories?

It wasn’t because of Detroit’s recent travails—Local Motors collected its two investment rounds well before the Big Three started passing the hat in Washington. More likely, it was because of Rogers’ impressive resume—Princeton undergrad, investment analyst, startup entrepreneur in China, Marine company commander in Iraq, Harvard MBA—and his passionate intensity when it comes to talking about cars. And not just about car design (though he loves his classic 1971 Mercedes 280SL) but about the auto industry’s carbon footprint, and what you might call its geopolitical footprint.

“Being on the ground in Iraq showed me that the war is really about our reliance on Middle East oil,” Rogers told me after a whirlwind tour of the startup’s headquarters yesterday. (I had scheduled the visit immediately after learning about Local Motors from the company’s unusual presentation at the December 9 Web Innovators Group meeting.) “The problem of oil end-use is absolutely being missed here,” he says. “We were helping the Iraqis to rebuild their oil ministry, but thinking deeper, thinking to myself as a businessman and an entrepreneur, I would have liked to just shut this whole apparatus down. Friends of mine had been killed. Global warming was weighing heavily on my mind. I really had a moment of ‘What should I be doing with the rest of my life? What can I do to make a difference?’”

His musings took him back to his love of cars—which could well be genetic, considering that he’s the grandson of Ralph Rogers, who helped develop the United States’ first diesel passenger car and took over the famous Indian Motorycle Manufacturing Company in Springfield, MA, in 1945. (The elder Rogers went on to chair PBS and co-found the Children’s Television Workshop.) After the Marines, Jay Rogers, who’s now 35, briefly considered starting a company to build cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells. “But making a bet on the science was not going to be a sure-fire way to change things,” he says. He wanted to make cars that people could actually buy, and soon.

“I looked at the supply chain and I saw that there are people who make great engines, great batteries, great lightweight materials—but the people who make cars can’t use them, because they’ve gotten stuck in their enormous apparatus.” For Ford, Chrysler, and GM (and, to be fair, for Toyota, Honda, and BMW too), bringing out a new car model is a five-to-seven-year process that can cost a billion dollars or more. Which means as much as the Big Three might want to respond to consumers’ changing tastes—their newfound disdain for trucks and SUVs, for example—they simply can’t, in any reasonable amount of time. It also means that bailout or no, any serious contribution Detroit can make to scaling back the nation’s petroleum consumption is likely half a decade away.

“I want to change how the system itself works,” Rogers says. “So I thought, maybe we’ll just make a system.”

The system Rogers and his colleagues have built so far is 50 percent Web 2.0 social community and 50 percent rapid-prototyping workshop. The first half of Rogers’ big idea is to …Next Page »

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A couple of news tidbits involving China in the past week have made me look more closely at what local startups and companies are doing to expand there. On Thursday, Seattle-based Airbiquity, a wireless communications firm focused on the auto industry, announced it has entered the Chinese market, branding itself locally as Ai Bi Ke Communications Technology and setting up an office in Chengdu. The move makes good sense, given China’s burgeoning car culture.

And yesterday, Seattle-based wireless startup Movaya announced its Chinese mobile-development team, also in Chengdu, is teaming up with PressOK Entertainment’s software teams in Russia and Belarus to develop mobile games. Ken Myer, the CEO of the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA), told me last month that he thinks the Chinese market for mobile games is pretty far behind the U.S.—but it could be a good time to get in on other mobile software applications.

Not sure what it all means yet, but it’s clear there’s a pattern. Chinese talent, companies, and market opportunities are becoming more embedded in the fabric of Seattle-area innovation. While the economic downturn could lead more U.S. companies to outsource jobs and services, they are also trying to tap a new global market. And on the flip side, Chinese universities and companies are looking to develop leadership roles and move up the value stream. It’s a compelling situation to watch.

A few other recent highlights:

—Bellevue, WA-based Formotus and Seattle-based Mobile Semiconductor talked to me about building relationships with strategic investors and partners in China. The mobile companies were part of a five-company WTIA contingent that toured China in October. One key takeaway was that building these relationships and understanding the market takes time and patience.

—Issaquah, WA-based McObject, a maker of data management software, has expanded in China this fall, adding a team in Beijing doing work on embedded databases. McObject, which was also part of the WTIA tour, already has a presence in the Chinese market, but is looking to accelerate its growth there.

—Oberon Media, a New York-based developer of games and platforms with a Seattle publishing office (I-Play), scored a $20 million strategic investment from Hong Kong-based Infinity Equity in October. The partnership represents a strong effort to establish an Oberon presence on the ground in China.

—It’s definitely not just about outsourcing anymore. Bellevue-based Intellectual Ventures, headed by Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung, has opened an office in Beijing. Its goal is to work with local universities and institutes to help commercialize inventions, as well as keep tabs on foreign competition for ideas and intellectual property. The company’s Asian expansion is being led by global technology head Patrick Ennis, who spoke with me recently.

—Microsoft Research Asia, based in Beijing, celebrated its 10th anniversary last month. The lab has become an epicenter for computer-science research in several areas, including graphics, user interfaces, multimedia, search and advertising, and now cloud computing and theory. Three of the lab’s managing directors have gone on to become Microsoft vice presidents in Redmond.

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The idea of electric vehicles is in the crisp Northwest air these days—and the vehicles are on the road. Earlier this week, we reported that Seattle-based V2Green, which makes software to manage the charging of plug-in electric vehicles, was acquired by Virginia-based GridPoint. V2Green is part of a pilot study being run by Seattle City Light to measure the behaviors of plug-in hybrid drivers, and help utility companies plan for the emergence of electric vehicles, as described by Alan Boyle at MSNBC. And with this week’s news that electric sportscar maker Tesla Motors, based in Silicon Valley, was bringing its prototype up to Seattle for a demonstration (as reported by Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times), well, I had to get in on the action.

