Public Trust In Autonomous Car Technology Is Eroding

In 2016, the MIT AgeLab, in cooperation with the New England Motoring Press Association, conducted a study to determine public attitudes about autonomous car technology. It found that younger drivers were more accepting of the idea that cars could drive themselves without human input than were older drivers. The more mature people who took the survey liked the idea of active safety systems that help keep a car within its proper travel lane, issue side collision warnings, adapt to the speed of other cars on the highway, or brake automatically in an emergency.

Credit: MIT AgeLab 2017

This year, in advance of NEMPA’s seventh annual technology conference, the AgeLab repeated its survey. The results showed that over the past year, trust in autonomous car technology has eroded. Most surprisingly, the largest decrease occurred among younger drivers. In 2016, 26% of respondents aged 16-24 reported they were comfortable with full autonomy. This year, that number dropped to 14%. Among those 25-34 years old, 40% were comfortable with full autonomy in 2016. For 2017, that number plunged to only 20%.

Professor Bryan Reimer is an associate director of The New England University Transportation Center at MIT, an organization is whose mission, according to its website, is to “understand, manage, and creatively exploit the strategic implications of disruptive change on the future of the transportation system.” He is also the head of the MIT AgeLab that conducted the 2016 and 2017 surveys. He told the NEMPA conference the change in consumer attitudes is a danger signal for an industry that is spending billions to rush autonomous driving systems into production. The issue, said Reimer, is a lack of trust.

Part of that is a reflection of technology issues everyone experiences on a daily basis. All of us are familiar with cell phones that suddenly lose their signal, internet sites that crash, or stories in the press about hackers who have stolen millions of identities from online retailers. Certainly hacking and trouble with internet security played a significant role in the last US election. Another part of the lack of trust is the innate understanding that building systems that can perform perfectly in Boston traffic in the middle of a blizzard is an extremely difficult challenge.

Even though 42,000 Americans died in highway accidents in 2016, the press focused on two fatalities that took the lives of drivers who were driving Teslas in Autopilot mode — one in Florida and one in China. Professor Reimer told the NEMPA conference, “I could write a 50 page dissertation on why Tesla Autopilot should be banned and another 50 page dissertation on why it shouldn’t.”

Another issue the MIT survey revealed is that people are confused about how autonomous systems work. In general, drivers learn about the systems through trial and error more than any other way. Reading the owner’s manual is a close second. Dealers come in a distant third and are the subject of much criticism. When the MIT team, headed by Hillary Abraham, one of the co-authors of this year’s study, went to various dealerships and asked questions about autonomous driving technology, she and her colleagues found the sales staff was often just as confused as the customers.

Abraham falls into the “younger people” category. When I asked her if she would feel comfortable getting in a self driving car with no pedals and no steering wheel to take her to the airport, she demurred and her body language suggested the idea was not very appealing to her. When I changed the question to ask if she would trust an app that could summon a self driving car, her body language became much more receptive. She told me she would trust the app more than the car itself.

Reimer said the decline in trust of autonomous car technology by younger people should worry automakers. It’s all well and good to develop advanced systems, but if people don’t trust them, they won’t spend their hard earned dollars to buy cars that have them. In fact, in this year’s survey, when people were asked how much they would spend for cars with such miraculous technology, 49% said they would never buy an autonomous car at any price. There were many reasons for that and the most common ones are summarized in the graph below.

Any good sales person will tell you that people usually won’t buy a new product so long as they have questions about it. The chart above shows people have lots of questions about autonomous car technology. Manufacturers would do well to take Reirmer’s data to heart and figure out how to answer those questions if they want autonomous cars to do more than gather dust out behind showrooms.

Customer confusion about new technology is not limited to autonomous driving systems. Surveys show that people are just as confused about the differences between hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and electric cars. Chrysler is so afraid of raising the issue that is refuses to to tell people its new Pacifica Hybrid minivan is a plug-in hybrid vehicle. Questions about charging procedures and how to find charging stations abound. In general, many dealers are doing a poor job of educating people. In fact, sales representatives often give conflicting or inaccurate information when asked.

Readers of Gas2 have left comments about dealers trying to switch them from an electric or plug-in car to a conventional car, actually bad mouthing the newer technology in the process. One Chevrolet dealer didn’t know his Chevy Volt cars needed to charged and got into an argument with a customer who asked why the car he was test driving didn’t have a full battery charge.

