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Honda Insight Gets Most Votes in Consumer Poll

10 August 2000

Gasoline/Electric Hybrid Car Takes Top Honors for Innovation Among Electronics Engineers; Poll Itself Incites Controversy Beyond the Product List

    SAN FRANCISCO - Who says electronics engineers lack soul or passion?  Not 
ChipCenter.  Ongoing interaction with readers provides a new discussion topic, 
every week.  Most recently, "Engineering Elegance" -- which rates innovative 
consumer products for their functionality in design -- stimulated unusually 
high numbers of respondents.  Readers were opinionated, even nasty.  The 
overwhelming winner?  Honda's Insight Hybrid Electric Vehicle.  Other winners 
include:

    -- Toshiba America Digital still imaging camera
    -- Motorola Multi-Communications phone
    -- Ericsson Bluetooth phone
    -- Sony Digital musical player
    -- Panasonic Hard Disc Video Recorder
    -- Netpliance Internet Access Appliance

    WHAT:  ChipCenter is a popular tool for electronics engineers and
purchasers that consolidates editorial content, demand creation, interest
fulfillment and e-commerce transactions into one online source.

    To provoke reaction from its users, ChipCenter rounded up seven cool
consumer products that any gadget freak or engineer (one in the same person)
would love.  All reflect the innovation found in today's design engineering.
The reaction to ChipCenter's poll -- usually a much more sober affair --
brought out a range of emotional and articulate responses.  On the positive:

    -- "This is an elegant solution to the high cost of gasoline and the
       world's shrinking energy supply (Honda Insight."
    -- "One phone that replaces a belt full of individual gadgets (Motorola
       Multicommunications phone)."

    The negative was downright nasty:
    -- "This is a list for teenagers, not engineers.  Get real."
    -- "This is boring.  Let's talk about something more interesting like
       'What is the expected outcome of the Mars lander mission in 2002?'"

    VOTING DETAILS:  The rate of participation in ChipCenter polls is
unusually high for a technical site, but the 2nd "Engineering Elegance" voting
was exceptional.  Readers who anticipated the topic change cast their votes
immediately -- more than 80% of the responses occurred within 36 hours of the
new question being posted.

    ADDITIONAL INFO:  ChipCenter has been named as one of the 200 best B2B
companies inForbes.com: Best of the Web: B2B.  Interactive Week magazine's
"Head2Head" column gave ChipCenter an "A" as the interactive resource for
"bringing together in one place everything an engineer could want."