Hyundai plans to keep making combustion engines, Mercedes is open to future V8 production, Cruise doesn’t think its robotaxis will ever be fully autonomous. All this and more in today’s issue of The Morning Dump.
Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday.
Hyundai To Continue ICE Development
Albert Biermann may have retired from his post at Hyundai, but he still advises the Korean company in a technical role. In an interview with Australian motoring outlet CarExpert, Biermann said that Hyundai remains committed to internal combustion.
“We are continuing for next emission levels [in internal combustion development]. We have no other choices. I mean, we are not giving up on combustion engines, right, we are global player,” he said.
“And there is no infrastructure available for EVs for quite some time in several regions.”
Quite the pragmatic approach. The simple fact is that it’ll be an unimaginably long time before every single new car sold in the world is electric. Since the general Western deadline of 2035 is a full 13 years away, we’re likely talking decades before everything goes all green. Of course, new Euro 7 emissions standards won’t make homologating future combustion-powered cars easy, but it will eventually be done.
Mercedes Might Keep The V8 Past 2030
In an interview with Australian outlet CarSales, Mercedes-Benz vice president for vehicle development Joerg Bartels indicated that Mercedes is leaving the door open for future V8 sales.
“In the end it has to fulfil our overall CO2 strategy, and we have a clear path on that one: being CO2 neutral at the end of the ’30s, by 2039. And from 2030 we just want to be pure electric,” he explained.
“But if there’s still a customer demand [for petrol V8s] in some regions, and it’s still part of our offering, why should we stop it?”
Exactly, why stop offering V8s? The fact of the matter is that combustion engines will remain useful in performance cars for quite a while. After all, weight is the enemy of performance and current battery packs are quite heavy. So long as market conditions allow, I say keep the V8s in niche applications.
The Chicago Skyway May Soon Be Partly Australian
It seems like there’s a lot of news involving Australia today, but bear with me for one more piece. Bloomberg reports that Australian company Atlas Arteria Ltd. plans to invest in a big chunk of the Chicago Skyway.
Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and OMERS Infrastructure sold their respective one-third stakes in the 12.5 kilometer (7.8 mile) road linking downtown Chicago to its south-eastern suburbs. The deal forms a venture with Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, which will retain a one-third interest, according to a statement Tuesday.
While an American toll road being partially-owned by other countries isn’t strange, it’s a little odder knowing the move goes against the wishes of Atlas Arteria Ltd.’s biggest stakeholder.
The acquisition was announced despite a strongly-worded statement Monday from Atlas Arteria’s biggest shareholder IFM Investors, following confirmation of the talks. It said the deal could be potentially “dilutive to distributions” and that those concerns were shared by other major shareholders.
“We are disappointed with the decision by Atlas Arteria to proceed with the acquisition of Chicago Skyway,” an IFM spokesperson said via text message. “As a major shareholder, we are considering our options.”
Of course, this deal is contingent on approval by the City of Chicago, among other things. It’s not quite set in stone, but it raises some questions on who actually owns certain pieces of infrastructure and what’s next for Atlas Arteria.
Cruise CEO Thinks Its Autonomous Vehicles Might Never Be Truly Autonomous
Care to hear something funny? Not “haha” funny, more “The future is going to be so stupid” funny. Reuters reports that GM autonomous vehicle subsidiary Cruise plans to never have truly autonomous vehicles.
“Well, my question would be, ‘Why?'” said Kyle Vogt, CEO of Cruise, a unit of General Motors, when asked if he could see a point where remote human overseers should be removed from operations.
“I can provide my customers peace of mind knowing there is always a human there to help if needed,” Vogt said. “I don’t know why I’d ever want to get rid of that.”
It’s very clear that the goal here isn’t autonomy, it’s increased margins. Imagine ride-hailing services with significantly reduced driver overhead. Instead of one driver per vehicle, one controller will oversee a group of vehicles in what I can only imagine to be a call center for autonomous vehicles. Maybe put the call center in a place with a low cost of living so that workers aren’t paid Los Angeles or New York rates. It’s great for corporate profits, but what will gig workers do if this supervised autonomous ride-hailing future pans out?
The Flush
Whelp, time to drop the lid on today’s edition of The Morning Dump. It’s Tuesday, which means I’ll be off to the Detroit Auto Show very, very soon. With automakers frequently choosing to unveil cars outside of auto shows to avoid fighting for coverage, what role will auto shows play in the future? If OEM auto show spending continues to dwindle, it could deprive people who like cars of the opportunity to check out the latest and greatest. Those are my thoughts, I’m interested to hear yours.
Lead photo credit: Hyundai
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I ain’t reading all that. I’m happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened.
Auto shows are a great idea in theory but rammed everything time I’ve gone. Hard to enjoy when you feel like cattle.
Your high praise of the Theta II kind of kicked the soapbox out from under you.
Hard to see auto shows sticking around in a meaningful way.
The thought of a one-to-many call center employee to 95% autonomous vehicle system is frankly more terrifying than an allegedly 100% autonomous vehicle that doesn’t do edge cases well. At least in one there’s a chance they try to figure out the hard stuff.
they used to be neat to see concept cars, and then to sit in the ones you might actually buy. considering the changes to online purchasing, they might actually become more relevant as many of us still want to put hands and actual eyes on what we plan to purchase.
