The Long Tailpipe - Shai Agassi's Blog

Electric Car Hacks

There is a wave of electric cars coming to the market as one-off conversions from existing cars into higher portion of electric drive (wheter converting into full electric or into plug-in hybrid). Some of them are actually getting on the road and getting some great reviews. I want to share with you some reviews that will remind you how the Apple I was when Woz brought it out to the world.

Today I want to share with you the story of eBox - a conversion of the Scion (Toyota) xB made by AC Propulsion of California. The car still looks like a scion (that's the point - don't change the car so it stays road approved), but was converted to Electric drive and loaded with 35kWh of Li-Ion batteries - giving it a range of 150 miles on a single charge. It looks like this :

If you want to read more about how it drives look here for the full review by AutoWeek, a respectable automotive weekly dedicated to old fashioned cars.

For those worried about performance, here is some data on this converted electric eBox:

"The eBox got from 0 to 60 mph in 7.02 seconds, versus 9.71 for the xB we tested four years ago. Braking from 60 to 0 took 126 feet in the eBox and 132 in the xB. The slalom went by at 42.6 mph in the eBox and 40.9 in the xB. "

If you didn't get it - the e Version is better than the fuel version by about 10-25% on all fronts. Say goodbye to good old golf cart - here comes the fast electric generation.

The price point for the one-off conversion is still very high ($55,000) - but if it can be done, it will be made automated - and given this is the Scion - it will be pimped not just coming in black...

More to come

Putting it all together – expanding the box

Every one of the dimensions mentioned before are tightly intertwined, as you must have understood by now. Platforming the suite through SOA evolution provides the way for the key processes to evolve more rapidly, and for additional functionality to be built more rapidly as composites. Simplification of deployment will cause massive adoption, providing a better platform for developers. the more functionality we get in the form of simple to adopt solutions – will cause more companies to go back to acquiring and deploying innovative processes for growth.

If flat world was the big wave of the last 5 years – shifting costs of operation away from high cost and into low cost – then the next wave of innovation will come in the form of automation. In a sense, what I’m saying is that some thing is actually cheaper than off-shore low cost operations – no-shoring. You can see it in many industries, when you want to beat cheap labor you automate production, and the same is bound to happen in the IT industry. I do not predict an end to the off-shoring movement, quite the contrary, it is here to stay and will continue to grow strong. There will be a synthesis between the two movements as certain tasks will get automated, or enabled through smarter tools and improved packaged solutions. As we move up the downward escalator (as Geoff Moore describes in Dealing with Darwin) the old non-valued parts of enterprise software landscape context will be designed out, and new parts will enable faster operation and innovation.

That’s where the eco system comes into play – what the open platform enables is the next generation of edge-processes. By simplifying consumption and freeing innovation budgets the eco system will flourish again with new products that can be deployed much faster across the enterprise. The core solution platform with the strongest catalog of Eco-system solution always wins. Ask Microsoft if you don’t believe me, that’s how they wrote the Windows story. To a certain degree, if SAP holds the source of axis for the box, the Eco-system players are the ones holding the outer vertex of the box, and pulling on it outwards – expanding the volume and value of the eco-system.

How far is this vision from reality? well, you can easily measure. Check to see how many suite cores are actively deployed at accounts (last I counted they are adding thousands of ERP installations every year). Check to see how much of the system is covered through enterprise services and how many NetWeaver installs are going live (about 500 a month, right now), and check how simple it is to get a full suite up and running (my goal was to do it in under 7 days). Finally, check how many eco-system solutions are made available by partners of SAP, and how many of them had a valuable exit, selling to SAP or even going public.

The combination of SOA, SaaS (whether on premise or off premise), new hardware (cloud architecture) and interdependent eco-system of innovation is the foundation of next generation of enterprise, or as I called it Enterprise 3G (E3G). Hasso discussed some of the characteristics in his keynote that opened sapphire Atlanta, If you read through the last five posts (sorry for going long on you – but you always know you’re going to get that long when you come to my keynotes) – you can get the blueprint for how I see SAP and the industry going forward. I hope I end up correct. I hope SAP still wins at the end – for the sake of our customers.

Shai

Stanford Presentation

This week I had the pleasure of being invited to speak at Stanford University - in what they call Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series. I have a confession to make - I tried to get into Stanford back in 1990, my application got rejected and I convinced my Dad to start Quicksoft - which became TopTier and a few other companies). So, when they ask me to come and tell my story to students I always say yes, as a way to share with the younger smarter students what lies ahead - after they leave stanford.

