To fulfill their commitments to environmental sustainability, leading mobility companies and most Autotech Council members have made commitments to making vehicles cleaner, reducing carbon impact, and supporting long term sustainability in production and manufacturing. In the near term, this requires massive investment in startups and new technologies, which we focus on this month.
Silicon Valley, California, May 30, 2022/Meeting Recap/ On May 26, members, innovators and the wider automotive community met on the subject of Cleantech in automotive and mobility. To fulfill their commitments to environmental sustainability, leading mobility companies and most Autotech Council members have made commitments to making vehicles cleaner, reducing carbon impact, and supporting long term sustainability in production and manufacturing. Our roster of speakers and panels addressed those needs with some great innovations that can
Special thanks to our opening speaker, Cassidy Shell, Transportation & Logistics Lead at Cleantech Group. Cassidy kicked off our meeting with a data-rich presentation, which also illustrated the trends going forward. She gave us some particular insight into the promise of electrification, and the niches where Hydrogen might play a role. Just after that, Roman Kiwakyou, Principal - Climate Technology at Shell Ventures, and Benjamin Richardson, Director, Energy Portfolio at Defense Innovation Unit, gave us a panel discussion of their groups’ efforts to shift the energy sources for mobility. Both have unique perspectives, with Shell looking to a future less-dependent on oil, and the DoD looking for energy savings, but also strategic advantages of using hybridization and diverse fuel sources for operations.
Our meeting was inspired by the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, where the talk of the summit was how to make vehicles cleaner, reduce carbon impact, and make the industry more sustainable in the long term. COP26 pledges should be taken with a grain of salt, but still, about $130 trillion was pledged towards green tech at the Summit - no small sum! The LA Auto Show promptly followed COP26 with a massive tilt towards new models and building competition in electric cars. And the massive US Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has funding to spur the adoption of vehicle electrification and charging infrastructure. But, at Autotech Council, we don’t think it’s the COP commitments that are going to drive a shift to cleaner solutions: we believe market economics mean that these choices are preferable for business, too. Companies that can produce cleaner cars that run cheaper, require less maintenance, enable car sharing, will win in the marketplace. Any carmaker seeking long-term profitability should seek to be a leader in this sector, or be beaten to market by a faster competitor.
We’d like to thank our hosts at Hyundai Cradle in Mountain View, all our panelists, and our speakers. For our Members, presentations are available in the Library.