Insights from autotech electrification in detroit 

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Transcript

Elena: I’m here with George Ayres at AutoTech Electrification in Detroit from AutoMobility Advisors. George, thank you for being here in this lovely auto tech living room. Thank you.

George: Thank you, Elena. Great to be here, a great event, learning all about electric vehicles.

Elena: Yes. And so this is going to be a great topic for today because you have such a wealth of knowledge not only in education, but just in general. So we’re going to dig deeper with the questions here, but first, the audience needs to know about you they need to know about your background, your story, so would love for you to talk a little bit more about your story and how you got to where you are today.

George: I’ve been an automotive for 30 years, basically. Being in the automotive space right now it’s probably changing faster. than it’s ever changed, which is really, really exciting. But I started like many interested in cars right at the time they were internal combustion engine cars, and motorcycles and related things and found a way to get into the car business and actually started in Ford Motor Company, answering the customer assistance hotline. So that was a lot of fun talking to customers directly when they were happy or not. And trying to figure that out. And then ultimately, working with dealers, working in product planning, got an opportunity to go work for Jaguar cars in the UK, which was super fun. And along the way, kind of got into the technology side a little bit more and ended up working with companies like Verizon. In fact, I have my Verizon socks I got here yesterday at the show and IBM in technology so kind of meaning a little bit more or less 13 years into the automotive technology side. And I have a lot of fun doing that because it’s changing so fast.

Elena: And that’s what I love about your background. So it’s not only at the OEM level, but this very, very technology heavy. So that’s why I love to hear your perspective on things. So just in talking about the show auto tech electrification here in Detroit, what were some of the insights or some of the panel discussions that have been happening over the past 48 hours that either intrigued you or something that maybe surprised you? Was there anything where you’re like, oh, wow, that’s that’s a little bit different than what I was expecting.

George: Sure. I think it’s a really, really good panel, some, some, some great participants. One that stood out for me yesterday was the panel kind of on consumer consumer adoption dealers, Ed Roberts, one of the dealer representatives was here very well. spoken about how dealers need to be more opportunistic about EVs. You might have heard that I thought that was really well done. Show grads from Cox was on that panel. So there was kind of a acknowledgement that there’s a lot more we can be doing to make EVs happen and really interesting panels. There’s companies here from a commercial side EVs, which people tend to forget is really a fast moving, EV concept. Lots of trucks, lots of medium duty vehicles, good for fleets to look at EVs. That’s an area we’d like to operate. So there’s a consumer thing we all read about. But the commercial side and fleets are really I think, pushing the envelope pretty quickly too. So it’s great to see all that representation here.

Elena: I agree. And the diversity of perspectives as well is also really great. So in this morning’s panel, even talking about the electrification of school buses, so we’re talking about your experience, what are you really excited to work on in 2024 in the arena of electrification, I know you have a lot of projects happening, but let’s just narrow it down, narrow down the scope to just electrification because be curious to find out with your experience in your background. What are you super excited to work on?

George: Sure. You know, a lot of my experience last 15 years is connected vehicles, and you can’t really have an EV without a connected vehicle. So but now you have charging stations and other parts of that system, also connected. Right? And everybody talks about data, right data is the new oil as we say. And that’s all part of that. So we’re kind of past the point of people talking about doing it. Now. They’re all doing it. Right. So every car is going to be connected in full stop. All the charging stations are going to have data flowing payment system, easier. Plug in charge is going to be very common. We work with a company that does for example, smart Evie routing. So plan your journey. For example, smart Evie routing. So you plan your journey, you can plan your charge time, add those journeys, right. So you can make it easier as an Eevee owner to go on a long distance trip. So you have kind of some choices about you know, do I want to get there faster, quicker total time. I want to have more charge at each point. So I’m willing to wait a little longer, which means I might have to go slightly out of my way to get a longer charge or a faster charge for more electrons essentially, and so you can kind of choose so it’s kind of a route planning but it takes into effect the EV nature of your car, specifically your car and all their around a surrounding charge. points on that journey within a certain area. And it’s really efficient and interesting, and you download it to the head unit of your car and away you go, right. I mean, you look it up on your smartphone and you push the button and you go.