So this morning I beat the rush hour over the I-90 bridge to Bellevue, WA, to an empty parking lot that used to serve a Kmart. There, I met Rachel Konrad and Zak Edson from Tesla, who set up a carefully controlled test drive for several journalists, including me and my “photographer” David Caffey, Xconomy’s VP and managing director of business development. (All photos courtesy of David.)

A “thunder gray” Tesla Roadster sat on the pavement waiting for us. It’s 100 percent electric, weighs 2700 pounds (900 of that is the battery), burns no oil, and is supposed to go from 0 to 60 mph in 3.9 seconds and go 244 miles per full charge. Its top speed is 125 mph. Konrad, Tesla’s senior communications manager, said it’s the first “highway-capable,” purely electric vehicle in production. The car is already on order for a bunch of celebrities, including Paul Allen, the Google guys (who bought three), Arnold Schwarzenegger, Matt Damon, George Clooney, and Leonardo DiCaprio. So I’m in pretty good driving company. Besides, who can resist saving the environment for only $109,000?

I got behind the wheel of the engineering prototype. Just one gear, no stick shift. Driving around the parking lot, the steering felt pretty good and tight to me (”Watch the bump,” said Edson). On the straightaway, I floored it and got up to 50 mph quickly before hitting the anti-lock brakes. The pickup was impressive. Not quite “back to the future” (88 mph), but enough to knock off my trusty New England Patriots cap.

Now, my driving experience is limited mostly to Saturns, Hondas, and the occasional Audi, so for more of a performance comparison, I had to defer to the expert. David, whose tastes run more towards Benzes, Porsches, and Ferraris, took a spin and noted a few things (if we must be critical): the handling actually felt a bit loose to him, the stability somewhat limited by the car’s tire width or light weight, and it was eerily quiet during acceleration—no satisfying roar of an internal combustion engine.

For Tesla, that’s the whole point, of course—to own the eco-friendly, electric-sportscar niche. The prototype is “pretty close to the finished product,” which will be available to local owners in June, said Konrad. “We’ve been doing a lot of intensive high-mileage validation…to see what happens when you drive for a long time…and when does the battery power start eroding.”

Tesla is privately financed and is currently in the middle of a Series E funding round, says Konrad. (Its investors include Elon Musk, VantagePoint Venture Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Jeff Skoll, Nick Pritzker, and the Google guys.) It is looking to open a showroom and service facility in the Seattle area by June. Meanwhile, the Tesla team is doing private demonstrations at Microsoft today, where there have been many early orders. Interestingly, it sounds like Bill Gates isn’t one of them. His recent backing of San Diego-based Sapphire Energy would suggest he’s betting on biofuels rather than electric vehicles.

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Back in February, I told you about SpotScout, a startup working on a system that drivers can use to search for vacant short-term and on-street parking spots from their computers or mobile phones. At the time, SpotScout was getting a lot of pre-launch publicity (CEO Andrew Rollert had recently appeared on NBC’s Today Show), and the company said it planned to turn on the service in Boston in February and in San Francisco and New York a couple of months after that.

Well, it’s been almost seven months since our story, and SpotScout still hasn’t launched. So I sent Rollert a note last week to find out what’s up. He said that the service is available now to a private group of beta testers, and that the company is busy “adding new feature sets” before it lifts the veil. “We’re in no rush to put up something that’s sub-average like our competitors,” Rollert wrote. “There’s 3-5 years of market operations before any one company has a real product—and no one’s going to get that lead any sooner with crappy bulletin boards like our competitors.”

Rollert may be right about the time horizon—and one can certainly make a case against launching a platform that’s not bullet-proof, particularly when your market consists of anxious drivers going around in circles, competing with everyone else on the crowded streets for the parking spots closest to their destinations. But it may be a bit over the top to characterize all of SpotScout’s competitors as “crappy bulletin boards.”

There’s one site in particular, Toronto, Ontario-based ParkingSpots.com, that seems likely to divert a few of the customers who might otherwise turn to Rollert’s service. By helping commuters to find long-term rental spots in urban cores, it could dampen demand for more expensive hourly spots.

I spoke last week with Aynsley Deluce, one of the partners behind ParkingSpots, which really did launch its service in February and includes Boston and Seattle among its covered cities. The whole premise of the site, she says, is that most cities have more potential parking spots than drivers are aware of—for example, in residential driveways, condominium garages, and out-of-the-way commercial lots. “Parking is an issue in every city,” she says. “The one thing you can’t control in a city is that we’re all running out of space. But there’s all this dormant space like your driveway that can be used in creative ways—it’s just that there’s no venue for doing that.”

Deluce says that she and her business partner actually purchased the “ParkingSpots.com” domain name six years ago. “We were enjoying a bottle of wine with some friends, and we were all urban, city-center people, and the one common bitch about living in cities was parking. After a couple more bottles, we went online and saw that the ParkingSpots domain was available. We said ‘Let’s park this’—no pun intended—and wait and see how things go. About two years ago, we started to see some services popping up addressing parking, and we were starting to get a lot of offers for the domain. And then last October or November we finally decided we were ready to start developing our own service.”

Non-commercial parking spot owners can create listings on ParkingSpots.com for free; the company’s revenues come from commercial operations (defined as anyone renting two or more spots together; the fee equals one month’s rent, due upon a successful match). Of course, anyone can create a free parking spot listing on Craigslist, too. But the problem with the listings at Craigslist, says Deluce, is that they’re not kept up to date. “A lot of times you’ll go there and find that the spot is already gone,” she says. “Our inventory is up-to-date, so there are no let-downs.”

ParkingSpots.com also offers a “proximity alert” that notifies users by e-mail if a spot becomes available in their desired neighborhood. In fact, the reason why you won’t find very many listings if you search the ParkingSpots website for spots in Boston is that so many people have signed up for these alerts that “as soon as a spot is up on the site it disappears,” Deluce says.

Deluce hopes that both drivers and property owners will find the site useful. “A lot of the guys—and by guys I mean women, too—that we have on our site could be just a small businesses or Speedy Muffler or Midas or a shop with extra spots on their property,” she says. “They are going to see a lot of advantage.”

