What Will Move You Tomorrow
Q&A With Christopher Borroni-Bird
GM Advanced Technology Vehicle Concepts Boss On What Will Move You Tomorrow
We're used to computing technology transforming at a breakneck pace. In comparison, automotive tech seems mired in stop-and-go. But don't be fooled. Dr. Christopher Borroni-Bird, director of advanced technology vehicle concepts at General Motors, has been behind many of this decade's breakthroughs that will reshape how you drive in the near future. With concept platforms like AUTOnomy, Hy-wire, and Sequel, Borroni-Bird is working to turn tomorrow's cars into customizable, all-electronic, zero-emission wonders.
Q: What drew you to your position at GM?
CBB: I joined GM in 2000 from Daimler Chrysler as director of design and technology fusion. I had this idea for creating a role that would look at how technology could enable design. Normally, scientists and technologists tend to look at technology and think about how it can help the environment or safety or performance. I was interested in how it could provide vehicles with new types of design freedom.
So early on, I was asked, "What would you do if you could design a vehicle around fuel-cell technology?" You know, take advantage of the fuel cells being developed at the time and actually design a vehicle around it. That's how the AUTOnomy concept—the "Skateboard"—came along. And the Hy-wire and the Sequel, I managed all three programs. Basically, it was about taking advantage of the design flexibility that fuel cells provide. I like to say that these vehicles are true electric vehicles. They're not just electric drive vehicles. They're electric brakes and steering, as well. That's what I'm really interested in—how technology can not only help address societal concerns, such as energy and the environment and safety, but also how can we make the vehicles more expressive, more personalizable, more emotional—not just the rational or the functional aspects of the technology.
Q: Are we making progress on realizing those, or are they still pretty much just concept?
CBB: The Skateboard is still something that we're pursuing inside GM, but we don't have any plans for production. The beauty of the Skateboard is it's not just limited to fuel-cell technology. It could be applied to the whole theme of electric drive, whether it's battery-powered or generator set, like the Volt. So it's not just a fuel cell concept as such.
Q: Which brings us to the economy. How much is today's economic news impacting GM's ability to maintain its R&D programs and carry them into production?
CBB: Propulsion technology in particular is something that is very important to keep on developing, whether it's electric drive, technologies around fuel cells, or around generator sets. So we're still heavily investing in this technology, as well as some of the safety technologies, and developing them very aggressively.
Q: Safety is obviously critical, but we all know that slick tech gadgets sell cars. So how does GM go about prioritizing which projects carry forward and which you let go?
CBB: Well, a lot of the stuff that's more gadget-focused tends to be much lower-cost development. The really expensive technologies to develop are typically propulsion technologies. If you're trying to displace an internal combustion engine, which has been developed for over 100 years, and replace it with a battery or fuel cell, that requires significant investment. But we're committed to doing that because it's very important. Putting in an MP3 player adapter, for example, is not something that requires a lot of research and development.
Q: So, on one hand, propulsion is one of your top priorities. On the other hand, gadgets sell vehicles. So...
CBB: I mean, we have to satisfy more than one customer, so to speak. We have a societal responsibility to develop cleaner and safer vehicles. But we also know that's not enough to sell vehicles. We have to develop vehicles that have an emotional appeal and a fun factor associated with them. If you're in the appliance or aircraft industry, it can be driven very heavily by functionality requirements. And if you're in the fashion industry, you can be driven to the other extreme by appearance. But the car is somewhere in between. That's what makes it such a fascinating industry to work in.
Q: If fuel-cell tech is so environmentally friendly, why is it taking so long to get going? Where is the resistance coming from?
CBB: I think the technology is coming along very well. The effort originally was just to make it work, and then, once you make it work, to get it small enough that it can fit into a vehicle. Then it must provide the vehicle with sufficient range and so forth. All of those challenges have been addressed one after another, and now we have to solve the challenges of making it affordable in mass production while having a design durable enough to last the life of the vehicle, which is roughly 10 years or 100,000 miles. I think we're pretty much there in terms of development. I think we have a very good design that, if it was mass produced, could be very affordable. But a lot of people are still hesitant with respect to hikes in infrastructure and the cost to set that up. They see a lot of interest in plugging hybrids, which also offer significant energy and environmental benefits. There's real competition, which may be part of the hesitancy on people's part to commit one way or the other.
Q: What about the very near future, like with the Chevy Volt?
CBB: Range-extended electric vehicles like the Volt are a really attractive solution because they leverage batteries and gasoline engines, which people are very familiar with. There's relatively little infrastructure development compared with pure battery-powered vehicles or certainly compared to hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. I can't say at this point which of those three makes the most sense because they each have a logic associated with them. But they all support the idea of moving toward vehicles that are driven with an electric motor. Whichever of those three pans out, they will all need power electronics and electric motors because that will be what’s driving wheels in the future.
Q: What's new and coming in safety tech?
CBB: We have in production things like adaptive cruise control, rear parking assist, and lane departure warning. But we see the future being really a combination of sensing and communications. Look at pedestrians walking across an intersection. If you were looking down on them, the intersection could be full of people, really dense, and yet nobody is getting hurt. That's because people have an ability to sense each other and communicate visually, nonverbally, and have a high degree of maneuverability. We can turn on a dime. I think future vehicles are going to be evolving toward that through a combination of sensing and wirelessly communicating with each other, and ultimately maybe even with electric motors in the wheels to provide very high degrees of maneuverability. But the sensing and communications is a critical part of vehicles that don’t crash and can drive themselves, which is the future. Sensing alone is technically feasible now. We demonstrated this with the autonomous Chevy Tahoe vehicle in 2007's DARPA Urban Challenge. Just with GPS and sensing technology, we were able to drive a vehicle without anybody in it over 60 miles on a simulated urban setting without any crashes. The vehicle was able to find its way using information downloaded through a memory stick. It was incredible.
