The electric vehicle (EV) market has been booming for years now and is attracting more interest as driving ranges increase and charging becomes easier. But there’s still a long way to go for the EV market to catch up with the internal combustion engine car market.
At Rockwell Automation’s Automation Fair 2024, a panel discussion focused on the key factors impacting EV manufacturing and battery development. Panelists included Gaetano Cantalupo (left in photo), vice president of manufacturing at EV manufacturer Lucid USA; Hugo Beltran, former associate chief engineer at Honda Development and Manufacturing of America (center); and Yin Yeh (right), executive director of the Volta Foundation (a battery organization with more than 50,000 battery professionals as members and 160+ member companies).
Following are key insights provided by Cantaloupo, Beltran and Yeh to questions posed by Ted Stockburger, global director of electric vehicles and batteries at Rockwell Automation.
Stockburger: As the automotive industry is going through this transition from internal combustion engines to hybrids and pure EVs, what are the key priorities for manufacturers?
Cantalupo: Three key priorities for Lucid are efficiency, sustainability and the customer experience. At Lucid, everything is built around the concept of efficiency — less battery, less weight, less resources. We work hard to develop efficiencies using technology to deliver our product at a lower cost. The point is to make the EV more affordable. And, for the customer, it’s also about the driving experience. I grew up in an era where a good car meant having a big engine and big tires. Today, cars mean something different. It's important, of course, to get from point A to point B reliably, but how you get there is also important. So, there’s a strong focus on software development and applications, which means that the technology architecture of the car must be properly developed to allow us to continuously improve it. The point is that after you buy the car, it should keep getting better and better with software updates.
Yeh: From the perspective of batteries, the key issue is supply-chain resilience, especially for companies making batteries and vehicles in the U.S. Here, the concerns stretch from raw materials to recycling. Another issue is workforce development. There's a big talent shortage in the battery industry today, so there’s a challenge around training the next generation of leaders.
Stockburger: In the automation industry, there’s a clear focus on digital and the use of data to improve processes. How are digital technologies and AI impacting the EV business?
Beltran: About a decade ago, I was asked to look at IBM’s Watson when it was relatively new. We tried it on a welding system used to pull the car together — a very critical area of the assembly process. To do this we sent all the CMMS (computerized maintenance management system) data along with all the quality data and operator reports into Watson for analysis. We discovered that it worked very well. Watson was 95% efficient at forecasting failures. But when it came to deployment, the technology at the time was very expensive, so the ROI didn’t make sense, and we put it on the back burner. But we continued to collect sensor data and, as a result, Honda now has a lot more digital data available that can be analyzed by AI for things like predictive maintenance.
Cantalupo: Digital is key for real-time production monitoring and quality checks to avoid downtime and improve quality. But you also need feedback from the customer to improve the car based on what the customer wants. We’re working with AI (artificial intelligence) now for predictive maintenance to get insights into issues that might cause a line to go down before it does.
Yeh: The intersection of batteries and software is the fastest growing segment in the battery industry in terms of percentage growth year on year. The reason for this is that we all have an intuitive understanding that there's value in the data generated throughout the battery life cycle. First, in terms of each battery lifecycle, a lot of simulation and modeling data are being used to innovate and make the next generation of batteries. On the product development and manufacturing side, there's a lot of traceability metadata—materials and process information that can be collected during the manufacturing process. And once the battery goes into a product, there’s the collection of time series data while the battery’s being used in the car—when it's being driven, when it's being charged, when it's resting. And then in recycling, data gets generated as well. So, there are all kinds of different data being generated in different formats; but there's a lack of data standardization today, which means there are a lot of opportunities that exist around collecting and standardizing data. And I can see how having all those data points available could be important to the buying and selling of used EVs in the future.
