The Verge has an interview today with Mike Timskey, Ford's 'Global Director of Vehicle Electrification and Infrastructure.' I found it interesting. There's not a whole lot of new information, but it's a good summary of Ford's current views on alternative-power vehicles. A few quotes:
So speaking of infrastructure, what’s the state of the art with fast charging? Is [fragmentation of standards] a concern for you? Where do you stand on that?Well, if you look at it today, you’re right, there’s a lot of vying for who’s going to have the future standard. You have CHAdeMO, you have Supercharger, and you have combo or SAE, which is all the other automakers. If you were to map out the number of electric vehicles or plug-in vehicles that are going to have each connector, I think you’d quickly find that the combo connector will be the most widely supported. So we’re bullish on that coupler, and we’re fully supporting it.
But what’s happening is something that’s pretty interesting — if you were to rewind a couple years ago, we were talking about battery swapping because you can’t charge the batteries fast enough, and we’re seeing — in fact, we’re even doing an experiment on how fast can we charge. So one of our mobility projects is how quickly can we get energy into a lithium ion battery, and what is the limit of that. And what are the limits of the infrastructure? In other words, what will the utilities allow us to provide during peak times? And frankly, that whole space is moving so quickly that I think that very soon — say, next-generation products — we’re going to see 150 kilowatts. So today, you’ll go out and find a fast charger and it might be 40 kilowatts, maybe 50 kilowatts. I think in the very near future you’re going to see 150 kilowatts. And even some automakers are talking about going further than 150.
On the same connector?
On one connector, yeah. The same connector because it has enough metal to support the higher power. It was really the lithium ion battery at the other end that was the bottleneck. And then the utilities were concerned about drawing that kind of power. So I think what you’re going to see is… I think battery swapping is much, much less likely now. Fast charging is becoming much more fast, high-power. And I think you’re going to see an emergence of these next-generation vehicles become much more capable and then have this fast-charge network that can charge them very quickly so that theoretically the battery electric vehicle doesn’t become a second or third vehicle, it becomes perhaps a primary vehicle.
I’m assuming you have some data on this — I don’t know how much you’re able to share — at what point is the crossover where we’re selling over 50 percent alternative fuel vehicles, hybrids, and electrics? Is that coming soon?We don’t really talk publicly about it, and I think part of it is there’s a lot of unknowns, meaning fuel prices and all the other things. What I can say is, one, if you look at our portfolio over time — so we’ve got what we call the power choice. We’ve got our EcoBoost, which is our downsized, turbocharged, direct injection. Then we have all of our electrification, so that’s battery electrics, plug-in hybrids, and hybrids, and then we have our natural gas and alternative type fuels. If you look at that portfolio over time, one of the biggest factors that we’re going to have to do is recapture braking energy and shut down engines during congestion, lights, start-stop, that kind of thing. So you start adding up where we have to take the product portfolio in the future, electrification is going to be a big element of it.
And when we cross 50 percent? I don’t really know. I can tell you right now we’re only running about 3 or 4 percent electrified products, and that number’s dipped down about a full percentage point since fuel prices have fallen. So we’re still in the early days, but I think we’re going to see an acceleration here in the next couple years. All manufacturers are likely going to embrace it, because it’s in everybody’s toolbox and it’s the right thing to do for fuel economy.
And you talked about battery manufacturing scale. Are you actively bumping into those limits? Gigafactory’s gotten a lot of press over the past year, and obviously it’s a huge constraint for an all-electric vehicle, but is that a problem for you, and if so, how are you addressing it?I can’t really comment directly on Tesla’s strategy, but I would say this: there’s a breakpoint that we all will get if we can collectively get the volumes. So there’s no surprise here that our Focus Electric is using the same cells as the Chevy Volt, we use the same supplier.
A123?
No, it’s called LG Chem. Holland, Michigan is the plant. So, just think about under that scenario, if those volumes grow and that supplier is able to collectively get the volumes, then we all will enjoy the same scale. So what I’m expecting to happen in the industry is, you know, there will be the Tesla strategy — stationary plus vehicle and put it all under one roof and produce a lot of them — and then there’s basically going to be our strategy, which is find the best-priced cell and battery pack that we can and let the supplier get the volume and scale by going across the industry. And I really think that it’s worked for us many times, and that’s how the supply base works, and so I think it’ll be an interesting few years to see how it all pans out, but we’re very confident in our strategy.