I don’t see autoshows going away any time soon. Too many people (such as me) are willing to spend money to go to them.
And I don’t see the move to BEVs or having some companies not using dealers would affect that.
Now having said that, car shows run by dealer associations (such as the big annual one in Toronto) have frozen out Tesla in the past. But the last couple of shows I went to (before Covid), even Tesla was there since too many people want to see what Tesla has.
“But if there’s still a customer demand [for petrol V8s] in some regions, and it’s still part of our offering, why should we stop it?”
The fact that these words showed up in a quote from Mercedes and not Dodge is baffling on some level. I wish they had come from Cadillac in defense of keeping the Blackwing around longer.
As to the big auto show unveils, I’m not too concerned. What I’d personally prefer would be some type of reveal on the internet, Web3, at a Starbucks kiosk, whatever. Then, have more manufacturer-sponsored auto shows spread around the country in cities smaller than New York, Chicago, et al, so there would be a better chance I could go see one and get an up-close taste of whatever’s new.
Only two of MB’s V8s start under $80k, the rest start above $112k. And they can also sell those to the super rich across their global markets for even more to offset emissions requirements.
Dodge exists primarily only in the US and emissions requirements will start killing their ability to sell budget V8s in cars.
Because Merc sells to the middle east clientele and those people can make whatever law they want.
I am baffled that the EV offsets don’t allow for even better V8’s while dropping the Ho hum ubiquitous 2.0 turbo everything engines and forcing those drivers to deal with Range anxiety and Battery longevity concerns.
“What this actually is, is a tacit admission that ‘autonomous vehicles’ always were and always will be the highest order of bullshit”
“Maybe then we can fucking get some actual progress on ADAS Level 3”
Explain like I’m five why we should give up on full auto and still work on Level 3? Just curious.
I consider myself to be an environmentalist. I believe in climate change, I’m concerned about how rapidly things seem to be escalating, my wife and I try to do our part to reduce our carbon footprint, et cetera.
…with that out of the way, the EV push is a little ridiculous to me. Is it good that EVs exist and are improving rapidly? Yes! Do I foresee EVs eventually making up a large portion of vehicles? Yes! Do I think we need to be investing heavily in them, their infrastructure, and the technology in general? Oh yeah.
But all of this freaking government grandstanding about them, coupled with society on a whole’s push to shift climate change responsibility onto individuals rather than corporations (far and away the biggest emitters of greenhouse gas) as well as our relative infancy in understanding the technology and its long term consequences is ridiculous. We still need ICE, and we will for many years. A lot of this NO ICE BY (insert deadline here) and guilt campaigning meant to get regular people into EVs is really misguided. Individuals driving gas cars are small drops in the overall bucket….and the tinfoil hat in me says it’s quite a coincidence that a lot of governments are pushing people into EVs rather than trying to hold corporate monoliths accountable. Follow the money….
So I’m glad that Hyundai, Benz, etc. will still be pushing the technology forward. It’s needed and who knows if EVs really are any sort of long term solution just yet. I’m glad they exist, but I’m not ready to jump the gun anytime soon…and it’s telling that so many major manufacturers aren’t either. They know a lot more than we do.
You nailed it. It’s way easier to commercialize people’s green guilt than it is to, say, ban Coke from using plastic bottles or increasing/electrifying our rail network to handle more freight.
Why is it surprising that Cruise would want to keep the option of having a person in the loop indefinitely? If the last 5% of driving scenarios is increasingly difficult to handle (and it is), you have to look at what the motivation in solving it is vs just having a person take over at that point. From the consumer’s perspective, the vehicle will still appear to be driving itself & you don’t need a warm body sitting in the drivers seat – they won’t suddenly be stranded if something difficult arises. From Cruise or the fleet operator’s perspective, they can deploy a mostly autonomous fleet sooner, under more conditions, and more reliably than if they had to develop an autonomous system that can handle everything conceivable. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they’ll continue to develop things to continue to expand the conditions that AVs can operate under, but this allows them to start deploying fleets more quickly, bringing in $ and experience.
Cruise: 8 self-checkout kiosks at the grocery store with one clerk there to punch a couple codes if you do it wrong, and now one ride-hailing call center attendant for multiple semi-automated taxis. It really all makes perfect (business) sense. And yeah, worrying about the gig economy worker is the least of any business owner’s concerns. I mean, the lack of concern by business owners is why we have gig economy workers in the first place instead of more full-time employees. The trend is perpetually downward.
Auto Shows: I like cars but I’ve only gone to one auto show twenty years ago. And it was fine. I’m not lamenting their potential eventual death.
I suppose it’ll become easier to shop for one’s next vehicle, when the field of possible candidates is cut in half between ICE and EV.
Unless you’re shopping for an EV where the number of models just keeps increasing.
Manufacturers can offer as many EV models as they want, but there’s a good amount of the population for which they aren’t a viable option yet (that nasty old ghost, charging infrastructure).
“The fact of the matter is that combustion engines will remain useful in performance cars for quite a while”
Yes, and in trucks, in cars used on long trips, in vehicles purchased by people without access to home charging etc etc etc