The automotive industry, forced to mend its polluting ways, appears to have seized on electrical vehicles (EVs) as a way to not only meet clean air mandates but also to catch up to changing expectations from consumers. And it certainly doesn’t hurt their image to be seen as green, rather than one of the main contributors to climate change.
Long content with the internal combustion (IC) engine, the U.S. automotive industry has been slow to pick up on EVs, losing leadership of EV technology and ownership to China and Europe. It may have been easy for U.S. automakers to dismiss the few drivers who took to Prius automobiles when the hybrid EV first appeared on the scene. They might have dismissed the success of the all-electric Tesla, which came out of nowhere (as Detroit may refer to California)—even when investor confidence made Tesla a more valuable company than their own.
More difficult to ignore were a series of government mandates the world over. The most aggressive mandate by China has stated that 25 percent of vehicles must be EVs by 2025. Japan would like 23 to 33 percent of vehicles to be electric by 2030. The environmental bellwether of California has stated there should be no new IC cars by 2035. U.S. President Joe Biden stated a goal of having 50 percent of all new vehicles sales be EVs, and while not a law, the U.S. government provides financial incentives to boost EV sales. Germany wants to go all the way: 100 percent electric passenger vehicles by 2050.
Tesla Serves an Example
A Tesla has a steering wheel, turn signals and pedals like a regular car—but don’t be fooled. You really driving an iPad—or more accurately, Tesla’s version of an iPad. With a conceit that is particular to the upstart automaker, the company made its own tablet. And to show it off, mounted the device to the right of the vehicle’s steering wheel and approximately in the same plane. It appears to float in space in the middle of the interior, displaying a distracting amount of information, enough to keep your eyes off the road or the dashboard—if there was one. The touchscreen is to display and control almost everything. The glovebox can only be opened from the touchscreen. Same for the airflow inside the car. Instead of the louvered vents in every other car, in a Tesla, you pinch and point on the screen to adjust the air flow. This applies to the side rearview mirrors, too. Their adjustment starts from the screen and ends with a multifunctional thumbwheel on the vehicle’s steering wheel.
It’s surreal. If not for the wheel and the pedals, driving a Tesla would seem like learning how to drive all over again. The first experience driving a Tesla will put you into one two camps, the traditional, status quo loving who ask, “Why did they have to change that?” and another, the more youthful, the digital natives raised on smartphones who ask, “Why aren’t all cars like this?”
Tesla’s success has made reluctant believers out of the automotive industry. Mercedes, making cars with dashboards for over a hundred years, introduced the 2020 S-Class sedan with a giant touchscreen smack in the middle of the space between the driver and the passenger. Although Mercedes has developed a blended pillar-to-pillar, eye-popping, 5K digital dashboard for its (all electric) EQS and offers it as a high-priced ($7,200) option, it offers the incongruously placed tablet as standard fare on newer models.
The touchscreen may be associated with electric cars but is not limited to them. However, an electrified vehicle can have many more of its functions available from a touchscreen or remotely.
Electrification offers many benefits over the conventional power systems it replaces, such as mechanical, hydraulic and pneumatic, and has a few disadvantages also.
Simplification
An electric car, with basically a battery and an electric motor, is a much simpler concept than a gasoline-powered vehicle. An IC engine has to be hefty enough to withstand repeated explosions (gasoline combustion), heavy reciprocating loads (cylinders), a liquid cooling system, a lubrication system so that it doesn’t seize, mufflers so you don’t lose your hearing and a system to trap pollutants (catalytic converter).
An EV does away with all that.
Control
The ease with which sensors and transmitters can be installed in electrical systems over mechanical and hydraulic systems offers micrometer control over their functions. Electrical signals can be controlled more granularly and lend themselves to computerization and AI. One pedal driving in an electric car (so called because releasing the accelerator pedal creates a braking action) is one of those why-isn’t-every-car-like this? moments. Quick answer: Because making current flow backward is easy and reversing energy lost as heat in the brakes is impossible.
Disadvantages
A EV’s disadvantages lie mostly with its batteries. The most commonly used EV battery packs are expensive, heavy, hard to source and exact a tremendous environmental and social cost in areas of the world that are most ill-equipped to handle it. But that is a story found in another place.Changing Habits
For a generation more comfortable with smartphones than automobiles, an all-electric vehicle that operates like an iPhone, as does a Tesla, is more of an expectation than a shocker. Veteran drivers, set in their ways, may have some adjustments to make. So, too, will the automotive industry that has for a hundred years cast and drilled engine blocks, bent exhaust pipes, and made radiators, transmissions and a peripheral industry that has grown alongside the automotive one (oil).
Not only do electric cars need a lot less stuff to be made whole but they also need different stuff. Are companies that made transmissions or radiators or services that put gas in the tank and oil in the crankcase … can they pivot to what is needed for EVs? EVs may be less needy of some types of parts but more needy of other types. An EV, which the public now expects to be decked out with tech, will create a bigger market for motors, sensors, microprocessors and connectivity hardware.
How Can We Help, Ask Tech Vendors
EV sales have been on the rise, even when the automotive industry was suffering during the pandemic, says a research report commissioned by Hexagon.
Hexagon (sponsor of the Automotive Section of this website), a multinational manufacturing technology vendor whose products can help simulate and manufacture many industries, has recognized the need for leadership in the automotive industry that must align with government mandates and consumer expectations. As would a department store that displays its merchandise for the season or occasion, Hexagon has repositioned its products as solutions to the automotive industry’s need to pivot.
Hexagon offers MSC Nastran, the all-purpose finite element analysis (FEA) program used primarily in aerospace that was acquired in 2017. The company adds Cradle, a computation fluid dynamics (CFD) program, for automotive use. Hexagon makes metrology equipment and systems. Perhaps most importantly, Hexagon makes industrial robots—and what better way for an automotive company to equip itself for an electrical makeover than with a team of versatile and tireless robots?
Hexagon offers Arrival Ltd. as an example of what a modern factory equipped with its multifunctional robots can do. The British company has created a “microfactory” for a mere $50 million that will churn out delivery vans. Ford and Mercedes factories cost almost $1 billion—20 times as much.
Amazon may have automated all aspects of warehousing but finds the “last mile” of package delivery slow going. The shopping giant wants to buy a hundred thousand electric delivery vans from Rivian, which would make Amazon’s delivery fleet roughly the same size as that of UPS, the nation’s biggest ground delivery service.
Amazon was an early investor in Rivian, a new EV company that may not have the cachet of Tesla’s sedans and SUVs but nevertheless has jumped ahead of Tesla with an all-electric pickup truck. Rivian’s R1T is already on the road, whereas Tesla’s Cybertruck is still in the lab.