Month: January 2016

From Fisker's website: "Henrik Fisker’s initial design rendering for The Force 1, a high-performance automobile debuting on January 12 at 10:05am at the 2016 North American International Auto Show in Detroit." (credit: Henrik Fisker)

Auto designer Henrik Fisker filed a lawsuit against British automaker Aston Martin this week, accusing the company of civil extortion (PDF). Fisker says Aston Martin threatened to sue the designer if he showed off his new Force 1 luxury sports car at the Detroit Auto Show in mid-January.

Fisker is well-known in the auto design world. He served as the president of BMW’s DesignWorks before he was brought on at Aston Martin. According to Fisker’s complaint, Aston Martin sold only 400 vehicles per year in the mid-ninties, but by the time the two cars Fisker developed for Aston Martin were in production, global sales had grown to more than 7,000 cars sold worldwide.

Fisker later went on to do entrepreneurial work. Fisker Automotive, which was supposed to deliver a plug-in electric hybrid car, went bankrupt and was purchased by China’s Wanxiang Group Corp. in 2014. Today, Fisker is set to release a new car he designed, called the Force 1, which will go into production later this spring. The Wall Street Journal notes that it is still unclear which company will manufacture the 745 horsepower, $300,000 vehicle that Fisker has designed.

(credit: Mike Mozart/Flickr)

Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc., the Denver-based chain staggering from a string of food-borne illness outbreaks at its restaurants, is under federal criminal investigation for a norovirus outbreak at one of its California locations.

The August outbreak occurred at a restaurant in Simi Valley and sickened 189 customers and 18 employees, according to a local health department worker who spoke with NPR. After the outbreak, local authorities reported finding meat held at improper temperatures and dirty conditions in the restaurant’s kitchen. A subpoena from a federal grand jury, disclosed Wednesday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, requires Chipotle to produce a range of documents related to the outbreak.

The US Attorney's Office for the Central District of California and the Food and Drug Administration are jointly conducting the investigation. In the SEC filing, Chipotle said it intends to fully cooperate, though it’s unclear at this point what criminal violations or charges might be pursued.

(credit: Alexander Russy)

San Francisco’s largest taxi company is on the verge of filing for bankruptcy protection, according to a leaked letter from its president.

The San Francisco Examiner, which published the December 10, 2015 letter on Wednesday, reported that Yellow Cab Co-Op is the largest taxi firm in the city, with 530 medallion holding drivers. By comparison, there are thousands of Uber drivers on the roads of San Francisco nearly every day.

The taxi industry as a whole has been under massive pressure from startup newcomers such as Uber, Lyft, and the recently defunct Sidecar. Those companies are regulated under California’s “transportation networking company” (TNC) law, which is separate from traditional taxi law.

Over under on the consumer Rift at launch: $500

— Kyle Orland (@KyleOrl) January 4, 2016

On Monday, when Oculus first announced that it would finally be taking consumer Oculus Rift pre-orders later in the week, I tweeted an over/under prediction that the Rift itself would come in at $500. Nearly 1,000 Twitter poll voters seemed to converge on that same expectation, with almost equal proportions guessing the price would be higher or lower than $500 (and 19 percent thinking the $500 guess was exactly right). It's not a random, scientific sample or anything, but the wisdom of crowd effect suggests $500 was a decent average expectation for the Rift price as of earlier this week (at least among the generally tech-savvy audience that would see my tweet).

Those baseline expectations were extremely important this morning when Oculus announced a $599 price for the first consumer edition of the Oculus Rift. It's not hard to find people online complaining that the price tag is just too much money to pay for an unproven device like the Rift, especially when you consider the added cost of the decently powerful PC needed to use the device. Comparisons to the PS3's famously derided "Five hundred and ninety-nine US dollars" announcement are already rampant.

It's also not hard to find early adopters admitting that they're willing to pay the perhaps higher-than-expected price—the ever-receding "expected ship date" on the Oculus Shop page suggests sales are surpassing inventories so far, at least. Everyone's budgetary threshold for VR is going to be different, and there's no reason that the early adopter, day-one price for a new category of consumer hardware should be the same as the eventual "mass market" price brought on by scale and technological advancement.

The Oracle v. Google legal battle over the use of Java in Android keeps on going, but this week Google made a change to Android that it hopes will let the company better navigate its current legal trouble.

Google told VentureBeat that it in "Android N," the next major version of Android, it is swapping Android's Java libraries from its own Apache Harmony-based implementation to one based on Oracle's OpenJDK—yes that Oracle, the same company suing Google. OpenJDK is the "official" open source version of the Java Platform, and Oracle makes it available under the GPL with a linking exception.

Google next told the court that it had "released new versions of the Android platform that are expressly licensed by Oracle for use by Google under the free, open source license provided by Oracle as part of its OpenJDK project. Specifically, these newly released versions of Android utilize the method headers (and the associated sequence, structure, and organization of those method headers) at issue in this litigation under the open source OpenJDK license from Oracle."

Jonathan test drives a pre-production Chevy Bolt. Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn, additional camera by Nathan Fitch. (video link)

LAS VEGAS—Today at CES, General Motors' CEO Mary Barra will formally unveil one of the most significant new cars in the company's history. It's called the Chevrolet Bolt, and when it goes on sale later this year it will be the first long-range battery electric vehicle that's truly affordable. In fact, GM says that after the $7500 IRS EV tax credit, the Bolt will cost under $30,000, making it cheaper than the average new-car price ($33,560 in 2015, according to Kelley Blue Book). Not bad at all for an EV with a 200-mile range.