Back at SpotScout, meanwhile, Rollert says his team is working on services that could add value to his site’s parking-spot-finder function before opening up the site to the public. For example, because the company will have information about where and when a users plan to park in a certain neighborhood, it could pass along time-specific discount offers for local shops or restaurants.

“Parking is really more about search, than just the spots,” Rollert said in note. “People don’t hop in their car to go to a garage, or a private or on-street spot, they go there for something to do or buy and the parking spots is merely a part of the procedure. No one else is hitting that angle like we are.” But this time, he’s not estimating when SpotScout will hit the streets.

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In Boston and Seattle, the professional sports teams aren’t just for entertainment—they’re managed by some of the biggest movers and shakers in the two regions’ high-tech economies. In the Seattle area, the Seahawks and the Portland Trail Blazers are part of Vulcan Inc., owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. The Kraft Group, owner of the New England Patriots, has built one of the NFL’s most advanced websites and has spun off a startup, Matchmine, that’s doing pathbreaking work in the area of online content and shopping recommendations. Many of the Banner 17, the group of financiers that owns the Boston Celtics, are partners at Boston-area venture capital and private equity firms. Over at the Red Sox, pitcher Curt Schilling is the founder of 38 Studios, which is building a massively multiplayer online (MMO) adventure game set to debut in 2011.

And now you can add one more connection between the sports and high-tech worlds. Yesterday marked the public debut of iRacing.com, an Internet-based auto racing simulation system created by John Henry, principal owner of the Red Sox and co-owner of Roush (no relation to me) Fenway Racing, and Dave Kaemmer, co-founder of Papyrus Design Group, which developed several of the best known PC racing games, including NASCAR Racing: 2003 Season and Grand Prix Legends. (In 1995 Papyrus became part of Sierra Entertainment, which was long headquartered in Bellevue, WA.)

The Bedford, MA, company has been working on its simulation—which combines PC-based software with a subscription-based Internet service that allows participants to race against each other—since 2004. The company has a staff of 42, half in Bedford and half (primarily digital artists and software engineers) working remotely, according to Scott McKee, iRacing’s vice president of marketing. If you’re familiar with the way most big commercial videogames are developed these days, you’ll realize that 42 is a tiny number; major console and PC games like 2K Boston’s Bioshock or Electronic Arts’ Spore (which comes out September 7) involve hundreds of developers and artists and have Hollywood-scale production and marketing budgets.

But iRacing goes out of its way to explain that its simulation system is not a game, and isn’t being produced or marketed like one. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that ‘game’ is a four-letter word to us, but we don’t think of ourselves as a game company,” says McKee. “What we offer is really the world’s most sophisticated commercially available racing simulation, conceived and designed with a very discriminating customer in mind—professional racers. We want to create a software package that will help them learn new tracks, hone their skills, or knock off the rust if they’ve been out of the car for a while. It’s really a driver development tool.”

McKee says he used iRacing to learn his way around Virginia International Raceway—one of two dozen tracks currently available in the simulation—before going there to participate in an amateur race. “I’d never driven the track before,” McKee says. “I spent about half an hour a day for three weeks driving the sim in a comparable car, and when I got there I was immediately up to speed.” So to speak.

Of course, you don’t have to be a real-world racer to use iRacing.com. On Tuesday, after a month of beta testing and two months in invitation-only mode, the company opened its simulations to anyone 13 or over who has a credit card, a Windows PC (sorry, Mac users), a broadband Internet connection, and a wheel-and-pedal set. (These PC accessories are available from joystick and mouse manufacturers such as Logitech and Microsoft.) Subscriptions cost …Next Page »

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We know our readers love to hear about radical new technologies and the business opportunities they create. So we weren’t shocked when our article last week about the Transition, the drivable airplane from Woburn, MA-based Terrafugia, turned up on Slashdot and brought more visitors to the site than any Xconomy story since our launch last summer (and temporarily brought down our Web server in the process).

But we were a bit surprised by the comments that readers left here and at Slashdot—the majority of which were critical, even dismissive, of Terrafugia’s concept as a viable business proposition. Given that “flying cars” have been fodder for sci-fi movies, cartoons, and Popular Mechanics covers since the 1930s, it’s understandable that some people feel jaded about the latest promises for airplane-automobile hybrids. But whether or not you’re personally interested in traveling in an airplane with folding wings that doubles as a road-worthy automobile, quite a few private pilots are—as the three-year waiting list for a Transition demonstrates.

Judging from the comments last week, many commenters hadn’t fully absorbed the factual points in the article (to put it politely). Others seemed to feel that because the concept of a car-plane hybrid has been on the drawing boards for so long, it must be inherently flawed. But if you hear out the prize-winning aerospace engineers at Terrafugia, you’ll begin to understand why they feel so certain that current-day materials and electronics make a roadable aircraft—one that’s safe both to fly and to drive—a feasible idea.

In the spirit of friendly debate, we boiled down the hundreds of comments to a dozen basic criticisms, then asked Carl Dietrich, Terrafugia’s CEO and co-founder, to respond to each one. The text of our conversation follows. Please keep in mind that the questions below represent our summaries of the most commonly registered criticisms. They don’t necessarily reflect the opinions of Xconomy or its editors.

Xconomy: Thanks for speaking with us again so soon. The first and most repeated criticism of Terrafugia’s work that we heard from readers last week went like this: “Just look how many bad drivers there are on the roads. Being a pilot takes much more skill than driving. So just imagine the havoc if lots of drivers had flying cars.”

Carl Dietrich: This is one of the most common misconceptions about the Transition. People assume that since we’re building a roadable aircraft it must be a flying car, and therefore will be sold to everybody who drives a car, and that’s just not the case. The vehicle will be sold to licensed private pilots and sport pilots, and these people will have gone through significant training in order to operate a vehicle like this. And they will hold a completely different type of license [from a driver's license]. It’s not something where there is going to be one of these things in every garage. It will be a rarity to see one of these vehicles for the foreseeable future. So you’re not going to turn around one day all of a sudden and see the skies blackened with thousands of Transitions. The real market for these vehicles is solidly in the hundreds of units per year. For cars, you’re talking hundreds of thousands of units. It’s a very different scale. This is an airplane first, and not a replacement for anybody’s car.

