A personal blog transitioning into an exploration of the intersection of design, technology and ethics
This blog post has now been re-arranged with the manifesto at the top, and the reasoning that led up to it beneath. Because, after all, placing the important content six or seven hundred words in is hardly being pure, is it?
Content First. All articles, images, and graphics must be there to serve a purpose. Superficial or filler material is forbidden.
Could VW really be in trouble, if they’re cancelling a factory and pushing back a car launch? I don’t think so, but they’re not entirely in the clear…
I’ve seen people commenting in various EV forums and social media on VW Could Delay Trinity EV Until 2030 And Scrap €2 Billion German Factory | Carscoops and concluding that VW are in big trouble and failing in the market. In reality I think it’s hard from the outside to draw any conclusions. VW is a master of building factories and cars. We know that. They provide variety and interest to a huge number of market segments.
The problem they have isn’t really an ICE/EV problem. It’s not a factory problem. It’s not a mechanical engineering problem. It’s the other ICE – in-car entertainment. They don’t have a software culture. No matter how much of a twonk you think Musk is, you might have noticed his contentious statements are never about software. Nobody says “Gosh, his opinions on software are so controversial.” And that’s because he’s a software guy. Tesla’s board is stuffed with software guys. His main weakness is that he thinks more can be solved with software than is always realistic – AI is still as dumb as a worm and easily tricked. So the newer vision only Tesla’s are known for being a bit, well, not great at stuff like self parking whereas the older hardware based ones do quite well. I’ve embedded the video below just to help:
Back to VW. They really need to get their head around the car’s user focussed software, build the right team, and nurture it well. That’s going to take a little while.
As for scrapping a new factory – that just makes sense – we’re moving to a world where people keep their cars for longer and there’s a larger gross margin per car. You can’t grow your market through price competition any more, VW as a group sell cars in one form or other in literally every geographical market too. They have to drive other value.
The transition to EVs *is* dangerous for older makers, but the choices to buyers are still sparse. Tesla make some of the most efficient electric cars out there, with some delightful software, but the cars aren’t to everyone’s tastes and cover a fairly tightly defined sector. I don’t like the idea I’m tied to apps from their store – why not use Android Auto or Apple Carplay as well?
So the legacy car makers know how to make cars. That’s absolutely not the problem. The “hours to produce a car” bit is spurious – you absolutely can’t compare two makers with that statistic. It’s often quoted, but I’ve seen wildly differing values from the same car maker’s different plants and it’s such a complex subject that isolating a single variable is likely to be misleading. Profitability over capital employed is the only real meaningful measure in any business, and even that can be hard to isolate if the business is deep into self-investment.
I’m in the market for a new EV next year. I really like the mechanical side of the VW Group EV range, but the software puts me off. Some of their brands implement it a little better than others, but it’s still a problem, and I can’t afford a Porsche or Audi EV.
Honda aren’t giving me something to progress to from the little e, which has amazing styling and is a lovely thing to drive and own, but the limited utility means it sits firmly as a second car… but then nobody else does such an interesting small EV, and the e-Up is gone if I wanted to go for just cheap utility. In fact
Only a few car makers sell smaller EVs with some sense of personality, decent RWD chassis, nice interiors. I don’t yet feel ready for a road-trip car to be electric only either. As a family it can work out more economical and maybe even greener to take a fully loaded and efficient diesel car on holiday than to fly. Although, yes, you can stop and relax with your car whilst recharging it, the stops come every 200 miles, and if you’re driving through the night, sitting in a car park with nothing to do for 40 minutes to get another 200 miles in just doesn’t appeal. In reality, I think Hyundai’s group, with Kia and Genesis, seem to be leading the pack with reasonably affordable EVs on 800 volt systems, decent in-car software, and good options for different types of buyers. I could see myself in a Kia EV6 or a Hyundai Ioniq, but they’re also still quite big, and I feel like we’ll have too much functional overlap between something like that and the old Volvo, with the result that the Volvo only really gets pulled out when we need two cars – something increasingly rare with more home working and both kids about to be in high school. At that point, we may even feel it appropriate to go down to one useful car in the household again, with the Lotus Elise providing last measure status for those rare days when we need to transport six or seven people.
What do you think?
P.S. This is a little experiment. I realised I was tapping out a huge comment in a Facebook group and thought that with just a small amount of extra work I could put the content on my blog instead of giving it away for free, to barely ever be read by anyone else, in a billionaire’s walled garden. I opine on loads of stuff. A lot of it is just that. Opinions. But whole magazines are sold on the back of the opinions of thirty writers: so I may as well put mine out there on the open web.
