President Obama to Visit Pittsburgh, Announce Manufacturing Initiative

President Obama will be in Pittsburgh Friday to discuss American manufacturing.

President Obama is expected to tour Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Institute before announcing the launch of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership. This new initiative will bring together the federal government, industries and universities to invest in and increase the production of emerging technologies.

Carnegie Mellon will be one of the universities involved as will be locally based Allegheny Technologies. The initiative will be led by Andrew Liveris, the Chairman and President of Dow Chemical and Susan Hockfield, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This initiative came about a little over two years after the President formed an advisory group - the President's Advisory Council on Science and Technology. Eric Lander was co-chair of the council. He says the US serving as a leader in advanced manufacturing is critically important. "Advancing on manufacturing based on new technologies can provide high quality, good paying jobs for American workers. 2nd, manufacturing and innovation are intimately connected. Keeping manufacturing locally helps facilitate more innovation here in The United States. And third, investing in advanced manufacturing capabilities that use advanced technologies is absolutely vital to maintaining national security," he said.

The president’s plan will invest more than 500 million dollars to build domestic manufacturing capabilities in national security industries, increase energy efficiency in manufacturing processes and ultimately keep jobs in those fields in the US.

President To Visit CMU Again

President Barack Obama will be back in Pittsburgh Friday June 24 to speak at Carnegie Mellon University. Mr. Obama visited CMU June 2 of last year and called for removing tax breaks for big oil companies and an end to a reliance on fossil fuels.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney says next week's visit will be to highlight the importance of manufacturing to the U.S. economy......." as well as key steps that government, industry, and universities will take together to create new industries and new jobs. The President will discuss the need to focus on cross-cutting technologies that will enhance the global competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing and speed ideas from the drawing board to the manufacturing floor.”

Earth Hour Calls Attention to Climate Change

Tonight from 8:30–9:30 the City of Pittsburgh will officially participate in the global event, “Earth Hour,” during which hundreds of millions of people, organizations, corporations and governments around the world will come together and turn off their lights to demonstrate a concern for climate change.
In 2007, the first Earth Hour occurred in Sydney, Australia with 2.2 million people turning off their lights in a show of support for efforts to fight climate change. Pittsburgh began participating the following year and in 2010, 128 countries took part in Earth Hour. That included 90 million Americans and iconic American landmarks, such as, Seattle’s Space Needle, the Las Vegas Strip, St Louis’ Gateway Arch, and the Brooklyn Bridge.

This evening Carlow, Carnegie Mellon, Chatham, Duquesne, Point Park and the University of Pittsburgh will all have buildings go dark for one hour.
Since 2008, Councilman William Peduto has led the effort to have Pittsburgh be a partner in this global event.
“I am proud of Pittsburgh’s continued environmental leadership. Pittsburgh’s universities have long been leaders of the region and it is only appropriate that they lead Pittsburgh’s Earth Hour efforts.”

CMU to Unveil Converted Honda Civic

This week Carnegie Mellon University Researchers will unveil a 2002 Honda Civic that has been converted from gas to all-electric. The Civic is the prototype for the university’s ChargeCar Electric Vehicle Conversion Project. The Civic's powertrain has been replaced with a 35-horsepower electric motor and 33 lithium-iron-phosphate batteries. It's estimated to be able to travel more than 40 miles at a peak speed of 70 miles per hour. Ben Brown, a Project Scientist with the Robotics Institute, says the car travels a sufficient distance for most drivers. "The Department of Transportation statistics suggest that somewhere around a 40 mile range is quite adequate." An open house showcasing the car takes place March 25 at 3p.m. in the Electric Garage located at 4621 Forbes Avenue in Oakland. At the unveiling, researchers will be taking names of those who want their car to be converted. Attendees will also have the opportunity to take a ride in an electric car. "One of the goals of this project is actually to get some vehicles out into the public and into the hands of the public in the Pittsburgh area to send a message that electric vehicles really are here and are practical," Brown says. Researchers are working with local mechanics and garages to expand use of the technology, and researchers will be available at the event for questions regarding issues and expenses involved with the conversion process.

Mentor Program Aims to Prevent Violence

The Black Political Empowerment Project’s Coalition Against Violence and Carnegie Mellon University will partner to have CMU athletes mentor local high school students.

