Traveling Geeks

Joule, the South African Electric Car

[Blogging Tour – South Africa 08] This morning we went to Optimal Energy in Cape Town to meet with CEO Kobus Meiring for a presentation of the South African electric car A.K.A. Joule. Presented last September at the Auto Show in Paris, this promising green vehicle got a lot of attention from the industry, but it will not hit the market until the end of 2010. The goal of Optimal Energy is to compete with the mainstream offering and not only with the other electric cars, that is the reason why it fits 6 passengers and has a 130 km per hour maximum speed. The company does not know which type of lithium battery it will use for the final product yet, and we did not see any drive test. If the final Joule is really as good as it is on the paper, we can expect a bright future for clean automotive. Features include: 200km to 400 km range, 0-100 km in 15 seconds, 0-50 km in 5 seconds, energy cost 4c* /km (compared to 80c/km with petrol, diesel). It will be priced around $22,000.

* This is the South African cent.

Africa joining the electric car craze, with Optimal Energy’s Joule

The entire world hopes to start driving electric cars soon, and Africa, despite its reputation for poor economies, is no exception. Luckily, a South African company called Optimal Energy is working to release a vehicle in 2010.

And unlike the many attempts to make electric cars as small and cheap as possible, the vehicle, called the Joule, will be a highway-speed, multi-passenger model aimed at the same people that buy full-priced four door vehicles, making it a good fit for Europe and the United States.

Optimal has the benefit of strong support from its government, which has put money into the company through a research investment fund. Having such backing gives Optimal the time to pay close attention to its engineering and design choices.

That has resulted in some some uncommon bonuses for buyers, like an optional solar panel integrated with the roof that will help charge the car, and varying seat designs — the standard model will have six seats, three front and three back, but North Americans would likely be more comfortable with four.

One interesting design choice affects both the physical car and its business model. The Joule will have an adjustable chassis that can fit a variety of battery types and sizes, so the company won’t be tied to using a particular technology. The battery will also be offered on a separate lease, to help ease the pain of simultaneously paying for the vehicle and, effectively, several years worth of fuel. Customers will also have the choice of paying for a smaller or cheaper battery to save money.

But even without the battery included in the price, the car won’t be cheap by local standards. While Optimal’s CEO, Kobus Meiring, isn’t ready to set a firm price yet, he says vehicles in the same class go for about 220,000 South African Rand, about $22,000 dollars. Compare that to the Tata Nano, sold in the same market. The Nano’s lowest price is around $2,200 – and it is still far out of reach for the poorest South African families.

That leaves plenty of potential buyers, but focusing only on the local market would be a mistake, says Meiring. “You really have to be a global player,” he says. “There isn’t a manufacturer in the world that remains successful by staying only in its own country.”

So far, the company has completed much of the design, and recently showed off the vehicle at a popular Paris auto show. It was well received, according to Meiring. That’s not a hard claim to believe; up close, the prototype model comes across as sleek and modern, and the car is supposed to have a robust range of almost 250 miles, and top speed of about 80 miles per hour.

While Optimal is also working on a three seat design and a truck, the Joule is furthest along, and the company is bulking up rapidly to reach production. It currently has 79 employees, primarily engineers, and is planning to open a manufacturing facility near its headquarters in Cape Town, or in another South African city.

What the company still needs is money, although perhaps less than companies based in countries with more expensive labor. It also needs international partners to begin selling the car, once it’s in production. Meiring says he’d be interested in forming partnerships similar to the one Think, a Norwegian electric car maker, set up with two American venture capital firms.

With any luck, the pieces will all fall into place — it’s not hard to imagine a Joule parked in an American driveway.

Same Information, Different Representation

Where to go when you get to ! Khwa ttu, the San Culture and Education Centre near Darling. Beautiful and fascinating place, incidentally, on which more posts coming.

360degree bloggers

Our first proper day of excursions kicked off today with a helicopter tour of Cape Town. What an absolutely stunning city CT is. I wont go in to that too much because this post is purely going to show you all the bloggers on the tour with me and the links to their respective projects […]

View from the new Mandela Rhodes hotel

Three Notes on World AIDS Day

As I wrote a couple weeks ago in an email to the Rising Voices mailing list, I have mixed feelings about World AIDS Day. On the one hand, it can help create the illusion that we only need to think about AIDS one day out of the year and then somehow everything will get better. On the other hand, December 1st can be an attention-grabbing starting point for sustained campaigns that advocate for the rights of HIV-positive individuals, like the AIDS Rights Congo project is doing; spread preventive education with creativity, like the REPACTED project in Kenya does on a regular basis; and amplify the voices of marginalized communities, like the Drop-In Center in Ukraine.