X: Criticism number two: Light aircraft have a higher fatality rate per passenger mile than cars.

CD: The absolute number of accidents and fatalities in light aircraft is substantially smaller, of course, than in automobiles. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were correct that accidents and fatalities per passenger mile are somewhat higher. But the things we’re doing to address those issues are what I think is important. There is a market for general aviation, so the question is what can we do to make it better, to make it safer. And I believe we’re doing a lot to make it safer.

Specifically, not only do we have this rocket-deployed parachute that can …Next Page »

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Carpenters, contractors, plumbers, and construction foremen are usually as tough as the pickups they drive to work. Until they leave one of their tools behind at home or at a job site. Then they cry like babies.

Just kidding. But lost or forgotten tools are a serious nuisance for these workers. Ford knows, because it sent teams of researchers to follow them around. “One thing that came up time and time again was that people were traveling hours a day to get to their locations, and it was a catastrophic experience when they realized that they forgot a tool,” explains Yael Maguire, CTO at Cambridge, MA-based radio-frequency-identification (RFID) company ThingMagic. “Two or three times a year, workers would have to run over to Home Depot to buy a replacement tool rather than go all the way home. So Ford wondered if they could offer a lot of value to people by making it so that somehow the vehicle itself could tell you whether you have everything, and whether you were missing a particular tool.”

The answer turned out to be yes, they could. And with help from ThingMagic and DeWalt, the Baltimore-based maker of industrial tools, Ford yesterday announced an option for the 2009 F-150 pickup called “Tool Link from DeWalt”—an RFID-based system that scans the items placed in the truck bed and shows whether everything is accounted for on an in-dash computer display.

The Ford-DeWalt deal is a big win for ThingMagic, a small startup that’s been around since 2001 and has worked with big companies like Wal-Mart on using RFID tags to increase supply-chain efficiency, but has never put an RFID product directly onto the consumer market. “The fact that a big consumer company is really embracing this new type of RFID technology is really exciting for us,” says Maguire, who—as the rest of the ThingMagic team went west for the big unveiling of the Tool Link system at the Chicago Auto Show—was in the home office in Cambridge yesterday, busy fielding calls like mine.

Maguire says the Ford partnership came about last year after the company approached him at the RFID World trade show, where he had just given a presentation on how to communicate with RFID tags in environments with lots of metal around. Coincidentally, that was exactly the problem Ford was pondering, after having noted several lost-tool catastrophes. “A truck bed can present a tough problem in terms of trying to read out information from RFID-tagged objects,” Maguire explains. The issue is that a truck’s metal body—not to mention all the tools piled into it—can create a mess of radio reflections, preventing the individual tags from powering up sufficiently to communicate. (Passive RFID tags like those normally attached to portable objects don’t have batteries, and run on power induced by the radio waves themselves.)

“They said, ‘Do you think this is possible?’” Maguire relates. “They had already talked to a bunch of companies and most of them had said no, it’s not possible. But we felt it would be a challenge worth investigating.”

Back in 2005, ThingMagic had partnered with Intel to develop a new chipset for an RFID reader that could get information back from tags faster, on less power. That chipset, the R1000, was ready last year, and when ThingMagic put it into a custom reader capable of running on vehicle battery power and tested it in an employee’s F-150, “We found from the outset that it was working really well,” says Maguire. All that was left was to find a supplier of indestructible, unremovable RFID tags and to work with DeWalt to put the reader itself into a ruggedized module that could withstand extremes of heat, cold, and vibration.

ThingMagic also worked with Ford and with Magneti Marelli, the maker of the in-dash computer, to create a software application that tracks objects RFID-tagged objects. Basically, the system allows a truck owner to enter a list of tools, along with a set of job profiles and the tools required for each type of job. “You say ‘Today I’m going to a particular job,’ and click on that job, and it will tell you if all the tools you entered for that job are actually there in the truck,” says Maguire.

It’s exactly the kind of problem where RFID technology excels. “In this case, we’re helping to answer a very simple question that is sometimes very hard to answer unless you are going to pay a ton of attention,” says Maguire. “And that is, are all of the things I want right here, right now?”

The Tool Link system that Ford announced yesterday is part of an innovative mobile-computing package called “Ford Work Solutions” that the company has assembled in an effort to maintain its status as the leading U.S. truckmaker. The other components include a GPS navigation system from Garmin, a voice-activated built-in phone powered by Sprint, a set of office-productivity applications that run on the Magneti Marelli computer, a fleet-tracking application for locating other company-owned trucks, and a system of cables and locking shackles designed by MasterLock to keep items in truck beds from mysteriously walking away. Work Solutions will be available as an optional feature on model-year 2009 Ford F-Series and E-Series pickups and on 2010 Transit Connect compact vans.

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The House of Representatives yesterday passed an energy bill that would require automakers to raise the fleet average fuel efficiency for passenger vehicles to 35 miles per gallon by 2020. It’s unclear what parts of the bill might ultimately become law, given strong opposition in the Senate and at the White House to other provisions such as the rescinding of tax breaks for oil companies and a requirement that electrical utilities generate 15 percent of their energy from renewable sources. But for the first time since the 1970s, it seems conceivable that carmakers will be forced to look at new technologies to reduce fuel consumption. And a blog post today by local cleantech executive Bilal Zuberi argues that diesel-fueled cars, of all things, should be part of the solution.

We’re not talking about your father’s noisy, soot-spewing diesel engines here. (My own father, in fact, had a diesel VW Jetta in the early 1980s that got great mileage but produced a frightening amount of black exhaust when you started it up. If you could start it at all—the Michigan winters tended to make the fuel turn to jelly, and for some reason you had to bring the battery indoors on cold nights, like a pet.)