B-PEP Community Liaison Kenneth Huston says his “Five for Five” initiative will pair up students from five local school districts with CMU basketball players in an effort to prevent violence.

Huston says the students, who hail from West Mifflin, Gateway, Brashear, Clayton Academy and Pittsburgh Public Schools, will be able to communicate better with mentors closer to their own age. He says in addition to attending basketball games, the pairs will talk about college life and attend summits involving regional businesses and nonprofits.

Huston says he was inspired to create the program after giving an anti-violence speech at a local high school.

“Young people that walked up to me said, ‘Mr. Huston, all that is well and good, but we’re always being talked at, and we’re not being talked to, and we’re not getting a chance to voice our concerns.’ And so I thought about that long and hard and said, ‘How can we come up with a way to give these young people a chance to really voice their feelings?’” says Huston.

The result is the Five for Five program, which Huston says stands as a challenge for other local universities to take part in.

Five for Five’s first mentoring event was February 20, when the CMU men’s and women’s basketball teams played Emory University.

"Watson" Goes for Win

The language-computing computer Watson will attempt to hold on to its lead tonight in the final episode of a three-part Jeopardy! series pitting the computer versus two of the shows greatest champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Carnegie Mellon University professor Eric Nyberg is a contributor in the creation of Watson, and says he will watch with excitement, though he already knows the result.

Nyberg along with CMU students Nico Schlaefer and Hideki Shima work with IBM on the development of the computer which has earnings of $35,734 after 2 rounds of Jeopardy compared to $10,400 for Rutter and $4,800 for Jennings. The 3 episodes were filmed last month, so Nyberg and other contributors to the computer’s creation know the results. Nyberg was surprised by Watson’s success on the second day.

“I think my expectation was really that it would be like what you saw on day one where it was sort of a neck and neck kind of thing where Watson did very well in some categories and didn’t really answer anything in some of the other categories,” Nyberg says. “That’s actually quite characteristic of Watson’s performance overall.”

The language computing computer processes the clues using a vast knowledge of the English language, programmed by people like Nyberg. Watson then calculates a confidence level for the answers it’s considering and buzzes in if it seems sure.

Nyberg says the research has been great for the field of language computing technology and he says CMU has already implemented improvements to the model idea.

“One of the things we’re working on at Carnegie Mellon is a technique that basically helps Watson to study for a particular topic,” Nyberg says. “You can give Watson documents that are on topics that you want him to learn about and then we have another tech that will go out and find other relevant texts that are available.”

However if Nyberg wants viewers to know anything, he jokes that Watson’s intelligence is nothing to fear.

“It’s not going to take over the world, it’s not dangerous and nobody’s going to give any launch codes to Watson when it thinks that grasshoppers eat kosher and Toronto is a U.S. city.”

Pittsburgh Moves Forward in Entertainment Tech Field

The Next Three Days, Unstoppable, and Love and Other Drugs were just some of 2010’s box office hits filmed in the Pittsburgh region, which is growing in the entertainment field. Inspired by that growth and interest in the entertainment field, the Pittsburgh Entertainment Technology (PET) Project is to launch January 27.

PET’s goal is to bring together all of the region’s entertainment technology companies under one banner.

“We’re going to hope to get all of the entertainment companies together, and all of the people interested in entertainment technology, film, and all the innovative things we’re trying to do together, in one room,” Organizer Kim Chestney Harvey said of the launch, which will be hosted at the Entertainment Technology Center by Don Marinelli.

Chestney Harvey says along with bringing all these people together as part of one group, creating a database for filmmakers who come to the region is another objective of the PET.

“We will put the contents of this database into a nationwide directory for the filmmakers to use and access,” Chestney Harvey says. “When they come here regionally to work they can look and see what assets they have here to choose from.”

The PET is a project put together by four groups including the Pittsburgh Technology Council, the Idea Foundry, the Pittsburgh Film Office, and Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. Some of the technologies that the region’s companies have produced for filmmakers include music compostion, 3-D computer graphics and visual effects, and branded gaming among other things.


“We realize that we have a really robust culture and a lot of really interesting things happening here and we kind of wanted to show our support for that and come up with some way to support what all of our local companies are doing,” Chestney Harvey says.

Scientists Gather at CMU to Talk about Gigapixels

CMU associate professor of robotics Illah Nourbakhsh says gigapixel images are changing the way scientists do research and the way they present their findings to the world. 220 scientists, educators and students are taking part in the Fine Conference on Gigapixel Imaging for Science this week on the CMU campus.