Here on the South Africa Bloggers Roadshow, which is meant, in the words of its sponsors, to “tell the story of South Africa,” there is no mention of HIV or AIDS at all. (Nor violence against women, for that matter.) Graeme Addison, Durban’s Dagga King and the organizer of our itinerary, apologized on the first day for the exclusion. So, let me take a few minutes to mention three relevant notes.

To Test or Not to Test: Thandanani’s Question

First, I have uploaded a video which features excerpts of a really fascinating conversation I had last Friday with Thandanani, Sinempilo, and Zwelithini. Much of the conversation was Thandanani explaining why he didn’t want to know his HIV status and Sinempilo and Zwelithini trying to convince him that he should get tested. But there are other fascinating parts as well. I learned that in South Africa low income mothers are given 200 rand a month when they become pregnant. The three felt that this policy contributes to the spread of HIV and AIDS because it encourages people to have unprotected sex as a way of generating income. All three also felt that if Black South Africans go back to their indigenous cultures rather than trying to emulate the West that HIV transmission would be reduced. For one, they’d be spending less time going out to clubs, drinking, and hooking up, but also there are parts of Zulu culture like the traditional virginity test which encourage abstinence. Enjoy the conversation:

Project Masiluleke

Second, I must take off my hat to Miss Zinny Thabethe, who I first met at Pop!Tech and then was able to see again last week in Pietermaritzburg. Zinny is used to a good deal of attention. In fact, if you open up Southern Africa’s edition of Cosmopolitan Magazine there she’ll be, one of South Africa’s “30 fun and fearless women.” You can also see her speaking at PopTech and featured in National Geographic magazine.

Zinny’s newest initiative is Project Masiluleke. As I wrote last month, PopTech is transforming from a mere annual conference to a constant social change incubator. In addition to its Social Innovation Fellows program, the PopTech group will also select inspiring projects which are ripe with potential and put them in “the accelerator,” which essentially means introducing them to all the right people in order to make the project a success.

Project Masiluleke is the guinea pig project of the Accelerator. There are two major parts to the project which will officially launch sometime this spring. In South Africa most mobile service providers offer a feature in which you can send someone a free text message asking them to call you if you are out of airtime. The message itself is only around 30 characters, which leaves more than 100 more characters of space. Rather than filling that space with advertising, as would be expected, South Africa’s MTN network will append public service messages asking its subscribers to get tested and offering counseling resources. The second major part of the project is an at-home HIV testing kit designed by New York City-based Frog Design. We saw a demo of the kit at PopTech and the thinking that went behind it is extremely impressive.

Blogging Positively

On Wednesday Serina and Daudi will be co-hosting a live chat about how citizen media can be used to supplement and improve the mainstream media’s coverage of the AIDS epidemic. Details on how to participate in the chat are on Serina’s blog. Also make sure to check out Juhie’s post on Global Voices about World AIDS Day, our special topic coverage page, and the Global Voices Google Map of HIV-positive bloggers around the world that Juhie put together with Solana.

New Media in Action

Miichael Spicer talks about the economy to blogger David Sasaki and his cellphone.

Enter a New South African Chapter

This past week, I touched down in dazzling South Africa, the beloved country I last set foot in 14 years ago and before that 24 years ago, both times living in various suburbs of Johannesburg.

Before embarking on two long Virgin Atlantic legs, I found it difficult to remember my first impressions as a young teenager and so I dug up old journals from the time and read as many pages as I could sift through over the course of 36 hours.

Both times I lived here the country was obviously under white rule – Botha and then later De Klerk, the latter who paved the way to a free South Africa, one which would embrace one-man one-vote and change party politics.

Before the intense blogging expedition which would begin later in the week, I found it necessary to walk the streets of Cape Town, to try to make sense of what was and what now is. The markets, art galleries, jazz bars, portside restaurants, gift shops, alley ways, office buildings, architecture, the people on the streets and behind café windows.

There it all was to smell, taste, hear, view and take it all in as if yesterday still was. But I was no longer a teenager and Cape Town wasn’t a 1984 or a 1992 Cape Town, yet would it still feel, smell, taste, sound and look the same?

There’s something very primal about a year abroad as a student. Ask anyone who has done one. You somehow adopt your exchange country in a way you would a daughter or son. It becomes part of you and you it. You can’t forget it; its voices, shapes, sounds and smells are integrated into your DNA. It’s a primal kind of relationship and so returning years later becomes a primal kind of experience.

