Let’s face it: Sometimes driving that Bugatti Chiron becomes something of a bore, so it is time to, say, climb on board the yacht for a bit.
But at some point gazing at the Amalfi Coastline becomes tedious.
So it is time to go below to partake in a bit of pool.
Pool, anyone? (Image: Bugatti)
And the Bugatti Lifestyle collection has you covered with the “Bugatti Pool Table.”
It isn’t produced by Bugatti but a firm named IXO.
According to Pedro Sanchez, general manager of the firm, “When we started developing the Bugatti Pool Table project, we knew we had to be different and excel in all arears in order to be extraordinary. At IXO, good is never enough.”
He goes on, but you get it.
There will be a total of 30 tables—all with a carbon fiber finish and a machined aluminum and titanium frame—will be produced. Five this year.
This brings us back to the ship: There is an available servo-driven system that will adjust the legs of the table predicated on a gyroscopic sensor so if there is a bit of a swell, within five milliseconds the table is flat.
If you live in California, there is a reasonably large number. Of course, there is also a reasonably large number of electric vehicles. Chicken or egg?
By Gary S. Vasilash
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, there are now 25 states that have at least 1,000 non-residential electric vehicle charging units. This means that if you had an electrician come over to your garage and wired it up for a Level 2 charger, it doesn’t count.
Yet for some reason, public and private chargers are counted.
No surprise that California has the most. 36,913 chargers.
Alaska has the least: 69.
Large yet comparatively out-of-the-way states have low numbers, too: 116 in North Dakota and 134 in South Dakota.
Even a small out-of-the-way state, Hawaii, has more than those two continental states combined: It has 784 chargers.
While the number of chargers is on the increase, the whole charging infrastructure is still a challenge for the acceptance of electric vehicles.
And this isn’t even taking the amount of time it takes to charge the average EV in relation to how long it takes to fuel a vehicle that runs on gasoline.
Making electric commercial vehicles seems to be what several companies are doing. But the approach of this U.K.-based company is unlike what those other companies are doing.
By Gary S. Vasilash
One of the more interesting companies in the electric vehicle space is Arrival, a firm that was founded in London in 2015, where it has its HQ, and which has also established a North American HQ in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Arrival is in the business of developing electric vehicles.
Arrival Automotive CEO Mike Ableson. (Image: Arrival)
Initially a bus (start of production: Q4, 2021). Then a commercial van with a payload up to 4,400 pounds (start of production: Q3, 2022). Then a larger van with a payload up to 8,800 pounds (start of production: Q3, 2022). And eventually a small consumer vehicle (start of production: Q3, 2023).
Here’s one thing that makes these vehicles notable: There is a modular structure so the vehicles can be tailored to the specific user and application. While “special builds” generally drive costs, starting with this design approach helps minimize that.
Here’s one thing that makes the Arrival approach notable: Rather than building these vehicles in conventional automotive assembly facilities that have a stamping plant and paint shop, as Mike Ableson, CEO of Arrival Automotive (and 35-year vet of GM, where his last position was vice president of EV Infrastructure, with a variety of advanced technology, strategy and engineering positions before that), points out on this edition of “Autoline After Hours,” the Arrival approach, known as “microfactories,” is predicated on establishing a manufacturing facility within what would ordinarily be considered a warehouse.
This is low-volume, regional manufacturing.
It will put its first U.S. microfactory, which will start producing buses later this year, in York County, South Carolina. There will be a second in West Charlotte, North Carolina, where as many as 10,000 electric delivery vans will be built, with production starting in the third quarter of 2022. It has another microfactory in Bicester, UK.
The vehicles have proprietary composite body panels so there is no stamping plant needed. The colors are molded in the material so there is no paint shop. The factory utilizes robotic transport vehicles that move from cell to cell so there are no traditional assembly lines. The assembly is done with mechanical fasteners and adhesives so welding equipment isn’t required.
Ableson points out that batteries are a big cost component of all electric vehicles. He also notes that essentially all OEMs are faced with the same type of battery costs. So, he explains, that the way to keep costs down is not only in establishing production capabilities, but also in designing and engineering the vehicles is such a way that they can minimize overall cost.
