The story of an electric hillclimb car has got me thinking about electric cars and racing. One of the upshots of automotive sports is that it drives innovation. The challenge of sanctioning bodies is how to make that innovation relevant to production car technology. I think hillclimb is a good start (as well as the F1 KERS system) but the best application would be the World Rally Championship. Think about it: with stages running anywhere from about 2-30 kilometers with short breaks in between, rally provides a great opportunity to innovate on one of the major drawbacks of existing electric cars--their long charge times. The rapid-charging technology developed to address this issue would be applicable to the production-based cars used in rally and help drive adoption of environmentally-friendly transportation.

Back in a previous life I worked on a teleoperated lunar vehicle at the Robotics Institute. That was an incredibly complex project, so I can only imagine the challenges involved in creating a lunar rover with a crew capsule that includes, incredibly, a way for astronauts to exit the capsule by getting into suit that are stored outside the vehicle! Amazing.

The new Sunday drive feature in Autoblog is something that I'll be reading on a regular basis. Their first two installments are from the bay area and Colorado.

The news that Dean Kamen is working on an electric car with a stirling engine makes me actually consider moving to New Hampshire to work for DECA. Wonder if they need product managers?