There’s something about the African sky, the air and the sounds at night outside your window that are distinct even if the skyline or a distant tree might remind you of somewhere else. This is true whether you’re in a suburb, a rural farm or an urban townhouse. While construction was in full force outside my guest bedroom window in a Cape Town neighborhood, it was ‘soft’ construction, African style.

You could hear the tinkering of tools with a deadening silence in between, the kind you can imagine hearing on a small-town American street in the 1940s. No large boisterous drills like the ones outside my San Francisco flat, the kind of noise that leave no room for anything other than ‘it,’ a reminder that change is happening outside you can’t control.

What a treat my necessary Cape walk was…….diving into any and every art gallery along Shortmarket, Long, Waterkant, and Loop reminded me of the creative talent and tasteful sense of design South Africa introduced me to in the 80s and 90s. It was still here, but perhaps less packaged in a neat bow in a gallery like in Sandton’s shopping center. I quickly learn that there’s a ton of interest in South African’s art and design in Dubai, whose elite even place custom orders they’re willing to wait on for months.

The new South Africa. Eager and energized to see what it has become, I meandered through alleyways, with wide child-like eyes looking for visible changes. “It’s hard to remember how it was before,” says my old friend Matthew, who worked with me in London selling art so many moons ago. Of course there’s the infusion of hamburger and retail chains. Starbucks has thankfully not yet made its way into its borders.

The then dark haired Matthew now has gray hair and is the CEO of a technology start-up in Cape Town’s city center. Together with his wife who moved here from Columbia sixteen years ago, we took in seafood and Stellenbosch wine. No doubt they witnessed someone returning back in time to a place he knew from childhood, far back into a distant past, one which had relics of Colonial Africa, segregated neighborhoods with high walls, all white schools with formal smartly ironed uniforms, and windsurfing along the Vaal River.

A time when Zimbabwe and the Transkei were popular weekend destination points for families. A time when the topic of discussion was primarily cricket and soccer. A time when we’d go on frequent hikes in the Drakensberg and attend afternoon braais on suburbia lawns, rich and gated suburbia lawns a mere mile from the Soweto township, where we’d often see smoke in the air and hear guns off in the distance.

In the early nineties, we sipped champagne and ate strawberries and cream and talked about the coming elections and what it would mean for commerce, for tourism, for sports, for the next generation, for peace of mind at last. Those who prayed for change, marched for change, put their lives at risk for change – white and black – would now have peace of mind at last.

While violence has risen in recent years, scams have become a part of life and HIV/AIDS in the country is now an epidemic, one which the entire world knows about and mourns over, South Africa remains a dazzling place. This beloved land where the white European and black African met in the 17th century and are now learning to live together equally and peacefully four centuries later.

Harmony must prevail if people wish to stay and stay they must for South Africa to continue to thrive economically and socially. If they lose their best talent to Australia, Canada, the states and the UK, the country will have to turn back the hands of time.

While I hear about white flight on one side and refugees flooding into Johannesburg’s Hillbrow on the other, I also hear about people’s love for a beautiful and yet tragic land they cannot leave and so they stay and figure out a way to make it work.

And within my first week here, I witness this commitment to making things work internally rather than a loss of hope. I meet inspired and happy white and black South Africans who love this country in a way I’ve rarely experienced elsewhere in the world.

A drive down the coast or a week in the bush will tell you the answer why among numerous other things. It’s one of the most beautiful, passionate, diverse and intense countries I’ve ever visited. Forward wind the clock to 2008. Let a new South African chapter begin.

South African Startup Has Joule of an EV

This morning’s blogger tour of South Africa included a stop off at the Capetown headquarters of startup electric car maker Optimal Energy.

The three-year old company is developing the Joule, a six-passenger all electric car that is scheduled to begin low-volume production at the end of 2010. CEO Kobus Meiring said the vehicle will have a maximum range of about 200 km, but the trunk has space for a second battery pack to double the range. The top speed for the car, aimed at city drivers, will be 130 km/hr.

The Joule is designed to compete with mainstream vehicles, not electric cars, Meiring said. He didn’t give specifics about the price, but said that without the batteries (which will be leased separately), the price will be in the range of 220 Rand (or around $25,000). The batteries will have a useful driving life of around 200,000 km.

The cost of the batteries is uncertain as the company has not selected a lithium ion battery partner yet, and Optimal Energy may lease batteries at multiple price points. (This is consistent with EV and plug-in hybrid makers in the U.S., who are similarly scrambling to identify batteries that meet their performance requirements). For EVs, batteries are a considerable amount of the cost, and the technology is still being tested and developed.