Over the years I found out that most of the metaphors I use come from the world of science and so I have a new set of lectures that I call "Nature of Business" - where I share some of my past experience and provide a way to look at those situations through the laws of science. I beleive a lot of technical people can relate better to the science than the art of business, so I hope that they can take the imagery and build a framework in their mind that will help them make the right decisions more intuitively.

I was already asked to convert the presentation into a book, so I might start posting some entries here in the blog and see what you guys think. If you like the PodCast and want to hear more - shout!

shai

Dimension 3 – Simplicity

The last and probably toughest part of our efforts at SAP was to simplify the consumption of SAP’s software by the customers. Simplification can be viewed as the attempt I mentioned in past entries to eliminate “IT tax” imposed on the whole industry by, well… by the industry. Every industry goes through stages where every rule is up for re-evaluation – these are the transition stages, such as the time where the industry went from big-iron to distributed Unix boxes. After those periods of great change, we tend to fall into a period where inertia drives continuous innovation with more and more extensions along an established architecture and business models. This is the classic innovation model detailed so well by Clay Christianson in his innovation series.

The last wave locked into a model where the application comes to the customer as “almost-done”, with various vendors allowing the customer (usually through a system integrator) to continue and modify the solution to fit their needs. No matter how many times we tried in the past to convince the customer that the offering is “complete” or “out-of-the-box” there is just too much inertia in using all means to fit the solution to the customer processes and not the other way around. I find an industry that spends a high multiplier of cost for implementation and operation to the original cost of the license as an industry that is ready for a disruption – in the classic Christensen model.

The effort this industry needs is a strong analysis of where the money goes to (in the true Total Cost of Ownership) and a concentrated attempt to design the costs out by changing the product, go to market, and eco system so that they just cannot accept the cost any more. Doing so successfully would not only make the customers happier – it would release many funds currently captured in the operational cost structure back into capital investment in the form of innovation.

Take as an example the BI accelerator (BIA) that SAP shipped almost a year ago now. BIA was one of the smartest software innovations that were created at SAP in the last decade – an algorithm that allows a system to store data warehouse in columns instead of rows – leveraging the low columnar variance to compress the data and distribute it across many CPUs. The result was a multi-billion record data warehouse machine that can retrieve any query in sub seconds. Amazing innovation. The team came to me with the software, and won an innovation competition inside SAP (in a wonderful battle of the geeks during our Developer kick-off). To install the software, you needed to be an expert in so many different domains – from hardware optimization to Software setup and analytics. I asked the team to finish the product – “get me a box that can be setup in one day with one on/off button”. Without aiming for that kind of solution we could not have scaled the deployment. The team delivered and BIA actually got the 100x performance boost promised and then some.

The interesting result, we did not understand up-front, was the elimination of the complex human element required to operate a data warehouse. You see, the highest cost in data warehousing is not the disk or cpu, rather you need to figure out how to eliminate the need to constantly “lift the database” by optimizing aggregates and improving query response times. By storing the data in memory you eliminate the ability to speed data access (Well, you also eliminate the need by getting to sub-second response). The result you should see when BIA takes hold will be a shift of that cost structure away from base technical maintenance into smart analytic applications (that and less database usage - which is an added bonus).

I have shared in previous keynotes projects such as Muse for simplification of UI, but there should be more such efforts eliminating costs out of installation, configuration, testing, general operation, etc. SAP announced some products aimed at similar simplification during Sapphire – such as the Duet appliance, or even Duet itself. I believe the next massive industry disruption is coming, in the form of massive TCO reduction. Most of that reduction will be in the packaging and system integration around the product – and some of it will be engineered into the product itself. SAP is in the best position to drive that change – you see, SAP doesn’t have a problem of trying to figure out how to connect lots of pieces together to make a solution happen. Instead of that SAP can work from a single blueprint and affect the change horizontally across the entire suite, and for all industries.

Second dimension – Platforming SAP

In a continued set of posts, I am examining the three dimensions of SAP over the last few years, and into the near term future. This one focuses on the introduction of the platform at SAP and the change it introduced to customers and software suppliers alike.

Undoubtedly the most dramatic set of decisions SAP has taken over the last 5 years revolved around the shift from an applications only company based on a closed proprietary platform to basing our solutions on an open standards-based platform (counter to ORCL's advertising). The decisions manifested in the creation of NetWeaver – supporting duality of ABAP and JAVA in a unified stack – and the decision to open SAP’s collection of processes to consumption through Web Services technologies as we have called them Enterprise Services.