Elena: What do you see in terms of collaboration between companies that is really interesting to you, right? Because none of us can really operate in this bubble, especially in this electrification ecosystem. Seems that everybody’s shaking hands with other industry. You know, OEMs are shaking hands with utilities and yesterday I was speaking to a gentleman from Nissan who was on the panel yesterday and he’s like never before I’ve I’ve been on a panel with the DTE with the the utilities. So that was different. So talk me through some of the collaborations that you’re seeing in this sphere of electrification.

George: I think, yeah. Neeraj from from Nissan. Great guy, did a great job yesterday. Yeah, I think there’s just so many, right there’s just take different angles of it, right? Payments and charging. There’s a whole group of FinTech companies that are trying to support that, you know, car IQ comes to mind, Sterling prices company that working with OEMs because OEMs are not payment companies, they build cars, they sell cars, right, but beyond that, it gets a lot harder a lot faster. We saw that with software, software development, right. And some of them invest other companies carry out and BW for example. Some of them tried to create it themselves, but they’re not supposed to be good at everything they need to work with other providers. So, you know, the obvious are ChargePoint providers, but the payment side of that is a different it’s a FinTech strategy. You know, there’s even collaborations that you know, that we see with mapping companies, as I mentioned, and all kinds of other you know, other services companies right, I saw our friends from Parkopedia here, for example. That’s a basic concept right? I need to be able to do that whether it’s TV or not, so I got to put that in my car. So just so many ways that I think OEMs can collaborate. And the good news is they’re more open minded now than they ever would have been. They realized they have to have partners to get the job
done.

Elena: Shout out to Parkopedia because they’re gonna be the episode right before this squad so I spoke with Parkopedia and yeah shout out to Adam for Parkopedia but I love your perspective on this because like you said, you know everybody has kind of up until this point has stayed in their lane right? This is the thing that I do really, really well and haven’t really deviated from that and let’s be real, many, many years. Some of the projects that you’re working on that are maybe in the pipeline. I don’t know if you can share any details on that or is it completely just under wraps a total secret black box?

George: No, I think one that comes to mind. It’s interesting. You know, we hear a lot about autonomous vehicles right. And kind of the way to autonomous is what we call a das right advanced driver assistance systems that’s lane Keeping cameras and all kinds of things that cars have now and we’re working with a startup smaller company that’s working on eight s based insurance products. So calculating driver risk, but using the eight s tools right So up till now most usage based insurance has been kind of old school we call OBD. Two dongles that tell you whether you’re accelerating or braking, not using the camera not using the radar LIDAR systems not understanding that lane keeping and adaptive cruise control systems. So raise it up a lot higher and precision. And what can you do with that right when you know the context of what’s happening in the car. So if you’re using a camera, you know the driver slowed down for the stop sign, but never came to a stop and slid through the stop sign. You would not know that otherwise you would just know gentle brake and it sounds like that drivers have saved driver. But when you see the camera video that shows them sliding through the stop sign that changes your risk calculation, right. So understanding the context of the car and its operation, not just the driver behavior or what’s happening in the car is interesting. And there’s all that data there. It’s all in the car. We just have to get to it. Right so one of the cool things about this company is they’re using edge processing techniques. So they calculate the driver score in the car. So the only thing that you have to transmit is the score, not the not the data, right, which helps privacy, it helps reduce costs for the OEM. There’s a lot of advantages. So we’re having a lot of fun talking to companies about things like that, you know, it’s not per se electric, but it’s it’s using that advanced driver assistance. systems in a new way. And it’s something I think you’ll see everywhere eventually.

Elena: George, this has been lovely, thank you for joining me here in this Ward’s Intelligence living room. This has been lovely. Can you please share where folks can go and get in touch with you and maybe even ask you a question if they have a question from our interview today.

George: automobilityadvisors.com Obviously LinkedIn, pretty active on that. We have a newsletter called The automobility roadmap, please sign up for that. We do that every two weeks. So we don’t try to you know, bomb your inbox but we make it interesting. It’s mostly about electric vehicles. So if you’re interested in electric vehicles, sign up for the automobile, your roadmap. Thanks for letting me be here. Great, comfortable living room. Thank you very much here at auto tech electrification.