Mark Fields, the former CEO of Ford Motor Company, famously told the press earlier this year that “nobody wants to buy electric cars.” Fields was fired this week and will be replaced by the former head of Steelcase, an office furniture manufacturer. Hopefully the new guy will know enough about sales to focus on educating potential buyers instead of making fun of them.

MIT Study Says Electric Car Range Anxiety Is Overstated

A study by MIT and the Santa Fe Institute published in the journal Nature Energy on August 15 finds that electric car range anxiety is overstated in most cases. The study analyzed the driving habits of drivers on a second-by-second basis. It concluded that 87% of vehicles on the road today could be replaced by a low-cost electric car even if there is no possibility of recharging it during the day.

The finding confirms what we already know — the typical driver seldom drives more than 45 miles a day on a regular basis. That means even an electric car with limited range like an original Nissan LEAFhas more than enough range to satisfy the needs of the majority of Americans.

In a note accompanying the study, Willett Kempton of the University of Delaware’s Center for Carbon-Free Power Integration wrote, “Most trips can be made in an EV with current battery size and an even higher fraction could be made if the battery size target set by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) is met.”

Jessika Trancik, a researcher with MIT’s “Institute for Data, Systems and Society” and senior author of the study says the research combined hourly temperature data in different US regions, survey data about trip lengths, empirical data on the fuel economy of different cars, and GPS-derived data on the speeds of vehicles and how they vary on a second-by-second basis. It assumed a modestly priced electric vehicle such as a 2013 Nissan Leaf and daily overnight charging.

The study also gives a boost to developing carsharing models. Even though a car may be adequate for the majority of daily needs, drivers still want a car that can take them over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house occasionally, or camping, or for anything other than getting back and forth to work. A second car in the household could be used for that, but many believe in the future we may simply rent another vehicle to fulfill those occasional needs.

Expanding the network of fast-charging stations so people could recharge their cars while away from home would also reduce range anxiety significantly. The Obama administration is a strong advocate for expanding the public charging infrastructure.

Transitioning to electric vehicles would significantly reduce emissions in the US, which is a large part of the governmental push. “If that 90 percent adoption potential was reached, then one could replace about 60 percent of gasoline consumption. That would only reduce emissions about 30 percent, which is still a very significant number,” Trancik said.

Studies like this are important, of course, but people buy on emotion and justify their decision later with facts. In other words, selling is all about emotion. Studies may say a given car has enough range for daily use, but the general perception is that 200 miles of range is the irreducible minimum needed to get people to consider buying an electric car. (Or maybe 200 kilometers in Europe, or 300 kilometers.)

Of course, longer range means bigger batteries and bigger batteries mean higher cost. Higher cost means fewer potential buyers. It’s a vicious circle, one that will only be broken in time as more and more electric cars take to the highways. The changeover to zero-emissions transportation is a process and it will take decades if not generations to complete.

Source: Times Picayune of New Orleans

MIT Explains Why Toyota and GM are Pushing Hydrogen

In recent months, GM, Toyota, and Honda have all made big public commitments to put hydrogen fuel cell equipped cars on the road by 2016. Some of their moves can be explained by President Obama’s expected hydrogen push and pressure from oil companies and gas-station owners to keep their infrastructure relevant in a non-petroleum economy.

Hydrogen fueled cars’ primary emissions are, of course, water vapor – so they’re vastly cleaner than petroleum fueled cars at first glance. They also have the potential to be convenient, since they can be refueled in about the same time it takes to fill a liquid fuel tank. Still, despite gas station owners’ vested interest in a liquid-fuel model, they’ve been surprisingly resistant to investing in the technology. Last year, for example, only 27 hydrogen filling stations were added to America’s infrastructure. That’s surprising for a technology that was once “the darling of the Bush administration” (Bush called for $1.2 billion in gov’t funding to develop fuel-cell technology in his 2003 State of the Union address).

Since then, of course, we’ve all learned that there are a lot of questions about just how environmentally friendly hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles actually are when the hydrogen that fuels them comes from natural gas, a fossil fuel that’s produced through highly controversial “fracking” processes that releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide (at best).

So, what’s really going on here? Why the sudden spark of interest? Kevin Bullis, of MIT’s Technology Review magazine, explains that, sometimes, “miracles do happen”.

