What he forgets is that the choice is still in the hands of every individual American. Average fuel efficiency of all cars in the US (in 2007) is still under 23 MPG (9.5 km per litre) while cars that are doing almost 40 are plentiful (and on top of that, hybrids and EVs are readily available or being introduced in the coming months).

They (BP) are guilty for sure but it’s just too easy to blame the corporations in my humble opinion. Instead of playing like you’re the victim, take matters into your own hands and stop consuming these enormous amounts if petrol!!!

Three minutes after I got home, I got a call from my friends over at Organisation in Design to join in the Daryl van Wouw show at the Amsterdam International Fashion Week. Great choreography, lots of repitition in the clothing though.

Supposedly fashion can’t do without Cafe George, but unfortunately, the kitchen closed too early for us. So we made our way to my favorite steak house, Castell. No tiny snacks here that keep models thin, but well, we’re no models anyway and after 5 hours of kiteboarding, a Brasil Fabuloso is just what I needed.

Completely broken (not from the boose, but from being out in the sun all day and working my ass off to not crash too often), we decided to call it a day after the coffee had been finished.

While the Jura machines are great, at home, I figured I wanted something less ‘automatic’, so I got myself a Quick Mill coffee machine. Don’t let their site fool you, the coffee this machine produces comes close enough to the average coffee you get in the land of espresso itself.

Combined with a container of Illy coffee and the classic Rob Brandt espresso cups (or in Dutch ‘espressodeukbeker’), available at Frozen Fountain, this makes for a great coffee experience.

The way we introduced Spring to the market was unique. The framework did not enter the market through a traditional sales-oriented approach. Instead, early adopters that saw the potential of the technology started using it, starting convincing others and slowly but surely adoption grew.

After having quit SpringSource I was looking for a technology that is relevant to a bigger group of people. Something I could explain my grandma. I found this in the market for electric vehicles. I had a feeling that a similar strategy that we used for introducing Spring to the market, would also work for electric cars and so we started The New Motion. And so far, that feeling has not proved wrong.

There are a few differences however, between the electric car sector and the software sector in terms of introducing them to the market. That’s what I want to talk about for a bit.

Technology adoption in a nutshell

Any significant new technology is adopted in a very comparable fashion. First, early adopters take on the technology. They don’t mind about a few disadvantages the technology has and take the leap. They help convince a group of more conservative people, the early majority to also start adopting the technology. What follows are the late majority and the so-called laggards. This model is explained in more detail on Wikipedia.

These early adopters are hard to find. They don’t let themselves being captured by traditional market segmentation. By converting an entire fleet of say 2000 cars of one big corporation, you’re likely to only catch 100 to maybe 300 early adopters; people that will likely spread the word. The rest are people that probably can’t see through the disadvantages the technology still has to get an enjoyable experience. These are not the type of ambassadors you’d want. In other words, you have to look hard for these 100 to 300 people, which are probably very much scattered everywhere.

Difference no. 1: the distribution mechanisms

With Spring, it was not that hard to find these people. Using online forums, news sites, mailing lists, the message in IT-land spreads fast. It’s easy to distribute your products. There are essentially no distribution costs; updates to the product are pushed to potential users in minutes, rather than days, weeks or months. The barrier for people to just try things out is also very low. Downloading a piece of open source software (as in the case of Spring) is done in two minutes.

With cars, this is different. You just don’t try out a car for five minutes and then give it back (the physical form of deleting something). Distribution is more complex; getting a car to a customer takes weeks if not months. This should be taken into account when looking at introducing a physical technology to the market, rather than a piece of software or online service.

Difference no. 2: the media

With online services and software, you can safely rely on online media. Messages pushed through online media, tend to spread quickly. Forums, mailing lists, social networks are easy to use; updates can be pushed to readers in minutes. These channels are also very easy to influence. Online, you can react quickly to what happens. In the early days at SpringSource we very actively monitored the influential media for any news to turn up about Spring or any related technology. In case something was written about us, we reacted, correcting where necessary and adding relevant other information.

