Think Global: photo: KnutBry/TinAgent/Think TechnologyThink an electric car has a chance in todays market? In the 1990s General Motors spent nearly $1 billion on their EV1. Ford pumped about $150 million into an electric car known as "Think" but sold it 5 years later. As Think was in bankruptcy, Norwegian entrepreneur, Willums, picked up Think, its factory, and Ford's nearly completed design for a new-model "City" for the fire-sale price of about $15 million. His company, Think Global, has raised $60 million in funding to roll out a new and improved version of the City this fall.
$43 million battery deal with Tesla Motors
Willums, whos experience is in solar panels, went to a brainstorming session at the Googlplex in California. Google billionaires, Sergy Brin and Larry Page, had test driven earlier versions of the Think. They are also major investors of another electric car, the Tesla. Tesla will sell customized batteries to Think Global. The group also came up with these radical ideas:
- Sell the car on the internet.
- Never build a car before it's paid for.
- No car showrooms or sales force.
- Sell the car but lease the batteries.
- Every car will be Internet and Wi-Fi enabled.
- Components will be open sourced modules.
- Assemble cars locally (no exporting).
- Use the car's batteries to feed the electric grid during power shortages.
- Car sharing companies like Zipcar and Flexcar allow trying before buying.
Batteries are separate.
By taking out the cost of the battery ($34,000) the "City" car will only cost from $15,000 - $17,000 in the United States. A "mobility fee" of $100 to $200 a month that might also include services like insurance and wireless Internet access seems to be part of the business plan. Managing a two way exchange of electricity with the electric grid is another possibility. Thousands of cars plugged into the electric grid could be tapped during energy demand spikes. PG&E plans to buy batteries that have outlived their usefulness for transportation but still retain capacity. The utility will install them in the basements of office towers and at electrical substations to store green energy produced by wind farms and solar arrays.
"Open source" modular assembly.
Willums car assembly plan resembles how Dell builds computers.
"He points to the black steel chassis of a City standing on a nearby pallet; it's shipped preassembled from Thailand. At one station, workers attach the car's aluminum frame -- made in Denmark -- and drop in a French motor. At another station, prefabricated rust-and dent-resistant polymer-plastic body panels produced in Turkey are hung on the frame of a nearly completed car."
Parts will be shipped for assembly near purchase points (like New York or California). The "Think" will do 70 mph and will have a range of 110 miles.
Update: "TH!NK GLOBAL" forum website link.
Source: CNNmoney.
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My kind of town: As of 2008, more than half of the world's population will live in cities. Only a lucky few will get to live here.
...and soon there will be about 3 billion more. According to a UN report, next year half of the world's population will live in cities. Throughout human history, most people have lived in rural areas or small communities. This will mark the first time ever that more people will live inside of cities than outside.
While life in a well-planned, well-maintained city can be quite pleasant (Minneapolis/St. Paul, anybody?), urban life does bring its challenges. Health services and sanitation systems are stretched thin, and disease outbreaks are common. The concentration of poverty often breeds crime. Having so many people in such a small area puts great pressure on local ecosystems. Since most cities are near water, those environments are especially at risk.
As of 2008, more than half of the world's population will live in cities. Only a lucky few will get to live here.
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We're #5! Minneapolis-St.Paul is ranked as the fifth cleanest city in the world: Photo by kevinthoule at flickr.com
Forbes magazine has an article on the world’s 25 cleanest cities. Minneapolis comes it at #5.
The list comes from studies conducted by the Mercer Human Resources Consulting which rate quality of living in various cities. They looked at things like producing sufficient energy cleanly, handling waste responsibly, encouraging recycling, and efficient transportation.
According to the article:
It is interesting to note that size does not appear to be a factor either in terms of size of population or physical size of the city. The most common trait in common to each is a focus on high tech, education and headquartering of national and international companies along with an extensive public transit system.
The ecotality blog notices something interesting – all of the top 25 are in industrialized democracies. Normally, we think of industry as being very dirty. But writer Bill Hobbs suggests that
“…industrialization created wealth which, in turn, buys the things (mass transit, especially) and pays for the policies that create a cleaner environment.”
I would add that, in democracies, citizens can pressure government and business to pass laws protecting the environment. The actions necessary to make a clean city require money and political will. Clearly, capitalism is good for the environment!
