News From the Auto Industry

THE STORY SOUNDS A BIT HOLLYWOOD.

That-the elimination of the block and the elimination of the linkages-in large part, changes the art of the automobile. More than the block is missing.

“A fuel cell stack can be spread around the vehicle and can take any shape you might imagine. It doesn’t have to be bunched up like the cylinders on an internal combustion engine,” says Christopher Borroni-Bird, head of GM’s Design and Technology Fusion Group and program manager of AUTOnomy. No block to design around.

What’s more, the mechanical linkages that have been part and parcel of every car built for the past 100 years-as in the steering system and accel/decel system-aren’t there, either. There’s no steering column to design around. These mechanical linkages have given way to X-by-wire technology, technology that GM’s partner on the AUTOnomy, SKF (Goteborg, Sweden), has transitioned from aircraft to automobiles.

How serious? Consider this: AUTOnomy is a “concept” car. It’s the sort of thing that gets rolled out on the stages of the world’s premier auto shows so that the buying public can get a glimpse of their potential transportation future. Generally, really good concept cars serve as models for much milder production vehicles at some point. Sometimes, the concept cars actually have mechanicals beneath their handcrafted skin. But they are fundamentally models.

Aw Snap! Audi R10s lose outright victory at Road America
Speaking of calling your shots, Audi said prior to Round Eight of the American Le Mans Series at Road America this past weekend that its LMP1 R10 diesel racers were poised to steal an outright victory from the LMP2 cars. …

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Mon, 13 Aug 2007 15:29:59 -0700

That-the elimination of the block and the elimination of the linkages-in large part, changes the art of the automobile. More than the block is missing.

“A fuel cell stack can be spread around the vehicle and can take any shape you might imagine. It doesn’t have to be bunched up like the cylinders on an internal combustion engine,” says Christopher Borroni-Bird, head of GM’s Design and Technology Fusion Group and program manager of AUTOnomy. No block to design around.

What’s more, the mechanical linkages that have been part and parcel of every car built for the past 100 years-as in the steering system and accel/decel system-aren’t there, either. There’s no steering column to design around. These mechanical linkages have given way to X-by-wire technology, technology that GM’s partner on the AUTOnomy, SKF (Goteborg, Sweden), has transitioned from aircraft to automobiles.

How serious? Consider this: AUTOnomy is a “concept” car. It’s the sort of thing that gets rolled out on the stages of the world’s premier auto shows so that the buying public can get a glimpse of their potential transportation future. Generally, really good concept cars serve as models for much milder production vehicles at some point. Sometimes, the concept cars actually have mechanicals beneath their handcrafted skin. But they are fundamentally models.

Note the name of that group: Design and Technology Fusion. These are people who are tasked with leveraging design and technology of finding beneficial strengths between the two. Adrian Chernoff, AUTOnomy Program Architect (and former Disney Imagineer), notes, “This is about the creation of some thing that we haven’t seen before.”

When asked about that fundamental architecture–the four wheels, parallel sets–Burns acknowledges, “Maybe we should have reinvented the automobile around two wheels or three wheels.” He’s thinking about the two-wheeled Segway Human Transporter. The AUTOnomy has all-wheel-drive, all-wheel-steering, and Silicon Valley-sized computer power. “This could be thought about as a four-wheeled Segway in terms of its maneuverability,” Burns says.

Regardless of that, the answer to the question is something that could (yes, I am being deliberately tentative here, not wanting to go out on any limbs) have profound effects on the state of automotive design, manufacture, retail, service, finance–you name it.

While it would be nice to think that the people at the top of the world’s largest automobile manufacturing company are actually asking one another about such lofty speculations, the story sounds just a bit too much like George Washington and the cherry tree–something a bit too wooden.

Developed by GM R&D with assistance from EDS, dieCAS (for die Casting Analysis System), is a workstation-based CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) product that has saved GM more than $8 million annually, according to the company. Since 1990, it has been used to reduce scrap and improve productivity in GM Powertrain’s die casting operations for transmission cases and engine blocks, GM added.

If you review the executive rosters of the leading companies in the automotive industry, OEMs and suppliers alike, we can all pick out good leaders and not-so-good leaders (names withheld on purpose). I think we all can take a chapter from the GM book of cultural change. If we can all learn from the success of others we’ll be further ahead in the long run. Why reinvent the wheel!

“By commercializing dieCAS, we will provide improvements in the cost and quality of castings, including non-powertrain applications, that are purchased from our suppliers,” explained Gary McDonald, director of the Enterprise Systems Lab at the GM Research and Development Center. “Furthermore, under the agreement, GM can continue to use dieCAS for its own casting operations at a reduced cost by spreading the costs of software maintenance over a wider number of users.”

