AD #2800 – Organizations Band Together to Fight Virus; Aston Makes High-Power Hybrid Engine; NHTSA Clearing AV Path
March 24th, 2020 at 11:38am
Listen to “AD #2800 – Organizations Band Together to Fight Virus; Aston Makes High-Power Hybrid Engine; NHTSA Clearing AV Path” on Spreaker.
Follow us on social media:
Runtime: 10:29
0:17 Details on GM’s Ventilator Production
1:12 Ford Teams to Make Virus Equipment
2:10 FCA Will Make Face Masks
2:27 Tesla Ships Ventilators to California
2:41 How Bad Could Car Sales Get?
4:05 Organizations Band Together to Ask for Help
4:51 How Do We Fight This?
5:53 Aston Makes New 3.0L Turbo V6 In-House
6:32 NHTSA Clearing Path for AVs
7:12 H-D LiveWire Sets 24-Hour Distance Record
7:51 Predicting Malfunctions & Notifying Workers
Visit our sponsor to thank them for their support of Autoline Daily: Bridgestone.
This is Autoline Daily, the show dedicated to enthusiasts of the global automotive industry.
And we’ve got some good news to report. Detroit is rolling up its sleeves and getting heavily involved in the fights against the coronavirus.
DETAILS ON GM’S VENTILATOR PRODUCTION
We’ve got more details on GM’s plan to make ventilators and the response has been terrific. GM is partnering with medical equipment maker Ventec and internally the effort is called Project V. GM is converting part of its plant in Kokomo, Indiana to build the machines. Within 48 hours it sourced 95% of the parts and it’s working on getting the final 37 parts it needs. The target is to make 5,000 ventilators a month with a delivery target of April 6. General Motors will buy the machines and will handle all the logistics for making and distributing them.
FORD TEAMS TO MAKE VIRUS EQUIPMENT
Ford is working with 3M and GE to manufacture respirators and ventilators in mass production. Ford is helping GE redesign its respirator to come up with a simplified design, and is going to assemble over 100,000 plastic face shields a week with the first ones getting distributed this week. Here’s a detail we love. Ford is grabbing off-the-shelf parts like fans from the Ford F-150’s cooled seats for airflow, and portable tool battery packs to power these respirators for up to eight hours. Details are still being worked out but the respirators will probably be made in a Ford plant by UAW workers. And the company will be using 3D printers at its advanced manufacturing center to make parts for all this medical equipment.
FCA WILL MAKE FACE MASKS
FCA plans to make 1 million face masks a month and donate them to police, EMTs and firefighters, as well as workers in hospitals and health care clinics. across the U.S., Canada and Mexico. FCA also marshalled its manufacturing, supply chain and engineering expertise to start quickly making the masks. It’s also looking at making ventilators and CEO Mike Manley says they will have more to announce in the coming days.
TESLA SHIPS VENTILATORS TO CA
Meanwhile Tesla bought 1,255 ventilators in China and shipped them to California.
HOW BAD COULD CAR SALES GET?
So, how bad will it get for the auto industry this year? On a recent Autoline This Week, auto analyst Jeff Schuster from LMC Automotive shared his outlook for how bad car sales could look this year.
Jeff Schuster, LMC Automotive
“Just with what’s been announced, through a few minutes ago and what we’ve heard that hasn’t yet been announced. We’ve taken out more than 600,000 thousand units out of North American production just with the shutdown. I think the bigger issue is, while I agree that I think these are the different levels and stages, looking at supply chain, looking at production levels. I think demand is what ultimately is going to drive this and we’re looking at demand, you know that certainly is going to take a lot more than that. We’re just from a range, down probably sub-15 right now for the year, 15 million units for the U.S. I think looking at a North American market that’s probably off anywhere between 12 and 15 percent and I suspect it’s going to get worse. So I think the industry is going to have to put the seatbelt on and probably should go with a 5-point seatbelt, at least through the remainder of the year.”
For more of that discussion, you can watch it right now on our website, or on our YouTube channel.
ORGANIZATIONS BAND TOGETHER TO ASK FOR HELP
In what we think is a first, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the National Automobile Dealers Association and the Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association have banded together to ask the White House and Congressional leaders for help during the coronavirus outbreak. The organizations are calling for a stimulus package that includes the creation of credit facilities, tax deductibility on paid leave at companies with more than 500 employees, delayed or deferred quarterly tax payments, expanded expensing for machinery and equipment and delaying the implementation of the USMCA. Analysts are predicting auto sales could fall as much as 40% in March, which would not only hurt the industry but the American economy at large.
HOW DO WE FIGHT THIS?