No, Zuberi’s company, GEO2 Technologies of Woburn, is working on components for a new generation of low-RPM diesel engines that actually produce lower emissions—and get better mileage—than conventional gasoline engines. As we explained in an October profile, GEO2’s microfiber ceramic filters are designed to make current emissions control systems for diesel engines cheaper by combining two subsystems (the particle filtration system and the oxidation catalyst, which gets rid of unburned hydrocarbons) into one. That could speed the adoption of diesel technology in North America, which is way behind Europe and Japan when it comes to the spread of clean diesel.

Rather than promoting gas-electric hybrids like the Toyota Prius, Zuberi thinks the regulators should push automakers to turn to the “best available technology” to improve fleet standards, including clean diesel. “Meeting the 35 mpg standard proposed in the new energy legislation currently before Congress will mean converting many high torque vehicles to diesel,” Zuberi argues. (By high torque he means SUVs, pickups, minivans, and large family sedans, which are heavier and therefore require more low-RPM power to accelerate.)

Zuberi, who is GEO2’s vice president of product development, gently knocks the media for not making the case for diesel clearer. “Work needs to be done to educate the public on how to evaluate the cost-benefit trade-offs when deciding on their next purchases: gasoline vs. hybrid vs. clean diesel. If not via the media, quite honestly, how is an average US consumer to know that ‘clean diesels’ have, on average, 20 to 30 percent better fuel economy than gasoline engines while providing better torque and performance and lower emissions?”

So, we’re doing our little part today. Go read Bilal’s post.

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A robot car built by MIT faculty and students was one of just six autonomous vehicles to successfully complete the DARPA Urban Challenge competition this weekend. However, when the results were announced Sunday afternoon, Team MIT had missed out on the big prize money, which went to the first three finishers: Tartan Racing (led by Carnegie Mellon University), the Stanford Racing Team, and VictorTango from Virginia Tech.

The challenge, presented by the Defense Advanced Research Agency, was designed to advance the state of the art for autonomous vehicles for use by the military. After semi-final qualifying rounds in late October, 11 teams were chosen for the finals, which took place on Saturday at the abandoned George Air Force Base in Victorville, CA. Their task was to navigate a mock-city environment that contained busy four-way intersections and other obstacles designed to simulate conditions that vehicles might encounter in a military supply mission. The event offered $3.5 million in prize money, with $2 million going to the winner, $1 million to the second-place finisher, and $500,000 to the third-place team.

MIT’s robot vehicle, dubbed Talos, was one of just six of the 11 finalists to complete the three challenges given the finalists and finish the course in under six hours. We checked in throughout the day Saturday to watch the competition via DARPA’s live webcast. By noon EDT, all 11 teams were successfully on the course. But almost immediately, some ran into trouble. Intelligent Vehicle Systems, an entry from Ford, Honeywell, and Delphi, got stuck right out of gate and had to be manually backed up and restarted. Similarly, Team Oshkosh Truck, which looked like a giant yellow Tonka truck, also encountered early difficulties.

Around this time came what might have been the world’s first autonomous vehicle traffic jam—seven vehicles piled up at a four-way intersection. A little over an hour and a half into the challenge, Oshkosh (oh gosh), Annieway (from Germany and the only team led by a woman), and ISV were being removed from the course. A half-hour after that, the Knight Rider bot (University of Central Florida) drove into a house, unfortunately a disqualifying error.

But given all the challenges of an urban environment, with stop signs, intersections, moving traffic, and various additional obstacles, it was impressive that even six robots finished the course. Indeed, with many of the vehicles at times traveling very quickly while obeying all traffic rules, it was sometimes difficult to believe they were completely autonomous. In addition to the four already mentioned, Team Cornell and the Ben Franklin Racing Team (University of Pennsylvania and Lehigh University) completed all the tasks.

MIT’s robot, with by far the most sensors of any robo-vehicle in the race, according to commentators, might have been done in by its own sophistication. The car carried 40 computing cores cooled by a rooftop air conditioning unit, all of which was powered by a 6-kilowatt generator. It seemed to get stuck repeatedly. And indeed, webcast commentators began asking such questions as, ‘Does MIT’s car think too much?’

“They’ve got enough going on in there to operate two or three cars,” said commentator Jamie Hyneman, co-host of the hit Discovery Channel show Mythbusters. “You don’t hear the car, you hear the generator and the air conditioner.” However, he added, “once they get those bugs worked out, watch out, it’s quite a vehicle.”

At 4:44 pm, Stanford’s “Junior,” became the first team to finish all three missions. One minute behind it was Tartan Racing (the winner was not just selected by time, but based on its overall performance throughout the challenge, much like an equestrian competition). When Talos finally completed the course, the commentator enthused, “MIT, in their first-ever DARPA challenge, finishes fifth across the line.”

We reached MIT aeronautics and astronautics professor Jonathan How, one of the team leaders, for comment late Sunday. “I congratulate CMU, Stanford, and Virginia Tech on excellent performances,” How wrote in an e-mail. “While we trailed them by some time, we are very pleased that we finished the full 55 miles and came in fourth place. I think this was a great accomplishment for a first time team, and think that the students and postdocs did an outstanding job. I am very proud of what the team was able to accomplish in the past year and a half.”

“By the way,” How continued, “I thought the race was going to be fun, but I didn’t realize that it was going to be that much fun. It truly was amazing to watch these robots driving around at speed with all that traffic on the road. What a blast.”

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It wasn’t a shoo-in, according to MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics Jonathan How. But Team MIT learned this afternoon that it has won a qualifying berth in the DARPA Urban Challenge finals on Saturday, when observers will learn which competing institution’s autonomous vehicle is best at navigating a complex mock-city environment replete with moving traffic, busy four-way intersections, and numerous obstacles.