Since 2009, the costs involved with fuel-cell vehicles have fallen. The prototypes that GM and Toyota built a few years ago cost well over $1 million each. Now Toyota says its goal is to sell its fuel-cell sedan for less than $100,000. Costs fell as Toyota found ways to reduce the number of parts in its fuel-cell system and to decrease the amount of costly platinum needed. The company says it’s pushing hard on R&D for manufacturing technology, among other things, to lower costs still more ahead of the 2015 launch …

… “Costs have come down at a pretty steady rate,” says Daniel Sperling, director of the Institute for Transportation Studies at the University of California at Davis and a member of California’s Air Resources Board, which oversees vehicle emissions regulations. “Most people in the auto industry think that, once in large-scale production, cost won’t be a barrier.”

All of that is just a long-winded way of saying “these guys are building hydrogen cars now because they can make money with them.” Looks like Kevin and I have very different definitions of the word “miracle”, you know?

You know.

Source: MIT Technology Review.

MIT Report Finds Natural Gas Has Significant Potential to Displace Coal, Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions; Role in Transportation More Limited

Natural gas will play a leading role in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions over the next several decades, largely by replacing older, inefficient coal plants with highly efficient combined-cycle gas generation, according to a major new interim report out from MIT.

In the transportation sector, the study found a somewhat smaller role for natural gas. The use of compressed or liquefied natural gas as a fuel for vehicles could help to displace oil and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but to a limited extent because of the high cost of converting vehicles to use these fuels. By contrast, making methanol, a liquid fuel, out of natural gas requires much less up-front conversion cost and could have an impact on oil usage and thus improve energy security, but would not reduce greenhouse gases.

The two-year study, managed by the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), examined the scale of US natural gas reserves and the potential of this fuel to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Based on the work of the multidisciplinary team, with advice from a board of 16 leaders from industry, government and environmental groups, the report examines the future of natural gas through 2050 from the perspectives of technology, economics, politics, national security and the environment.

The Future of Natural Gas is the third in a series of MIT multidisciplinary reports examining the role of various energy sources that may be important for meeting future demand under carbon dioxide emissions constraints. The first two reports dealt with nuclear power (2003) and coal (2007).

A study of natural gas is more complex because gas is a major fuel for multiple end uses—electricity, industry, heating—and is increasingly discussed as a potential pathway to reduced oil dependence for transportation, the study team noted. The interim report just published is intended to contribute to the energy, security and climate debate. A full report with additional analysis addressing a broader set of issues will follow later this year.

The report includes a set of specific proposals for legislative and regulatory policies, as well as recommendations for actions that the energy industry can pursue on its own, to maximize the fuel’s impact on mitigating greenhouse gas. The study also examined ways to control the environmental impacts that could result from a significant expansion in the production and use of natural gas—especially in electric power production.

In the very long run, very tight carbon constraints will likely phase out natural gas power generation in favor of zero-carbon or extremely low-carbon energy sources such as renewables, nuclear power or natural gas and coal with carbon capture and storage. For the next several decades, however, natural gas will play a crucial role in enabling very substantial reductions in carbon emissions.

—MITEI Director Ernest J. Moniz

Two major factors that can make a significant difference in the near term in reducing carbon emissions are using less energy and using gas instead of coal—especially by replacing the oldest, least-efficient coal plants with the most-efficient modern combined-cycle gas plants, said Moniz, who chaired the study, along with co-chairs Henry Jacoby, Professor of Management, and Tony Meggs, MITEI Visiting Engineer. Professor Jacoby is co-director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.

The study found that there are significant global supplies of conventional gas. How much of this gas gets produced and used, and the extent of its impact on greenhouse gas reductions, depends critically on some key political and regulatory decisions.

In the United States, for example, there is a substantial amount of low-hanging fruit available by displacing inefficient power generation with more efficient, lower CO₂ emitting gas plants.

That kind of substitution alone reduces those carbon emissions by a factor of three. It does however raise complicated regulatory and political issues that will have to be resolved to take advantage of this potential.

—Ernest Moniz

Some of the study’s other key findings:

1. The United States has a significant natural gas resource base, enough to equal about 92 years’ worth at present domestic consumption rates. Much of this is from unconventional sources, including gas shales. While there is substantial uncertainty surrounding the producibility of this gas, there is a significant amount of shale gas that can be affordably produced.