While ABAP is a great domain specific language, designed and optimized for data centric transactional applications, it has never caught up as a general purpose programming language outside the domain of few aficionados. At the same time, SAP and the SAP customer base has a huge vested interest in making ABAP successful, to the tune of probably $100B in software that is implemented and running 7x24 at tens of thousands of customers. The need to support a new programming language did not emerge from the desire to improve ABAP – quite the opposite – it came from the desire to attract new talents trained in Java into the SAP camp and letting them leverage the greatest collection of enterprise processes by writing code in a language they are used to from school. The end result of the effort is a reviving of ABAP and basis as the most popular provisioning process platform, and NetWeaver's Java as the most integrated composition engine on top of those processes.

We had to decide at SAP two major decisions at the time: the first was whether we should build a platform or sign up with one of the vendors like IBM WebSphere or Microsoft .Net. After a serious evaluation it became very clear that if we choose one we have to choose all middleware platforms. As result of the fact that none of the vendors agreed on a real set of standards and they all diverged by more than 90%, we have come to the conclusion that we have to build our own platform. The harder derivative question around the technology platform became "should we keep this new platform for ourselves or sell it as an open middleware platform". Had we kept the platform to ourselves we would have only caused every customer to have NetWeaver as one more platform with high integration costs between technology stacks.

At first it seemed as though we will have no chance to penetrate the middleware market, but as numbers show we had done an amazing job. NetWeaver had launched in earnest in January 2004 – only three years ago. A year later, in Q1 2005, Merrill Lynch reported that we have reached the brave position of 1% (yes, ONE percent) of what the call "intent to buy" market share. Since then, NetWeaver created a significant adoption wave and ASUG reports more than 50% of SAP customers have picked NetWeaver as their strategic platform. Similarly Merrill Lynch reported in early January that NetWeaver reached 16% intent to buy market share in middleware platforms. That number is amazing especially when put in context - .Net had 17% market share, but every other Java platform (WebSphere and Fusion included) had less than 16% intent to buy share. That positions NetWeaver as the Java middleware market leader – and that is after 3 years.

The main driver in my view was the decision to combine processes with technology in the creation of a business process platform – manifested through the opening of processes through web services – the Enterprise SOA strategy we have embarked upon a few years back. As it happens, we started building composite applications under the xApps brand a few years back, and as we started building more and more of these composites we collected a list of processes residing in the suite that we exposed through an API. This is like extracting a dictionary out of a textual body of work (in our case the shakespeare and the bible of processes). Once you wrap those processes with web service interfaces you create an SAP dictionary and the big question was – do we keep THAT secret sauce to our selves or expose it to ISVs.

The question is the same as a country that enjoyed tariff protection around its borders forever and now decides to accept free trade over night. It is a scary proposition, and a tough decision, since you can open up and get a wave of innovation as an up side but also cannibalization of the account base as potential downside. The decision came down to not only open up but proactively evangelize the platform to ISVs through SDN and even help them get funded through the NetWeaver fund. The amazing wave of innovation that swelled around SAP was rewarded by more customers getting xApps, as well as SAP being able to acquire ready made solutions like GRC and xMII from Virsa and LightHammer.

The combination of technology openness and process openness created a new SAP proposition – one that is a platform for many companies to build on, inside a company or inside an industry. The adoption of an open ERP together with the current adoption of NetWeaver (500 installations going live every month!) makes that vision into a reality.

Missing presentation - Dimension 1 - Functionality

The Functionality Dimension

As I said in the intro to this presentation there are 3 and a half dimensions I will cover - today the main one - functionality.

