A key Harley-Davison exec is driving off into the sundown, automakers and suppliers are discovering that one of the best websites for factories within the U.S. are literally fairly restricted regardless of the abundance of area on this nation, and Toyota and Exxon are proposing cleaner gasoline. All that and extra on this Thursday version of The Morning Shift for April 13, 2023.
1st Gear: Moves at Harley
Harley-Davidson Chief Financial Officer Gina Goetter will go away the corporate on the finish of April to supervise funds at Hasbro of all locations, the motorbike maker introduced Wednesday afternoon. From Reuters:
Harley issued an announcement saying that Vice President, Treasurer David Viney will function interim CFO after Goetter’s departure on April 28.
Shares of the corporate had been down 2.8% in prolonged buying and selling after falling greater than 6% on Wednesday.
Goetter was appointed CFO in September 2020 and performed an integral function in Harley’s restructuring plan, known as “Rewire,” to part out much less standard bike fashions and simplify its enterprise technique by catering to an older buyer base. […]
After slicing a whole lot of jobs in 2020, Harley has both crushed or met Wall Street earnings forecasts lately, whereas navigating excessive inflation and provide chain constraints. The firm benefited from sturdy demand for leisure purchases throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
This comes after Harley completed off 2022 with some excellent news, some unhealthy. The firm noticed shipments rise by 18 p.c within the fourth quarter, in contrast with the identical interval a 12 months earlier. However, that quarter was additionally the primary wherein Harley’s electrical motorbike enterprise, LiveWire, was spun off on the inventory market from its conventional choices, in a transfer much like what Ford’s carried out with its separate “Model E” and “Blue” enterprise items. It wasn’t a sterling debut for LiveWire; the division bought simply 69 bikes over that span. Who would have guessed the Harley crowd can be averse to the idea of unpolluted mobility?
2nd Gear: The Search for the Perfect EV Megasite
Sure, the United States is an enormous nation with numerous land. But area isn’t the one consideration for each automotive firm or battery provider that desires to lift a brand new manufacturing unit this decade, as Reuters reported Thursday utilizing Volkswagen’s new electrical truck division as a case examine:
Volkswagen’s off-road model Scout Motors studied 74 completely different parcels of land throughout the U.S. final summer time because it hunted for a spot to construct a $2 billion meeting plant.
It shortly eradicated nearly all of them. In one case, they discovered it might take six years to construct a wanted rail hyperlink. Others lacked entry to scrub energy – essential for a challenge for “green” electrical automobiles. Some didn’t supply sufficient close by expert labor.
“We were hitting a deadline,” stated Scott Keogh, Scout’s CEO, so that they settled for a parcel in South Carolina that has all their desired options however is a bit smaller than they initially needed – 1,600 as an alternative of two,000 acres.
Scout’s scramble highlights a problem going through dozens of world producers. Fueled by a mixture of hefty authorities incentives, a transition to new transportation and power applied sciences, and nationwide safety considerations about counting on distant suppliers, particularly in China, there’s a factory-building growth happening throughout the U.S.
But all that new building has an actual property drawback. More particularly, a “megasite” drawback. While the U.S. has plentiful land, there aren’t that many locations to shortly plunk a billion-dollar-plus manufacturing unit.
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Labor, infrastructure and power are typically fascinating for any manufacturing campus, however some corporations have very particular wants. Consider Intel. While Scout acknowledged a rail hyperlink as essential for its megasite, very like Rivian (which can be referenced within the article), the chipmaker really required a plot that wasn’t too near passing trains, as a result of the vibrations they’d create would wreak havoc on manufacturing of nanometer-sized silicon.
Good old style promoting issues too, as South Carolina officers reminded Reuters. That’s the place Scout in the end determined to base its headquarters:
The VW Scout plant, for example, is located in clear view of a significant interstate freeway connecting South Carolina’s coastal areas to the higher Midwest. That means placing the Scout title, being revived by VW after 4 a long time of dormancy, in sight of tens of hundreds of passing motorists a day.
“We have a lot of people who are coming from the north or from the Midwest down that highway that would drive right by that facility as they go to the beaches of South Carolina and Georgia and Florida,” stated Harry Lightsey III, South Carolina’s secretary of commerce. “That was all important.”
third Gear: Trucking Fuels of the Future
Battery-electric tractor-trailers are selecting up use, and consultants imagine roughly 12 occasions the variety of them will likely be constructed by 2030 in contrast with hydrogen fuel-cell rigs. Still, truck makers say they’re not ready to spurn hydrogen but, as a Bloomberg story revealed Thursday illustrates:
Battery-electric vans are already making an influence on the highway, with Volvo, Daimler Truck and Volkswagen’s Traton providing different-size fashions to logistics purchasers. DHL has put a number of of Volvo’s e-trucks to work on London streets. Germany’s DB Schenker in January ordered 100 electrical vans from Traton’s MAN model and has an settlement with Sweden’s Volta Trucks for some 1,500 e-rigs. Danish transport firm Maersk final 12 months ordered 300 automobiles from Swedish startup Einride for its US warehousing, distribution and transportation enterprise. […]
But don’t rely out gasoline cell vans simply but. Their drivetrains convert hydrogen into electrical energy that then powers the motor, emitting solely water vapor. A gasoline cell powertrain weighs much less, permitting the automobiles to drive longer distances with better hundreds and shorter refueling stops.