The technology has its roots in NASA labs when space exploration vehicles took hundreds of photos that were merged into massive panoramas. The technology has gained some fame recently with CMU’s GigaPan project. Nourbakhsh says the use of multiple high resolution images is starting to show up in a wide rang of disciplines. He says it is in use at the microscopic level where individual insects are being photographed hundreds of times, at the human scale with projects such as scans of fields of flowers where individual bees can be found doing their work, to the intergalactic scale being tackled by NASA scientists. Nourbakhsh says scientists are even using GigPan type technologies in time-lapse projects. “It lets the public visually understand science in ways that were not possible before and that means the public is better able to understand the future of the world and the way the public impacts the world,” says Nourbakhsh.

Nourbakhsh says he is excited by the fact that the event has drawn scientists from such a broad range of fields. Vertebrate paleontologists, for instance, will report at the conference on their use of gigapixel imaging to provide detailed documentation not only of the quarries where fossils were discovered but also of the fossils themselves. Entomologists will discuss how they used GigaPan to watch 3,200 cells in a beehive breeding frame over a period of 12 days as they searched for clues to Colony Collapse Disorder. “We’re still early in the evolution of this technology, but we hope that this conference will help us identify those areas where gigapixel imaging holds the most potential, whether as a research tool, an educational device or as a means of engaging the public at large,” says CMU scientist Randy Sargent.

Along with the scientific program, the conference will feature a juried gallery show at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in which eight images will be exhibited as prints measuring 4 feet high and up to 23 feet wide. The gallery prints will remain on display through the end of the year.

CMU FBI Fight Internet Dangers

Carnegie Mellon University and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have launched a joint effort aimed at helping students better understand the dangers that lurk on the Internet. The effort brings together the FBI’s Safe Online Surfing Program (SOS) and CMU’s Alice software package. The SOS program was launched 5 years ago to deliver Internet safety information to third- through eighth-grade students. Since then it has been used in 41 states and has reached more than 70,000 children. Along with getting out the information the program builds competition among local schools. The FBI partnership with Carnegie Mellon will allow the students to create 45 second animated public service announcements on Safe Online Surfing practices using CMU’s Alice application. The late Randy Pausch created Alice while he was part of the university’s School of Computer Science. It teaches the basics of programming in a fun way where students often do not even realize hey are learning. Middle and high school students will create the videos and FBI agents will judge them later this school year to select a winner in two age groups. Teachers must sign up on line to take part in the program. Assistant section Chief of the FBI’s Cyber Division, Nick Savage, says the goal is to reach more than 25,000 students with the competition this year. He says he then hopes to take the wining videos out to other schools. Savage says students learn best when they are teaching and he believes there is a great need to educate young people about hazards associated with Internet. Both the FBI and CMU hope this will be a multi-year collaboration. Savage says the FBI conducts the SOS program and other programs in an effort to be more proactive in an effort to prevent crimes before hey happen.

TechBridgeWorld Provides Technology to Underprivileged People

Bernardine Dias has made it her mission since youth to provide modern technologies to underprivileged nations and she is now achieving her goal with TechBridgeWorld, a Carnegie Mellon research group.

After growing up in Sri Lanka at the base of the economic pyramid and seeing how the lack of modern technologies can damage a society, Dias has not stopped trying to change things.

Dias has seen the organization founded in 2004 grow from one person to many student and volunteer researchers with the goal of providing modern technologies to those nations without any.

"Our primary goal is to innovate computing solutions or create new computing solutions that address the needs and are relevant to people in underprivileged communities,” Dias explains.

Dias provided an example of one of TechBridgeWorld’s most successful works that is still being used to teach today. In 2006, TechBridgeWorld began working with a blind school in India to create a program that helps students read and write Braille and offers the functions of correction and audio feedback. The tutor has since been expanded to blind schools in the United States, China, Bangladesh, and others.

The organization has focused on small projects since it’s inception but hopes to have the opportunity to work on large-scale projects with bigger communities.

"We’ve sort of focused on smaller scale projects, how do we scale this up given the knowledge that we have?” Dias asks.

Dias earned her undergraduate degree in computer science and physics from Hamilton College and then began a graduate study at Carnegie Mellon University. With a Ph.D. in robotics in hand, Dias applied for a research faculty position at CMU and began the organization TechBridgeWorld in 2004.