James Loewen, a professor at the University of Vermont, has published a disturbing new book. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism tells the story of American cities and towns which kept out – and often drove out – all non-white residents. (The title comes from the signs which were often posted at the entrance to town, saying “N*****, Be Out Of Town By Sundown.”)
Researching this topic proved to be very difficult. A few towns actually had laws and ordinances prohibiting non-whites from living in the city. But most achieved their all-white status through unofficial means – violence, harassment, and unspoken agreements not to rent or sell to minorities. (Most sundown towns excluded blacks and/or Jews, though many in the West excluded Chinese, Mexicans and/or American Indians.) Very few towns ever discussed this aspect of their history in the newspaper or in official town histories. So, Loewen was faced with a challenge: how to prove racism without official evidence?
First, he had to come up with a definition. He decided to define a sundown town as an incorporated entity of at least 1,000 people that excluded blacks for decades – that was at least 99.9% white, and was that way on purpose. “Incorporated entity” meant he wasn't going to look at sparsely populated rural areas. It also meant he was looking at an entire town that had driven out blacks completely – not simply divided itself into all-white and all-black neighborhoods. Similarly, “at least 1,000 people” limited his search and focused on towns that probably had to make an effort to exclude blacks.
Finding towns that were all-white required reading census statistics. Not just reading them, but also interpreting them. He found towns that had dozens of black families in the census of 1870, 1880, and 1890 – but, in 1900, 1910, or 1920, suddenly dropped to zero. This could be a sign that the blacks were driven out of town by mob violence – something he could often confirm by reading newspapers.
Some towns had black populations with very unusual characteristics. For example, the census might show a town had 1,508 blacks, all male, no children, and none counted as head of a household. It would turn out that each of these 1,508 were prisoners at a jail. Or the census might show 67 blacks, almost all female, few children, and again none head of a household. These he found were domestic servants. In a few towns, the census showed just one black family, decade after decade. It often turned out that, when the citizens drove out the blacks, they left the town barber alone. In all such cases, blacks may have been on the census, but they were certainly not free to live within the city, so he counted them as sundown towns.
(Some towns, especially suburbs, were established as all-white and just stayed that way, even after such laws were declared unconstitutional.)
The trickiest part was proving that towns were all-white on purpose. Few ever wrote their policies into law. Instead, he had to rely on oral history. He would interview the town's oldest residents. If several of them independently offered the same explanation, he would accept that as evidence that that's probably what happened. (Some scientists dispute his methods, but historians and sociologists have long accepted oral histories to fill in gaps in the official record.)
So, how many sundown towns did Loewen find? He has confirmed at least 1,000 towns were exclusionary at some point in their history, and suspects the total number could be as many as ten thousand across the US. Hundreds of counties were all-white. The entire state of Idaho, for a time, was all-white. Most of these towns were in the Midwest – Illinois alone had over 470 sundown towns in 1970, about 70% of all the towns in the state. Other concentrations were found in the northeast, the Ozarks, Appalachia, and Oregon. (Interestingly, the deep South had very few – Loewen could only find six in the entire state of Mississippi. But outside the South, more than half of the cities and towns in America were whites-only for some period of time.)
Are there any sundown towns left today? Hard to say. Surely, there are several hundred all-white communities in the US today. But are they all-white on purpose? Housing discrimination is illegal. Mob violence has thankfully become rare.
But low-level harassment, which is harder to document, still drives blacks out of some towns. No one will hire them, store owners won't sell them anything. Home owners and real estate agents may unofficially agree to only sell to whites. Police give them a hard time. Some towns still have “whites-only” laws on the books. Even though those laws are unenforceable, if the entire town believes they are legal, then they will act as if they are.
So, while sundown towns have been illegal since 1968, there are still hundreds of communities which still operate that way. There are reports as recent as 2004 of blacks having trouble moving into certain towns. There were still “No Blacks After Dark” signs in some areas in the 1990s. And one town in Illinois had a siren on the city water tower. They would blow it every night at 6:00 pm to tell the blacks it was time to get out of town.
They didn't stop blowing the whistle until 1999.
(To learn more about sundown towns, you can read an interview with Loewen here and a review of his book here.
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