During my stay with my daughter in Carmel, Indiana (near Indianapolis) I finally managed to visit a local club. During my previous stay I couldn’t as all clubs in the region were “on holiday” with Thanksgiving.
Finding the clubs is easy with the Rotary app on the mobile.

My daughter took a day off so she could take me and join the lunch on 1 April.

Always interesting to see how other clubs work and how they can be different.
A pretty large crowd, men and women. Relaxed and friendly atmosphere. Efficient handling of visiting Rotarians with attendance slip that also functions as a badge.
They read the 4-way test, as we sometimes do. Different: a (Christian) prayer and allegiance pledge to America, those would be a definite no-go in our clubs (non religious and we are many nationalities and religions). No “Happy Money” collection. Contrary to our club, I guess few visitors (only me!).
I made a short introduction of our Beijing Club and we exchanged banners.

The presentation was for me very interesting: the speaker gave an overview of the operation of the “Bankers Life Fieldhouse”, the Indianapolis indoor stadium for basketball that houses the Indiana Pacers. Just a few days earlier I visited the impressive stadium for the match Indiana Pacers – Chicago Bulls. As I worked before for the Olympics I could appreciate how much the sports industry is advanced there, certainly compared to China that is decades behind. The whole setup, security, facilities, food and beverage, merchandise outlets, the fan clubs, the atmosphere: whaw. Great stuff. See the figures of what it means in terms of contribution to the economy…

I hope next time to re-visit the club and maybe visit others in the region.

We tried another location for our weekly lunch, this time on 15 March we were in the Westin Hotel.

The speaker was Nevijo Mance, Vice President of Research and Development Projects at BMW Beijing. He presented BMW’s automated driving technology.

When developing automated driving technology, efficiency and low emission remain as long term challenges. Different countries have different emissions standards. In order to fulfill the raising CO2-emissions and fleet targets, significant shares of BEV/PHEV-vehicles are necessary. BMW i3 takes advantage of the benefits of a pure BEV architecture. Laserlight is the latest innovation of BMW Group. It enables excellent visibility of 600 meters, great energy efficiency and is harmless to human eyes. Digitalization is driven by politics, new players and evolving customer requirements. BMW’s latest innovations include Gesture Control and Touch Command. Current advanced driver assistant systems play an important role in protecting people. The new 7 Series already provides functions very close to highly automated driving.

However, true automated driving still means a big step because of a responsibility switch from man to machine, from no system/driver only to driverless vehicles. The Highly Automated Driving Architecture has both on-board and off-board intelligence to enable localization, perception and trajectories planning. Environment models are still very restricted when compared to human perception. Price levels of current high performance lidar sensors are a concern, but cost efficient alternatives are already on the horizon and expected to become mass market compatible. Remaining challenges comprise industrialization as well as technological, social and legal aspects.

(thanks to Celine for the pics and the overview)

It was also Cornelia’s Farewell, we will miss her, she is one of our “old timers” in the club. She will leave Beijing at the end of March. She will look for a new club in Berlin. She thanked the members of Rotary Beijing for a great time and expressed her hopes that she would return in the future.
That is a constant concern in our club: people leaving, because their assignment is at the end or they retire… or they run away because of the pollution…