Julius Genachowski:

Colorado is currently considering proposals to outlaw Uber and other services that enable passengers to book a car service from their smartphones. Uber and its competitors face similar challenges from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to Washington, DC.

In May, the North Carolina State Senate voted unanimously to prohibit Tesla Motors, the innovative electric car company, from selling cars directly to consumers, including via the Internet. The Texas legislature recently retained similar prohibitions until at least 2015.

Bruce Sterling:

When you’re a professional spy hierarch, there are few things more annoying than these conscience-stricken Winston Smith characters, moodily scribbling in their notebooks, all about how there might be hope found in the proles somehow. They’re a drag.

See, dissidence is like Andrei Sakharov. Such a useful guy, modest, soft-spoken, brainy, built you a hydrogen bomb. This eerie device straight from hell even works, so it’s all good. Then all of a sudden he’s like: you know what? The noble science of physics shouldn’t harm mankind!

What kind of self-indulgent, fatuous gesture is that? Look here, Dr Labcoat: why was the public’s money given to you, if not to “harm mankind”? If physics was harmless, you wouldn’t have a damn salary!

That’s what life feels like for the NSA right now. That is the shoe Snowden laced on their foot. If you’re NSA, as so many thousands are, you’ve known from the get-go that the planet’s wires and cables are a weapon of mass surveillance. Because that is their inherent purpose! You can’t get all conflicted, and start whining that Internet users are citizens of some place or other! That is not the point at all!

Libby Copeland:

For a variety of reasons, women are not as good at negotiating as men. For one thing, we’re not as practiced at it. Several studies have shown that women tend to negotiate less often, in part because the assertiveness required for the task gets socialized out of us. After all, nice girls aren’t supposed to cause conflict, and there are real-world implications for those who buck the rules. In one study, both men and women pronounced female job applicants less hirable when they asked for more compensation than when male applicants did the same thing. (Male subjects in particular were less likely to want to work with women who tried to negotiate.) So it’s not surprising that negotiating causes women more anxiety than it causes men and that women are less likely to realize they can negotiate in a given situation. You have to do all sorts of tricky things to get them to haggle, like describe it as “asking” instead of “negotiating” or explicitly tell them that they’re allowed to do it. It’s no wonder that women were said to flock to the defunct car company Saturn, which was known for its no-haggle policy.

Part of what’s so crazy about buying a car the traditional way is that the Wild West pricing means there’s no way to know whether the deck is stacked against you from the outset merely because you’re a woman. Studies conducted in the ’90s by economist Ian Ayres showed that Chicago-area dealerships routinely quoted blacks and women higher initial offers than white men, so that even after haggling they wound up with higher prices. Data from auto repair shops shows something more nuanced: Women are quoted higher prices unless they break gender stereotypes, either by showing they know the market rate for a repair or by insisting on a discount. All of which is why, when women buy a car, we first research the bejesus out of it. We know that certain salesmen will be inclined to treat us as easy marks, and we’ll need to defy their expectations. So we prep and prep and then show up, hoping we don’t get a jerk. Sure, we can request a different salesman or hit another dealership, but we’ll pay for it in wasted time.

AAA:

Graduated driver licensing (GDL) systems are designed to protect new drivers by limiting their exposure to risk initially and gradually phasing in additional driving privileges as they gain experience. Although numerous studies have shown that GDL has significantly reduced the numbers of 16- and 17-year-old drivers involved, injured, and killed in motor vehicle crashes, the few studies of its effects on 18- and 19-year-olds have produced conflicting results. Some researchers suspect that because most states’ GDL systems only apply to new drivers younger than 18, GDL might encourage young people to wait until age 18 to obtain a license to avoid the requirements and restrictions associated with GDL, resulting in older teenagers having less driving experience and higher crash risk than they would without GDL.

Via Syeven Sinofsky

The Economist:

The other great change is in automotive technology. Rapid advances in engine and vehicle design also threaten oil’s dominance. Foremost is the efficiency of the internal-combustion engine itself. Petrol and diesel engines are becoming ever more frugal. The materials used to make cars are getting lighter and stronger. The growing popularity of electric and hybrid cars, as well as vehicles powered by natural gas or hydrogen fuel cells, will also have an effect on demand for oil.