The company uses the term “radical impact” in relation to what it is doing.
Arguably, if they pull off what they are undertaking, that won’t just be corporate rhetoric but a true statement.
Ableson talks on the show with Joe White of Reuters, Mike Austin of Hemmings and me.
Then White, Austin and I discuss a variety of other subjects, most of which have to do with vehicle electrification claims and efforts being undertaken by companies including Honda, Volkswagen, Ford and General Motors.
While not full-on stark minimalism, Honda is recognizing the need for a more human-oriented interior in its 11th-generation Civic
By Gary S. Vasilash
One of the things that has been going on in interior design is that as the vehicles have become more tech-centric, there is a near feeling of driver claustrophobia.
The term typically used to describe the space is “cockpit,” as though the driver is actually trained as a pilot in an F-18 when, in fact, all that person really wants is to be able to go to the store to pick up a few groceries.
With its minimalist interior design Tesla has started a trend in this direction.
Inside the ’22 Honda Civic. (Image: Honda)
The interior of the 2022 Honda Civic is the latest example of a driver-not-pilot approach.
On a macro level, that there are pulled back A-pillars, a low hood and a flat dash, as well as a low, flat beltline, means there is a more spacious view to the outside (a good thing when behind the wheel).
Honda is calling approach “Man-Maximum, Machine-Minimum,” which is something that they followed year ago, but seem to have forgotten over the years, as they tried to stay of the moment.
There is an available 9-inch color touchscreen—the largest screen in any Honda (you would imagine this would be in something like the Odyssey or Pilot)—that runs “a simplified navigation structure with fewer embedded menus.”
What’s more, there is a physical volume knob and hard buttons for Home and Back.
It is understandable that OEMs would chase consumer electronics in terms of interfaces, but it is also clear that in some cases things have gone to far. While you look at your phone when making a selection; if you’re driving a vehicle you should be looking at the road ahead. Thus something like a knob to crank up the sound is an ergonomic solution for a car, while it would be inappropriate for a phone.
And they’ve put a 0.8-inch finger rest on the bottom of the touchscreen, something that is car-appropriate.
Sure, U.S. voters don’t like greenhouse gases. But others ought to dislike them more and do something about it
By Gary S. Vasilash
While cars and trucks are certainly not the only contributors to noxious emissions, they provide more than a minimal amount, to understate the case. Wildly.
Let’s face it: the future of personal transportation isn’t gasoline or diesel fuel
By Gary S. Vasilash
Hau Thai-Tang, Ford chief product platform and operations officer (think of him as the guy who is in charge of product development) points out that the company has announced that it is in the process of investing $22-billion in electrified vehicles through 2025.
And because making a transformation from a dependence on engines that run on liquids to motors that run on electricity is no mean feat, Thai-Tang says that the company is kicking in an additional $185-million, this for developing and equipping a 200,00-square-foot facility that will be known as “Ford Ion Park.”
That’s ion as in a net electrical charge.
The learning lab, which is going to be located somewhere in southeastern Michigan (let’s see: Ford HQ is in Dearborn; it has a Battery Benchmarking and Test Laboratory in Allen Park; it is restoring the Michigan Central train station in Detroit where it will be creating an innovation hub), will be a place where they will be able to not only determine the best ways and means to develop batteries—lithium-ion and solid-state types—but also how to pilot the production of them.
Don’t try this at home! Mary Fredrick, Ford battery validation engineer, and Dane Hardware, Ford design and release engineer, measuring the voltage of a battery at the Ford Battery Benchmarking and Test Lab. (Image: Ford)
There will be some 150 employees (manufacturing, engineering, product development, purchasing, quality, planning) at the site.
