As many as 83 elevators and escalators along with 48 generators for the Metro Bus stations will arrive from China next week, a senior official of Rawalpindi Development Authority (RDA) said.
“A total of 24 bus stations are being set up in the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad and each of them will have 18 platform doors, three elevators and escalators,” Rawalpindi Commissioner Zahid Saeed, who is also the Metro Bus project director said.
Around 432 electronic platform doors had already been imported, while the elevators and generators will arrive on December 30.
Saeed said the generators would be installed to run elevators, escalators and platform doors in the bus stations. The total cost of the elevators and escalators is around three billion rupees, he added.
The contractors, he said had already been asked to accelerate the import of glass sheets and other material for the establishment of bus stations. He said construction work on Metro Bus Service Project would continue round the clock adding that all efforts were being made to complete project at the given timeframe.
Starting from Flashman’s Resort Chowk in Rawalpindi, the Metro Bus Service Project will end at Pakistan Secretariat in Islamabad. The buses would cover a distance of around 23.2 kilometres through Benazir Bhutto Road, Faizabad, IJ Principal Road, 9th Avenue and Jinnah Avenue of Islamabad. Initially, 60 buses would ply between the twin cities, accommodating over 150,000 passengers
83 elevators, 48 generators for Metro to arrive next week
One Goal to Bring Together Industry Leaders
One Goal to Bring Together Industry Leaders for healthy competition, China International Motorcycle Trade Exhibition (Cima Motor) and PCMIC has One Voice
Are Chinese motorcycles posing threat’ to the Japanese & Indian industry Or It’s just another country doing business?
The Organizers Cima Motor and Pakistan China Motorcycle Industry (PCMIC) invite industry leaders to the 13th Annual Global China International Motorcycle Trade Exhibition (hereafter refers as CIMA Motor 2014), the largest motorcycle exhibition in Asia, Friday, Nov 14 through Sunday, Nov 17, 2014 in Chongqing, China.
This year’s theme, “Economic Parity: One Voice, One Goal,” will provide opportunities for the motorcycle makers and parts companies to join the exhibition & conversation in leveling the playing field for minority companies to do business.
The three-day exhibition & conference will connect automotive executives, entrepreneurs, suppliers, dealers, automotive manufacturers, advertising agencies, media outlets and others from across the motorcycle and parts spectrum to discuss strengthening and creating opportunities for people of color.
With the appearance of some credible-looking bikes like the CF Moto 650NK and 650TR, Loncin LX650 and the Qianjiang QJ600GS in recent months there’s been growing rumbles in the bike press about the Chinese industry.
Words like ‘threat’ and ‘invasion’ are inevitably bandied about, as if Chinese bike makers are dead set on crossing borders in massed ranks, wiping out the opposition through strength in numbers and cheap price tags.
The fact is that yes, China is becoming a bigger player on the world market, with overall numbers of Chinese-made bikes expected to surpass sales of Japanese machines in the near future (albeit mainly uber-cheap scooters, so while sales volumes are high they still account for a far smaller chunk of the overall amount of money being spent on motorcycling).
But those expecting the Chinese to come in and wipe out or seriously damage existing brands, mimicking the effect that Japanese imports had on European manufacturers in the 1960s and 1970s, have got the wrong end of the stick. History doesn’t tend to repeat itself quite like that, and China’s situation is very different to that of Japan fifty years ago.
Japan’s export strength was a function of the country’s engineering abilities, honed during WW2, and the fact that its economy was on its knees after the war. ‘Export or die’ might have been a British post-war saying but in Japan it carried even more truth, leading to government-controlled cooperation between companies with the simple intent of bringing more money into the Japanese economy. Firms were forced to work together, sometimes even merge, for the greater good of the Japanese economy. And the European manufacturers that Japan’s bike makers hurt were generally complacent, over-confident and unwilling to change in response to their new rivals. Those that rose to the challenge survived, those that dismissed it didn’t. Modern businesses, those that survived the Japanese challenge, were part of that challenge or have grown up since it, aren’t likely to behave in the same way. They operate in a global market quite unlike that of the 1960s, when national pride, tax strategies and insular thinking meant buyers were far more likely to buy home-grown products than imports.
