AD #2356 – VW Says Au Revoir to Paris, GM to Extend Platform Lifecycle, Safety Lessons Translate to Giant Moonroof

On today’s show… Volkswagen decides to skip the Paris auto show… GM is expanding the life of its vehicle architectures… and we’ll take a look at the new 48V hybrid system in the Ram 1500. All that and more coming right up on Autoline Daily.

This is Autoline Daily the show for enthusiasts of the automotive industry.

VW SAYS AU REVOIR TO PARIS
As we’ve reported, there’s a growing number of automaker’s skipping the Detroit auto show. But it isn’t the only show in trouble. Reuters reports that Volkswagen won’t display any vehicles at this year’s Paris auto show. However, VW’s other brands, Audi, Porsche, Skoda and SEAT will still attend. But the VW brand now joins Ford, PSA, Opel and Volvo who have also announced they won’t be at the Paris show. Auto shows are costly for automakers and this is another example that they feel they’re better off spending that money elsewhere to promote a new vehicle.

GM DIPS ARCHITECTURES INTO LAZARUS PIT
When car companies develop the new platform or architecture for a car, it generally lasts for 8 years. They come out with a car, do a major update after four years, then replace it completely after 8 years. That’s how they’ve done it for decades. But in an upcoming episode of Autoline This Week, Dan Ammann, the president of General Motors says they’ll come out with a new architecture that can last for 10 to 15 years. It will be a modular architecture that will accommodate different sizes of vehicles and different powertrains, especially electric. It will allow for over the air updates and accommodate the latest in cyber security protection. By nearly doubling the time it can use an architecture GM will save billions in investment cost. We’re showing you pictures of GM’s SURUS architecture for fuel cell vehicles, and while it may not be exactly what Ammann is talking about, we think that directionally this is where GM is going.

SAFETY LESSONS TRANSLATE TO GIANT MOONROOF
And speaking of vehicle architectures, Acura is using lessons learned from designing safe vehicles to give the all-new RDX a giant standard panoramic moonroof. It started in 2014 when the new small overlap crash test was only two years old and Acura was designing the all-new MDX. One of the enabling pieces to developing an overall safe vehicle was the area around the door opening, called the door ring, seen in yellow, which is able to carry and distribute heavy loads. And at the 2018 Great Designs in Steel Seminar in Michigan yesterday, we learned the door ring for the all-new RDX has evolved into a hot stamped inner and outer piece, claimed to be a world first and made of varying thickness sections. It’s part of what allows the RDX to have a giant panoramic roof while still maintaining safety targets. The other part is structural adhesives, something the automaker only recently embraced. But even though it’s new to its arsenal, the RDX features a whopping more than 30 meters or 100-feet of adhesives. And you can see by this picture how much better structural adhesives can help distribute force over a steel beam compared to using just spot welds.

Still to come… Ford is set to resume F-150 production.

MAY MOBILITY TO DEPLOY AUTONOMOUS FLEET
May Mobility, a Detroit start-up company that’s developed self-driving shuttles, just announced the first commercial deployment of its vehicles. Starting on June 11, in Downtown Detroit, the company will provide, Bedrock, a property management firm, with autonomous shuttles that will transport its employees to lunch, parking spots or their offices. If you’d like to learn more about May Mobility, we interviewed the COO of the company, Alisyn Malek, during our supplier symposium at this year’s Detroit auto show.

BMW GETS LICENSE TO TEST AVs IN CHINA
And in related news, BMW is the first foreign automaker to be awarded with a license to test autonomous cars on public roads in China. The automaker will test Level 4 self-driving cars in the city of Shanghai and collect several petabytes of data for its research.

FORD WOULD JUMP THROUGH FIRE FOR F-150
If you ever wondered how massively important the F-150 is to Ford, just look at the lengths it went to get production of the truck back online after a fire at the plant of one of its suppliers. Ford said it entered the plant “while it was still smoldering” to move and repair 19 dies that are used to shape magnesium parts. Another die was damaged enough that it needed to go back to the supplier’s plant in England, so Ford rented a giant Russian cargo plane, of which there are only 21 in the world, to send the massive 87,000-pound piece overseas. Now Ford says production will resume at its Dearborn, Michigan plant tomorrow and its Kansas City plant on Monday.

Coming up next, a look at a look at the new 48V hybrid system in the Ram 1500.

RAM DETAILS BENEFITS OF 48V SYSTEM
We’re starting to see 48V hybrids trickle into new vehicles. Yesterday, Kia announced the Sportage will get a diesel 48 volt system and the new Ram 1500 will offer one as well. On last week’s Autoline After Hours, we were joined by Rob Wichman, the Director of Ram Truck Engineering, and he talked about benefits of the system.

(Clip from AAH #420 can only be viewed in the video version of today’s show.)

For more about the nuts and bolts of the new Ram 1500, you can watch that entire show right now on our website, Autoline.tv or on our YouTube channel.

Don’t forget to tune in to Autoline After Hours later today when we’ll have Jon Walker, a 3D printing expert at the company EOS. We’ll get to the bottom of what’s really going on with 3D printing in the automotive industry. That’s AAH live today at 3 pm eastern time on our website or our YouTube channel.

But that’s it for today, thanks for watching and please join us again tomorrow.