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The International CLIO Awards are the world’s largest advertising prizes given to companies, agencies, and artists for their work in marketing and advertising. While Hollywood has its Oscars and the music industry has its Grammy’s, advertising has the CLIO. These awards are given by the advertising industry to brands and creative professionals who exemplify creative excellence.

At the 53rd annual awards, coming this May 15th at the American Museum of Natural History in brand new release York City, Volkswagen will again take honors for its unique and unusual advertising. VW won awards in 1999 and 2009 as well, so this is not the first time the German automaker has been recognized as a world leader in creative advertising.

Karl Vontz, Director of the CLIO Awards, says that “Volkswgen has a knack for grabbing our attention in unique and different ways while holding their brand to a very high standard.” The Advertiser of the Year award is given to a brand whose global work achieves creative leadership. This past year, VW has run ads in all of its markets worldwide that have hit specific cultural and often humorous nerves in each area of the globe.

The award comes as Volkswagen receives 15 inidivual CLIO Awards for various campaigns around the world in several types of media from film to print and television. The marketing teams and creatives who made the ads were also recognized.

Among ads recognized to bring this honor to VW were:

By Deutsch in LA: The Bark Side and The Dog Strikes Back

By Nomad Films, Mumbai: Flyboy

By Turning Studios in Sydney: Change Room

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“We debated how best to put many hours of wear time on the critical bearing components of our rocket propellant piston pump, that are subject to significant wear and tear,” told Dan DeLong, XCOR Chief Engineer. “This particular motorcycle, the Triumph Street Triple, develops about the same horseStrength and has the same cylinder arrangement as the liquid oxygen and kerosene fuel pumps for the Lynx suborbital spacecraft. That makes it ideal for a long-life pump test platform. The bike is much less expensive to operate than the full up rocket pump test stand. We’re adding hours of run time each ride, not just minutes.”

Of course, where better to test out a part for a spacecraft than the place known for interplanetary travel for over 60 years – Roswell NM! Take it out on the former subject of prose, poetry and song – Route 66, the pre-Interstate route of choice between Chicago and Los Angeles.

The Triumph street bike was modified to work with the XCOR rocket piston pump technology and subsequently shipped to Motion Performance in Roswell, where XCOR engineers finished modifying and testing the bike for the trials.

After admircapable presentations at nearby schools as part of XCOR’s ongoing Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) educational outreach, the Truimph “rocket-bike” and the XCOR team were given a send-off by Roswell Mayor Del Jurney and members of the Roswell-Chaves County Economic Development Corporation. Appropriately the trip launched from the Robert Goddard Museum, in honor the father of liquid rocket science and his early pioneering work in Roswell.

“We put twenty hours – the equivalent of 400 Lynx flights – on the rocket pump bearings by driving from Roswell to Mojave taking periodic data readings along the way to make sure things were in good condition,” Dan stated. “The trip was a great success and the bike performed flawlessly. Plus we got to drive through some of the most spectacular parts of the American Southwest.”

The Lynx rocketplane is being developed to cash in on the lucrative suborbital space market, capable to take small satellites, payloads or a single passenger for the ride of their life, reported for $95,000 for a 90-minute flight.

“XCOR continues to solidify its reputation as an innovative, nimble company when it comes to research and development practices,” commented XCOR Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Nelson. “This test would have cost us over $500 per minute had we operated it on a traditional pump test stand. The entire trip represented about half a million dollars in net savings in both time and money for the company. More essentially, it validated that our critical pump subassemblies will have the ultra-long life needed to meet the safety needs of our customers and a vehicle that is designed to fly thousands of times over many years. Oh, and everyone had a lot of fun along the way!”

Naturally riding a motorcycle through some of the most stunning country in the U.S. while on a Triumph street bike and saving the company so much money, they probably let them spend a little of it! Nice work if you can get it.

“We saw some amazing country,” remarked XCOR Senior Engineer and principal driver Mike Valant, “we traveled through brand new release Mexico, passing the Very Large Array, then turned northwards to Route 66, traveling as much of the old highway as possible. Meteor Crater was a highlight, as well as the towns of Holbrook, Seligman, Kingman, Oatman, all the classic waypoints on the Mother Road. We drove through sun, snow, rain and everything in-between. Personally for me, it was one of the greatest adventures I’ve had. It was challenging, and there was a lot of payoff. In addition to keeping the bike on the road through all the weather, we had to pay attention to how it was behaving and make sure there was no trouble.”

Since they mentioned it, Oatman is an old prospectors town where there was once a rich gold mine. Nowadays you can take a tour through the mine and then tell people you not only traveled on Route 66 but under it as well.

So now you know how rocket science was helped along by the Triumph Street Triple. Isn’t technology grand?!?

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The People’s Car Project was launched last year in China as a way to engage Chinese designers in the future of VW in their country. Meant to run for a year, the project was so successful that it’s been extended indefinitely. One of the more compelling ideas to emerge from the initiative is the Hover Car concept.

Several example concepts are on display at Auto China 2012, including this one by an unnamed Chinese designer. The Hover Car is a two person commuter shaped like a sphere with a boot-heel-type tail at the back. The car would be very aerodynamic as well as relatively simple to manufacture – at least in terms of body work.