(For me it’s a little unsettling for car companies such as GM and Optimal Energy to be touting the wonders of a car when the major driving force–the batteries — are an unknown quantity. It’s like HP promising a wonderful new computer without knowing which CPU they’d use.)

Executive Marketing Manager Diana Blake said the company is considering batteries from 20 companies including those from China, the U.S. and Japan, and is also looking at ultracapacitors — the costly but durable solid state devices that can supplement batteries. Third-party battery companies, such as Better Place, which is setting up operations in Israel and the U.S., would be welcome to compete in battery leasing, according to Meiring.

Optimal Energy is targeting South Africa’s 700,000 units per year vehicle market. The Joule is designed to meet European safety regulations so that exporting to the north can also be an option.

The motivation to start the company included issues familiar to Americans — energy security (Meiring claimed 90 percent of all wars in the past 50 years were over energy), reducing carbon emissions, and increasing local jobs. However, the company has not yet studied the carbon impact in switching from South Africa’s diesel fuel derived from coal (nearly the entire market) to electricity from coal. Meiring said that electric batteries are five times more energy efficient than internal combustion engines, but transmission and energy losses in transferring energy to and from the batteries will lower the relative benefit. Since coal-to-liquids is about as carbon and energy intensive transportation around, the bar is pretty low for the vehicles to have a positive carbon impact.

While South Africa is currently under producing electricity to meet demand (and is therefore building more coal power plants), Meiring says the power grid has more than adequate power to accommodate overnight recharging even if the entire 7 million vehicle fleet switched to electrics.

Optimal Energy has several advantages in launching an electric fleet without impacting the grid over U.S. auto companies. First, the South African government’s Department of Science and Technology is a shareholder. Also, the state utility Eskom provides 90 percent of the electricity for the country, so introducing the vehicles requires dealing with a single entity, as compared to the U.S.’ mishmash of local private and public power providers.

Also, the country is on a single time zone, so night time recharging administration could be consistent through the nation. Meiring says introductory talks have begun with Eskom (which “has bigger fish to fry” because of insufficient power generating capacity), but they haven’t done demonstrations like are being done in the U.S. to test the impact of the vehicles on the grid. Meiring said the company plans on having the vehicles automatically recharge only at night, but an override would allow daytime charging.

Optimal Energy’s management include several engineers who developed helicopters for the government. Meiring said the company has outsourced much of the research and development to universities. He said that South Africa had been a leader in lithium battery technology until 1994 (when the government changed), and he believes that they could return to prominence in that area. Availability of lithium should not be an issue as nearby Zimbabwe has considerable untapped resources, according to Meiring.

The field for a full-time electric vehicle remains wide open as much-hyped Tesla Motors continues to have problems. While Optimal Energy did not mention selling the U.S. market, if the company can provide a hit in South Africa with locally-produced vehicles, the world may come calling.

(The blogger tour and meeting with Optimal Energy is being sponsored by the South African International Marketing Council).

The GRID and South Africa’s First Mobile Documentary

As if staying at the Rosebank Hotel didn’t already completely spoil us, we began our blogger’s road show of South Africa with a box full of gadget goodness thanks to the kind folks at Vodacom. Included in the bag was a Vodafone E172 Mobile Broadband USB Stick with enough 3G data to keep us publishing blog posts and uploading photos and videos from the road wherever we may be. We were also given the new Samsung G810, a mean mobile media monster which will let me upload photos and videos directly to Flickr within seconds of taking them. The phones come pre-loaded with a small piece of Java software called The GRID, which I first saw on Vincent Maher’s blog a few weeks ago.

The mobile program automatically detects your location and allows you to upload text, photos, and videos which are then displayed on a map along with all the other user-generated content around you. In this way it is very similar to Brightkite’s iPhone application. Here in South Africa iPhones are rare, but lots of phones are able to install java apps like The GRID. The GRID also allows video uploads which are not yet permitted on iPhones.

What really has me excited about The GRID is a project they did with youth living in Soweto, South Africa’s largest township. The youth were given phones and asked to upload multimedia content about their communities. There is now a wealth of content about Soweto on The GRID and more than 20 mobile documentaries have been made. It is exactly the kind of project we like to support at Rising Voices. Here’s a trailer:

What has me excited about this new Samsung G810 is that it means that in a couple hours I can give Frerieke my Nokia N95 so that she can give it to one of her Afrigadget Mobile Reporters. I was given my N95 by the good people at Pop!Tech and I know they’ll be pleased that it will be used for such a worthy cause. And if you’re not reading Afrigadget you’re missing out.