Steffe added that dieCAS has shortened process development time up to one year for large powertrain castings by eliminating trial and error with physical hardware. The scope of the dieCAS analysis includes heat transfer and solidification, liquid metal flow, and casting and die distortion, he said.

With the purchase, Archstone, which also owns Archstone Studio City and Archstone Studio Colony, will control 827 units along Studio City’s Bluffside Drive and is investing in a Studio City apartment market where the average rent was $1,577 a month during the third quarter, 18 percent more than the county average, according to RealFacts.

If you review the executive rosters of the leading companies in the automotive industry, OEMs and suppliers alike, we can all pick out good leaders and not-so-good leaders (names withheld on purpose). I think we all can take a chapter from the GM book of cultural change. If we can all learn from the success of others we’ll be further ahead in the long run. Why reinvent the wheel!

“By commercializing dieCAS, we will provide improvements in the cost and quality of castings, including non-powertrain applications, that are purchased from our suppliers,” explained Gary McDonald, director of the Enterprise Systems Lab at the GM Research and Development Center. “Furthermore, under the agreement, GM can continue to use dieCAS for its own casting operations at a reduced cost by spreading the costs of software maintenance over a wider number of users.”

Steffe added that dieCAS has shortened process development time up to one year for large powertrain castings by eliminating trial and error with physical hardware. The scope of the dieCAS analysis includes heat transfer and solidification, liquid metal flow, and casting and die distortion, he said.

With the purchase, Archstone, which also owns Archstone Studio City and Archstone Studio Colony, will control 827 units along Studio City’s Bluffside Drive and is investing in a Studio City apartment market where the average rent was $1,577 a month during the third quarter, 18 percent more than the county average, according to RealFacts.

Earlier this year, Archstone-Smith bought three Santa Monica apartment complexes totaling 229 units for a combined $57.5 million.

According to my unnamed source, there is a leadership army of 400 key executives who are charged with the responsibility of cascading this cultural philosophy throughout the entire company worldwide. When the leaders lead and the team implements, success is certain.

At $306,000 per unit, the price eclipses recent high-end deals for Pasadena’s 214-unit Alexan City Place ($264,000 per unit) last year and Santa Monica’s Sea Castle ($270,000) in 2001. Only Legacy’s $85 million sale last September of the 187-unit Legacy at Westwood to Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association College Retirement Equities Fund, at $455.000 a unit, trumps the Studio City deal.

When these facts were laid out for me it was easy to see that change in an organization as large as GM doesn’t happen in one year and it certainly can’t be through the sole efforts of one person. However, I’m still not willing to give up the importance of Rick Wagoner’s role in perpetuating and even re-kindling that which had begun nearly a decade ago.

If you review the executive rosters of the leading companies in the automotive industry, OEMs and suppliers alike, we can all pick out good leaders and not-so-good leaders (names withheld on purpose). I think we all can take a chapter from the GM book of cultural change. If we can all learn from the success of others we’ll be further ahead in the long run. Why reinvent the wheel!

Learning to Lead at Toyota
Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 82, No. 5. (2004), pp. 78-86+151.Many companies have tried to copy Toyota’s famous production system - but without success. Why? Part of the reason, says the author, is that imitators fail to recognize the underlying principles of the Toyota Production System (TPS), focusing instead on specific tools and practices. This article tells the other part of the story. Building on a previous HBR article, “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System,” Spear explains how Toyota inculcates managers with TPS principles. He describes the training of a star recruit-a talented young American destined for a high-level position at one of Toyota’s U.S. plants. Rich in detail, the story offers four basic lessons for any company wishing to train its managers to apply Toyota’s system: There’s no substitute for direct observation. Toyota employees are encouraged to observe failures as they occur-for example, by sitting next to a machine on the assembly line and waiting and watching for any problems. Proposed changes should always be structured as experiments. Employees embed explicit and testable assumptions in the analysis of their work. That allows them to examine the gaps between predicted and actual results. Workers and managers should experiment as frequently as possible. The company teaches employees at all levels to achieve continuous improvement through quick, simple experiments rather than through lengthy, complex ones. Managers should coach, not fix. Toyota managers act as enablers, directing employees but not telling them where to find opportunities for improvements. Rather than undergo a brief period of cursory walk-throughs, orientations, and introductions as incoming fast-track executives at most companies might, the executive in this story learned TPS the long, hard way-by practicing it, which is how Toyota trains any new employee, regardless of rank or function.

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