When dealing with a electric cars, people communicate about it in much more traditional ways. Printed car magazines are still around, newspapers write about cars and radio and television also dedicate airtime to them. Also, whenever news happens, it’s much harder to react properly. Newspapers are spread once per day at most. Magazines probably once every months and there’s usually no place you can correct or react to a radio show. Even if there is, people probably don’t read it.

This is the second challenge that you have to deal with when dealing with less ‘online’ technologies.

This is what I also encountered today. The Telegraaf (the largest Dutch newspaper) published an article today about the legislation in Amsterdam that promotes the use of electric vehicles. Not just on their website, but also in the print edition (including a picture of yours truly). People in Amsterdam get a free (but non-assigned) parking spot, including a charge station. The Telegraaf (always looking for controversies) thought this was an excellent opportunity to stir things up a bit and published an article calling the legislation ‘only applicable for the absolute elite’. The article wasn’t very well-balanced and they mis-quoted me several times. All and all I wasn’t very happy with the coverage. But that’s where it gets difficult. It’s hard to react to something like this. You can’t just go to the newsdesk and tell them to reprint all 700.000 copies of the paper.

The other thing to these traditional media is that a lot of people read them; also people that don’t necessarily belong to your initial target audience. Remember what we said about the early adopters being the target audience of choice when introducing a new technology to the market? Well, the mainstream newspaper are typically not read by the early adopters or at least, much more read by the majority and the laggards. These groups can’t immediately judge the potential of a technology and will just criticize everything they find just a tad negative.

The fact that this got picked up by the Telegraaf, also means (at least, to me) that we must be doing something right. Controversies are all in the game. Some people might not immediately understand what we’re trying to achieve here. But we’ll keep on pushing until everybody understands.

Conclusion

It’s important to keep in mind that when dealing with a physical product that’s (in the end) hopefully going to adopted by the entire population you keep into account the different distribution mechanisms and the media when planning your approach to introduction. In the end, misplanning things might bite you later on.

Coming back to Spring: sometimes I long back to the days of endless flamewars on TheServerSide where people like Bill Burke, Marc Fleury, Mike Spill and Rolf Tollerud. But then again, having your picture up in the biggest Dutch newspaper is also not something you experience every day, is it . Whether it’s online flames or printed articles that try to get you off your feet, with a good product and a lot of perseverence, you’ll always make it.

Have a look here to see what it’s all about and how to get invited to the first party on the 20th of May.

As usual, things went quite smooth, a little too smooth maybe and that gave me enough confidence to go even faster. And then things went wrong. I (almost) bumped into Giorgio (one of my friends that went along for the week) and while avoiding him I fell… quite hard…

The result: a tiny fracture in my lumbar spine (the lower part of my spine that is). Fortunately nothing that could or potentially can impact my nervous system, so I guess I got lucky. Together with an eardrum that I destroyed late last week (not in the same accident, but while landing in Oslo for a sgort visit), March wasn’t a very good month for me, physically speaking. I feel like a wreck right now . Oh well, I guess this only means I have to wait with opening the kiteboarding season until early May, which means all my buddies will be way ahead of me learning new tricks .

All this happened on Tuesday by the way, so I had a lot of time to relax. Fortunately we had rented a great chalet, including hot tub, saunu and very spacious living room including loads of DVDs. So no boring times for me past week. The only time I hated not being out on the piste was last Friday when some knee-deep powder had come down on the slopes… That certainly would have been fun…

The trip from the place the accident took place to the lift station was quite thrilling by the way. Fixated in a banana (or at least, that’s what they call it here), going downhill head-first is not something I’d like to repeat very often. When it comes to activities that involve adrenaline, I’d like to control when the adrenaline comes myself instead of having some (pretty expert) skiing rescue guy do that for me.

It was also the first time I ever saw a CT-scan machine. They gave me a CD with all the pictures on it, but the application that displays the images is only supported on Windows, so before I can post these, I’ll have to find a Windows machine first.

There are three main issues with the price of electric cars. One dealing with the customer’s perception and behavior, one dealing with the size of the industry and a last one dealing with the complexity of the technology and the difference between battery-powered cars and their gas-guzzling equivalents.

Getting the gas-guzzling consumer into an pricey electric car

Traditionally (in the Netherlands at least), people buy their cars. After their house, it’s the second-most expensive purchase in their lives. The difference with a house however is that for a car, people (again, in the Netherlands) usually do not use lend money or otherwise finance the purchase. They save money for their car and simply buy it.

