Blog – Automotive Outlook for 2021 and Beyond

1. Biden Presidency - Government lifer, Biden has already laid out a blueprint of what to expect, and it has got electric vehicles written all over it: clean energy incentives, investment in an electric vehicle charging infrastructure (with a goal of 500,000 outlets by the end of 2030, up from 87,600 now), federal fleet purchases of U.S.-made EVs, and expanding EV tax credits for U.S.-made vehicles and “middle-class” (vs. high-end) consumers who buy electrified vehicles.
2. EVs Having Their Moment Speaking at a supplier’s conference in November, the CEO of ZF Friedrichshafen, a Tier One automotive supplier that specializes in chassis and driveline components, sounded the alarm on the company’s bread and butter, gas-powered vehicles. “Customers are speeding upbringing electric to the market—battery-electric and plug-in hybrids,” said Wolf-Henning Scheider, the ZF CEO. “It will be tremendous stress in the organization. We have to shift priorities even further than we thought.”
3. Battery Battles Heating Up - With EVs, batteries are where all the cost and vehicle weight go, so leading in the battery equation gives an automaker a giant head start. Currently, Tesla is ahead on that front (and others as well, like casting the entire rear underbody of the vehicle in a single piece with mega-casting machines from Italian company IDRA), says Sandy Munro, an automotive engineer/teardown expert who specializes in lean design. Munro did a teardown of Tesla’s new 4680 battery pack for the Model S and estimated its cells have six-time the power, five times more energy, and increase range by about 16%, at half the cost compared to Tesla’s current iteration. “That’s a leap forward that nobody’s going to be catching up to anytime soon,” Munro says.
4. New Ways of Working (Thanks, Pandemic) - COVID-19 has both exhausted the automotive workforce and given them exhilarating experiences that they did not ask for but could be learning from. ZF’s Scheider shared a snippet of what 2020 has been like for his company: “We had to shut down 150 plants around the world within a few days. We switched 60,000 people in a week from working on-site to Microsoft Teams. … We launched a new plant in April, and nobody was there—our people managed to launch this plant from remote. All the equipment was launched, the processes—people from around the world did it from their computer at home. If our organization can do this, we can manage other topics that are coming up.”
5. Supply Chain Change-up - "Black swan” supply troubles related to labor and raw-materials shortages and logistics logjams around the pandemic, combined with new U.S.-China trade rules under the Trump administration, scrambled the global equation for both OEMs and suppliers. New tariffs on steel and aluminum and components manufactured in China had U.S. automakers and suppliers reconsidering their supply chain footprint, sometimes resourcing parts in similarly far-flung places like Vietnam or Taiwan but also considering a more regional supply chain model with parts sourced closer to a company’s manufacturing hubs.
6. AVs Exiting the ‘Valley of Disillusionment’ Autonomous vehicle technology reached peak hype cycle between 2015 and 2018 when prototypes with mod living room interiors populated auto shows, automakers raced to snap up stakes in AV technology companies, and the most optimistic estimates (we are talking to you, Ford) had Americans behind the self-driving non-existent-wheel by 2021. But all the hoo-ha and spectacle turned out to be premature when consumers steadfastly remained less than enthusiastic about surrendering control of their automobile to a computer, technology development did not keep up with the wildly ambitious timeline of marketers, and the federal government failed to make any progress on regulating AVs and setting national standards for their testing.
7. A Shift in Labor The pandemic, combined with a burst of consumer demand for new vehicles beginning in summer, had suppliers scrambling to keep the lines running in the second half of 2020. While suppliers were racing to implement new safety protocols—often with part of their workforce sidelined for COVID-related reasons—automakers were asking them to run their production lines full throttle to both meet demand and build inventory in case a second COVID wave required another shutdown. “You can’t burn the candles at both ends for too long, or it becomes a really big problem,” cautioned Julie Fream, president, and CEO of the Original Equipment Suppliers Association, at the organization’s November conference. She noted that suppliers were struggling during the pandemic with having enough labor—the people who were able to work we're having to work overtime to meet demand, and they were stressed from overwork.

Source - https://www.industryweek.com/leadership/media-gallery/21150611/back-to-the-future-7-developments-shaping-automotive-in-2021-and-beyond?utm_source=IY+IW+Daily+Headlines+-+Afternoon&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=CPS201228037&o_eid=7930I4506489J2B&rdx.ident%5Bpull%5D=omeda%7C7930I4506489J2B&oly_enc_id=7930I4506489J2B

Here is my work on automotive

https://www2.slideshare.net/paulyoungcga/manufacturing-sector-canada-and-usa-september-2020 and automation - https://www2.slideshare.net/paulyoungcga/what-is-next-for-business-and-government-automation

Linked-in

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/blog-manufacturing-automation-reshoring-paul-young/?published=t