A surprising number of prominent teams, including Team Caltech, Team Princeton, and Axion Racing, were definitively eliminated after qualifying events held at George Air Force Base in Victorville, CA, from October 26 through 31. And while MIT wasn’t one of the teams eliminated, it also wasn’t among a group of six teams named by DARPA as qualifiers on Wednesday, creating considerable suspense as to whether the MIT “supercomputer on wheels”—a Land Rover loaded up with sensors, servers, and software by a multidisciplinary team of faculty and students from MIT and Olin College—would be allowed to compete for the $2 million grand prize on Saturday.

But officials from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, sponsors of this year’s challenge as well as two previous robot-car races in 2004 and 2005, released a list of five more qualifying teams this afternoon, including MIT. In the end, 24 of the 35 teams who traveled with their robot cars to Victorville were eliminated from the competition. MIT was the only team from New England to make the finals (or even the semi-finals).

How, who spoke with me from his office at MIT before boarding a plane for California, says he listened in on the announcement remotely as a colleague in Victorville held up a cell phone. “It’s nice to get this far,” How says. “There are good friends of mine who did not, and it would have been tough to have done this amount of work and not get through. I really feel bad for those guys. But I’m just hoping we can go out there and put on a good show so that MIT can be proud.”

How says the main point of the qualifying events was “to make sure that every vehicle in the race is sufficiently safe that they can just leave the robot driving around.” That’s probably a good thing, given that the environment on Saturday will be more complex than anything any of the teams have dealt with before. All 11 robot cars will be on the course simultaneously, along with as many as 80 other vehicles, including chase cars and spectator vehicles. “It’s going to be a lot of fun to see what happens,” How says.

According to How, Team MIT didn’t make it into the first group of qualifiers because the Land Rover had trouble with one particular event, a loop designed to test how well the robot cars could merge into moving traffic. “You’re facing two lanes of oncoming traffic,” explains How. “You turn left across that traffic, merge with moving traffic, drive around a loop, cut across traffic again, join moving traffic again, and so on. The question was how many laps could you do in 20 minutes.” Tartan Racing—one of the first six qualifiers—completed 16 loops in the given time. Team MIT completed six or seven. (Stanford’s team, the defending champions from the 2005 Grand Challenge, did well in the qualifing events and was on the list of six teams announced Wednesday.)

Every team had two chances at the merging-traffic event, and some were able to fine-tune their planning and navigation software sufficiently to improve on the second go-round. Others weren’t. “The traffic was only moving at 10 miles per hour, so a human would probably have been okay with it, but it is a hard problem” for robots, How remarks.

Past DARPA challenges simply involved getting a robot car from the start line outside Los Angeles to a finish line near Las Vegas. Saturday’s finals, where all team members will be forced to look on from spectator stands at the edge of a suburb-like test course, “will be quite a bit different,” How says. “We’ll get to see [the cars] over an extended time. And once the robots start meeting up, then it really becomes stochastic”—a big word for completely chaotic.

How’s own specialty, as I wrote after visiting MIT’s Urban Challenge team in early September, is developing path-planning algorithms like those used by unmanned aerial vehicles and deep space probes to cross unknown territory safely. And that, as it turns out, is the exact problem the robot cars will face on Saturday. “Say there’s a robot blocking the road. Do you sit there and wait? What if he is waiting for you? Do you move back? You need a very general strategy that’s able to handle many different scenarios,” How says. How well MIT’s car handles such unpredictable situations will be evident in a couple of days—when the event will be webcast live at http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/.

UPDATE 11/2/07 2:40 p.m.: DARPA has released the list of all 11 teams that have advanced to Saturday’s finals.

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Boston doesn’t have an auto technology cluster, but it’s big on cleantech—and it also has Tom and Ray Magliozzi, better known as Click and Clack, the Tappet brothers. And who should know how cleantech and cars come together better than the proprietors of Cambridge’s Good News Garage and hosts of NPR’s Car Talk show? Not Congress, they figure. Yesterday, the folks in Congressman Edward Markey’s office announced that Tom and Ray have sent a letter to Congress arguing that the U.S. can meet 35 mile-per-gallon fuel efficiency standards in five years—almost a decade sooner than the watered-down compromise language currently under consideration.

“As any listener knows, Tom and Ray are where common sense begins when it comes to cars, and when they say reaching 35 miles per gallon is feasible and the smart play for the American auto industry, people should listen,” said Markey in a statement. The Massachusetts Democrat chairs Congress’s Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, to which the brothers Tappet addressed their letter of October 25.

“There are technologies aplenty that already exist that could be used to meet much higher CAFE standards,” Tom and Ray wrote. They then tick off 15 examples, from hybrid-electric diesels to higher-voltage electrical systems and common rail fuel injection, which is already used in diesel cars.

Tom and Ray note that the auto industry has traditionally resisted government regulations, claiming they would impose various hardships. Yet, the brothers write, “Every single time they’ve resisted safety, environmental, or fuel economy regulations, auto industry predictions have turned out, in retrospect, to be fear-mongering bull-feathers.

“Isn’t it time we (you?) stop falling for this 50 year-long line of baloney?”

You can read the letter here.

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What’s the common thread between the space shuttle’s thermal tiles, log-cabin mansions in Aspen, Play-Doh, pasta makers, and diesel engines? There is one—really—but to find out what it is, you have to pay a visit to GEO2 Technologies in Woburn. The clean-energy startup has turned an industrial warehouse just off I-95 into a giant kitchen-laboratory, complete with giant microwave, for baking advanced diesel-exhaust filters.

The three-year-old company has perfected a way to build these filters out of an unconventional material, ceramic microfibers like those used in the space shuttle’s tiles (of which more later). The technology could keep the air cleaner in diesel-crazy Europe and help diesel technology make a comeback among car buyers in the United States, who have shunned it for decades because of the filthy black soot generated when diesel engines start.

“The auto industry is a huge market undergoing tremendous pain from tightening emissions regulations,” Bilal Zuberi, GEO2’s vice president of product development, told me Tuesday before taking me on a tour of the kitchen-lab. But in the field of emissions controls, “there hasn’t been too much innovation in the area since the invention of the catalytic converter in the 1970s.”