Analysts at Citi, a bank, calculate that if the fuel-efficiency of cars and trucks improves by an average of 2.5% a year it will be enough to constrain oil demand; they predict that a peak of less than 92m b/d will come in the next few years. Ricardo, a big automotive engineer, has come to a similar conclusion.

Not surprisingly, the oil “supermajors” and the IEA disagree. They point out that most of the emerging world has a long way to go before it owns as many cars, or drives as many miles per head, as America.
But it would be foolish to extrapolate from the rich world’s past to booming Asia’s future. The sort of environmental policies that are reducing the thirst for fuel in Europe and America by imposing ever-tougher fuel-efficiency standards on vehicles are also being adopted in the emerging economies. China recently introduced its own set of fuel-economy measures. If, as a result of its determination to reduce its dependence on imported oil, the regime imposes policies designed to “leapfrog” the country’s transport system to hybrids, oil demand will come under even more pressure.

Meghan Kelly:

Unmanned vehicles rely on a number of sensors to be able to move without hitting anything. These include the GPS, laser range finders (LIDAR), cameras, inertial measurement units (IMU), wheel sensors, and more. But these sensors can be tricked to run your driverless car off the road, into walls, and, in the case of one van, over highway medians.

These hacks are scary when you consider how advanced Google’s driverless cars are. Many believe these are the future; that they’ll take us from place to place without our intervention. But if you can hack into the computers that exist in cars today, the extensive systems of unmanned cars will be ripe for “experimentation.”

The types of attacks that can derail the sensors vary but aren’t always very sophisticated. For example, LIDAR sensors use a rotating mirror to check for potential obstacles and weather changes in the area. It scans the area with a laser, and anything that reflects that laser is then picked up by the mirror. The sensor analyzes that data and decides what is in front of it.

Horace Dediu & Jim Zellmer:

We discuss the odds of disrupting the present automotive club via Tesla. We further dive into the regulatory and cultural environment that sustains the current players, while reflecting a bit on Segway, Toyota’s Winglet, organ donors and the Fiat “multiair” engine. Finally, we preview a larger discussion on apps in and around the car.

CBS News, via David Nichols:

Mark Stewart turns quite a few heads as he zips through the streets on his neon green ELF bike. With each pedal, his feet take turns sticking out from the bottom while a gentle motor hums in the background.

What he’s driving looks like a cross between a bicycle and a car, the closest thing yet to Fred Flintstone’s footmobile, only with solar panels and a futuristic shape.

It’s a “green” option for today’s commuters.

Stewart, a 65-year-old family therapist and school psychologist from Cambridge, Mass., took the summer off in order to drive his new ELF bike more than 1,200 miles on trails and roads using the East Coast Greenway, a bike and pedestrian trail that runs from Canada to Key West.

He began his journey by flying down to Durham, N.C., on July 15, and estimates that the entire trip will take about a month. He covered the first leg, from Durham, N.C. to Reston, Va., over roughly five days, 60 miles at a time.

Dave Lee:

UK families are more likely to watch TV together now than they have been in over a decade, according to a study.

Communications regulator Ofcom said 91% of adults watched their main TV set once a week – up from 88% in 2002 – but their attention may be distracted.

It said the popularity of smartphones and tablets was taking teens out of bedrooms back into family rooms.

Most family members now multi-tasked while sitting in front of the TV, the survey of 3,700 over 16s found.

My Car Gossip Blog:

Have you heard of Pop Bang Colour and the incredible artist behind the work, Ian Cook?

If you haven’t heard of him before now then you are in for a surprise when you see his artwork and realise that all of his paintings are created using toy car wheels, large tyres and remote controlled cars. He is really taking art into the modern world and creating paintings that are so fantastic that you wouldn’t believe that he never even uses a paintbrush. Being trained in fine art at university, he has always had a passion for art and grew up as a car enthusiast, an inspiration and influence of his was his uncle who worked in the car industry all his life.

It wasn’t until his ex-ex girlfriend gave him a radio controlled lightening Mcqueen from the film cars, the red “95” one, for his Christmas present that he found a unique skill and started actually painting with toy cars. In his own words “I did colour wheels and abstract pieces and then moved on to images which included logos, portraits and cars…. cars with cars seemed the most effective.”