8/11/2014

EMC - driving the future

1) Please introduce yourself.
We are Christian Henriquez, Javier Rincón and Leonardo Valente, from Chile, Mexico and Argentina respectively, we are students at Singularity University's Graduated Studies Program (GSP) 2014, doing our final team project, giving hybrid cars not only to developed countries, but to the whole world.
 2) What brought three young men, coming from three different countries to share the same vision?
Basically we are three gearheads (did you realize that you cannot use "petrolhead" anymore?), we are equally passionate about cars and amazed by the new technologies in transportation that we can join everyday at Silicon Valley, and cannot find in our countries.

3) What inspired the name of your team project?
Exponential is the key idea below our technologies, both the massive production and adoption of high tech electric motors, electronic controllers and computer interfaces are radically lowering the cost of our solution. Motor Company is for big businesses about cars, and we are thinking big!

4) Why do you think your team project will make a real difference?
There's a huge potential for green transportation in today's cars, why do we have to wait for all them be replaced with hybrid or electric ones? 100 millon cars worldwide are waiting for an affordable, easy and powerful solution to became more efficient and less polluting.

5) What are the next steps on your implementation plan till August 24th, and beyond?
We are waiting for the electric motors that are already coming from china, while buying some important stuff: A car!, batteries, wiring, small computers, diagnostics interfase, wood (you need wood, ever) to get the prototype running by final presentation. After that, if the people that can help us show interest, we are going to work hard on make this dream commercially possible. Is not that difficult.

6) What is your target client group, and why?
We are focusing on medium to high usage drivers, commercial vehicles and taxis first, because they can get payback for savings in less (in some cases much less) than a year. But we know there are many families that like this kind of solutions too.

7) Which has been the biggest challenge you have managed till now and how have you solved it?
While being foreigners in this country, we had to solve several issues about payment for things in china, car registration, etc. Would be much easier and less time consumpting if we had a social security number!!!

8) Since the start of GSP14 we are running a crowdfunded project together with Eventifier to make all tweets tagged #GSP14 available for one year http://bit.ly/SingularityUniversityGSP14. Which role do you see social media, and especially Twitter, can play for the success of your project?
Social media was key raising awareness in our countries! This lead to lots of support in our indiegogo campaign https://t.co/8hrEMyyByo but we are waiting for the real help from Singularity Community here in the USA! That's why every tweet helps!