Japan Airlines Opens New Routes With 787 Deliveries

Photo: Boeing

Japan Airlines is now the second airline in the world to operate Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner. The airline took delivery of two of the new composite airplanes this week and plans to quickly put them into service on routes the airliner was designed to fly: non-stop international trips not served by the bigger long-haul aircraft.

One of the first places to benefit from the new airplane will be Boston, MA. The city currently doesn’t have any non-stop flights to Japan. Beginning April 22, Japan Airlines will begin the first U.S. 787 route with non-stop flights between Boston and Tokyo. Later this year JAL will also initiate the first non-stop Japanese routes out of San Diego with 787 flights to Tokyo.

Japan’s All Nippon Airways took delivery of the first 787s and currently operates them domestically as well as as on flights to Europe. ANA is planning 787 service to both Seattle and San Jose in the next 12 months.

The deliveries of the new airplanes bring a dose of good news for Boeing’s new jet which is years behind schedule and continues to have teething issues common to most new airplanes. Earlier in the year the plane maker announced fixes needed for a problem with the fuselage. But beyond small problems with the airplane, one of the bigger issues is how the company will ramp up deliveries to airlines forced to change plans because of production delays.

“It’s going to be a difficult process” says aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group. But he adds without another next generation airliner on the market, Boeing has a little room to breathe. “The best thing you can say is that they don’t have anybody nibbling at their heels,” says Aboulafia, “The [Airbus] A350 is late as well.”

Japan Airlines was forced to push back plans a month for new routes to Moscow, Delhi, and Beijing because of the belated delivery of its 787s, and Air India is looking for hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation. The company is currently building airplanes at a rate of 3.5 per month and hopes to be up to five per month by the end of the year.

At Paine Field, the airport adjacent to the Boeing factory where the 787s are assembled, an unused runway and just about every other open space is currently serving as a parking lot for Dreamliners as they await delivery. There are a few dozen airplanes awaiting changes that were discovered in flight testing after these examples rolled off of the assembly line.

Boeing currently has more than 870 firm orders for the Dreamliner, but just 7 are in service today. JAL is expecting two more 787s next month and Boeing’s chief of commercial aircraft Jim Albaugh has said he expects the company to deliver between 35 and 43 this year.

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Google’s Autonomous Prius Drives Blind Man to Taco Bell

Steve Mahan is clinically blind, having lost 95 percent of his vision over the course of several years. But on a sunny day in the Bay Area, the Google crew arrived to shuttle him around, running errands like the rest of us and making a trip through the Taco Bell drive-through.

It’s one of the most compelling cases for driverless cars.

Steve’s freedom could be regained when autonomous vehicles make it to the mainstream, enabling other visually-challenged denizens to enjoy the freedoms most of us take for granted.

As we highlighted in last month’s cover issue, the age of the autonomous car is coming up quickly, with Google, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and General Motors all working on new, innovative ways of making the driverless car a reality.

Still, there’s more to this video than Google’s brief YouTube description conveys.

To begin with, the legal hurdles of self-driving cars are numerous and varied. While Nevada has enacted legislation to allow the testing of driverless vehicles on public roads, there are still a myriad of legislative challenges ahead, ranging from how many occupants have to be in the vehicle to who’s at fault if a collision occurs.

Partner that with the fact that destinations have to be pre-programmed and the waters get even murkier, although Google concedes that Mahan’s ride was “a carefully programmed route.”

But even with all that in mind, after watching Steve’s simple journey for a bad burrito, how can you not get behind a technology that enables one of the most quintessentially American freedoms?

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French EV On A Round-The-World Electric Odyssey

If you happen to live in a small town west of the Rockies and see a small electric car with French license plates, don’t panic. It’s just Xavier and Antonin attempting to circumnavigate the earth in an electric Citroën.

The car of choice for the Electric Odyssey is a Citroën C-Zero, a rebadged Mitsubishi i-MiEV with a French accent and a range of between 70 and 90 miles. Engineers Xavier Degon and Antonin Guy are taking turns behind the wheel, and thanks to the relatively short range get to stop at small towns and big cities the world over to preach the EV gospel. The central tenet of that faith? “If a standard electric car can make a world tour, every single person is able to use it to go shopping.”