The general perception of cost associated to a car is the list price of the car. In other words, a €39.000 car that uses 1 liter of gasoline for every 10 kilometers of gas is still considered to be less expensive than a €40.000 car that only uses 0,8 liters for every 10 kilometers of gasoline, while the difference in gasoline consumption over four years (and a yearly average of 13.000 kilometers) makes up for the €1000 price difference.

This €1000 difference all of a sudden gets a lot larger if you’re talking about the difference between electric cars and gas cars. An electric car uses on average about one-third of the amount of energy (measured in Euro’s that is) compared to a gas car. Taxes are largely absent for electric cars (and not for gas cars). Electric cars however are more expensive (largely due to the battery in the car).

The small difference in purchase price between the different gas cars all of a sudden gets very big when comparing to electric cars. And with all these Dutch people nicely saving up their money to buy a car and not looking at the monthly costs, we’re screwed. The electric car starts with a large disadvantage here.

There’s only one option and that’s breaking the habit of people looking at the purchase price. Instead they have to start looking at the monthly costs (regardless of whether or not people finance their car). Even though it might make sense for any rational human being, this still is very difficult! We’re still trying though, because we don’t expect people to start forking out €40.000 for an average-size 4-seater in the coming years. So, what we’re doing these days is talking about monthly costs only!

More info (in Dutch) by the way about the total costs for a car can be found here

Economies of scale

A second part of the price barrier has to do with a lack of economies of scale. Currently, only a few thousand electric vehicles are produced every year (world-wide). In Holland only, about 389.000 vehicles were sold in 2009 (and this was a pretty bad year). As soon as large numbers of car are produced, efficiency in the production process can increase and prices can decrease. This needs to happen for electric cars before they start being affordable without monetary incentices (subsidies).

That’s why we’re actively creating demand for the cars (with projects like a large EV tender with more than 3.500 vehicles of only three different types being ordere by large Dutch companies in an initiative started by us amongst others).

Batteries

The last part of the price barrier has to do with the battery that powers the car. While an electric car in and of itself is a rather simple and low-maintenance piece of machinery (much simpler than a gas-guzzler), the complexity lies in the battery and the battery management system.

The battery is first and foremost an expensive component of an EV. The battery in my Tesla Roadster probably goes for €30.000 to €40.000. The second thing (and much more important) is the amount of knowledge we have about the life expectancy of these batteries. We simply do not know yet whether or not such batteries will hold up for 5, 7 or 15 years. Some people have a hunch and tests obviously have been performed, but there’s no objective opinion or verdict about it.

This is why financial services companies such as lease car companies write off the battery in about 4 years and sometimes even add an extra amount of money to take into account the risk associated with the battery breaking down in these 4 years.

Writing off €40k in for years, calculates to a total of about €800 per month (not taking into account the interest). And then we haven’t calculated other costs, such as the other parts in the car, and insurance, et cetera. If this doesn’t change, it’s going be a pretty expensive car.

The 4-year term is not very reasonable though. Financial services companies don’t know anything about batteries, so they’re just being the usual conservative self. This needs to change and that’s exactly what we’re doing.

We’re going to continuously monitor the battery (by instaling a little device in every car) and use the monitoring data to come up with an accurate prediction of the life expectancy of the car. Using real-world data along with lab tests, we’ll be providing an objective opinion for every battery about the so-called state of health. This opinion we’re going to use, to provide better financing options.

Concluding

By increasing the amount of cars being produced and accurately measuring and predicting the state of health of the battery in the battery-powered cars, prices will go down. Chances are that it’ll take a long time before we get to the same purchase prices for gas cars compared to electric cars, so this is why we also have to change the perception of the consumer: we need to start talking about monthly costs instead of purchase price only.

In other words: a lot of work is left to be done.

More on the individual subjects in future blog posts.

The reasons for electric vehicles

Whether or not you think the IPCC is right or wrong about the temperatures and sea levels rising and glaciers melting, there are enough other reasons to start looking at alternative ways to get ourselves from A to B. Oil does not only result in more CO2, but aso pollutes our environment in many other ways. In Amsterdam for example there’s a halt on construction of new building, due to the high levels of NOx in the atmosphere, mainly caused by ICE cars (Internal Combustion Engine) driving around town.