The organization receives funding from multiple sources including individual donations, financial grants, and corporate donations from sponsors like Google and Yahoo, but Dias knows funding is essential to the growth of the team and it’s ability to help communities.

“Additional funding will take TechBridgeWorld to an entirely different level,” Dias says. “We would be able to impact so many more students and communities around the world.”

Sky Art Floats Above Pittsburgh

Pittsburghers will look to the sky tonight and tomorrow to find messages in the air.

A small airplane will use white smoke to write common advertising phrases like “SPACE AVAILABLE,” “ALL SALES FINAL,” and “EVERYTHING MUST GO” in the city sky as part of Carnegie Mellon University Professor of Art Kim Beck’s “The Sky is the Limit” project.

The block letters will be written one mile high, and Beck says people should be able to see them all across the city at 6 o’clock tonight and 10 a.m. Saturday.

Beck says she expects a variety of reactions.

“I think some people will be utterly confused by it. I think some people will think it’s actually advertising something but then not know what the advertisement’s for, and then I think some people will make the leap and have an environmentalist read on it. Maybe somebody will read ‘Everything Must Go’ and it’ll have kind of a personal resonance.”

After the ‘performance’ is finished, Beck will install large pictures of the skywriting in storefronts downtown. Beck says while the skywriting will fade in an hour or less, the pictures will be a permanent reminder of the impermanent – another theme she calls central to the work.

Beck says she got the idea to depict advertising phrases from the overabundance of them during the recent economic recession. She says while they often mean “good deals” on the consumer’s end, they also mean a lost job or a company closing at the seller’s end.

Green Building Process Scrutinized

Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University have received a $2 million federal grant to investigate the actual environmental effects of “green” buildings.

Led by Pitt engineering professors Melissa Bilec and Amy Landis, the study aims to make sure green buildings are performing as well as they can.

Bilec says every new structure, including any green building, has an environmental footprint from the materials used to build it to the last day of its existence. That total environmental effect constitutes a building’s life-cycle assessment, or LCA.

Bilec says one of the goals is to expand the scope of LCAs to include the building’s effect on the people who live or work in it.

“[We’re] really trying to connect people with their buildings. Right now, 90% of our time is spent inside, but we really know very little about the environment that we occupy, from the air quality to the energy usage or the water usage. So that’s what we’re trying to do, is connect people with the indoor environment.”

Another component of the study is a survey of architects, contractors, and other people in the construction process to determine the weaknesses of the LCA.

Bilec says the team will ultimately submit new recommendations to the United States Green Building Council.

Take Part In Pittsburgh's Giant Panorama

If you can see the top of the U.S. Steel Tower someone may be taking your picture today. Between 11 am and 2 pm a team from Carnegie Mellon University will be taking a giant panoramic photo of the city. The "Pittsburgh Gigapanorama", a high resolution panorama, will be shot from the top of Pittsburgh's tallest building, the U.S. Steel tower. Anywhere visable from the Steel Tower will be captured in a portait. A GigaPan photograph is a composite image made up of many smaller images stitched together to make one giant photograph, as seen here in last year's photo of the city.

Pittsburghers are invited to make signs, wear costumes and pose for the camera as it takes a massive high-resolution picture of our city. The picture will be accessible online before the end of October.

Carnegie Mellon's STUDIO for Creative Inquiry will broadcast updates every five minutes using Twitter and Facebook to help participants know where the GigaPan camera is pointing at the time they check.

Carnegie Mellon's David Bear began the project during a fellowship at CMU and has been financially supported by the Sprout Fund and the Heinz Endowments. The GigaPan Camera, and other tools used for todays project, were developed by the Create Lab at CMU's Robotics institute.

Open Contest Seeks Best Use of Elec. Car Batteries

Carnegie Mellon University researchers are turning to the public to find the best possible way to use electric cars’ batteries.

The college’s electric car program, ChargeCar, announced its “ChargeCarPrize” contest last week. The person who comes up with the best system for distributing energy from electric car batteries wins an electric car.

Assistant Professor of Robotics Illah Nourbaksh says eight “secret drivers” will have driving habits like distance and altitude recorded by a GPS system.