Given the success of things like the Mustang Mach-E, which Thai-Tang says is on dealer lots for about a week before it is snapped up by a customer, an inventory turn time that is nothing short of astonishing in an industry that typically has vehicles on dealer lots for a few months, not a few days (although this has been changed by the global microchip shortage that came right on the proverbial heels of the factory shutdowns last year caused by COVID-19), Ford sees that there is a need to get the wherewithal to produce more EVs (an electric Transit is coming later this year; the electric F-150 by mid-22), and so it is creating the capacity that will allow it to ramp batteries faster.
Thai-Tang notes, of the overall drive toward electrification: “We will no longer take an approach of hedging our bets.”
With the billions it is spending, seems like it is pretty much pushing in a lot of chips.
If nothing else, the people at Porsche are imaginative when it comes to promoting its brand.
The latest effort is even more surprising than the hiring of the Science Guy:
A 212-page book titled. . .Hip-Hop Culture—A Road Trip through Europe.
The book is based on a pre-COVID trip that Niko Hüls, publisher of a hip-hop magazine, Backspin, took with people from Porsche.
Hüls and a Cayenne. (Image: Porsche)
The travels gave rise to profiles of hip-hop artists including Kool Savas (Berlin), Lord Esperanza (Paris), Edson Sabajo (Amsterdam), Falsalarma (Barcelona), Lars Pedersen (Copenhagen) and the Flying Steps (Berlin).
In what may be the understatement of the year, Sebastian Rudolph, Vice President Public Relations, Press, Sustainability and Politics at Porsche AG, said, “Hip-hop and Porsche – at first glance, this may seem a surprising combination.”
He added, however, “But this pairing stands for diversity and cultural values.”
You’d be surprised at what can be done with what might otherwise seem to be organic waste. Like using it to create car parts
By Gary S. Vasilash
Dr. Deborah Mielewski is a Technical Fellow at the Ford Motor Company.
Two things to know about that: (1) Ford employs about 87,000 people in the United States (more if the people from elsewhere are added, but she works in Dearborn, so we’ll use that number). (2) There are 16 Technical Fellows at Ford.
Yes, she is a rare individual.
She obtained her PhD in Chemical Engineering.
You might be thinking: “Technical Fellow. . .one of 16. . .chemical engineering. . .snooze.”
And were you to be, you’d be wrong.
Mielewski, whose focus is on sustainability, is one of the most enthusiastic and engaging individuals who talks about the environment and recycling and closed-loop processes who isn’t on the Discovery Channel or some outlet like that.
In fact, she probably ought to be.
But for the Earth Day episode of “Autoline After Hours” we have Debbie Mielewski talking about what she and her colleagues are doing in the lab to help make the crossovers, trucks and cars that Ford produces more environmentally sound—and doing so in ways that are not, well, what you might imagine.
One of her earlier undertakings was to develop seat foam using soybean oil. Unbeknownst to her at the time, Henry Ford had been a big proponent in using soybean oil for a number of applications, such as in paint and for body panels.
Ford was once so big on soybean that it built a processing plant on the grounds of the Rouge Complex in Dearborn. (Image: Ford)
The foam that they were creating in the lab took a while to come to a usable form (to say nothing of finding a way to attenuate the rather unpleasant fragrance emitted), but they worked at it and the material debuted on the 2008 Mustang.
Then they’ve had a variety of other atypical materials that they’re using.
She says—at least partially in jest—that while driving home from work one Friday night she thought about having a margarita when she got home. And that she would get in touch with Jose Cuervo on Monday to find out whether there might be some materials they could source (other than tequila, that is).
To obtain the juice that turns into the beverage the heart of the agave plant is roasted, ground and compressed. And then there is a whole lot of plant matter, fibrous, left over. While the Jose Cuervo company uses some of it, as do local artisans, there is still a large quantity left over.
The Ford scientists determined that the fibers are good for plastic reinforcement.
She says she likes coffee. Thinking about that led to the discovery that when coffee beans are roasted, their skin, chaff, comes off. Millions of pounds of the stuff. Ford and McDonald’s are working together to use the chaff as a composite reinforcement material instead of the traditional talc. It is lighter. Better. And is otherwise waste.
Wheat straw. Dandelions. Shredded paper currency. These and a whole lot more are being used and investigated by Mielewski and her team.