And this brings us to the question of the day. How do we balance the need to fight the coronavirus with the need to keep the economy running? Do we stop everything and risk plunging the world into another Great Depression? Or do we figure out some way to manage the risk and try to get the economy back on its feet before the year is over? We’d love to hear your thoughts. And please, leave out the political finger pointing. There’s plenty of that going on everywhere else. What we’re interested in is getting good ideas on how to solve this crisis, not figure out who to blame. There will be plenty of time for that later.
ASTON MAKES 1ST IN-HOUSE ENGINE IN OVER 70-YEARS
When so many automakers are developing electric cars, Aston Martin is going in the opposite direction. The automaker released information about its first engine built in-house since 1968. It’s a turbocharged 3.0L V6 that was designed to be electrified from Day One and will be used in the Valhalla sports car. Aston calls Valhalla the ‘Son of Valkyrie.’ Valkyrie is the company’s top supercar and the Valhalla will slot below it. Even so, when the new V6 is paired with electrification it will become the most powerful setup in Aston’s range. It will be mounted mid-ship in the Valhalla, which goes on sale in 2022.
NHTSA CLEARING PATH FOR AVs
If you ask anyone about what’s holding back autonomous vehicles, one of the first things they will bring up is rules and regulations. NHTSA took a historic step to removing some of those barriers. It issued a proposal to make federal safety standards more modern and clear up confusion in occupant protection. That includes removing rules for manual controls in autonomous vehicles and safety standards for vehicles that will never have any passengers, like those used for delivery. Now NHTSA needs your feedback. It’s looking for comments from the public on every aspect of this proposal.
H-D LIVEWIRE SETS 24-HOUR DISTANCE RECORD
Many people made fun of the Harley-Davidson Livewire’s 100 miles of range. But we all know there are hyper-milers that can smash any range estimate and a Swiss rider set an unofficial 24-hour distance record on an electric motorcycle. The rider went a little under 1,100 miles in just under 24-hours, which is over 200 miles more than the last record set in 2018. And they did it on their own! That sounds like a lonely trip.
PREDICTING MALFUNCTIONS & NOTIFYING WORKERS
Today’s cars are becoming more complex and so are the factories that build them. But many factory floor workers don’t have a formal education in statistics or data mining. On last week’s Autoline After Hours our special guest was Jeff Trumble, whose company has developed AI software to help those workers. In the following clip he sheds more insight into the software.
Jeff Trumble, Trumble Inc.
“So, what we did is created a product that protected our target user community. All of that bright human capital on the factory floor. And what we did is protect them from having to do any statistics, any data mining skills. So, the product doesn’t require that from its user community. All of the monitoring, all of the statistics, all of the data mining is all done automatically. It’s an artificial intelligence piece of software. It understands where people work, what operations they’re responsible for, what shifts they work, it knows what products are running down the line. It knows what the specifications are, in terms of both the equipment, cycle times for example and it also knows design specifications. With all of that knowledge baked into the product, as it scans the factory floor around the clock 24-7. It looks for non-conformances, it ignores if everything’s fine. So, it’s like finding a needle in the haystack. If everything is fine, no one hears from the system. If something is emerging as a threat, and that’s the key, as it’s emerging, the system notifies the person closest to that particular operation or station that a correction needs to be made. And when you put all of these ingredients together what you have is proactive control of your factory floor, not reactive. And there are many good strategies out there but they’re still reactive and it has been for 100 years.”
You can watch that whole show right now on our website, or on our YouTube channel.
But that wraps up today’s show, thanks for watching and please join us again tomorrow.
Thanks to our partner for embedding Autoline Daily on its website: WardsAuto.com
Share
Permalink
Comments (35)
March 24th, 2020 at 11:58 am
A number of companies are working on developing an antibody test for the coronavirus. This would allow you to identify people who have developed likely immunity to the virus. They might be able to treat patients safely or take on other front-line jobs during the pandemic.
March 24th, 2020 at 12:02 pm
We already have workers working at their jobs (for certain industries), and while it is not feasible to use masks that are needed for the medical folk, after masks catch up with demand and are being produced in surplus, offer (or require) industrial workers that want to go back to work that option, to wear then and get those lines working again.
Kudo’s to all the vehicle manufacturers that are stepping up and helping in our time of need.
AV’s and a lot of other public transportation are going to be put on the back burner (as also auto sales) until we get a grip on our situation. I’m wondering how this will affect acceptance of ride sharing (taxi, Uber, busses, etc.).
March 24th, 2020 at 12:02 pm
Unfortunately I feel the estimates are still to high. This will be a depression era vehicle sales year I fear. I am not a doom & gloom person but who can buy a vehicle if they are not working.