China is in a quite different economic position to 1960s Japan. Its economy is already huge – the second largest after America – and wealthy (it’s the largest creditor in the world, lending money to other nations). It’s also got an enormous population with fast-improving standards of living and wages. The result for Chinese bike firms is that the big money is to be made not by exporting to Europe and making large-capacity, Euro-friendly models but by concentrating on the ravenous home market. Sure, Chinese scooters are doing well in the UK, but largely as a result of western import businesses seizing opportunities to buy cheap bikes over there and flog them for peanuts over here. For the Chinese manufacturers themselves, we’re small fry in comparison to the millions of potential customers they have on their own doorsteps.
Yes, now some big bikes are starting
to emerge from China, but once again the target isn’t a Japanese-style export boom – they’re simply reflecting the growing affluence in China itself (where the likes of Ducati now also sell bikes to
the growing numbers of wealthy Chinese businessmen that seem at odds with
the concept of a communist country).
If those bikes also appeal over here,
then why not offer them to us as
well?
The bikes they’re turning out look increasingly decent, and in future you might well end up riding a Chinese-made bike (don’t scoff, your dad probably would have done the same if you’d once suggested he’d ride a Japanese one). However, it won’t be because Chinese bikes have somehow destroyed the industry elsewhere, it will be through choice. There’s also a good chance it won’t be a Qianjiang, Lifan or CF Moto, but something with a much more familiar name; after all, your iPod was almost certainly made in China but it’s still an Apple product. Honda has factories in China, along with other established brands, while yet more already outsource production of components to Chinese firms. The fact is that China is already a world-stage player in the bike market – not a ‘threat’ or an ‘invasion’ but just another country doing business.
In addition to shifting from transportation-oriented motorcycles to large-displacement motorcycles, Chinese motorcycle manufacturers must change their marketing approaches to meet new market requirements. Consumers of large-displacement motorcycles are completely different from consumers of small-displacement motorcycles in terms of education background, life style, consumption levels, consumption habits, and consumption psychology. However, researches reveal that the manufacturers adopted the same showroom sales approach for the two different types of product. In overseas markets, manufacturers pay more attention to culture display and product experience for every large-displacement motorcycle model. Instead of launching advertisements that have poor message delivery effect, manufacturers tie brand value with services and influential public events such as club activities and motorcycle race sponsorship to generate culture recognition.
About Author:
Muhammad Yousuf Shaikh, An Auto Industry Consultant, Motorcycle Industry Expert, Motorcycle Designer, China Sourcing Expert, Serial Entrepreneur and the Founder & Chairman of Pakistan China Motorcycle Industry Council (PCMIC), offers his analysis of the motorcycle trade & industry trends from Pakistan & China. The Chairman PCMIC working with motorcycle trade & industry for over two decades, Yousuf believe that new projects could help motorcycle industry to design and produce new design, new tech & large displacement motorcycles in Pakistan to compete with Indian motorcycle industry as Pakistan offered exclusive incentives in taxation on new entrant to manufacture new design, new tech & large displacement motorcycle. For further details and for assistance please email at [email protected]
Governor to open 7th Engineer Convention
Punjab Governor Ch Muhammad Sarwar will open the 7th International Engineering Convention on December 23 (Tuesday) in Lahore. The two-day International Civil Engineering Congress is being organized by the Institution of Engineers Pakistan for the first time in Lahore on Dec 23-24. The IEP Lahore Centre chairman Capt (r) Engineer Khalid Sajjad said that the Convention, arranged by the Institution of Engineers, Pakistan Lahore Centre, will deliberate upon the theme ‘Development of Infrastructure’ with special focus on construction of large water reservoirs and dams in the country including KBD. Khalid Sajjad said that the purpose of this congress is to familiarize engineers, executives and departmental engineers with the new techniques in civil technology especially in constructive solutions. He said that this conference is also aimed at extending the work to science and technology development with particular focus on national economic development, water and agriculture, material and minerals, construction technologies, risk mitigation, environmental engineering, sustainable development, roads, highways and bridges.
Pakistan exempts taxes on import of solar panels
The government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif exempted customs duty and general sales tax on import of solar panels for promoting alternative and renewable energy in Pakistan.
Currently, the customs duty is applicable at five per cent and general sales tax (GST) at 17 per cent on imports of inputs as well as finished solar panels.
As per the decision, local manufacturers will now import duty free inputs for local assembling of solar panels, while importers will also enjoy duty exemption on import of finished solar panels.
A senior official in the ministry of industry said that the decision was taken to bring manufacturers at par with importers of solar panels.
“This decision will promote healthy competition in the domestic market,” said the official who requested anonymity.