While Volvo has six battery-electric vans on supply and bought greater than 4,300 of those automobiles since 2019, it’s additionally pursuing gasoline cells. The firm final 12 months began testing hydrogen vans with 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) of vary that may be refueled in quarter-hour. Daimler Truck has carried out comparable trials the previous few years.
From the skin trying in, it actually looks as if when you think about weight, refueling (or recharging) time, and all of the power concerned, hydrogen makes probably the most sense for vans, whereas battery-electric is finest suited to passenger automobiles. Unfortunately, that’s not likely the way in which any of this works, as a result of in the end the one which will get the mandatory infrastructure first will win out. EVs could have the quantity, so electrical vans it’ll be.
4th Gear: Toyota and Exxon
In one other different fuel-related story, Toyota and Exxon have introduced they’re working collectively to check low-carbon blends in internal-combustion engines. Also from Bloomberg:
The gasoline blends are created from cleaner feedstocks and will someday reduce greenhouse fuel emissions from inner combustion engines by as a lot as 75% in contrast with common gasoline, stated Andrew Madden, Exxon’s vp for technique and planning, citing preliminary trial outcomes. The fuels proved suitable with Toyota automobiles, elevating the prospect of a drop-in answer that might compete with battery-powered vehicles in future.
The fuels are “very much at the test phase” and would require authorities coverage help earlier than changing into commercially accessible, Madden stated stated in a Wednesday interview. They’re principally a mixture of current feedstocks like renewable biomass and ethanol produced utilizing cleaner processes, he stated.
“Having a solution for liquid fuels that we can use in the existing fleet, having it in the kind of policy construct where we allow the market to innovate, is the lowest cost way to decarbonize transportation,” Madden stated.
The one consideration the story doesn’t increase is worth. Which is essential, as a result of artificial or low-carbon variations of petroleum may solely be an excellent Band-Aid for typical fossil fuels as long as they’re not prohibitively costly by comparability.
Maybe that’ll be solved within the 2030s. Either method, Toyota stays one of many solely automakers holding EVs at considerably of an arm’s size, so the Japanese automaker appears an excellent accomplice for Exxon. After all, InfluenceMap did not too long ago think about each among the many “five most influential corporations obstructing global climate action.”
fifth Gear: Cruise Must Grow
General Motors’ self-driving taxi arm Cruise is decided to broaden its footprint this 12 months and no person can do something to cease it. From Automotive News:
In 2023, Cruise goals to broaden its business operations, presently restricted to parts of San Francisco, Phoenix and Austin, Texas. It’s getting ready for quantity manufacturing of the Origin, an autonomous car with no steering wheel or pedals, at GM’s Factory Zero in Detroit.
Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt stated the corporate is on monitor for — if not forward of — its purpose to succeed in $1 billion in income by 2025.
Achieving that focus on is just not a certainty, although some analysts who observe Cruise and GM say it’s an affordable purpose. The firm’s skill to transition from a cash-burning startup to a sustainable enterprise would signify a major milestone for Cruise and the nascent robotaxi business, which has had a rougher path towards viability than many within the business anticipated.
“Almost all of our energy as a company is going into scaling,” Vogt informed Automotive News. “Figuring out how to set up new markets, crank up the volume of vehicles, get ready for the Origin, make sure all of our support systems handle that kind of volume. And so our metrics and reporting have started to resemble that of a business operating at scale.”
The metropolis of San Francisco pleaded with California officers to restrain Cruise and competitor Waymo to “a series of limited deployments with incremental expansion” again in January. Trouble with that’s, you’ll be able to’t maintain your self as a enterprise on restricted testing. This is why transferring quick and breaking issues will all the time be the motto of Silicon Valley.
Reverse: Oh Sometimes, I Get a Good Feeling, Yeah
It was on today in 1997 — 26 years in the past — that Tiger Woods received his first main, the Masters match in Augusta, Georgia. This is related to us, a automotive web site, as a result of it coincides with one of the crucial memorable but middlingly successful auto-athlete endorsement offers of the trendy period.
Neutral: RIP Craig Breen
Rally followers around the globe are mourning the lack of the 33-year-old Irishman, who died in a testing accident in Croatia early Thursday forward of subsequent week’s World Rally Championship occasion. His co-driver, James Fulton, was unhurt. Our condolences exit to Breen’s family members.
Source: jalopnik.com