Historically SAP worked a very simple formula – build more functional coverage (in other words cover a new process/transaction set) and you cover more users in the enterprise. The more users you support the more money you make – by virtue of the fact that the software is licensed by the number of users. The only problem with this model is you fairly quickly start going down a long tail curve and the further down that curve you go the lower the margin is for the next set of users you try to cover - less desire with higher cost to build. Let me try to illustrate without the assistance of a football field sized presentation screen behind me…
Every company needs a compliant general ledger (well, Enron suspended disbelief on that for a short period of time…but that didn’t last long) – so that puts ledgers at the top of the process curve, in a sense making it the blockbuster of processes. Similarly, most companies need to manage employees – hence HR is so big, but only half of the world’s companies need manufacturing process support (the services companies don’t manufacture anything…other than money), so you start pretty rapidly to run down that process desirability long tail curve. As you get to vertical processes you find yourself in segments that cover 4% of the market (25 industries – average 4% per industry), and from there you get to process of one, which is what the system integrators are really good at building once for each of their customers.
Some of the greatness of what SAP has done was in leveraging the horizontal presence in ERP to get to industry, and flipping that back around to embed all vertical expertise into a single copy of ERP. The industry “switch framework” that allows a company to turn any number of vertical industries in one implementation allowed for the understanding that market leaders span multiple industries (think about oil companies that are also chiemical manufacturing companies with a huge retail business in gas station outlets). By supporting such a unique framework you reduce the complexity of cobbling together the mid-tail processes which is the exact opposite to what ORCL did in buying a unique application for every vertical problem (try and put together Retek, PeopleSoft and G-Log in one environment and understand the meaning of the famous British underground warning “mind the gap”). Full disclosure: I was not in charge of converging these industries together in ERP – that happened before my time.
What we have done recently is to leverage this same technology and approach to create a model by which the core of ERP is stable and the edge processes can come around that core without disruption to the business – as we called them enhancement packages. That combination gives customers the best of both worlds – stable business processes where things don’t change but rapidly releasing enhancements on edge processes where processes are dynamic and rapidly adopted.
The on-going test though will be how much innovation will SAP continue to delivery through the enhancement packages. I believe that the next frontier will always swing from externally bound processes – in supplier/customer relationship which was the key issue beginning of this decade – back to in-bound processes around talent management and portfolio management which defines the second half of the decade. In a sense every time we look at a different asset class in the business and try to convert it quickly to more value on the P&L. If the 80s were focused on converting manufacturing capacity into orders and cash, the 90s were all about converting customer relationships into orders and cash, and this decade will be about converting skills (both product and people) into winning business. If that theory is correct the next set of process innovation will flip back again into ERP – look for improving the value of your people, the understanding of your manufacturing and goods delivery and enhancing the value you get out of your order to cash as you start dis-intermediating the players around your business and bringing in more margin in the process. The last asset class that is under-utilized and as result under valued, by the way, is risk which is the current and future hot spot for software.
If you look at where we at SAP moved on the axis over the last 2 or so years – you will find a lot to be happy about. The key pillars – ERP and CRM – have had tremendous progress. ERP is getting adopted by thousands of customers, and the rate had only picked up after the delivery of ERP 2005 (again full disclosure, I was only marginally helpful on that). The separation into core plus enhancement packages together with the SOA enablement of ERP made SAP ERP the de-facto ERP platform (see previous blogs) for any innovation around this market by any sane ISV. On CRM we have moved an amazing distance between CRM 5.0 and CRM 5.1 by simplifying implementation, UI and ability to scale. The functionality was always there, but once we made it usable, scalable and most important covering all the industry vertical capabilities, we made the suite a killer product. Putting these two pillars together in coordination with SRM and SCM addressing the full supply chain without the need for ORCL like x-Projects to glue between them (what’s with that? What happened to fusing products by re-writing from scratch???) created a tremendous process platform that by the end of this year has full coverage on all industries from one code base.
As I said, what I described is only the first dimension, but the most important one – historically that is what customers bought from SAP, and delivering on it for the last few years in the suite was critical to delivering on the main covenant of the “SAP-Customer” contract – after all SAP is still an application company. Tomorrow we will push the next axis.

Shai

PS. These are not independent axis – they define a three dimensional box…it is hard to explain as one of you asked without the big screen behind me – but work with me…I have less resources at my disposal now.

PS2. Hope you are enjoying Sapphire as you read this post..

Geek Dinner at Davos

On the last day of the World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, all participants put on their gowns and go to a multi-cultural gala event. In years past, the techie geeks and press covering them were excluded from the event, so a few decades back they started a seperate dinner called the Geek's Dinner. the place is a small restaurant, which will remain un-named, as in recent years the place is packed on that invitation only evening. The event is a real geek fest (and it takes one to appreciate a good geek fest). You cna find yourself sitting next to Sir Branson (Mr Virgin himself), Peter Gabriel or my friends Geoff Moore (who got me in) and Chris Anderson (who we missed this year).

