hybrid minivans “coming soon”

There have been few hints as to when hybrid minivans might be available, but the Windsor (Ontario) Star claims they are just around the corner, starting with Chrysler models.

Evidently Mike Omotoso of J.D. Power has some inside information. According to the newspaper, he says Chrysler “intends to put its two-mode hybrid system in the Grand Caravan starting next year” and that it “will be able to sell up to 7.5 per cent of its 2010 minivan production run as hybrids.”

Omatoso also expects hybrid minivans from Toyota by 2010, as reported elsewhere.

hybrid Toyota minivan by 2010?

I haven’t seen much speculation on hybrid minivans lately, but today BusinessWeek reports: “By 2010, Toyota is also believed to be planning two more dedicated hybrid models, including a new hybrid minivan.“

I would have preferred something more substantial than “believed to be planning” but I’ll take what I can get.

drag racing hybrids

Times Online has some fun racing a Toyota Prius against a Honda Civic Hybrid on a drag strip. Electric motors have good low-end torque, so we should expect these two cars not to perform terribly, even though they are optimized for efficiency over performance.

The Prius edged out the hybrid Civic in the quarter mile. Then for good measure they put the Prius up against a Lexus GS 450h hyrbid. The 450h is one of the faster production vehicles out there, with a 0-60mph time of 5.2 seconds, so this was hardly a fair fight but it was entertaining. See the article for details.

It would have been interesting to see how well a Honda Accord Hybrid would have done on the track. The hybird Accord was optimized for performance, not efficiency, and was discontinued when it didn’t sell well. It wouldn’t have beaten the 450h, but its 0-60mph time was a respectable 7.5 seconds.

In a separate article, Cars.com says that the 2008 Toyota Highlander hybrid “is too quick. Yes, unnecessarily quick.” I wouldn’t say the hybrid Highlander was optimized for performance, but it retains a V6 engine. Ford chose to downsize to a four-cylinder engine for its similarly sized Escape hybrid. For this reason the hybrid Escape bests the hybrid Highlander in efficiency. The reviewer would have preferred that Toyota had made the same choice. I tend to agree.

update: In an older New Hampshire drag race, a hyrbrid 2008 Highlander and a conventional 2008 Highlander hastened to a draw.

negative volume discount

My local Safeway supermarket has 12-packs of 16 oz. Snapple on sale (slightly) for $9.99, but it also has individual 16 oz. bottles “buy one get one free” for $1.39. I guess the message to take from this is that that the cardboard carton on the 12-pack is somehow is worth $1.65.

update: My local Giant supermarket has 12-packs on sale for $5.99.

JTreeTable

A combination tree/table component has never been a part of Swing, but has been available to Swing programmers for almost as long as Swing itself. The original was written by Philip Milne and Scott Violet before the release of JDK 1.2, when Swing had to be downloaded separately and still used the com.sun.java.swing package name. Read the article and check out the code yourself if you like.

Essentially, it was a clever hack that used a JTree as both a TableCellRenderer (to paint the tree column one cell at a time) and a TableCellEditor (to allow the tree to react to mouse and keyboard events). The code was actually pretty simple, and it did work, but it was limited. After a couple years, some of the limitations had been overcome. A subsequent article provided event handling, and a third supported editing of the tree column. JTreeTable had become usable, but it was still a hack, and it still had rough edges.

Over the years since then, many people have taken JTreeTable and adapted it to their needs. Some of these adaptations have been released for others to download and use. If you look, there are a lot of almost-but-not-quite-compatible versions of JTreeTable out there. Some are commercial, some are free, but they all seem to be based on the Milne/Violet approach. They also all tend to have plenty of pending bugs in their bug-tracking systems.

I’m not familiar with most of the commercial implementations, but of the free ones I’ve seen I like JXTreeTable the best. It’s part of the SwingX project from SwingLabs. It works pretty well and it is actively developed, which means there are regularly-updated releases and that bugs do tend to get fixed, though plenty of bugs remain. A down side is that the implementation is huge. It is built on top of SwingX’s custom JXTable and JXTree components, not directly on Swing’s JTree and JTable.




The interesting news is that there is a new implementation of a Swing tree table component that is not based on the Milne/Violet code. They call it the Outline component. (The name is evidently taken from a tree table component in OSX.) I haven’t had time to take a serious look at it, but it does seem to do a lot of things right. But not quite everything right—at least not yet.

I’m looking forward to keeping an eye on this new implementation. Things I’m hoping for: (1) fewer bug reports than a typical Swing tree table, (2) improved UI consistency, and (3) better and/or simpler handling of fireXxxChanged() events.

new Honda hybrids coming

Honda has been working on a Prius competitor, a hybrid-only family hatchback they hope to be selling by next year. They will be made in Japan with 100,000 or so intended for the North American market.

What’s new is that Honda says it will also manufacture a hybrid version of the Fit subcompact, though probably not as soon as 2009. (The Fit is called the Jazz in some markets.) I might be interested in a hybrid Fit. The conventional Fit has been getting surprisingly good reviews—much better than the Toyota Yaris, its competitor in the small car segment, for which no hybrid plans have been announced.