But the handicap is that sensing technology is quite expensive if you outfit the vehicle with the amount of sensors that were on that vehicle. It isn't a cost-effective solution, and the designers weren't too happy about it, either. We think that the best solution is a combination of communications technology and sensing and that would allow us to minimize the number of sensors, minimize the cost, and get the benefits of both. Because there are situations where sensing makes more sense than communications, such as when there are no other vehicles nearby and you still want to be able to sense road conditions to avoid black ice or other obstacles. On the other hand, if you're coming to a right angle bend, you can't see what's around the corner using sensors, but you can communicate with another vehicle using communications. Each of these has its own place.
We're strong proponents of vehicle-to-vehicle communications, some limited amount of sensing, and combining those two with GPS and digital maps and maybe some limited infrastructure, as well, particularly at places like intersections. The goal of all of this is really not to take away the fun of driving, because that's still important, but to provide people with the choice. Imagine you had a switch in your vehicle and you could decide whether you wanted to drive autonomously or manually this morning. Let's say you're commuting to work and you'd rather be using your cell phone or relaxing or something. You'd be able to drive autonomously, but you don't have to. It's not about taking away control from the driver, but it's about providing a choice and some additional benefits. If vehicles operate autonomously, perhaps in dedicated lanes, maybe of highways, then you can get some additional benefits in terms of safety, as well as energy and environment.
Q: What's the green angle?
CBB: We tend to look at energy efficiency and the environment and think that means we have to make the product itself more efficient based on a test cycle. But another way it can be more efficient is to make it operate more efficiently by better traffic management. If you have vehicles that don't have to stop and start as much, if you don't have accidents as much, that will reduce congestion. So there's a lot that can be done to reduce the CO2 footprint of the fleet of vehicles out there without necessarily making the vehicles themselves more efficient.
Q: You're talking about a lot of factors that are going to require significant cooperation beyond just GM. It could mean every automaker around the globe reaching agreement. In the tech industry, we have so many problems with format wars. Does the auto industry face the same challenges?
CBB: Well, we are looking at the benefits that might be provided for the early adopters of vehicle-to-vehicle communications. If your vehicle has the ability to communicate with an intersection, and you come up to a red traffic light but there’s no other traffic around, wouldn't it be good if you could just be waved through without having to wait? So there are some benefits for early adopters, but I agree that the real benefits come when large numbers or the majority of vehicles are able to communicate with each other, and that will require cooperation, and car companies are cooperating on this activity. It's not like each car company is just doing their own thing independently. It's a little bit like with hydrogen vehicles. We compete in developing hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, but we have to work together if we want to set standards for hydrogen vehicles, battery vehicles, in terms of charging standards and so forth. There is some level of cooperation that's already ongoing with respect to infrastructure integration.
Q: Is there a greater propensity for cooperation between all of the manufacturers right now in order to help spur new sales? Could the bad economy actually be a long-term boon?
CBB: That's a good question. We're certainly looking at where it makes sense to cooperate. When it comes to things like transmissions, we're working with Ford, and with hybrids we’re working with BMW, Daimler, and Chrysler. We certainly understand the need to sometimes pool resources to work on technologies. Maybe in these conditions we need to be looking at more examples of that.
Q: To bridge some topics here, do you envision advances that could help combine safety and sensing with more gadget-oriented technologies?
CBB: Hm. In other parts of the world, like in China or India where people are walking in the streets more than they do here, you see quite a lot of accidents where vehicles that could communicate with pedestrians would be very attractive. If pedestrians had a gadget on them that allowed them to communicate with the vehicle, whether for personalizing the seat and temperature and music settings before you get into the vehicle, or whether it’s to basically say "don't hit me", all of those things become possible. That's the power of communications technology to really rethink our industry. It's very profound. We think about energy and environment and safety and congestion, being able to find parking, being able to personalize the vehicle the way you want it, how can you make it so the vehicle fits into your lifestyle a lot more easily than it does today so that time spent in the vehicle isn't wasted. Whether it's between vehicles, vehicles and the infrastructure, or between vehicles and people when they're not in their vehicles, it's all about connectivity. So I think connectivity is going to become a really big thrust in the future because it affects nearly every aspect of the automobile. And together with electrification, which basically helps to address energy diversity and the environment, those are the two main threads we see for the future.
Q: At the end of the day, when you go home and you reflect back on your job, what do you take away?
CBB: You know...obviously we're going to continue to sell vehicles in North America, but the expected growth in car population is in the emerging markets like China and India. And people are walking from rural China to urban China at an amazing rate, like I think 15 million migrated last year to the coast in search of a better life. But when they get to these big cities, it's really congested, even by New York standards. So you have to ask yourself, how will people move around in the future? If it's already congested, and only a small percentage of the population can afford a car, but that population's going to grow significantly in the next 10 to 15 years, how will people move around in the future? It can't just be that everybody's going to have an electric vehicle because that still gets stuck in traffic. So one of the things I'm really motivated about is trying to give people personal mobility in a way that is sustainable, not only to the planet but also as a business. We need to think not just about making vehicles environmentally sustainable and reducing our dependence on foreign oil, but when it comes to big cities around the world, that's not enough. We have to provide people with an ability to go wherever they want whenever they want with whoever they want. That's the promise of the automobile. If we don't do anything about it, that promise is going to die.