Electric Rickshaws Will Hit The Roads of Pakistan Soon
It seems like a great time for electric vehicles in Pakistan. We are seeing more and more hybrid cards on the street, initiatives aiming to replace motorcycles with E-bikes are gaining steam and now, we will also be seeing the Electric Rickshaw on roads in Pakistan. The new vehicle is called the Z5 E-Tricycle and it is going to be launched by Zar Motors.
Electric Rickshaws
The E-Rickshaw looks sleek and visually, it is a step up to the traditional ones we see on the roads currently. It converts sunlight into energy and is expected to have significantly lower running costs.
Charging and Mileage:
The biggest issue for electric vehicles is charging and it seems like the Z5 takes care of that nicely. It can be charged through any normal outlet (100V-240V) just like your cellphone. You can charge the battery up to 80% capacity in 2 hours while a full charge would take around 7 hours. The 80% charge will last for about 50 kilometers.
While there is no information about pricing just yet, it’s safe to assume it will cost more than a traditional rickshaw. According to the company’s own estimates, the cost of buying an E-Rickshaw will be paid off in 14 months. The Rickshaw will have capacity for 1 driver and 3 passengers although it can be extended upon request.
For major cities like Lahore, the E-Rickshaw could be an amazing replacement. We know that we’d prefer it over regular rickshaws for the noise and air pollution reductions alone.
Khwaja Ahmad Hassan, adviser to CM Punjab, was recently seen testing the Z5 E–Tricycle recently at the CM Office in Lahore. That makes sense since the use of these new vehicles is already covered under the Rozgar scheme by the government. We just hope that the benefits of the E-Rickshaw outweigh the initial costs so that Pakistan can move towards a greener future.
Price and Availability:
The price and availability of the E-Rickshaw are unknown at the moment.
via ProPakistani
Chinese Drivers Welcome Our New Robocar Overlords
A poll released today suggests that driverless cars appeal most in China and India and least in Japan, with English-speaking countries—the only comparison group—taking the middle ground.
The Japanese position at the bottom and India’s near the top are strange. Could Japan’s reputation for robo-philism be unjustified? Was the survey—conducted online—unrepresentative of opinion in China and India?
In their paper on the survey, authors Brandon Schoettle and Michael Sivak, of the University of Michigan, address the second question. They argue that “though the respondents in these two countries may not be representative of the overall population, they are likely to be representative of those individuals who would comprise the initial market for autonomous and self-driving vehicles in these countries.”
Here are some key numbers. Respondents who were “very interested” in having a totally self-driving car peaked at 47 percent in India (a little ahead of China) and cratered at 8.5 percent in Japan. The median respondent (that is, the one at the 50th percentile) was prepared to pay US $1600 extra for such a car in China; the sum was just a tenth as much in India, and precisely zero in the other four countries.
To probe the minds of possible early adopters, the pollsters list the premium that the 75th percentile would pay: $8,000 in China and $2,350 in Australia, with the U.S., Britain and India coming in a few hundred dollars lower. In Japan, these 75th percentilers would pay a paltry $465.
So how to explain Japan’s apparent coolness to autonomous vehicles? Maybe its reputation for liking robots has been exaggerated. Maybe one’s attitude to robots is irrelevent to the decision to buy them. Or maybe the Japanese are simply further along the famous Gartner hype cycle than we are; maybe they’re standing where the rest of the world will be, soon enough.
via IEEE
Cars That Look and Listen to Find Themselves a Parking Spot
Sharp eyesight can’t reliably keep you vertical if you have lost your sense of balance, which shows just how important it is to have several different senses at your disposal.
That’s the idea behind a system recently proposed by two Korean engineers to make a car better at finding itself a parking spot. Rather than depend on ultrasound sensors mounted on the grille, as some parking programs do, or on cameras mounted on all sides, the researchers fuse the two kinds of sensor. Three, if you count data from the odometer, which measures the movement of the car.
The auto industry is working on ways to automate the entire parking process, not just the last bit. And Audi, Volvo and Nissan have all shown off parking-space finders that perform well in controlled circumstances, say by linking to a parking lot’s WiFi system. But to work alone in an uncooperative world, cars will have to wring more data from their existing sensors.
Jae Kyu Suhr, an IEEE member, and Ho Gi Jung, a senior member, recently laid out a way to do that. The researchers are affiliated with Hanyang University, in Seoul; their work was supported by the Hyundai Motor Company.
Sensor fusion is tricky because the various sensors look at an object from different angles. The researchers solve the problem with a lot of math and some plain old ingenuity.