Last night was the count for the local by-election, in which I stood as a Liberal Democrat candidate. I lost. I came third. And I’m OK with that. But this isn’t a political blog, at all, even though I’m involved in it. So if you want the results, they’re here.
Once upon a time, I loved motorsport. I dreamed of being a racing driver, with adoring fans. I wanted to be like Damon Hill, who’d achieved a lot without losing his essential good character as a person. The only problem was that I had no money. At all. I was pretty much skint right up to my mid twenties when things started to sort themselves out. I had my extravagances, of course – this is the UK. Being skint doesn’t necessarily mean no car, no healthcare, and destitution. But I was skint enough that from the age of 18 to 25 my only motorsport release was the odd bit of indoor karting.
And during this, I realised that although I felt fast, I never won. I could get to the front, sometimes, but I’d always lose it.
Then one day, a friend and I were chatting, and we realised we had the same problem. We tried to hard. We so desperately wanted to win, that if we found ourselves in the first three positions we’d try so hard to maintain the position or pass the person in front that we’d make mistakes.
So in our chat, something profound was said, and I don’t know by whom, and it went “You know, it’s OK not to be first. If you have a strong second, sit on it.”
So we attended race night, and he came away with first place, and I came away with third. We’d both done better than ever before. Because we accepted that it was OK to come second.
And it’s OK, even, to come last. After I acknowledged that, I actually got better, and won my class several times in a real life car, albeit at a regional level. But at no point did I worry about losing. I just wanted to do my best.
Watch this race:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1q6JZtLrdc
I chose women’s athletics for a reason. Why? Because these are probably people most of you have never heard of. And you see the lady who came last? You’ve no idea who she is, right? You can’t even work it out by quickly looking at the video.
Yet she is, far far and away, a much faster sprinter than almost anybody you know in real life. She’s a ‘loser’ to many. But she isn’t to me. I bet she’s put in as many hours of effort as the champion. Maybe even more. I bet she’s worked and sweated, and strained and trained, and been shouted at and told off, and when she goes to the supermarket, few people will recognise her.
She’s the brave one. She’ll know for sure that she’s not going to be the fastest. She’ll even know that she stands a good chance of coming last. But my oh my, did she put the hours on, just to get to where she is.
Trying matters. In trying, you can make a difference. To yourself, to others. But you can’t and mustn’t beat yourself up about it.
It’s OK not to win. It’s not OK to not try, if you think you can do it.
If you’ve ever taken a look out of the window and thought “That’s not good enough” but then gone back to doing nothing, then that’s no good unless you have a really good reason. And there are plenty – again, don’t beat yourself up.
A winner in life is someone who tries. People notice. Losers are the people who say they won’t pick up litter, because it’s beneath them. Losers are the people who spit on your pavement because they can’t be bothered to use a tissue. Losers are the people who mock others because they’re different and, in the minds of the loser, somehow inferior.
Losers don’t come last. Losers don’t even try. And they lose the hardest in the end.
So I suspect I’ll stand for the council again. And I’ll almost certainly lose again. And that’s OK.
And if you fancy joining me as a loser in local politics, well, leave a comment with your email address below. Your email address won’t be published online, and I’ll ping you. At some point. Don’t expect an immediate response, but I’ll try!
All I did was say “yummy yummy” on every mouthful of food, and he started laughing like mad. By the time I did this video he’d long finished his dinner, so I just carried on…
There’s enough in the video to convince anybody, but I’ve decided to add my own few thoughts.
As long as the military culture exists that allows this to happen, then the West can never consider themselves superior in any sense, nor can we ever expect peace in the Middle East or the cessation of Islamic terrorism. What happened was murder, pure and simple. The airmen acted as judges, jury and executioners.
I felt sick. You probably will too. I know that this post won’t reach the eyes of anyone in a significant position of power, but if I show it to you, and you show it to some more people, then we can be a tiny part of what will put pressure on the US military authorities to properly investigate this video and explain fully what happened.
It would appear that, perhaps through a state of heightened tension and military paranoia, that any grouping of individuals in Baghdad could become targets. With nobody taking real care to check what was actually happening the killing of innocents, including two children, was inevitable.
But what really really made me angry was the way the airmen talked like teenagers playing a video-game. They described the scene as ‘nice.’ They were please with their blasting apart of a van that had been trying to help rescue the wounded. Their descriptions of the people they were watching didn’t for one moment suggest they were dealing with people or individuals. People with children, parents, lovers, dreams and ambitions.