“Every month, the data that has been accumulated for the past month of driving gets tested against the best open algorithms that have been submitted to us so far on the website. And so we see for the past month, if any of these drivers were driving an electric car and they were using the algorithms that have been submitted, how efficient would they have been? How little energy would they have been able to use and still get a great commute done?”

Nourbaksh says combined with new supercapicitor technology developed by CMU, the best algorithm will allow electric car batteries to shrink. Since batteries are the most expensive part of the cars, that means prices will shrink as well.

“When they’re $45,000, they’re just something for the elite. If we can get that cost down so a new electric car is fifteen- or twenty-thousand dollars, then we’re talking about a much bigger demographic.”

Nourbaksh says the contest is slated to take up to 18 months, but it could finish early if “some genius” comes up with a great algorithm sooner than that. In the meantime, the algorithm that performs the best by the end of each month earns its author a $250 gift card.

Details on ChargeCarPrize can be found at ChargeCar's website.

Goal: Make Oakland “America’s First Digital Community”

Innovation Oakland took another step on the path toward reaching its goal today by introducing a new interactive “wayfinder” kiosk. The kiosk can help visitors find everything from parking and a bus schedule, to a museum and a place to eat. Don Carter is director of CMU’s remaking cities institute and is helping to design a larger program to help people get around the neighborhood. He says the kiosks are just the start. “[The kiosks] are probable the most photogenic [aspect] at this point but we think that one of the strongest parts will be the ‘virtual wayfinding’ that people with smart phones or internet connections can use,” says Carter, “five years from now we think that will be the primary way people find their way around.” The web and smart phone applications can be found at the Innovation Oakland web page. The plan also includes a comprehensive design for street signage and functional public art for all of Oakland. An executive summary of the report can be found here. Carter says right now the Oakland streetscape is over crowded with old, out of date, and confusing signs that need to be replaced.

To build the kiosk, a group of four graduate students at CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center jumped feet first into the neighborhood. Center Associate Executive Producer Mk Haley says getting around Oakland was a problem the students were living as they launched the project. “They were all brand new transplants to the Oakland area and they had a lot of fun field trips where they poked through every nook and cranny,” says Haley. Several town hall meetings were held to get input from the diverse population that moves through Oakland everyday. Haley says there are two distinct different communities who need help getting around Oakland, “students who will show up with every single technology gadget on their belt possible and they want to connect to satellites and internet and lasers and robots, and then you have the community who just need to now the bus schedule.” (A video demonstration of the kiosk can be seen here.) Haley says the team decided to not spend the time and money trying to make the kiosk able to withstand life on the street corner. Instead the kiosks will be placed inside buildings. “We did a lot of research on the estimated life span of kiosks and it is not very long,” says Haley, “We worked with a company in New York City, their kiosks get stabbed.”

Innovation Oakland is looking for funding to make the plan a reality but is yet to put a price tag on the effort. Carter says that number should be known in the coming weeks. They hope to have design plans formalized in the next 6 months. Carter says they will use that time to look for the money needed to make it a reality. He says they hope to tap into federal and state dollars because they believe the design can be used as a model for other cities and neighborhoods across the country. A report on the design plan can been found here.

CMU Announces Infrastructure Lab

Carnegie Mellon University hopes to unveil a new infrastructure research laboratory by the end of the year.

The university announced today that it has partnered with IBM to create the IBM Smarter Infrastructure Lab on the school’s main campus.

Civil and Environmental Engineering Department Chair Jim Garrett says the idea is to help businesses and governments make informed infrastructure investments. Garrett says the lab will do that in two ways.

“We’ll have researchers that are working on new technologies and new areas of development, but also bringing in various government authorities [and] municipalities that have already collected some data and want to better understand their system and better understand what might be done with that data to help them better manage their infrastructure.”

Garrett says for example, some water authorities already contract companies to collect data on the state of their distribution systems. The lab would simply compile that information and help the authority understand where to invest its money.

Garrett says the project is part of the Pennsylvania Smart Infrastructure Incubator, which will build two laboratories at a cost of $2.2 million with investments from the state, the university, IBM, and Bombardier, Inc.

President at CMU Wednesday

President Barack Obama comes to Pittsburgh next week. The White House is not giving any details of the purpose of the visit just yet other than it's for an event at Carnegie Mellon University Wednesday.
The White House did say it's a priority for the President to travel outside Washington which he has been doing on a near weekly basis recently.
The President is in Chicago spending the Memorial Day Weekend with his family.