March 24th, 2020 at 12:15 pm
typical downturns last 6-18 months, no fiscal stimulus will work if you can’t leave your house to work or buy a car or sell a car, typically you need to lower interest rates 5% to get out of a recession well at today’s interest rates how do you do that? History does not repeat itself but it rhymes
March 24th, 2020 at 12:25 pm
great to see the arsenal of democracy involved in the fight against coronavirus. proud of the automakers involved. yes we can!
March 24th, 2020 at 12:31 pm
If nothing else I hope this shows governments how important manufacturing is to each country and that helping some of these companies stay alive can be more important or just as important to the safety of your country as a field full of bombs and tanks.
How long do we stay at home??? I think it’s too early to talk about that. Let’s have that discussion in 2 weeks. I’ve read that the forecast for the U.S. at the moment is for deaths to be doubling about every 3 days.
March 24th, 2020 at 12:46 pm
Thanks Jon and autoline daily for keeping us up to date in these troubled times!
March 24th, 2020 at 2:06 pm
If GM needs floor space to make medical equipment, they have plenty in Kokomo, Indiana. Collectively, GM and Delphi probably have more than a million square feet of unused space in Kokomo. They also have what was a class 1 clean room silicon wafer fab. That might be useful, if the air handling equipment and filters are still there, and would still work.
March 24th, 2020 at 2:23 pm
I think that decentralized mitigation is the way to go forward once this 15 day national “lockdown” is completed.
Keep limiting the importing of cases from outside the US for a bit. Perhaps requiring a negative test at any airport prior to boarding, if cheap and fast kits are available.
My problem with draconian stop work orders are really the impact on small businesses. 90 percent of those have 10 or less employees and many of those are family or close friends who would interact even if shut down. At least in Pennsylvania, gatherings of less than 10 are permitted, yet I have a friend with only 4 employees, one of which is her husband, that has been forced to close. As they have nearly zero public contact (most orders are online or phone), the benefit to public health is minimal and the impact on her company is devastating.
I say at the end of the 15 days let governors run it. Hopefully they will realize that treating every county the same is not good policy.
March 24th, 2020 at 2:27 pm
It is good news that so many are standing up to address the pandemic. Just I’m concerned that the two week “stay at home” is not long enough. In Alabama and many States, we have only one week left at least for those States that implemented “stay at home” policies.
Three weeks would exceed any known incubation period, long enough to show a distinct reduction in cases. An extra week would give time for the new supplies to start flowing to the medical staff and facilities who need them. Then relaxing the isolation orders could let us restart the economy.
March 24th, 2020 at 2:45 pm
Your taking a big chance on limiting the isolation period, if you let people back to work before this nightmare has run its course the end result could be catastrophic.
March 24th, 2020 at 3:24 pm
There is no balancing between the Corona Virus and the economy. If we don’t stop the deaths from the Virus we won’t have an economy to speak of…
March 24th, 2020 at 3:58 pm
Gotta use the great industrial engineers we have during this shutdown to get the most out of our lines while maintaining social distancing. If that means running lines at half speed to allow for fewer processes between stations, so be it. My guess is that we would over supply in the short-term if we build more than that anyway. The Big 3 (+ alpha) can then become kind of a TVA from the 30′s/40′s and build things people need in idle places (& even after the crisis is subsided, to build an inventory) like ventilator, masks, etc.
Go USA!!!
March 24th, 2020 at 4:10 pm
9 Limiting “imported” cases would do nothing. The virus is here, with cases doubling about every two days in the U.S. Also, ending the “lockdown” at 15 days would be a disaster, especially since we have so little testing to know who to isolate. The countries that got “over the peak” either had massive testing capabilities, like South Korea, or massive “lockdowns,” like China. Trump wants to trade a depression for a plague, but the way things are going, we could end up with both.
In addition to the link others have posted, this give a good view of what’s going on, with graphs of confirmed cases, deaths, and more.
https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest
March 24th, 2020 at 4:18 pm
9 Some small businesses I normally frequent, restaurants, are being hurt badly. I normally had dinner out almost every day, mostly at local non-chain, or places with only 3-5 locations. Most of them are still open for carry out, but they have lost all of my business. I eat out partly for the “atmosphere,” in addition to the food, and if I can’t get that, I just eat at home.
March 24th, 2020 at 4:57 pm
I would like to see the white-collar workers investing in their own companies by actually taking a week of vacation during this crisis. One week of vacation could directly affect the bottom line of the companies as the accrued vacation is a financial burden.
March 25th, 2020 at 7:49 am
14 Agree, Kit, the virus is here and limiting travel isn’t going to make much difference. But I think you should consider ordering carryout from your favorite restaurants, if you can. They are in a life and death struggle right now; if you want them to survive, give them some of your money.
I’m glad that Autoline is emphasizing that Tesla “bought” the ventilators they donated. The ABC early morning news said Tesla built them, and that’s just wrong.