There are, I’m sure, a great many in the military who’ll be appalled by this video. Let’s hope they can encourage Thinking amongst those who appear to have detached themselves from any sense of empathy.
MS have, at last, come up with what appears to be a competent rival to Google. Here’s five ways in which it beats Google.
Microsoft (MS), quite frankly, gets a lot of grief in the internet world. Sometimes it’s fair (I never like MSN, for example, from way back in the mid nineties) and often a little unfair.
But Live Search simply wasn’t up to the job. It didn’t work well. And I know that people that found IE defaulting to it would either work out how to change it, or simply type Google.com into the address bar. In other words, many tried it, but it didn’t find the answers they wanted. The algorithm has been slowly improved with time, but the damage was done. MS knew they had to relaunch.
Bing, they felt, was the answer. And in some ways, it’s a better and more productive tool than Google:
While I’ve heard many question the function of the landing page photo, I personally really like it. It’s attractive, well designed, and brings a little bit of beauty into the day. You can’t sit and surf pretty images at work, so if they’re there as part of the ‘wallpaper’ of a daily tool then that’s a lift we all need.
The infinite scroll facility of the image search makes it a quicker tool to use. Chunking of text related searches makes sense, because we can scan a page relatively slowly, but with images the human eye can scan a huge amount of visual information incredibly quickly which means that Bing’s constantly scrolling visual tool is way ahead of Google’s image search.
Searching for video content can often be a slow and painful process. In Bing, when you get a series of videos up on screen you can simply hover your mouse pointer over a video to preview the first 30s and get a feel for the video, rather than visiting the site and waiting for a slow load. The previews are poor quality, in order to get quick loading, but they’re good enough. I feel this is one of Bing’s most effective innovations.
One thing where they may struggle is that if you click the video and that video has an embed option, you get it on the Bing site, rather than going through to the source site. So a YouTube video search result doesn’t send you off to YouTube. Content owners may not like this.
When you hover over a search result, you’ll see a small orange marker appear over to the right. Hover over that and up pops a preview of the content you’re looking for. Again, saves a wasted visit as it lets you scan a little bit of content for relevance – something that’s quicker this way than clicking on yet another unnecessary site.
Bing is, purportedly, a recursive acronym that means Bing Is Not Google. But there’s something important in that – Microsoft is a highly profitable, focussed company that has the resources to provide an alternative to Google. This is important – without solid competition Google will cease to innovate appropriately. MS suffered a similar fate on the desktop – they were too dominant and rivals couldn’t compete. Apple’s OS9 was dreadfully dated when sat next to a Windows machine of the same era, yet Windows had significant flaws. It’s only lately with Windows 7 that MS have really started to get their act together properly – because OSX finally gave it some decent competition in certain sectors.
When you start seeing articles on how to change from Google to Bing on Firefox, you know something’s happened.
Microsoft Seadragon, with it’s deep zoom and mobile capabilities, and Photosynth technologies could be tied into the image search, for example. As cheap processing power expands and more and more images are geotagged, this could form an astonishing visual search capability. A shame it won’t be coupled with Google Street View – imagine what that could be like?
Search is going to become more relevant and more powerful with time. Developers (our own Interconnect IT included) are busy creating a lot of powerful geocoded databases which will allow for some amazing mashups. If Google and MS start fighting for dominance in this space the opportunities for users and information suppliers are vast. Are you looking into it?
Europeans are considered to be the best educated, most sophisticated people on the planet. They also like diving into bogs, throwing tomatoes at one another, and chasing cheese.
I sometimes think that the British are an unusual breed when it comes to sport, but when you look around Europe you start to realise that quite possibly we don’t have the monopoly we thought we did.
If you’re thinking of a trip to Europe where you can get involved with some local sports, consider these.
Here’s a selection of videos showing some of the things Europeans do for fun:
Take cheese, a round one. Go to a steep hill. Find a group of like minded maniacs. And then chase the cheese down the hill only to be greeted by a group of similarly crazy catchers waiting to ‘rescue’ you at the bottom. That’s England’s annual cheese rolling contest. Many people will be hurt and this is proof that the insurance companies and inept Health & Safety consultants haven’t yet managed to stop people risking their own lives for no sound reason whatsoever.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOyQBSMeIhM
The Scandinavians are about the most equitable people you can imagine, yet it’s the men that have to do the carrying in this sport. Wife Carrying is a sport that involves running a 253.5m course, with your wife on your back. I personally find the Estonian wife-lift the easiest, but there are a number of styles.