First, the car moves past a parking area, scanning for the marked edges of parking slots and for obstacles (such as a parked vehicle). The several cameras and the two ultrasound sensors of course provide different vantage points—what is visible to one sensor may be obscure to another.
At a given point, called a frame, the car processes all the information available to classify the parking area according to its structure—an array of rectangles laid out orthogonally, or on a bias, or in a staggered fashion, and so on. Now that the car knows what it’s dealing with, it knows what to look for: say, for the characteristic edges of a staggered rectangular parking spot.
By breaking down the job in this hierarchical fashion, the researchers say, their system can keep the computational time to just 32 milliseconds, compared with 82 ms for a vision-only system. “These results reveal that the proposed system can surely operate in real time,” they write.
Next, the car moves on to the next vantage point, giving each sensor system the chance to get a better view, at least of some features. Because the odometer tracks the car’s position, the system can figure out the new angle of observation and use it to update its earlier estimate. Besides improving accuracy, this continuous updating helps the system handle roads that aren’t perfectly flat.
Finally, the system offers a selection of possible spots to the driver, who selects one by punching a touchscreen. From this point, the system works like existing car-parking programs.
There are a few drawbacks. The system can’t work as billed at night or in dimly lit, reverberating underground parking lots. To overcome that problem the researchers are developing new algorithms and working with specialized equipment, such as cameras with greater range. Rather than try to make one size fit, all, they’d have independent programs to work in the light of day, at night, and in closed spaces.
Autonomous Emergency Braking
Humans are still a factor in the adaptation of automatic braking
The remarkable thing about letting a car do the braking for you is not that the car stops. It’s how late the car hits the brakes. It’s almost as if a teenager were testing his or her reflexes. Those of us raised on automatic transmissions and cruise control may expect cars to take flighty human drivers out of the loop rather quickly. But if my ride in a test vehicle at the 2013 Frankfurt Motor Show is any indicator, carmakers are taking their time taking over. Even the most imperturbable driving instructor might get jumpy using today’s autonomous emergency braking (AEB), also called advanced emergency braking systems.
AEB isn’t even a teenager: Mercedes-Benz introduced an early version with its 2005 S-Class. That system used radar to detect obstacles, warned drivers, and primed brakes so that they would be more effective when the driver finally used them. Yet in an indoor test in simulated foggy conditions, the car’s radar failed to activate the system. A journalist crashed one into another Mercedes-Benz during a televised demonstration. Company engineers later decided that the garage’s steel interior had confused the radar. But the technology is maturing, and the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP), a public-private car-testing body and the counterpart to the U.S. NCAP, will require AEB to obtain its highest safety rating next year
Now the state of the art is to use more than one type of sensor to cross-check for obstacles, carmakers say. Some complement radar systems with optical cameras. Today’s S-Class has short-range and long-range radar, optical cameras, and ultrasonic detectors for the closest obstacles. Optical cameras can be fooled by sunlight, wet roads, and night, of course, and ultrasonic sensors work only at the shortest ranges and lowest speeds. Certain research vehicles also include lidar, a radarlike system that uses light rather than radio waves. As the instruments grow smaller and cheaper, carmakers may include lidar in production cars as well.
Yet carmakers still hesitate to override a driver’s instincts. The German auto club ADAC reported in a test [pdf] that it deducted points from a BMW 5 Series for initiating only partial braking after warning the driver. But such a limited action may please self-confident drivers. Harald Barth, a product marketing manager at car supplier Valeo, says that one reason carmakers have kept the brakes on autonomous driving is that they want to win the trust of drivers. “We need not just to offer good systems but also to educate the end user. We are going step by step,” he says.
That will also give engineers more time to figure out how humans react to having control taken away from them. Last year, a pair of studies applied analyses called system-of-systems and operator sequence diagrams to AEB scenarios. They both found that when autonomous systems attempt to take over from human drivers, humans do not always respond well. Or sometimes drivers respond too well and do not react in time to take over again when the autonomous systems attempt to return control to them. The latter study sounded a grim note: “There are no formal methods for testing the performance of AEBs from either a technical or human factors point of view. The effectiveness of AEBs will, however, become increasingly clear in the coming years through fatality and injury statistics,” its authors wrote.
Going slow will also give Euro NCAP and other testing bodies more time to improve their testing capacity. Now Euro NCAP uses a small trailer as the crash target, allowing only simulated rear-end collisions, but it says it will develop targets simulating pedestrians, among other improvements [pdf]. For pedestrians, if not anxious driving instructors, that should be a relief.
via spectrum.ieee