Chapter 8: Making electric cars smarter{0}
Making electric cars smarter
Stephanie Mehta’s article entitled Making electric cars smarter is about a man named Shai Agassi that founded a company called Better Place. It is a company that is building a network of charging and battery-switch stations for electric cars.
Agassi’s former job was a software engineer for a company called SAP. He founded Better Place to fuse information technology with the automobile manufacturing business. His idea was to produce cars with the best technology as opposed to using the cheapest. The automobile industry hasn’t been “disrupted” for 100 years and Agassi would like to change that. The disruption is new technology.
He is making technology that helps with modern electric cars. One of the problems facing electric cars is when to charge the battery. Like getting gas, it is not always convenient. His software would learn your driving habits/schedule, talk to the network system, and figure out the best time to recharge the car. Also, just like “apps” on iPhones, they heading in that direction for cars as well with things like possibly CarTunes.
It applies to chapter 8 of the textbook entitled Operations Management and Supply Chain Management in that it is helping with operations management. As operations management is about taking inputs, transforming them, and producing outputs that are greater than the cost of the inputs, the technology that is proposed will do just that. Normally things like sheet steel, engine parts, and tires will go in as inputs, but modern technology features will greatly increase the “value-added”.
Mehta, S. (2009) Making electric cars smarter, Fortune. Retrieved October 15, 2009, from http://money.cnn.com/2009/10/14/technology/better_place_agassi.fortune/index.h tm