Get Rid of Your Car – project ideas for students of management

For background information, you might want to read an old post of mine:

http://newstudentresearch.blogspot.com/2013/03/virtual-cars-for-everyone.html

Let me touch upon the key points from the above-mentioned blogpost, before I move on to discuss ideas for a small student project. We should each have a chauffeur driven virtual car. It should be available anywhere, anytime. Tap an app on the cell phone and optionally enter a destination and time of departure; you should have the driver calling you and turning up in a few minutes to take you where you wish to go.  This is already there, is it not? We should recognize that companies like Uber and Ola have made a significant impact on our lives in India. 

Let us look at what is not there. No one has got rid of his car! Customers have not accepted that owning cars is irrelevant as long as they can use cars whenever they want to. Society has not recognized the ongoing revolution as one that needs to be promoted through the right incentives. Lumpy “real” cars waste parking space in houses and apartment buildings, and in the places that people visit. We have not recognized the virtual car as one of the major solutions to traffic problems and atmospheric pollution. We have not visualized that it can create employment in significant numbers. We have only grudgingly accepted “taxi aggregators” as yet another enterprise and have done nothing to promote them. The issue is not one of administrative decisions; it is about the right visions for the transportation systems of the future.  

Unless society recognizes that information technology has made it unnecessary to have personal vehicles in most cases and creates the right policies to have them replaced by virtual cars, we will continue to have a moribund system of transportation. What are required are tax incentives to promote the use of shared vehicles, encouraging investments in companies providing shared vehicles, and support to employment generation for a large number of drivers. The use of shared vehicles will reduce wasteful investment in vehicles, because shared vehicles are far more productive. It will also eliminate waste of drivers’ time - private car drivers wasting their time waiting for car owners to come and occupy their cars.

Now to a student project on virtual cars:  some ideas discussed below  may be more relevant to countries where potential drivers are plentiful, but money to buy cars is relatively scarce; however, there are challenges to innovation in every country in regard to this new industry. I will offer a set of questions to trigger ideas for projects in this area:

a)   What incentives will persuade customers to give up “their own cars” in favour of virtual cars? If I am self-employed, the cost of owning and operating a car can be charged to my business expenses, saving me tax. Can we offer the same benefit to the self-employed for using virtual cars?

b)   Even employed persons can borrow money to buy cars and get tax benefits on the loan interest they pay. Can we allow customers of virtual car companies to invest in these companies to the extent of the cost of a car and get some tax benefits for that? For instance, if the virtual car operator gives them a discount of some X% because they have invested in the company, can the government treat the discount as tax-free income?

c)   How can a virtual car company deploy the investments it receives from customers to promote their own business? Can they, for instance, command a business loyalty from the customers through discounts in fares?

d)   Can the virtual car companies expand their business by offering car loans to their drivers? What role can banks pay in this regard?

e)   Can we prepare presentations to stimulate thinking in selected companies in this field?

f)    What would be right agencies to argue for suitable legislation to promote this socially relevant concept?

g)   What regulatory safeguards do we need to ensure that monopolies do not run away with the business and to protect other customer interests?

h)  What should manufacturers of electric cars do? Will the virtual car companies create and operate shared infrastructure for supporting electric cars under their control? What can the car manufacturers do to promote this? What should the government do to promote this?  

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Using solar power through an UPS

(This is a small project, but one that should be carried out with responsibility. Do the work only under the supervision of Electrical Engg Department Staff in your college/university Lab).

  

Solar panel prices are coming down but if you include the cost of batteries and solar panels, they are expensive. Products are available in India from a few vendors, but they are not priced like commodity items.  On the other hand, common UPS units are available at commodity prices. They incorporate a battery and inverter and come with power cables, plugs & sockets, all ready for use. The project suggested here is one of connecting a solar panel (SP) providing about twenty or thirty watts of power for a few hours a day to an UPS of the type used with a PC. The schematic below illustrates the idea.

 

A solar panel with a nominal rating of 30 W seems ideal for charging a UPS of the type discussed above. The SP needs only to provide a DC output at the voltage of the UPS battery, which is usually 12 V.  The charge controller has to prevent reverse flow of current and prevent over-charging.  The typical UPS used with PCs has a 600 VA rating and has capacity of about seven Ampere hours (Ah). That provides for a nominal 84 Watt hour (Wh) energy storage. Assuming that we do not want to utilize more than 50% of the nominal capacity before recharging, such a device can deliver 40 Wh per day, enough to power a 5W LED lamp for 6 hours a day and to provide a few Watt hours to charge one or two cell phones. In fact, some UPS vendors offer models with built-in USB sockets that will charge most cell phones. 

The Solar Panel

Those interested in understanding sizing calculations would find the website http://www.batterystuff.com/  quite useful.  The site http://www.wholesalesolar.com/solar-information/charge-controller-article gives some information on the working of a charge controller. ICs for use in building a charge controller are available from vendors such as Texas Instruments.  I would urge students interested in this project to read about the risks of continuing to draw current from a battery when its voltage has fallen below a specified safe level, such as 11.6 V in case of 12 V batteries. Precautions should be taken to avoid under-voltage operation. One way of ensuring this is to build the system around an UPS that provides protection against under-voltage operation.

Social and Economic implications

The LED revolution has made small size solar installations attractive. Five hours lighting per day through a 5 W LED and a cell phone charger working round the clock would be a boon to most rural households. A solar UPS can provide this even without traditional electrification, but benefits from it if available. It makes it easier to live with power-cuts. Lighting based on a solar UPS confers significant advantages to small shops. Remote locations can use solar UPS units to provide some street lighting. Rural hospitals would find reliable lighting very valuable.  This article has had a focus on systems providing power in the range of 5 to 10 W; however, the future will see surging demand for units with higher capacities. At a macro-level, the UPS market in India is already worth several thousand crores of rupees per year; but it largely serves urban customers. Hybrid UPS units that can use traditional electrical supply as well as solar energy are practically absent in rural areas. The technology for putting them together exists and is relatively easy to master. This segment alone is likely to grow into a few thousand crores per year business within a few years. In the early stages, pioneering engineers will put together their own products and provide services. Within a few years, we can expect that small hybrid units will roll off big production lines and be available at commodity prices. The pioneers will see their business continuing to grow despite such mass manufacture, as long as they are present in rural locations to handle retail sales and to provide services.

Apart from providing reliable lighting, this industry will create several hundred thousand jobs all over the country.

Srinivasan Ramani