Shale Gas Regulations and Technology Discussed

Engineers, gas company representatives and politicians gathered on the Carnegie Mellon University campus this morning to talk about the place where technology and regulation meet. Much of the talk centered on environmental regulations and water and how technology can make it affordable and safe to meet those regulations and still pull the gas from the Marcellus Shale.
Engineers are always racing to fill voids. In the case of Marcellus Shale gas drilling, they have spent a great deal of time looking for ways to lower the cost of cleaning water coming out of the wells after the hydrologic fracturing process to the standards set by state and federal regulators. Kelvin Gregory is an engineering professor at CMU and moderated the panel. He says one solution is finding ways to reuse the water that comes back out of the well to fracture another well. Typically 30%-40% of the water pumped underground comes back out of the well. When it does so, it is contaminated with salts known as total dissolved solids. Gregory says there are also ways to choose the source of the water wisely to lower the environmental impact. Water that flows out of abandon mines often fouls creeks and streams for miles. He says that water can be used in the fracturing process. Gregory says that will help clean up the impacted waterways and reduce the amount of clean water pulled from other water sources.
Gregory says it is not a question of “if” the salts can be removed but rather a question of “at what cost.” He says the process is very energy intensive but if engineers can find ways to reduce the cost it allows gas companies to operate profitably with tighter environmental regulations in place. Gregory believes that to make the regulatory and entrepreneurial process mesh, all sides need to be as transparent in the effort as possible and the public needs to be informed of all the issues at hand.

New Research Provides Insight Into Decision Making Process

New research from Carnegie Mellon University researchers suggest that replaying events in the brain may have less to do with creating long term memories than with an active decision making process.

In the study conducted in 2008 and published this month in the journal Neuron, rats had electrodes recording the brain activity of rats as they navigated a maze. In previous studies, rats were measured moving in a linear fashion. Working at The University of Minnesota, they monitored certain neurons, called place cells, which fire in response to physical locations. They enabled the researchers to identify where an event was being replayed based on which place cells were firing. So for example, a rat might be in one place but the firing of the cells showed that it was replaying the events that occurred in another place. They found that rats would replay the path they had experienced less often and that replay is not just important in subsequent moments but important in mapping an entire environment.

The study was funded by The National Institutes of Health, The National Science Foundation and The Pennsylvania Department of Health.

CMU Wants to Put You in an Electric Car

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are calling on Mechanics, students and community members to take a look at their electric car Friday in an effort to find a few people interested in converting their cars from gas to electric. The ChargeCar Project’s electric vehicle program has a converted 2006 Scion xB that will be on display from 4-6pm in the Planetary Robotics Center high bay on the first floor of the Gates and Hillman centers, 4902 Forbes Ave. The group also has a commercially available RAV4-EV all-electric car tat it will roll out for the event. CMU Associate Professor of Robotics Illah Nourbakhsh says they have also just purchased a Honda Civic that they will begin converting soon. The goal of ChargeCar is to encourage Pittsburghers to convert their own cars to all electric. To do so, Nourbakhsh and his team have created a “recipe” for changing a gas powered car to an all electric car that he says any mechanic can follow. Nourbakhsh says they can provide the needed parts to the mechanics for the process that takes about 5 days. He says it is estimated that a conversion will cost $5,000-$6,000. Nourbakhsh says they are hoping to find ways to lower that cost through foundation grants, state and federal tax rebates and company sponsorships. “If you don’t mind driving around with a PPG sticker on your car you might be able to get back $1,000,” says Nourbakhsh. The group has already landed a grant to pay mechanics for their time as they get the needed training. Nourbakhsh says 5 years ago none of this would have been possible. He says better batteries have made it technologically possible and government officials are more willing to talk about rebates and draw up new guidelines for electric cars to pass inspection. ChargeCar says it wants to make each car customized to the user. If your daily commute is 12 miles round trip then they will put in a battery that gives you 20 miles on a charge, if your drive is 20 miles then a 30-mile battery will be used. Nourbakhsh says he gets 100 miles on a $2.00 charge and the batteries they use charge using the standard 120v outlet that is already in your garage. Nourbakhsh says you can do his with any car but it works best with lightweight cars with manual transmissions. He says there are plenty of old Civics and Corollas on the market that fit the bill.