Most popular news article this week: an interview with Nady Boules, director of General Motors’ electrical and control integration research skunkworks. He told how the automaker sees the pathway, timeframe and costs in moving through semi- to fully autonomous driving – the automaker has begun road testing prototype Cadillacs capable of semi-autonomous driving. GM calls the system ‘Super Cruise’.
The automaker is big on this sort of thing. At the Shanghai Expo a while back, it staged a superb demo of future autonomous motoring in a big city, a world in which your fully automated electric pod-on-wheels would hang off your apartment balcony, quietly nibbling on electricity to recharge its cells, till you jumped in and were whistled off to, say, the airport. There, you’d jump out at the departures door and pet pod would zoom off to self-park in a high-rise structure, grazing quietly on more fresh volts till you return and – via a smartphone app – summon it to the arrivals door to pick you up. All great stuff but, in a world where local governments struggle even to repair potholes, I suspect the infrastructure for schemes such as GM imagines is decades off yet.
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Cross-town rival Ford, meanwhile, is on a far east factory building/opening spree. With new plants well in hand in China, where it was a late entry long after GM and Chrysler, Ford this week opened its new Focus factory in Thailand where it already knocks out the non-NAFTA Ranger truck – a project not without recent problems thanks to the monsoon last year – and Fiesta. This means the ASEAN markets and Australia/New Zealand, etc, will start getting the C-segment Ford from Rayong rather than Germany (South Africa was once a partial source for Down Under Focus), as is already the case with the B-seg Fiesta which switched from Germany to Thailand supply for these markets a while ago. The inevitable slight change in specifications gives the local NSCs the chance to launch a ‘new’ Focus line, too, as was the case with the Fiesta.
We reported on April sales in western Europe, a challenging region usually mentioned these days in quarterly results despatches from automakers and suppliers.
In the US, one of the latest alliances between automakers began to take shape as Nissan and Daimler broke ground for an engine plant that will supply Infiniti and Mercedes; this will be the first time Daimler has made car engines that side of the pond. They’ll go into the C-class at the Merc assembly plant in Tuscaloosa – dontcha love the name? – Alabama.
New plants (and products) are also on the way to Brazil, as automakers digest the recent government mandates for the auto industry and start making plans which will include Mitsubishi’s local distributor setting up to make cars alongside the trucks and SUVs already assembled locally.
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By GlobalDataAnd, taking time out from the autobiz for just a bit, though there is an autos angle, we’ve been talking football with GM’s Vauxhall. Me, I haven’t a clue about the sport, which is why Simon, one of several fans of the ‘beautiful game’ here at j-a, was our man with the notebook…
Have a nice weekend. We’re expecting some sun, for once.
Graeme Roberts, Deputy Editor, just-auto.com
