The future of the car industry

I’ve blogged and lectured many times now on the future of cars, public transport, trains, and I’ve retained my view that private cars and public transport (taxis, buses and trains, apart from very high density systems like London’s Underground) will eventually be replaced by fleets of driverless pods or self-driving cars (most probably the pods in city areas and some self-driving cars for non-urban areas). It can’t happen overnight of course, and there are various routes to getting there, but now that we know Tesla is setting up a big factory in Germany, the fog has lifted a little on the near and mid-term future.

Tesla will make electric cars. They have always been the future, but efforts and laws to reduce CO2 emissions are significantly expediting the trend. For the purposes of analyzing the future of the industry, there are really three distinct parts to consider. Electric vehicles can be considered to be a chassis, that can be adapted and re-used across a wide range of vehicles, a cabin, with its more individual appeals and decor, physical comforts and luxuries, and all the electronics, intelligence, sensors, displays, comms, entertainment.

With expertise in all camps, Tesla can flourish, but its much greater global expertise in the battery industry puts it in pole position to make a few standard electric chassis models that can be marketed to other manufacturers. The existence of those standard chassis allows new small manufacturers to spring up to offer a wide range of vehicles customized for every niche. These manufacturers don’t need the range of expertise of the conventional car industry, with many decades of expertise making relatively dumb vehicles with combustion engines. They will only have to learn the skills of making the comfortable cabins to sit on those chassis. (Don’t you hate that word too, with no proper plural!)

The car industry is therefore finding that much of the value of its historic core skills is quickly evaporating while having to compete on fairly equal terms in a new market using new technology with new manufacturers.

An electric chassis can include the motors to drive each wheel, and could also be easily adapted if and when new energy delivery systems using inductive pickups from the road surface move into the market (already successfully demonstrated in buses), and if and when lithium batteries are substituted by super-capacitors. So companies like Tesla can carry on making their own high-spec electric cars/vans/lorries but also flourish in a parallel market selling chassis with built-in drives to other companies who just need to put a decent cabin on top. It’s good strategy to see competitors as a potential market. Co-opetition works too.

This could be devastating to most of the big car manufacturers. Where will their market differential lie? Basic everyday markets could use the standardized chassis. How could they differentiate a high performance car when Tesla already offer ones that go 0-60 in under 3 seconds? The various electronics and AI systems will not compete only with Tesla but with all the big IT companies who also see roles in these markets: Apple, Sony, Google already but likely Samsung, LG, Microsoft and Amazon following soon.

It is possible that some existing car manufacturers will adapt just fine. They’ve known for many years that this future was coming and those with good strategies will cope. It is very likely though that some won’t cope and that very many jobs will be lost from the existing vehicle manufacturing industry, already bleeding jobs thanks to automation. It’s certainly not an industry I’d want to invest in for a decade or so until the weaker players have been removed from the field.

The main uncertainty that remains is whether the new industry goes the self-driving vehicle route, with lots of expensive sensors and IT in every vehicle, or the dumb pod/smart infrastructure route, with cheap cabins and simple chassis powered and navigated by the infrastructure. The latter could be much cheaper in urban areas, while the former would be better outside towns. My guess is that in the far future, we’ll have both, with self-driving vehicles outside urban areas, and pod systems inside urban areas (self-driving vehicles can easily be made downwards compatible so that they can behave like pods when in town).

Powering electric vehicles in the city

Simple stuff today just to stop my brain seizing up, nothing terribly new.

Grid lock is usually a term often used to describe interlocking traffic jams. But think about a canal lock, used to separate different levels of canal. A grid lock could be used to manage the different levels of stored and kinetic energy within a transport grid, keeping it local as far as possible to avoid transmission losses, and transferring it between different parts of the grid when necessary.

Formula 1 racing cars have energy recovery systems that convert kinetic energy to stored electrical energy during braking – Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS). In principle, energy could be shared between members of a race team by transmitting it from one car to another instead of simply storing it on board. For a city-wide system, that makes even more sense. There will always be some vehicles coasting, some braking, some accelerating and some stopped. Storing the energy on board is fine, but requires large capacitor banks or batteries, and that adds very significant cost. If an electrical grid allowed the energy to be moved around between vehicles, each vehicle would only need much smaller storage so costs would fall.

I am very much in favor of powering electric vehicles by using inductive pads on the road surface to transmit energy via coils on the car underside as the vehicles pass over them.  Again, this means that vehicles can manage with small batteries or capacitor banks. Since these are otherwise a large part of the cost, it makes electric transport much more cost-effective. The coils on the road surface could be quite thin, making them unattractive to metal thieves, and perhaps ultimately could be made of graphene once that is cheap to produce.

Moving energy among the many coils only needs conventional electrical grid technology. Peer to peer electrical generation business models are developing too to sell energy between households without the energy companies taking the lion’s share. Electricity can even be packetised by writing an address and header with details of the sender account and the quantity of energy in the following packet. Since overall energy use will fluctuate somewhat, the infrastructure also needs some storage to hold local energy surpluses and feed them back into accelerating vehicles as required, and if demand is too low, to store energy in local batteries. If even that isn’t sufficient capacity, then the grid might open grid locks to overflow larger surpluses onto other regions of the city or onto the main grid. Usually however, there would be an inflow of energy from the main grid to power all the vehicles, so transmission in the reverse direction would be only occasional.

Such a system keeps most energy local, reducing transmission losses and simplifying signalling, whilst allowing local energy producers to be included and enabling storage for renewable energy. As one traffic stream slows, another can recycle that same energy to accelerate. It reduces the environmental demands of running a transport system, so has both cost and environmental benefits.

 

 

Isn’t graphene fun?

I’ve just been checking up on progress on supercapacitors to see if they are up to the job of replacing car batteries yet. It looks like they will be soon. Supercapacitors have lower energy density than lithium batteries, but can be charged extremely quickly.

My favoured technique is to build mats into the road surface every 50 metres (i.e. same as streetlights), and to charge the supercapacitor bank using induction as the car passes over them. That means that even a small energy capacity would be adequate. It wouldn’t have to power the car for 100 miles or more like a battery, but only for the first and last few kilometres of a journey where there are no mats. Otherwise, range wouldn’t be limited as it would charge all the time on the trip.

However, a few minutes ago I had another little spark of enlightenment. Why not also use the pads for propulsion too, using a linear induction motor?  (I like those)

If the pad gives an impulse to the car as well as a capacitor recharge, then the capacitor won’t need to be as big. And if the impulse is gentle enough, passengers won’t feel a jolt every time they drive over one.

Another little insight, hardly worthy of the name, is that with trains of self driving pods, the pods could be so close together on most journeys that they effectively have a continuous circuit from one end of the train to the other. That means that public transport pods that are only used locally and on certain routes might be able to get by with tiny capacitor banks.