She tells a story about telling one of her colleagues to go collect some of the post-processed hemp at a Detroit medical marijuana distributor. (He was a bit reticent. . . .) Another fiber that may have application in automotive component production.
This is a fascinating look at a subject that will become only more important explained by someone who has spent more than 30 years of her career working on it.
Mielewski recalls that early on, when some of her other colleagues from the more traditional product engineering teams looked askance at her presentations, Bill Ford, known for his environmental leadership, had her back. Now the whole approach is becoming more pervasive. And not just on April 22.
This is no ordinary Rolls-Royce, which begs the question as to whether any Rolls is an ordinary Rolls
By Gary S. Vasilash
A Rolls-Royce Dawn, a 563-hp convertible, will set you back at least $356,500. (Well, probably not you necessarily, or the readership demographics of this site are far more elevated than I think.)
And you can reckon that Rolls-Royce Dawn that has been personalized through the firm’s Bespoke Design operation would ratchet that number up significantly. Especially if the person with whom the Bespoke team worked with is Japanese architect Kengo Kuma.
Kengo Kuma and the special Rolls (Image: Rolls-Royce)
Yet Rolls-Royce Motor Cars and Kengo Kuma have collaborated on a Dawn, one influenced by Kuma’s architectural design of a luxury residence in downtown Tokyo named “The Kita.”
The vehicle is for the owner of a multilevel penthouse in The Kita.
According to the 2020 Mercer Cost of Living Survey, Tokyo is the third-most expensive place in the world to live (Hong Kong is #1 and Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, is #2).
Presumably if you can afford a penthouse at The Kita the price of even the most luxurious Rolls-Royce is, for you (again, not you), the sort of money that you’d find under the tatami.
This electric crossover is the start of a new approach at Cadillac
By Gary S. Vasilash
Cadillac has revealed the production version of what will become the first of its electric onslaught, the 2023 LYRIQ. With the exception of those who are exceedingly focused on such things, the LYRIQ production version looks essentially like the LYRIQ show car.
Jamie Brewer, the vehicle’s chief engineer, says that they were able to accomplish this by working very closely with not only the design team, but manufacturing, as well as the suppliers.
It is also interesting to note that the vehicle is going to be delivered nine months earlier than had been initially announced. According to Brewer they were able to achieve this through a virtual development process, in which there was extensive digital simulation and testing such that when they did their first pre-production builds there was “high fidelity” between what was expected and what was achieved.
Andrew Smith, executive director of Cadillac Design, and his team certainly had a big challenge in front of them, given that this is the first of the electric vehicles that will define Cadillac’s future.
Smith said he told the design team that they were to develop a “Cadillac that happens to be an electric vehicle.”
He also suggested that they are taking a somewhat different approach to creating models for the brand than some of its competitors do.
“Cadillac is a fashion brand,” Smith says. “Fashion is about change.”
While he says that there are a set of core values and principles, Cadillac design is not about making variants of different sizes and architectures of the same basic thing.
From a functional point of view the LYRIQ has an Ultium 12-module, 100 kWh battery pack and a rear-drive Ultium Platform. Brewer says that the LYRIQ development team and the Ultium development team sat with one another such that they were essentially the same team. She says that by having this close collaboration they were better able to optimize the systems for the vehicle.
The LYRIQ will have an estimated 340 hp and a 300-mile range on a full charge.
It offers high-speed DC fast charging at 190 kW, which means that about 76 miles of range can be achieved in 10 minutes. There is a 19.2-kW home charging module that is capable of providing 52 miles of range per hour of charging.
The vehicle is to start production at the GM plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, in Q1 2022 and become available during the first half of the year. The starting MSRP is $59,990.
According to Rory Harvey, vice president of Global Cadillac, the brand intends that from now on when there are new vehicles developed they, like the LYRIQ, will be EVs, not powered with internal combustion engines.
Of course, that is probably predicated on the acceptance of EVs by the market.
Should the LYRIQ be prelude to what’s to come, they probably won’t have an issue.
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