   Globally, baseline estimates show that recoverable gas resources probably amount to 16,200 trillion cubic feet (Tcf)—enough to last over 160 years at current global consumption rates. Further, this global resource figure, excluding the US and Canada, does not include any unconventional gas resources, which are largely uncharacterized in the rest of the world. Russia, the Middle East, and the US have the highest concentration of global gas reserves.

   In the US, unconventional gas resources are rapidly overtaking conventional resources as the primary source of gas production. The US currently consumes around 22 Tcf per year and has a gas resource base now thought to exceed 2,000 Tcf.

   In order to bring about the kind of significant expansion in the use of natural gas identified in this study, substantial additions to the existing processing, delivery and storage facilities will be required in order to handle greater amounts and the changing patterns of distribution (such as the delivery of gas from newly developed sources in the Midwest and Northeast).

2. Environmental issues associated with producing unconventional gas resources are manageable but challenging. Risks include: Shallow freshwater aquifer contamination with fracture fluids; surface water contamination by returned fracture fluids; excessive demand on local water supply from fracturing operations; and surface and local community disturbance, due to drilling and fracturing activities.

3. Natural-gas consumption will increase dramatically and will largely displace coal in the power generation sector by 2050 (the time horizon of the study) under a modeling scenario where, through carbon emissions pricing, industrialized nations reduce CO₂ emissions by 50% by 2050, and large emerging economies, e.g. China, India and Brazil reduce CO₂ emissions by 50% by 2070. This assumes incremental reductions in the current price structures of the alternatives, including renewables, nuclear and carbon capture and sequestration.

4. The introduction of large intermittent power generation from, for example, wind and solar, will have specific short and long term effects on the mix of generation technologies. The short term effects (meaning daily dispatch patterns of various fuels) of large amounts of wind generation for example will reduce gas generation significantly and could force baseload coal plants to cycle, an outcome which is highly undesirable from an operational perspective.

   In the longer term, the reliability of a system in which renewables assume a baseload role in power generation will require additional flexible natural gas peaking capacity, although this capacity may be utilized for only short periods of the time. Renewables as baseload power, firmed by natural gas generation, will require new regulatory structures to ensure reliability of the system and incentivize the building of flexible gas capacity.

5. The overbuilding of natural gas combined cycle plants starting in the mid-1990s presents a significant opportunity for near term reductions in CO2 emissions from the power sector. The current fleet of natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) units has an average capacity factor of 41%, relative to a design capacity factor of up to 85%. However, with no carbon constraints, coal generation is generally dispatched to meet demand before NGCC generation because of its lower fuel price.

   Modeling of the ERCOT region (largely Texas) suggests that CO₂ emissions could be reduced by as much as 22% with no additional capital investment and without impacting system reliability by requiring a dispatch order that favors NGCC generation over inefficient coal generation; preliminary modeling suggests that nationwide CO₂ emissions would be reduced by more than 10%. At the same time, this would also reduce air pollutants such as oxides of sulfur and nitrogen oxides.

6. A global “liquid” market in natural gas in which supply sources are diverse and gas prices are transparent, set by supply and demand with price differences based on transportation costs, is desirable for US consumers.

   There are currently three regional gas markets—North America, Europe and Asia—which have very little integration and which rely on completely different pricing structures. Modeling suggests that the integration of these markets would result in substantially lower consumer prices for US consumers.

The study makes many recommendations regarding the role of natural gas in a carbon-constrained world, suggesting that policy makers should consider supportive policies in the following areas:

Supply

• Require disclosure of all components of hydraulic fracture fluids.
• Require integrated regional water usage /disposal plans for unconventional gas production.
• Support renewed DOE R&D program weighted towards basic research and “off-budget” industry-led program weighted to technology development, demonstration, and transfer. Programs should be designed to optimize gas resources and ensure that they are produced in environmentally sound ways.

Power generation

• Pursue displacement of inefficient coal generation with natural gas combined cycle generation.
• Develop policy and regulatory measures to facilitate natural gas generation capacity investments concurrent with the introduction of large intermittent renewable generation.

Transportation

• Remove policy and regulatory barriers to natural gas as a transportation fuel.

Global markets

• Support polices to foster an integrated global gas market, including the integration of natural gas issues into the foreign policy apparatus, with strong involvement of the Executive Office of the President, supported by a strengthened natural gas policy apparatus at the Department of Energy.

• Export US knowledge in unconventional gas characterization and production to nations that can advance US strategic interests.