March 25th, 2020 at 7:59 am
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
Europe has a REAL problem w the CV. Not only Italy now has 6,800 deaths, nearby Spain is already at 2991 and may pass CHina’s 3,163 in a matter of hours, not days. France is already above 1,000 deaths.
I messaged on FB with a much younger colleague from Italy (she always remembers my birthdays) to see how she was, she and her family was ok but her region was not much hurt so far, while other regions, as she said, were “on their knees”. (she’s from Genoa)
March 25th, 2020 at 8:07 am
20 from the link it seems this is exclusively a “first world” problem, huge third world nations do not show any cases worth talking about, BUT I believe this is because of their lack of testing. INDIA, I heard yesterday on PBS, while it can administer 10,000 tests a day, only tested 20,000 people in 2 MONTHS. This is clueless socialism for you (and her economy has suffered for it since 1947, much more detail available if anybody here cared)
March 25th, 2020 at 8:17 am
17 You are right in that I should support restaurants I like by getting carry out. I will do that some, even though it’s not really my thing. They need all the help they can get now.
March 25th, 2020 at 8:24 am
https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/chinese-plants-start-rest-world-shuts-down?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20200325&utm_content=article7-image
Ι guess Tesla will still make 100,000s of Model 3s and Model Ys, they just will have to be made in its Shanghai Gigafactory.
March 25th, 2020 at 8:24 am
19 China is one of the most socialist countries on the planet, and they did pretty well with controlling the virus, once they admitted that it existed.
March 25th, 2020 at 8:35 am
22 No it is not. It is an oppressive totalitarian regime whose economics are CAPITALIST since 30 years, which is why it THrived. It is more capitalist than even the USA. AND pay attention to what I wrote before you comment. I was talking about INDIA. IF you know the details about the INDIA debacle since 1947, try again. ( you can be sure that I do)
March 25th, 2020 at 8:38 am
22 You don’t know what to believe when China says it. I think I have spent enough time there, and very recently, to know. I was there in Nov where their TV badmouthed the protesters at Hong Kong every night in English, AND it never said what their demands were, ONLY that they were hooligans. it of course never interviewed anybody who expressed the protester’s position and demANDS.
It was CAPITALIST S KOREA that did by far the best job with the virus, AND their numbers are RELIABLE.
March 25th, 2020 at 8:42 am
Also, there are several reasons why oppressive totalitarian regimes may be better equipped to deal with the CV:
1. They do not value human life. They really could care less if a million people die or suffer. The individual has few, if any, rights, SO they can lock them up, enforce distancing, etc much more rigorously than the US ever will.
2. Because of 1., they will never commit economic suicide to save the lives of a few elderly people who have 3 pre-existing conditions and a low immune system. This sounds rational and proper, until that elderly person is your mother or other loved one.
March 25th, 2020 at 8:48 am
Back to the CV map, Monaco is an outlier, with a far higher longevity of its citizens than any other nation. Primarily because it is full of 1%ers, you need at least $10 mill (maybe more now) to become a Monaco subject. They also have some locals that are middle-income mostly.
Monaco with its 30k people has 23 cases, so far no deaths.
San Marino with also 33k people, has had more than 120 cases and more than 20 deaths due to the CV.
My own county had 35 and no deaths a few days ago, today it has 50 and three deaths already.
March 25th, 2020 at 8:50 am
19 Re spain, it already way surpassed CHina, Spain now has 3,434 deaths vs less than 3,200 of china.
March 25th, 2020 at 8:52 am
24,25 I agree with every statement in these two posts. WOW.
March 25th, 2020 at 9:07 am
14) Just FYI, The USA has officially tested more persons then South Korea. So by the logic presented we should be over it very soon….just like South Korea.
March 25th, 2020 at 11:16 am
23 China’s health care system, as many other things, is socialized. That is what pertains to what is going on now.
March 25th, 2020 at 11:21 am
24 We can believe what comes out of China, as much as we can believe what comes out of the mouth of D.J.T.
March 25th, 2020 at 11:29 am
29 SoKo started testing much earlier, and had tested a much higher percentage of their population.
March 25th, 2020 at 11:36 am
John you forgot one. Project V may stand for virus
March 25th, 2020 at 11:51 am
Granted it’s an engine planned for a hybrid application but seems about a year ago all manufactures were saying due to the EVs they didn’t have any new engines in development. Yet we hear of new engines. I guess this was probably already in development when that news was announced. I wonder if anything has changed with the low gas prices and current economic changes.
March 26th, 2020 at 11:53 am
31 Seriously? Your hatred for Trump is so deep and irrational, you cannot think rationally. SO you believe that the US army gave the virus to CHina, as THEY CLAIM?
Give me your worst example of what Trump said, and try to be accurate and not out of context, that is remotely close to the above filthy lies and propaganda.