One of the highlights of my business year is the IESF conference. Here in the USA on September 20th – this year at the excellent venue the Inn at St. John’s in Plymouth everyone I got feedback from enjoyed the event.
The mentor.com website is now showing video highlights of lots of the speakers at that conference. And I hope it will inspire you, if you are reading this in Europe or India to follow the event links to the Munich and Pune conferences and sign up and attend.
For Automotive Engineers an Informative networking event
In the suburbs of the Motor City, for the eight hundred plus conference attendees, the keynote speakers were compelling and insightful. A little way down the dance card I was again flattered to be asked to participate. I provided a “set-up” introduction to my colleague Sjon Moore’s noteworthy demonstration of advanced Mechanical, Electrical and Thermal model-based engineering tools, joined up, integrated and exercised to solve a problem, answer questions fast. 3 domains typically silos of engineering, joined up and solving real issues. Faster than a reasonably intelligent person with optimistic expectations would have thought was at the edge of their highest wishes. Beyond the capacity of a skeptic pessimist to believe wishful thinking would ever take them. Fast results to show conclusions about how a system level component switch proposal had vehicle range consequences. Fast decision support. Fast architectural feedback. I should also credit the work Doug Hall did in preparing the presentation with Sjon. Oh. Did I mention it was impressively quick?
http://go.mentor.com/4Vkre
Above is the link to Sjon and my presentation. Jump forward to about 20 minutes in to see the start of description of the cross-domain demonstration. This also has the merit of skipping over my contribution.
My short review at IESF 2017 in Plymouth, MI covered my opinion of some of the salient points of the emerging Electric Vehicle and hybrid drive train passenger car markets worldwide. That was a large-picture context in which I advanced a view of some of the engineering challenges we the Mentor Capital subject matter experts had seen in this domain over the past year. That theme of the concerns/requirements from customers was a reprise of the 2016 presentation I had done. And I’m going to, in the rest of this post explain what I interpreted about trends from differences those snapshot perspectives 12 months apart exposed.
In my next blog post I will make some observations derived from my experience of and research into the EV market, characterizing the competition for a share of an increasingly congested market and how the newcomers are striving to attain an optimal electrical distribution system design process. Some of the other IESF presenters looked at the trends in this segment and analyzed what that meant for the future.
Not had a picture of some goats for a while on the blog.
Last year this year.
But first the the contrast in 2016 & 2017 market reviews – in my opinion indicated a terrific increase in the investment, commitment, and more business taking major bets on their success in EV and PHEV cars. Not just the public nature of the press announcements, it was the uptake in frequency, the willingness of conservative players in the auto industry to go public with a commitment to EV and PHEV plans which was striking.
- In 2016 I picked out for my home USA audience that a truism of the EV market was that the trend was 50% of the world’s EV passenger cars were going to be built by Chinese companies.
- In 2017 the trend had accentuated to over 60%. Stimulated by the Chinese government’s policies and enabling measures, Chinese companies were as a matter of normal good business practice establishing and established with design and manufacturing presences in North America as a tactic to advance dominance in the segment five to ten years hence.
- In 2016 concerns were about consumer’s EV range anxiety, and whether low gasoline prices were having a suppressing effect on EV sales volumes and whether the breakthrough to substantial market share – say above 5% of total – was going to happen in three or five years or ever at all.
- In 2017 these two issues weren’t permanently closed – however the new hot topics were technologies like Artificial Intelligence and the connected car experience. And the concern about lagging consumer acceptance of advanced EV cars swayed towards the degree of autonomy offered in the driving experience, and away from whether viable range could be achieved above 200 miles, and/or fast charge discussions.
- In 2016 press releases from OEM’s established in the market as producers of EV and PHEV cars emphasized their expansion of portfolio and the relaxation of their reliance on Internal Combustion Engines so much.
- In 2017 the same customers boasted of the normality – the driver-experience-attraction of hybrid and EV vehicles.
- In 2017 the retreat from diesel started in 2016 became a rout in 2017.
The supplier ecosystem forming for EV and PHEV vehicles has become over the last year much more visible as a sign of maturity. Going to a trade show this year compared to last year, going to a conference event like IESF one can sense by the increase in participation that the sector has matured. New-ish-to-the-market entrants – chip designers and chip manufacturers, alongside engineering companies who are huge automotive systems’ integrators – one and all want to place their products in as many of the next 100 million cars as they can.
Lots of insightful presentations
Siemens, with the Mentor products they acquired is positioned to contribute to customers success in this transportation systems modeling challenge because those products work very well, address the specific concerns of the EV/PHEV engineers and are used by the early adopters. Capital is one of the ways these companies mitigate the risks they know they are taking on by seeking more than their fair share of the upcoming revolutionized car market.