If you’ve been to Finland, you’ll know that they’re not the most svelte of peoples. If you want to take part and have a typically skinny French wife you stand a good chance…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIB9UcA5iQU
The Spanish grow an awful lot of tomatoes. This needs celebrating. What better way than to throw them at each other? Every year, in Buñol, Valencia, the Spanish enjoy nothing more than to throw tomatoes at La Tomatina And why not? Beats throwing donkeys off churches. My family happens to live in the Valencia region, and I fully intend to attend though it’s worth noting – I’ve been to a few Spanish festivals and I know that alcohol and chaos feature strongly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPQCH1b_LgE
You might think of snorkelling as something to do at a Caribbean beach. Not the Welsh. They like nothing better than to get into fancy dress, head to a bog and get swimming in the annual Bog Snorkelling competition. There are prizes for speed, but many people enter the contest to raise money for charity and, consequently, the efforts that get the most attention are likely to raise the most money – hence the fancy dress.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAh7e9d45_Y
The chaps at Cam-Trax have come up with a rather nifty bit of software that can turn practically any easily visible object and a cheap webcam into a game or PC controller.
I wish I could code that sort of stuff….
Now I’ll get back to working on SQL queries when I should actually be out partying…
Almost worth it for the ooh-la-la.
If you’re in Britain you’ll already be aware that for the past few weeks we’ve been getting rain of near biblical proportions, with floods causing a lot of damage in the Midlands, and just a lot of heavy rain in the rest of the country.
Aintree wasn’t much different, though not quite so bad as last September where going out on my worn out tyres I felt as if I was powerboat racing. The rain came, and stayed on all day with some strong torrents. Ultimately my car span, but I can’t take too much of the blame… more later….
I’ve always loved the Aintree sprint. On the surface of it, it shouldn’t be a great event. The circuit is relatively simple, albeit surprisingly technical, and the weather can sometimes be dreadful, but I still love it. So in this season where I’ve really cut back on the events I’m doing, I’ve made sure I get in the odd event here. And I need it, on days I do a sprint or a trackday, that’s all I think about. Although some may think motorsport is stressful, to me I love the fact that for one whole day I’m not really stressing about business – I’m forever reading books, networking with people, keeping an eye on our servers to make sure they’re behaving, trying out new software, thinking about how to build new leads. A lot is done in the office of course, but as anyone who’s started a business will know, you don’t get much relaxation in the early days.
Back to the event… well, being a wet day, no records were going to be broken. The car was, however, in good form with the rebuilt dampers freshly fitted. Of course, I hadn’t had a chance to set them up right. And I wasn’t going to fiddle with the settings at Aintree either – I ain’t grovelling in the rain!
For the practice runs I was on a conservative 60.62 and 57.78, getting me second and first fastest times in the class. David Sykes, a newbie at Aintree, showing that he gets into the groove incredibly quickly with 60.35 and 58.03 times. The other close competitor here, Russell Thorpe who beat me here in the rain back in September set 61.12 and 57.93 times. I knew it’d be close between the three of us.
I knew my first competitive run would be critical – with the rain potentially getting harder, the chance of improving wasn’t high. So I went out with my teeth gritted (you can buy suitable grit from all reputable sports shops, in case you wondered) and did everything almost perfectly. The start, the three corners. In fact, everything was going just so until about 100yds from the finish line I decided a change from fourth to fifth would help as the engine was running out of puff. So it’s a shame I manage to select third….
It’s at this point I’d like to thank the people who used to work at Rover, to thank David Andrews who built my head, and all other people who’ve bolted my engine together in the past. Because in spite of being buzzed, momentarily, to over 9000rpm, it survived! I did listen carefully for new rattles but no, everything was great.
That spoiled my run, rather – I pottered over the line about ten miles an hour slower than I should have and set a 56.81… Russell, a car behind me, set a 56.73, and David Sykes was a second behind at 57.94.
The next two runs were basically the same, but without the mistakes. Myself finding 56.18 and 55.92, Russell a consistent pair of 56.62 and 56.61 and David Sykes failing to respond until his final time of 57.30 – damn good for someone new to Aintree and in the rain. But then we suspect he may not have seen just how solid those Grand National fences are. I was happy and relieved to get the class win – like all wet events, the Elise always makes you work hard for a win. Which Russell proved when I let him borrow the Elise for the ‘fun’ run that Liverpool Motor Club often manage to fit in at the end of the day. And I got to go and have a go in his Renault 5GT Turbo – and confirm that it has a handling problem, perhaps due to an over-aggressive differential, which makes his times at the moment all the more impressive.