Another is the fact that the amount of oil that’s easy to get to is decreasing day by day. Oil prices, whichever way you look at it, will increase and our children will experience the day the amount of oil we need to drive our cars is not going to be enough (provided we don’t change our habits that is).

A third one of the geopolitical situation. Dependence on foreign countries to provide us with something that’s so vital to our economies is something that’s not very desirable. Using alternative ways to transport ourselves with energy that’s generated closer to where we live and within our span of control (and ultimately in a clean and renewable fashion) is a better model to build an economy on.

Concluding, there’s enough reasons to look at alternative ways to transport ourselves. Electric transportation is one them and also one that’s quite within reach. The technology has been around for ages and although there are certain barriers, it’s not that hard to get going.

How to accelarate the market

As a country to make the switch to electric cars is not easy. In my view there are a few barriers that we need to overcome, before we start to see widespread adoption.

Perception

People need to understand and experience electric cars are not just cars that can only drive 50km/h. People need to understand that when the car is powered by clean energy, it really *is* clean. People also need to understand that the limited range electric cars currently offer is not something that will stand in the way of widespread adoption. Concluding, there’s not enough reliable information on the market for it to adopt electric cars easily.

The market for cars and their price

Electric cars are hard to find and they’re very expensive. The demand needs to increase, which will result in higher numbers of production. Ultimately this should result in lower prices.

Infrastructure

Electric cars need charging stations. In order to charge your car, you will need to plug it in for a few hours before you can drive again. Charging stations need to be rolled out in a widespread fashion in order for people to be able to drive.

Range

The electric car is frequently associated with having a limited range. While this is certainly true, you can also turn the picture around: with an electric car, you will never have to stand in the cold and the rain to get your tank filled up.

Even though that might be true, the range still is an issue. Driving to the South of France is not going to be easy and within a decent fast-charging (or battery swapping) infrastructure, it’s going to be hard to get there without having to spend days and days recharging.

Our initiative

We set out on a journey last April to try and overcome some (if not all of) barriers while at the same time offering people an easy way to start driving an electric car if they want to. We’re taking a parallel approach here: on the one hand (together with a lot of partners) we try and tackle some of these barriers while on the other hand just doing whatever is needed to help somebody drive an EV.

The last bit is going to be our business model. We’re going to be (as some people call it) a Mobility Service Provider. A virtual car dealership you could call it, but then with a lot more service than you would get at a traditional car dealership.

Well, that’s it for now. In future posts I’ll zoom in on some of the above issues that I think we have to overcome to get the market started.

For now, don’t hesitate to ask questions obviously .

Now, some 8 years later, it’s time to say good bye.

As of last week, I am no longer involved with JTeam. I already quit SpringSource last March and moved into the world of electric cars. After SpringSource (which we started in 2004, together with Rod Johnson and 4 others) was acquired by VMWare late last year, the only tie I had left to the Java community was a share in JTeam, the company that’s continuing to build great software on a daily basis. Last month I passed on that share to Bram and Steven. They’ll be continuing to rock the Java world with their fantastic team of engineers.

Thanks Bram, Steven, Leonard and everybody else @ JTeam. It was a wonderful 8 years!

Onward!

As I learned, CNAMES override must other DNS records and a CNAME conversion is done even before an MX lookup.

At first, I had A records for both remotion.biz, www.remotion.biz and *.remotion.biz, pointing to my web server. I then removed the remotion.biz A record and changed it into a CNAME (pointing to www.remotion.biz). I left the MX records as is and thought this would work.

But, like I said, after researching online for a while, the CNAME overrides all other records. So if a mail server is looking up the MX record for remotion.biz, it first does the CNAME conversion, causing it to search for an MX record for www.remotion.biz instead of remotion.biz. And since no MX record for www.remotion.biz exists, things went sour!

Well, I quickly changed things back and after the changes had propagated everything was back to normal.

I’m happy I made this mistake on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Now it was only 3 people calling, instead of 20, which it’ll probably be on a busy weekday.