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By Robert Martinez, Deputy Commissioner, New York City Police Department If you are one of those people who, to protect yourself against hackers and cyber thieves, removes your hard drive and smashes it with a hammer when discarding your old computer, you will want to read this. Today, every public leader must contend with the critical role technology plays in the structure and operation of government and the need to maintain the highest levels of cybersecurity. This is especially true for government fleets and fleet vehicle connections to government data banks and computer networks. Vehicles today have more memory and computer capability than an F-14 fighter jet. All this memory and even a driver’s control of a vehicle can be just one hacker away from a big problem for fleet managers, both government and private alike. READ MORE |
Wired Lyft announced that it would expand its “Ditch Your Car Challenge,” an attempt to both promote its services—the company makes the whole idea of not owning a car a little easier, goes the argument—and to continue to cast itself as a traffic-busting, city-friendly transportation option. The challenge works like this: Roughly 2,000 participants from 35 cities (including Miami, New York, Pittsburgh, and Salt Lake City, along with Charlotte, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee) will apply to be randomly chosen to pledge to ditch their cars for a month. In exchange for their fidelity, they’ll receive $300 in Lyft Shared credits, a one-month Zipcar car-share membership and $100 drive credit, $105 in public transit fares, and $45 to go toward a bike-share option. (These figures might vary slightly by market.) The catch: Participants have to actually own a car to ditch. Read the article at Wired. |
The Detroit News Ford Motor Co. CEO Jim Hackett reminded the White House that levies on steel and aluminum “took about $1 billion in profit from us.” Rival automakers used a Senate hearing to warn that extending the tariffs to foreign-made vehicles could cost jobs and drive consumer prices higher. Ford’s executive chairman, Bill Ford Jr., used Thursday’s 100-year birthday celebration of the iconic Rouge complex in Dearborn to sharpen the point: “Our business runs a lot better when we have clarity,” he told a media scrum Thursday. “Our lead times are long, our capital intensity is such that our business is at its best when we have certainty.” Read the article at The Detroit News. |
MSN Several states have moved to get rid of red-light cameras or diminish their use in local communities as complaints pour in from drivers who think the cameras are there to reap revenue rather than prevent accidents. The insurance industry group, the IIHS, cites its own research. “A 2011 IIHS study of large cities with longstanding red light cameras found that cameras reduced the fatal red light running crash rate by 24 percent and the rate of all types of fatal crashes at signalized intersections by 17 percent,” it said in a report. Read the article at MSN. |
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Bloomberg U.S. and Canadian negotiators worked around the clock this weekend to secure an agreement just before a Sunday midnight deadline, allowing leaders from those nations and Mexico to sign the accord by late November. The 24-year-old Nafta will now be superseded by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, covering a region that trades more than $1 trillion annually. The new trade pact offers Canada and Mexico some cover from the Trump administration’s threat to impose duties on car imports for national security reasons. Canadian auto exports up to 2.6 million units won’t be impacted by any U.S. tariffs on foreign cars. Mexico got the same threshold level, though neither country exports that many cars to the U.S. Read the article at Bloomberg. |
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The Daily Beast If you bought a car in the last few years, there’s a decent chance you won’t buy another one. In a decade—maybe less—you may subscribe to a car service the way you subscribe today to Netflix or Blue Apron. When you need to go to Whole Foods, you send for a car on your iPhone or tell Alexa to send you one. Or you’ll order Whole Foods online, and an autonomous car will bring the groceries to you. Americans only use their vehicles about 5 percent of the time, which is poor use of capital. When you’re not driving it, you’re parking it. And 80 percent of the trips we make are 1- and 2-person trips, so we could tailor shared-use vehicles for those kinds of trips. Read the article at The Daily Beast. |
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VW Teams Up with Stanford
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The Detroit Bureau Volkswagen has teamed up with Stanford University to develop a process to manufacture the fuel cells that can power vehicles in the future by reducing the amount of platinum used. Fuel-cell technology is regarded as a serious alternative to battery-electric technology, but it has always come with a comparatively high cost. “This technology opens up enormous possibilities for cost reduction, as the amount of precious metal used is minimized. At the same time, service life and catalyst performance are increased,” said Stanford Professor Friedrich Prinz. “In addition to the fuel cell, atomic layer deposition also offers a whole range of other applications requiring high-performance materials, such as next-generation lithium-ion batteries.” Read the article at The Detroit Bureau. |
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