We caught up with the team just outside of Nebraska, where they were planning the long journey over the Rockies. After beginning their journey in Strasbourg, France and crossing the Atlantic on a ship, they’ve been driving across the USA since March 7th. Since then, they’ve survived several traffic stops, inscrutable charging stations and days of eating high-calorie diner food — so a few mountains shouldn’t get in their way.

“Usually, if we are stopped somewhere, people around will come to ask us what is our car about,” said Degon. “This situation did not happen so much in Europe.” In addition to speaking at colleges, elementary schools and community events, the little car with the French registration has also twice attracted the attention of the local constabulary.

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MyFord Touch 2.0 Iterates on the Sophomore Slump

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It’s a pattern played out by bands year after year. A successful debut album is followed by a lackluster sophomore effort. Music fans are used to it. Gearheads, less so. But the dreaded “sophomore slump” has affected the auto industry’s domestic golden child after Ford’s critically acclaimed Sync infotainment system was followed up with the less-than-renowned MyFord Touch.

Putting aside the much-maligned capacitive controls for audio and climate settings, MyFord Touch – and its upmarket sibling, MyLincoln Touch – proved a step too far for the average consumer.

The eight-inch resistive display originally fitted to the Ford Edge and closely followed by the new Explorer and its platform siblings from Lincoln featured four on-screen quadrants – phone, navigation, audio, and climate – and in theory, was supposed to make selections both more intuitive and less distracting. It proved the opposite, and to make matters worse, reliability issues began to plague the range of MyFord Touch-equipped vehicles.

So nearly two years after launch, Ford is out to rectify the situation with MyFord Touch 2.0, a major update to the system that features stability improvements, a revamped user interface and a range of performance and functionality upgrades.

Ford began shipping update kits consisting of a USB drive and SD card with new maps earlier this month, and we got our hands on a pre-update 2012 Ford Edge and the upgrade kit to put both the installation process and new software to the test.

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OnStar Lets You Track Your Spouse for $0.12 a Day

Photo: OnStar

Suspicious spouses used to have to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars on private investigators to keep tabs on their significant other, but a new feature from General Motors’ OnStar division can do it for just over a dime a day.

The new service, dubbed Family Link, allows owners of OnStar-equipped vehicles from Chevrolet, GMC, Buick and Cadillac to track a family member through the OnStar website and receive email and text alerts when the vehicle arrives at a location or at a specific time.

“We are depending on subscribers to tell other family members that they’ve enabled the service on the vehicle.” –OnStar

OnStar vice president of subscriber services, Joanne Finnom, says Family Link is something subscribers have been asking for, and last year the company responded, enlisting 4,500 OnStar customers to test the service. Family Link was a hit, with Finnom saying the testers “told us it provides them peace of mind by staying connected to their family when they’re on the road.”

Family Link is being pitched to parents who want to keep tabs on their kids – the latest in a long series of products targeting minors with no legal recourse – but it could be used to track anyone driving an OnStar-equipped vehicle enrolled in the service. But with all location tracking services, the privacy and security implications are murky at best.

“It’s troubling,” says Parker Higgins of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Any time a new service like this is introduced you have to think beyond what’s described in the press release.”

OnStar representative Cheryl McCarron concedes that, “We are depending on subscribers to tell other family members that they’ve enabled the service on the vehicle,” but that’s an obvious leap in trust, not to mention the security issues surrounding multiple family members having access to a shared account with one username and password.

Account security aside, the larger issue is maintaining a balance between anonymity and security, and as Higgins points out, “It’s important to remember that you can provide a service that is valuable and useful and still be violating people’s privacy.”

OnStar will begin sending invitations to an initial batch of customers next month, with more invites going out in June before the service rolls out across the U.S. later in the year. Family Link is GM’s first a la carte offering through its embedded OnStar system, requiring an additional $3.99 month on top of the standard monthly telematics subscription package. And while the service could extend to the recently introduced OnStar FMV system, GM isn’t including the aftermarket mirror setup in the initial Family Link introduction.

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