Many diesel engines today, Zuberi explains, contain elaborate, multi-stage exhaust control systems to trap particulates and burn off the unburned hydrocarbons found in diesel smoke. But the more devices are added to these systems, the more backpressure the engine has to deal with, reducing fuel efficiency. The “holy grail” of emissions control, he says, would be a single high-porosity filter that traps soot and burns off the extra hydrocarbons without increasing backpressure.

That’s the specialty of the house at GEO2, which is privately held and has 27 employees. But how the company got there is a twisty tale. The inventors of the original technology behind GEO2 are Gordon Alward and Robert DiChiara, who were neighbors in California. According to Zuberi, one day several years ago Alward and DiChiara were discussing regulations in Aspen, CO, (where Alward had visited) requiring that woodstoves and fireplaces include expensive scrubber systems to reduce wood-smoke pollution. DiChiara, a Boeing engineer who works on heat-shield systems for hypersonic craft like the X-37 space plane, wondered whether light, porous, microfiber-based ceramic materials like those used to protect the space shuttle during atmospheric re-entry might work as scrubbers, capturing the particulates in wood smoke or engine exhaust. Alward and DiChiara wound up patenting the idea, and went to Boston Consulting Group, where Zuberi was a consultant at the time, for advice about starting a company around the technology.

There were a few problems. Existing microfiber-based materials were brittle, flaky, and hard to manufacture in specific shapes like those needed for engine parts. But Zuberi, who had joined BCG after earning a PhD in physical chemistry at MIT, and Rob Lachenauer, a 17-year BCG veteran, saw promise in the technology—not to mention a wide-open market. The four decided to launch GEO2 in 2004, with Lachanauer as CEO and Zuberi in charge of product development.

Most exhaust filters are designed as honeycombs of interlocking tunnels made of conventional ceramics. Zuberi and Lachenauer say the company spent more a year on an ultimately futile attempt to make these honeycombs by boring holes in big blocks of microfiber-based ceramics. The holes were too large and imprecise, and the process was wasteful, since more than half of the material in a bored-out microfiber block would have to be thrown away.

That’s when it occurred to Zuberi and Lachenauer that the process normally used with conventional ceramics, extrusion, might work better. But nobody had ever figured out how to blend ceramic microfibers into the Play-Doh-like consistency needed for the extrusion process, in which the material is squeezed through holes in a die, similar to the extruding discs used in pasta makers but with much more complicated geometries. So GEO2 experimented with different kind of microfibers and binding agents until it found the right blend. The company ultimately bought a whole assembly line of industrial-strength kitchen gadgets to make the filters, including a giant mixer, a torpedo-sized extruder, a 15-foot-tall microwave oven (to dry the extruded filters) and a large sintering oven (to fire them).

Not much is left of Alward and DiChiara’s original plan—but the concept is intact. “We wound up changing the materials, the manufacturing techniques, and the management team, but other than that, everything’s the same,” jokes Zuberi.

In GEO2’s finished filters, ceramic microfibers are cross-linked and bonded at the microscopic level by a glass-like ceramic glue, giving them a structure with high mechanical strength, high porosity, large surface area, and high resistance to thermal shock. This means, for one thing, that even as the filters load up with particulates, exhaust gas still has many paths to travel, lowering backpressure. It also means that the filters are strong enough to survive being heated up to the temperatures needed to oxidize the unburned hydrocarbons that accumulate from diesel soot, a process called regeneration.

As a result, a single structure made from GEO2’s material can act as both a particle filtration system and an oxidation catalyst—potentially saving car and truck manufacturers and their customers a lot of money. “These multifunction filters will be a huge thing in the marketplace,” Zuberi predicts.

Lachenauer says GEO2 is poised to sign mass-manufacturing deals with one or more makers of conventional ceramic honeycomb structures. And now that the company knows how to make its filters, there are many potential applications beyond diesel exhaust systems, Lachenauer says, including better catalytic converters for gasoline engines and filters for the incredibly polluting two-stroke engines in scooters, lawn mowers, and leaf blowers.

Zuberi believes that multifunction diesel filters may also be one key to a potential renaissance for diesel-powered passenger cars in the United States. “If you drive a lot in the city, sure, buy a Prius, but if you are going to do a lot of highway driving, a gasoline hybrid doesn’t gain you anything,” he says. “Meanwhile, diesel cars in Europe and Japan are getting 43 to 53 miles per gallon.” With technology like GEO2’s new filters, the perception that diesel engines produce dirty smoke will be overcome, and manufacturers will be able to improve emissions control without sacrificing profitability, Zuberi predicts. “It’s an easy sell.”

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Driving in urban traffic is a stupendously tricky task demanding a constant stream of split-second, almost subconscious decisions. In fact, if you give it too much thought—Am I driving inside the lane markers? How much space should I give the car ahead of me? Who got to this intersection first? Is that old lady going wait for the walk signal?—you’ll probably steer yourself right into an accident. Yet creating an autonomous vehicle that can handle such decisions in real time is the whole point of the DARPA Urban Challenge, the third major robot-car competition mounted by the U.S. Defense Advance Research Projects Agency. And to meet that challenge, a team at MIT has built what amounts to a supercomputer on wheels.

On August 9, DARPA named the MIT team as one of 36 semi-finalists for the Urban Challenge, to be held October 26 through November 3 at the urban military training facility at the former George Air Force Base in Victorville, CA. The institute’s team will be the only one representing New England in the DARPA challenge, and believe it or not, it’s the first time MIT has won a berth in a DARPA robot-car event, which this time around carries a $2 million first prize.

That creates just a “little bit” of stress for Team MIT, acknowledges aeronautics and astronautics professor Jonathan How, one of four principal investigators (PIs) leading the school’s effort. “The MIT name is on the side of the car,” How pointed out last week as we peered into the team’s extensively pimped-out Land Rover 3. “Is it possible to add more pressure? I don’t know.”