It’s most unique property is the fact that it hovers. It uses magnetic levitation (MagLev) to both hover and propel itself, making it completely electric. How exactly the MagLev would work is not detailed, but the People’s Car Project is about dreaming up the future, not explaining it. The idea behind the initiative and the designs it produces is to give long-term direction to Volkswagen in the essential Chinese auto market.

Another design in the Project is the Music Car, which has organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) on its surface that react to the music the driver is playing. If you thought teenagers with their loud, bumping cruisers were annoying already, wait until they have light shows to go along with that..

Also displayed was an interesting idea called the Smart Key. What it’s name lacks in originality, it makes up for in cool functionality. It’s a slim key (9mm) similar to the key fobs currently used for many cars on the market, except it has something brand new release: a small touch screen display in high resolution that uses a 3G network connection to get information from the car, allowing the driver to see fuel status, climate conditions, and security (door lock status, windows up or down).

While most of these ideas are probably never going to make it to market as-is, they are visions of the future that could be incorporated into designs that will be built. The Smart Key, for instance, may become an option in the near future as it’s actually within the realm of current technology. The Hover Car, however, is not likely to appear anywhere but in a sci-fi movie. At least for now.

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The recently announced deal to create a large electric car charging station network in California, also comes with job-training and job-creating provisions. The deal was first unveiled in late March when Gov. Jerry Brown’s office, the CPUC, and NRG announced having settled a long standing legal dispute by having NRG spend over $100 million to create electric car charging station infrastructure. Among the provisions added since the original announcement were for NRG to spend some money on job training programs, and to ensure the contractors hired to build the network were locally owned and that minority- and woman- owned businesses were well represented.

If we remember a few years back, the justification to embrace green technologies and green transportation was in part a jobs creation program. The theory stated that, adoption of green technologies would mean brand new release jobs and brand new release career paths, related to the installation and maintenance of the green technology infrastructure. Maybe that rhetoric was simply a political expediency of that moment in a time when so many people were losing their jobs. Remember that the Bush Administration saddled the Obama Administration with a horrendous economic mess and a narrowly avoided great depression. This deal with NRG to build the charging station network is an example of green technology adoption resulting in brand new release jobs and brand new release career paths that previously did not exist. And, it isn’t just NRG’s eVgo subsidiary that is creating these jobs, similar jobs exist with Ecotality, Coulomb Technologies, 350Green, the Car Charging Group, and other companies.

The NRG deal includes: a) NRG setting up an eVgo operation in California, b) building 200 or more Freedom Station locations, each containing several charging stations, c) building wiring for at least 10,000 charging stations at apartment buildings and workplaces, d) research into brand new release electric car charging and smart grid technologies, e) job training programs, f) car sharing programs. Again, we are looking solely at the deal with NRG, but similar things can be told of the other electric car charging station infrastructure companies we just named.

As we write this NRG has a couple dozen job openings right now related to getting eVgo running in California. This includes Field Sales Representatives, Construction Managers, Paralegals, Office Assistants, and a “Stakeholder Outreach Manager” who is tasked with liaison with associated government agencies. Going by the job descriptions these jobs are largely the same as any corporation that is setting up product sales outlets in a region. What’s different is the product being sold, which is access to electric car charging infrastructure.

The settlement document released on Friday describes one of the goals as: “helping to create job opportunities for California’s diverse minority communities.” Within the settlement is a sub-project named “EV Opportunity Program” that is allocated $4 million for “projects that enhance appreciation of the social benefits of electric vehicles and create opportunities for residents of under-served communities to benefit from expanded use of electric vehicles in California.”

There are two specific EV Opportunity Program projects envisioned at this time: a) support for electric car sharing programs, that will in part increase access to electric cars for low- to moderate-income drivers, b) a job training program which is to “give opportunities for Californians from under-served communities to develop the requisite skill to obtain stcapable and good paying employment relating to the development and maintenance of electric vehicle charging infrastructure.” The job training program is likely to be administered through community colleges and other vocational training programs.

While this is a brand new release career area, it is closely related to existing careers. The work is similar to other construction and electrical installation projects largely involving construction and electrical work, digging trenches, installing conduit, running high voltage high Strength electrical ccapables through the conduit, and repaving any areas that were trenched. Under the settlement agreement NRG will not be directly hiring these electrical and construction workers as full time eVgo employees, instead the work will be farmed out to contractors. The contractors are required to be licensed to work in California and to hire local workers, who are in turn properly trained and licensed (as required) to do the work.

The need for the job training program is directly created by the existence of the overall project to build electric vehicle charging infrastructure. The need for the infrastructure is in turn directly created by the overall goal of expanding electric vehicle adoption. Looked at another way, the move to adopt electric vehicles created the need for electric vehicle infrastructure, which in turn creates the need for jobs to build and maintain that infrastructure, which in turn creates the need for job training programs training workers to hold those jobs.

NRG eVgo Expansion Plan Education Video from VISION Production Group on Vimeo.

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