Some people think it is foolish to create hybrid versions of small cars that are already fairly fuel efficient. GM and Chrysler seem to feel this way, but I don’t. I test-drove a hybrid Tahoe the other day and it was nice enough, but I just don’t find that kind of vehicle appealing. The Auto Beat Blog seems to agree with me.

The Telegraph reports that four new Honda hybrids are coming, including a two-door sporty car, but doesn’t actually say what the fourth hybrid model will be. Dare I hope for a hybrid minivan?

ANSI vs. ISO keyboards

North America mostly uses ANSI keyboards. Europe mostly uses ISO keyboards. The layouts are similar, but ISO has a few extra keys. An ANSI keyboard usually has two keys between L and Return, while ISO usually has three. Also, ANSI places Z adjacent to the left Shift key, but ISO has an intervening key. To allow for this, ANSI has a wider left Shift key than ISO.

I own a couple of ISO keyboards. I bought them on eBay in early 2006 because they were the cheapest USB keyboards I could find at the time. I can’t really type on them, though, because my left pinky consistently hits the intervening key when it is hunting for the Shift key. (My right pinky also has some trouble with Return, but not to the same extent.)

The image to the right shows an ISO keyboard on top and an ANSI keyboard on the bottom. The ISO model is a Silicon Graphics SK-2502U. The ANSI model is an Inland “Windows 107-Key USB Keyboard” (which, at $4.99, just may be the cheapest keyboard for Mac Mini). Note the width of the left Shift keys and the relative location of the Z keys.

Now take a look at the European Dell Vostro 1310 keyboard shown below. Dell has inadvertently created a hybrid ANSI/ISO layout. This is no good because they have shifted all the letters on the bottom row one slot rightward from where a touch-typist would expect them to be!

The Z should be below A and S (in both ANSI and ISO) but on this laptop the Z is below S and D. Oops.

Dell admits its blunder and will provide replacement keyboards.

The Vostro keyboard error has received a lot of press on the web, but to my knowledge noone has mentioned the ANSI vs. ISO issue. It would seem to explain how this astounding error could have been made when the North American Vostro keyboard was adapted for European release.

New iMac is world’s first Montevina machine?

Apple released new versions of their iMac all-in-one computer today. What’s interesting is that they appear to use the Intel’s Montevina (”Centrino 2″) platform chipset, which hadn’t been expected to appear until June of this year. Intel has given Apple a jump on one of its products (a quad-core Xeon processor) before but, presuming it is confirmed, Montevina in the new iMacs would qualify as a surprise.

Alas, Apple did not update the Mac Mini, which is now looking quite long in the tooth. In the past Apple has updated the iMac and the Mini simultaneously.

[update: Two articles by TG Daily and Electronista focus on the processor (which does seem to be an Apple exclusive), not the chipset, but do make it clear that the new iMacs are still Santa Rosa machines.]

GM on hybrid vehicles

General Motors is using the New York International Auto Show to dispense various comments on hybrid vehicles.

“We had the technology to come out with a hybrid at the same time as Toyota,” says vice chairman Bob Lutz, “in hindsight, it was a mistake” not to bring it to market. Lutz estimates that it would have cost $250 million per year to do so, but staying on the sidelines “cost GM billions in sales because it lost its image of having superior technology.” Of course Toyota managed to turn a profit on its hybrids after a few years.

GM doesn’t intend to make the same mistake with its plug-in hybrid, the Chevy Volt. “We won’t make a dime on this car for years, and the board is OK with that,” says Lutz. The Volt is part GM’s plans to mass-produce hybrid vehicles with lithium-ion batteries by 2010. GM hopes to choose a lithium-ion battery supplier by April.

Lutz also says, “by 2020 we figure that 80% of vehicles will require some sort of hybridization” to reach the eventual fuel economy standard of 35 mpg. That includes both mild and full hybrids. But he estimates its hybrids will be only 15% by 2015.

Hybrid cars will fell the sky!

Two articles appeared today that project the resources that will be consumed by hybrid cars. The headline in the Science Daily is “Hybrid Cars May Require Hundreds Of New Power Plants To Be Built,” while headline in the Economic Times is “Hybrid cars will spare petrol but guzzle water.”

The problem is that neither of these articles are actually about hybrid cars, in the sense that every hybrid car manufactured by Toyota, Ford, Honda, Nissan, Lexus, Mercury, Saturn, Chevrolet, GMC, and Dodge is fueled completely by gas. You couldn’t plug them in even if you wanted to, so they place zero extra demand on the power grid.

Both articles are actually talking about plug-in hybrid vehicles, which aren’t being made yet (except experimentally) but might be some day. If they ever catch on, they will indeed pull power from the grid. To that end, studies of their resource implications are a good idea. I just wish they were presented in a less alarmist manner.

In its second paragraph the Science Daily article says that the “study examined how an expected increase in ownership of hybrid electric cars and trucks will affect the power grid.” Not until the fifth paragraph does it clarify that it is an “analysis of the potential impacts of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles projected for 2020 and 2030.” (Emphasis added.) The article in the Economic Times never does clarify.

edit: Science Daily now mentions “plug-in hybrid electric cars and trucks” in the first paragraph.