Content by The Buzz Business
11
Mobility
Ford: thinking
outside the car
and the box
S
The pros and
cons of suming
e are all consumers. Consumption is what our economies are
built upon. At the most basic level, A
produces something and B buys it.
More and more, people ask me
about prosumption. That is, A produces something and B buys it, but B
also produces something to sell back
to A or on to C.
This changes the economic paradigm. Consumers become producers
and vice versa, turning the law of the
market in which supply and demand
are balanced upside down.
For example, electric vehicles (EVs)
are today seen as a way to get from A
to B. But, looking down the road, they
can become batteries that store and
sell electricity back to the grid.
Via ‘vehicle-to-grid’ (V2G) technology, EVs can power homes, offices
and anything else, whenever we need
it. V2G lets users pull from the grid if
they want to go somewhere and push
when they don’t.
Power is increasingly produced
from renewable sources, but they
don’t deliver as and when it is needed.
Scaled up, V2G could supply gridbalancing inputs when demand rises.
V2G also cuts the cost of EV
ownership, as power companies pay
to use your battery when your car is
parked, creating a virtuous cycle that
could generate a real revolution.
If you use your EV to store and sell
energy, big producers could, one day,
be replaced by millions of individual
prosumers. At Enel, we plan to produce and consume, because the sum
of both adds up to more than one.
Ernesto Ciorra,
Head of Innovation and
Sustainability, Enel
peaking at the Further with
Ford 2016 conference at the
automaker’s Michigan headquarters in September, CEO Mark
Fields insisted that “the world is
changing very quickly,” moving
from owning vehicles to sharing
them. Ford is revising its business
model to focus not just on how
many cars it sells, but what services
it should offer.
The creation of
its Ford Smart
Mobility subsidiary
in March 2016,
which former 3M
executive Raj Rao
has been hired to
run, aims to position
the company as a
leader in autonomous
driving, connectivity,
data analysis and, above
Honda’s
hydrogen society
O
nce you look beyond burning
petroleum, using any source
of energy to drive vehicles is, in
theory, possible. But if you also
take eliminating air pollution into
account—not just emissions of carbon dioxide but a whole cocktail
of other environmentally harmful
compounds—the answer, according to Honda, is elementary.
What is a
zero-emissions vehicle?
An electric motor
combined with a
hydrogen fuel cell”
Thomas Brachmann,
Chief Project Engineer,
Honda R&D Europe
In response to the United States’
original Clean Air Act of 1970,
Honda began to manufacture lean
combustion engines to reduce
all, customer experience in the
mobility space.
“It is all about being a consumerfocused company and maintaining
our relevance,” asserts Mike
Nakrani, director of global business
associations. “Cars will remain
important, but fewer people want
them like they used to. Millennials
we talk to are interested in what
cars can provide. That may not be
ownership, but being able to use
one when they wish to.”
According to Nakrani, Ford
controls about six percent
of the traditional auto segment, worth $2.4 billion
a year. But the total mobility sector is worth
around $5.4 billion,
making it a much
larger profit
opportunity
if the company can
achieve a
similar share of the marketplace.
“The more a car can do, the
better,” Nakrani says. “More is
going to happen in cars, which
is a big focus of our research.
emissions. Then, following amendments to the law in 1990, it moved
on to battery-powered EVs that
produced zero emissions, as long
as the electricity came from
sustainable sources.
At the time, EVs faced
major obstacles to consumer take-up, such as
long charging times and
limited range. That led
the Japanese automaker
to explore the potential
of hydrogen fuel cells of
the kind used by the Apollo
space program for its cars, explains Thomas Brachmann,
chief project engineer at Honda
R&D Europe.
Fuel cell electric vehicles
(FCVs) combine hydrogen
with oxygen to produce
power while only emitting water,
“which is not regarded as dangerous in any way,” Brachmann
notes. “We wanted to have a true
zero-emission vehicle.”
In 2008 Honda launched its
first production model, the FCX
Clarity, in Southern California,
under a fully-serviced lease plan.
It has run pilot schemes
in Europe and Japan,
but the lack of hydrogen filling stations
has proved a hurdle
to date. Now that
Hyundai and Toyota
are marketing FCVs
in selected markets
and more service stations are opening, Honda
plans to unveil the new generation Clarity Fuel Cell by
the end of 2016.
“In the next five years,
we will be in a much better
position to launch larger
quantities of FCEVs, because
volume is the most important
consideration for carmakers,”
Brachmann says. “We are targeting
economies of scale and need to
generate demand.”
It’s not about
moving from an old
business to a new
business. It’s moving to a
bigger business”
Mark Fields,
CEO, Ford Motor Company
Connectivity is massive; IoT is a
huge space. The car is one of the
most personal devices we have
right now. It knows where you are
going and where you have been.
There are ways of enabling it to
do so much more. People need
to figure out what they want it to
know. Automakers need to think
beyond the car too; the market
is really about the miles people
travel.”