While the new report emphasized the great potential for natural gas as a transitional fuel to help curb greenhouse gases and dependence on oil, it also stresses that it is important as a matter of national policy not to favor any one fuel or energy source in a way that puts others at a disadvantage. The most useful policies, the authors suggested, are ones that produce a truly “level playing field” for all forms of energy supply and for demand reduction, and thus let the marketplace, and the ingenuity of the nation’s researchers, determine the best options.

Illustrating the role of natural gas as a bridge to a low carbon future, the study’s authors stressed that it would be a mistake to let natural gas crowd out research on other low- or no-carbon energy sources, but it would also be a mistake to let investments in such alternatives crowd out the expansion of natural gas resources in the near term, particularly for the purposes of CO₂ emissions mitigation.

The study received support from the American Clean Skies Foundation, Hess Corporation, Agencia Nacional de Hidrocarburos of Colombia, and the Energy Futures Coalition and the MIT Energy Initiative. The report issued this week is a preliminary overview of a more detailed report that will be released later this year.

New Carbon Nanotube Electrode Material for Li-ion Batteries Tackles the Power Performance Gap Between Electrochemical Capacitors and Batteries

Researchers at MIT have developed a new carbon nanotube electrode material for a Li-ion battery based on redox reactions of functional groups on the surfaces of the nanotubes. The electrode, which is several micrometers thick, can store lithium up to a reversible gravimetric capacity of ~200 mAh g^-1_electrode while also delivering 100 kW kg_electrode^-1 of power and providing lifetimes in excess of thousands of cycles, both of which are comparable to electrochemical capacitor electrodes.

A paper on the work, led by Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering Yang Shao-Horn, in collaboration with Bayer Chair Professor of Chemical Engineering Paula Hammond, was published online in the journal Nature Nanotechnology 20 June. The lead authors are chemical engineering student Seung Woo Lee PhD ’10 and postdoctoral researcher Naoaki Yabuuchi.

Layer-by-layer techniques are used to assemble an electrode that consists of additive-free, densely packed and functionalized multiwalled carbon nanotubes. A device using the nanotube electrode as the positive electrode and lithium titanium oxide as a negative electrode had a gravimetric energy ~5 times higher than conventional electrochemical capacitors and power delivery ~10 times higher than conventional lithium-ion batteries.

—Lee et al.

The performance can be attributed to good conduction of ions and electrons in the electrode, and efficient lithium storage on the surface of the nanotubes, the researchers said.

While such electrodes might initially find applications in small portable devices, with further research they might also lead to improved batteries for larger applications, such as in vehicles, the team suggests.

The layer-by-layer fabrication method involves alternately dipping a base material in solutions containing carbon nanotubes that have been treated with simple organic compounds that give them either a positive or negative net charge. When these layers are alternated on a surface, they bond tightly together because of the complementary charges, making a stable and durable film.

The carbon nanotubes self-assemble into a tightly bound structure that is porous at the nanometer scale. In addition, the carbon nanotubes have many oxygen groups on their surfaces, which can store a large number of lithium ions; this enables carbon nanotubes for the first time to serve as the positive electrode in lithium batteries, instead of just the negative electrode.

This electrostatic self-assembly process is important, Hammond says, because ordinarily carbon nanotubes on a surface tend to clump together in bundles, leaving fewer exposed surfaces to undergo reactions. By incorporating organic molecules on the nanotubes, they assemble in a way that “has a high degree of porosity while having a great number of nanotubes present,” she says.

The electrodes the team produced had thicknesses up to a few microns, and the improvements in energy delivery only were seen at high-power output levels. In future work, the team aims to produce thicker electrodes and extend the improved performance to low-power outputs as well, they say.

In its present form, the material might have applications for small, portable electronic devices, says Shao-Horn, but if the reported high-power capability were demonstrated in a much thicker form—with thicknesses of hundreds of microns—it might eventually be suitable for other applications such as hybrid cars.

While the electrode material was produced by alternately dipping a substrate into two different solutions—a relatively time-consuming process—Hammond suggests that the process could be modified by instead spraying the alternate layers onto a moving ribbon of material, a technique now being developed in her lab.

This could eventually open the possibility of a continuous manufacturing process that could be scaled up to high volumes for commercial production, and could also be used to produce thicker electrodes with a greater power capacity.

Funding for the work was provided by the Dupont-MIT Alliance; the US Office of Naval Research; and the MRSEC Program of the National Science Foundation.

Source: Green Car Congress