Strange situations in auto industry

Issue #72, Apr 6th, 2021

This week witnessed strange situations in the automotive industry. On the flip side, it is a happening sector and we should not be surprised to see such news! Whistleblowers need safety to raise alerts when they witness a damaging scenario in their organization. The auto industry wants a share of the pie of the funds earmarked by the U.S. Congress to address the global shortage in chips. The reaction Mahindra & Mahindra's MD and a doyen Pawan Goenka had when he first looked at the R&D department is part of the auto industry folklore. He is retiring. Here are some updates from the media reported this week.

Whistleblower program for auto safety

For Kim Gwang-ho, it has been 1,700 days since he first told U.S. regulators that his then-employer, Hyundai Motor, was failing to address a design flaw linked to engines seizing up and at times catching fire. Mr. Kim, a former safety engineer at the Korean auto maker, said the days he has counted will be worth it if he receives a reward he believes he is entitled to as part of a whistleblower program Congress ordered the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to create in 2015. The problem: The agency never set up the program. - WSJ

Government funding for automotive chips

Automakers want a portion of the money the U.S. Congress approved for addressing the global semiconductor shortage to be reserved for vehicle-grade chips, warning of a potential 1.3 million shortfall in car and light-duty truck production in the U.S. this year. Congress last year authorized federal spending on research and design initiatives to boost domestic chip production and create a subsidy for domestic manufacturers. - Bloomberg

Where is the rest of it?

“Where is the rest of it?” was the first reaction of Pawan Goenka, the managing director of Mahindra and Mahindra, when he first saw the company’s R&D department over 27 years ago after leaving his job at General Motors and joining M&M to set up its R&D unit. Today, as he retires, he wrote in a letter to his colleagues that on his first day at the company, he was given a tour of the company’s R&D Centre and he was panic-stricken when he realised that the company hardly had any R&D infrastructure in place back in 1993. The team has come a long way from where it was back then. - Economic Times

What went wrong with on-demand rides?

Uber and some transportation experts once predicted that getting a ride with the tap of an app would help reduce traffic and increase riders’ use of public transportation. Instead, the opposite happened. What went wrong? Gregory D. Erhardt, who analyzes transportation modeling systems at the University of Kentucky, shared that the companies and some transportation experts misjudged how the ride services would be used. The theory of on-demand rides was that they would be like carpooling. As people drove to work, they’d pick up an extra person or two along the way — and some money, too. But Uber and Lyft turned out to be more like taxis. - NY Times

A computer on wheels - the Apple car

As tech companies become a key part of the auto industry, cars are looking more like giant computers on wheels. To understand why a tech giant like Apple might want to make a car, we built one out of iPhone parts with old phones. Some parts were 3D printed. - WSJ

A green tidal wave for the EV industry

President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion plan to overhaul U.S. infrastructure, the biggest such initiative in more than half a century, could trigger a “green tidal wave,” in the words of one analyst, speeding the transportation industry’s shift to electricity from carbon-based fuels and generating big benefits for companies ranging from Elon Musk’s Tesla to General Motors and electric vehicle startups. - Forbes