Every evening (hosted by uber-geek Joe Schoendorf of Accel Partners and a board member of the Forum) evolved diferently, but this year we somehow got into engineering challenges, and I brought out my best party trick. It just so happens that this trick can get you a lot of free drinks in any bar, with the exception of a bar where the drinks are free already...and everyone is well into 170+ IQ score.   every evening (hosted by uber-geek Joe Schoendorf of Accel Partners and a board member of the Forum).
Since we all sat next to Tony "AlwaysOn" Perkins the cameras started rolling. Sergey disqualified himself by showing how he can solve the puzzle in less than 1 second (he must have parallel processed it...or simply embedded google into his brain), but the rest of the fire power on our table solved in sub-minute.

Enjoy the movie

The Missing Sapphire Presentation

The one Sapphire keynote you will never get to see...will be my 2007 Sapphire keynote.

Next week is Sapphire, the first one in years that I do not attend (I have been going to every one of them since 1999 – even when I couldn’t get good seats in the concert). There was a presentation I was about to share with all of you about our strategy, but it is pretty understood that once you are not accountable for the strategy’s execution you should not decide on the strategy either. In any case, I thought this one presentation should see the light of day – especially in light of some comments made over the last few weeks about the strategic direction for SAP in the post-shai era. My intent this year is to share with you all the 3 axis (plus the x-factor) of thinking we have applied to SAP over the last few years, and since the information in this presentation is not a secret, I figured you can enjoy getting a written version without the big lights, and larger than life screen behind me.

First of all let me comment on some comments I have been hearing recently – most of all about the new “back to basics” approach SAP should take. It is important, in my humble opinion, that SAP does not go back to anything – the path forward that the company had taken over the last 4 years was the right path, and if SAP needs anything at all it is acceleration not an about face. At the macro level the decisions taken, such opening up to web services standards and the great support for Java in NetWeaver (as Dennis described in remarks this week) were essential for the continuous success of the company. Imagine today an enterprise software company fighting at account level to justify why “Java is bad and SOA is a fad” and you can understand that the position would have been ridiculed across the industry. The fact that Oracle had followed every step of our path including the recent announcement of Project X (come on, at least pick another letter when you build an xApps-like strategy) in the place of Project Fusion shows that the technology strategy was the right one, and shaped the entire market. But, since I keep getting many talkbacks from you all, I will leave you for the final verdict.

So what were those three axis of innovation?
- The first and most fundamental one is the functionality axis – the one which SAP was built around for the better part of its first 30 years. SAP programmers define themselves by the transactional modules they have built over the years, and they continue to evolve and drive those modules from the key genome of transactional process understanding so unique to SAP.
- The second axis introduced a few years ago around the formation of NetWeaver is that of openness or platform. We had to make two key decisions around the platform-ing of the mySAP suite – one around the technology infrastructure (in particular should we buy from someone or should we build our own), and the other (much tougher) one – should we document our engines through Web-Services in ways that will enable smaller ISVs build solutions that target our core Suite accounts
- The last one, a fairly new effort that started a couple of years ago, revolved around the simplification of SAP. That whole effort revolved around simplifying the consumption of our solutions in ways that would eliminate waste, or as I called it “SAP Tax”. The thought process was fairly simple – find places where people had to perform tasks that did not provide direct business value and eliminate them through better design or better packaging of the products.
- The x-factor was the eco-system effort that we drove in earnest since 2004. The thought process was one rooted in the conviction that if we get a great collection of enterprise applications around SAP that can bring value to the customer, plug to the platform, complete the processes that were in the long tail of processes for each enterprise, without adding complexity we will get a true win-win-win relationship and all boats will rise with the rising tide. We saw that happening at a much faster speed than we originally hoped.

In the next few days I will dig deeper into each segment of these axis, as you go through your real sapphire, you can read here your “virtual presentation” – hopefully they will match. The team at SAP has been doing a great job, and will continue down that path. I can tell you that the work that the entire product teams had embarked on will continue and the path is the right one. We were getting the products like CRM to not only cover more functionality – but more importantly I also saw them getting simpler to deploy improved usability and opening up through a multitude of web services. That story cannot be turned around, nor will it be – SAP is marching forward to success.

shai

ps. This is the one year which the entertainment was my first choice...and I don't get the tickets anymore. if you get to go, get me the autographed disc.

What is ERP

I received a couple of followup questions on the topic of ERP as well as a question regarding whether Best of breed is about to make a comeback, in particular inside the core ERP domain. so instead of getting deeper in talkback land, I figured to post another one on the topic and clarify. I was also told that my posts are too long to read, so I will try to go shorter.

