HotWire

SAN JOSE, CA (FCN) -- A new technological innovation, the first major advance in recent memory not discovered in the FCN Lab, promises to raise new channels for global product delivery and make car buying a lot easier.

Samuel Cooke, a computer programmer with Lucent Technologies and freelance software developer, just released the beta version of a Physical Deanimation Cyber Copier called HotWire that he says can send copies of physical objects like cars and trucks over the internet.

“The vehicles are scanned into a computer and then broken down digitally into super small fragments, even smaller than an atom,” Cooke told a collection of technology enthusiasts and journalists at Google headquarters in Mountain View. “Computers act as storage hubs, holding bits of many different cars at a time. Whenever you download a vehicle, you facilitate other’s transfers.”

HotWire is not exclusively for those in the know. “Anyone can have access,” says Sergey Wagoner, head developer on Cooke’s research team. “These tiny CarBits are made available online to any user with the right software and a fast internet connection. It can take a few days of downloading, but end users are able to download complete copies of current model vehicles for free.”

And the vehicles are fully functional.

Todd Weston, a test driver for Ford, recently took a copied Land Rover LR3 on the highway. Weston, who has driven several thousand cars during his testing career, reported no difference between the cyber car and the real one. “It handled beautifully, cornered like a dream and accelerated about as poorly as the normal Rover,” Weston said with a smile in a post drive interview. “Next time I want to get the fully equipped version with a built in DVD player and TomTom.

Unlike Star Trek’s “beaming,” a HotWired car remains on the lot and can be purchased by a user. But paying money for cars may not be necessary in the near future as software developers create user-friendly programs that can search for and download cars.

“The market is already saturated with free programs car download programs,” explained ScuttleMonkey on Slashdot. “Besides Cooke’s HotWire, you’ve got CarDonkey, OverCar, Careaza, CarMX, CarTorrent, CarPheus, eCar, CarNucleus, CarShare and Karzaa. Some of these programs have model specific filters and you can copy from a specific lot if you know of a car you really want.”

Car manufacturers, already struggling from declining revenues and increasing labor costs, are feeling threatened by the new technology. Detroit native and General Motors CFO Fritz Henderson issued a press statement last week, expressing some of his company’s concerns. “Real people work real hours in real plants to bring home real food to their real families. With HotWire, consumers will have access to our products and we won’t see any of the advantages of our work. If this continues for very long, there won’t be any cars to copy and thousands of hard working Americans will be out of a job.”

Asked if he sees HotWire as facilitating theft, Cooke answered that he is just trying to make information more available to the world. “I’ve heard the ‘piracy’ allegations and quite frankly I think they’re a load of blue collar crock. A car is nothing more than a organized collection of quarks and leptons – albeit a couple novemdecillion quarks and a few centillion leptons,” he said. “We’re not robbing any pensions here; just facilitating communication.”