How’s specialty is developing path-planning algorithms of the type used by unmanned aerial vehicles and deep space probes to chart safe trajectories through unknown territory. And planning will be one of the big tasks preoccupying the 40 CPUs, or “cores,” bolted into in the way-back of the Land Rover, which currently occupies the Aero/Astro hangar in MIT’s Building 33. With all that computing power on board—more than any other team’s vehicle will be carrying, as far as How knows—the MIT car will, in theory, be able to think its way out of dilemmas that may stymie other vehicles navigating the DARPA course (the details of which are kept secret until the day before the competition). “We have algorithms in place that are using 15 to 18 of our cores,” says How. “If you didn’t have 40 computers you couldn’t do it that way—so we have a design freedom that others may not have.”

Ostensibly, How and co-PI Seth Teller, a professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), invited me over to the hangar to show off the Land Rover. (See a brief slide show of my visit here.) But we spent most of our hour together talking about its sensors and planning algorithms—which is probably a sign of how the field of autonomous-vehicle research has progressed.

Teller and How explained that thanks in part to technology developed and tested during DARPA’s previous competitions, it’s now fairly easy to equip a car for autonomous operation. Attach electric servo-motors up to the gas pedal, brakes, and steering column, and throw in a few dozen off-the-shelf automobile radars, laser range finders, and video cameras, and you’re done—well, if you have the expertise of several MIT departments and a team of undergraduates at Olin College of Engineering* to call on.

“Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s going to drive so well in an urban setting,” says How. That’s because the real challenge in the DARPA competition lies in building the software that will give the vehicle the ability to picture its surroundings and respond to encroaching hazards, all the while moving toward the finish line.

Vehicles participating in the DARPA challenge will need every ounce of awareness their builders can provide, given that the race itself has become much more complex since its earlier incarnations. In the 2004 and 2005 DARPA robot challenges, cars zoomed through the open Mojave desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. (Or rather, in 2005 they did; five vehicles crossed the finish line that year, with Stanford taking first prize, whereas the best team in the disastrous 2004 competition progressed no further than about 7.5 miles.) This time, cars will have six hours to navigate along a series of checkpoints, such as intersections, that will be handed to teams 24 hours prior to the competition.

Each robot car must plan its own route between the checkpoints and make the journey completely autonomously, using only sensor data and GPS systems to navigate. The cars must also obey all California traffic laws, such as ceding the right-of-way to preceding vehicles at four-way intersections. Judges will deduct points if cars fail to avoid obstacles such as lane markers, curbs, or traffic barrels.

“There are at least three levels of planning happening in the car,” Teller explains. “There is the long-range planning of ‘What intersections do I visit?’ Then there’s ‘What is the next few hundred meters of trajectory? What road segment should I choose to advance the mission?’ And then there’s, ‘What’s coming up in the next five or 10 meters, or the next few hundred milliseconds?’ [And] how should the gas and steering and brakes be moved so that the car meets the higher-level trajectory goals.” (See video of the MIT vehicle in action here.)

“It’s a lot more dynamic than previous challenges,” sums up How. It’s also, arguably, more socially relevant. As Teller notes, “If you could have safe autonomous cars, you might be able to avoid many of the 40,000 highway deaths we have every year in the United States. You could probably save a lot of fuel by having cars drive in a more smoothly coordinated fashion. And you could improve productivity by letting people read or work in the back seat while their cars drive.”

That relevance is part of the reason MIT threw its weight behind the project this year. But students from MIT’s Aero/Astro, Mechanical Engineering, and EECS departments also had a fair bit to do with it, say Teller and How. MIT didn’t send a team to the challenge at all in 2004. A student-led group raised $100,000 to build a vehicle in 2005, but the institute provided minimal additional support, and the team failed to qualify. A self-critical article in the November/December 2006 MIT Faculty Newsletter argued that “MIT can do much better” in supporting student projects. The new effort reflects that philosophy, and has also won the sponsorship of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, the Ford-MIT Alliance, and a number of other sponsors.

“We have had a very motivated group of graduate students who very early, in June 2006, basically banged on the table and said, ‘We really want to do this,’” Teller says. “We were game to do it, but to have them come and basically insist that we do it pushed us over the edge.”

Stanford roboticist Sebastian Thrun, who led his team to victory in the 2005 competition and will again head the Stanford entry in Victorville, says he welcomes the new competition. “I was sad to see MIT absent in past Grand Challenges,” Thrun says. “I am a big fan of the MIT team, since it has recruited world-class robotic researchers…I predict the level of technical innovation will be remarkable for this team in the 2007 race.”

Indeed, when MIT faculty enter a competition, they enter to win. At least, that’s the impression I got from inspecting the team’s Land Rover, which is bristling with sensors on the outside and stuffed with processing power on the inside. To gather information about its position, the car carries an inertial sensor to track short-term changes in direction, precise odometers to measure the amount of ground the car has covered, and a high-end GPS receiver. To see what’s around it, the car is also equipped with mid-range laser scanners or “LIDAR” (for light detection and ranging) that project a skirt of laser beams around the body, detecting objects within about 60 meters. This is supplemented by about 15 longer-range automotive radars of the same type used on luxury passenger cars for adaptive cruise control—and, to provide an extra level of awareness, a fleet of video cameras, which are mainly used to detect road edges.

All in all, the car’s sensors sweep a disk-shaped area about 150 meters in radius. “Within that disk, we have pretty good situational awareness of what we have to avoid,” says Teller. From there on, it’s a matter of finding the way between checkpoints and adapting to last-minute changes in the course, doubling back if necessary—which is all the job of How’s planning algorithms.

On the final day of the competition—November 3, regardless of rain or fog—the most important task will be “establishing what you know and what you don’t know, and planning effectively through that in an uncertain world,” says How. “I think what we have here is a car that, both from a sensing perspective and a computing perspective, will achieve sufficient understanding so that we can proceed. That’s the only thing we’re thinking about right now. That, plus winning the race, of course.”

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