There is no doubt that ERP, which was a key differentiator for companies 10 years ago has become more context for some of the companies today, and for those who had bad implementations, even worse a costly commoditized set of processes (and if they picked a non-SAP product, a costly legacy set of processes). For the companies that know how to use ERP as a strategic asset there is no doubt that a great SAP implementation is a core component of their differentiation. If you ask Niall O'Connor at Apple as a CIO of one of the fastest growing consumer focused brands in the world what was the secret sauce behind their success - and no doubt he will point out the speed of their execution on iTunes, their scaling of supply chains for iPod, and the volume they run through their retail business as great proof points to the amazing role ERP plays at Apple (right behind the genius that Steve Jobs brings to the product design/strategy table). By the way, Apple's implementation of SAP is one of the most inspiring uses of technology in the enterprise. I hope one day to get Niall's permission to share with you some of the stories behind the scense at Apple.

Without a strong core ERP you cannot scale a company and you lose scale even on successful strategy. That is core - that matters. What is context, is a stale implementation that does not allow you to change corporate processes with any agility. What is interesting to ask in that case is what effect does best of breed have on that agility - hence on the value of these application assets. Well, the more applications you have designed separately, the less you can afford any change and the more you invest in the gaps between them. As a matter of fact, I believe Oracle's customers should hear the famous British Tube warning (that is their subway not their TV...) "mind...the gap!!!". If you have not been to the London underground, you will not get the story, but if you have been you know that the tube was badly designed so that there is a gap in some stations between the train and the platform, and yet instead of solving it, there is a big voice that just reminds you not to fall.

Does it mean that you should yank out every thing you have and install one vendor's software and nothing else. Probably not, you should evaluate carefully what makes sense to yank out, and what makes sense to interface, and phase out over time. The close to the core processes the harder it is to live with best of bread. But on the edges, I definitely see things on the boundary line of ERP that will get interesting offers from many vendors. Enterprise SOA was the way SAP designed a way to integrate these offerings by design, not as an afterthought. Vendors that will take advantage of that set of interfaces will not only help the customer spend less on technical plumbing, but more importantly make sure that the systems evolve over time in conjunction with the core engines.

The issue with best of bread is that like most products we buy in life, we can only sense the cost of acquisition, not the full life cycle cost. You pay for best of breed by moving away from buying software and into building systems. I believe that long term the market will always move away from building one off and into buying en-masse. It is just the direction that water and costs flow - downwards. the main issue we have to focus on is simplicity - and that is the gene that I was working on the most at SAP - simplifying our world and our customer's world.

Shai

ps. I was told today that someone cheered regarding my departure...I heard that is becoming a more popular sport these days in some parts of Europe. I promised that I will take myself lightly so I decided to link over to that post, but I read it first to see if he had a base in reality to anything he said, but since he must have lived in some distorted reality field, I figured you don't really need to read it...

NY Times starts operating a hybrid van

I was pointed to this post on gawker talking about the new plug in hybrid van which the Ny Times will experiment with over the next three years. While the post is very negative in tone (quesitoning whether the times gets it or not), I actually believe that Plug-Ins running into main stream is a great strating point towards tipping transportation from fossil fuels to electrons. While plug-in hybrids may be a bit of a strange in betweener they have the potential to get consumers more comfortable with the transition to the degree that each half step will seem natural - first you use electric power but can resort to fuel when needed, then you notice that you only used electricity most of the time, and you give up the combustions engine.

In any case, for those of you in NYC - check out this announcement of today's event. If you have been there - tell us about it.

THE NEW YORK TIMES LAUNCHES THE FIRST PLUG-IN HYBRID SPRINTER

VAN ON THE EAST COAST AND FIRST OF ITS KIND IN NEW YORK STATE

VAN TO TAKE ITS MAIDEN RUN FROM MIDTOWN TO

THE NEW YORK TIMES PLANT IN QUEENS

 

WHAT:
The first plug-in hybrid medium duty vehicle on the east coast and in New York State will be unveiled.

The New York Times will collect data for three years for the New York Power Authority, DaimlerChrysler, Electric Power Research Institute and ConEdison. The Dodge Sprinter plug-in hybrid vehicle can operate up to 20 miles in zero-emission electric mode or as a traditional hybrid with a diesel engine. A plug-in hybrid lends itself to a commercial application because it can be recharged with a 220-volt outlet overnight. The New York Times vehicle is among the first in a test fleet operating in the United States.

WHO:
Executives from The New York Times, DaimlerChrysler, New York Power Authority, Electric Power Research Institute and ConEdison.

WHEN:
Wednesday, April 11

10:45 a.m.

WHERE:
In front of The New York Times building