Elon Musk absolutely deserves a great deal of credit for popularizing the idea that a battery powered car could be a viable mainstream transportation product. The cult of personality around Musk is in large part the catalyst for Tesla securing 400,000 pre-orders for the Model III well before it goes on sale. Yet as in most industries there are those that work in far more anonymity than Musk while exerting much greater influence on the long-term future of that business. One of those influencers is Dr. Christopher Borroni-Bird, an engineer and researcher who has been helping to shape the future of mobility over the past two decades.
Borroni-Bird is currently vice-president of strategic development for
While you might not think of Qualcomm when considering cars, the company is heavily involved in some very important transportation related projects such as vehicle-to-external communications and wireless charging for electric vehicles. At the 2016
Over the past several years, Musk has increasingly been compared in the press to the late Steve Jobs. Like the Apple co-founder who managed both Apple and Pixar, Musk runs two companies as CEO, Tesla Motors and SpaceX. Musk is a highly opinionated, outspoken, micro-manager, much like Jobs. Musk also gets credit, at least partly deservedly for technologies not necessarily invented or conceived at Tesla, but certainly shaped and refined into something commercially viable by the engineers and designers that work for him.
When describing the architecture of the Tesla Model S, X and presumably the upcoming Model 3, people often refer to this skateboard as a key component. The Tesla chassis consists of a frame that holds the massive battery pack that spans virtually the entire area between the four wheels along with the suspension, brakes and of course the cylindrical motors. On top of this platform, Tesla has the ability to attach different body styles for different applications although so far we’ve only seen two in production, the five-door S sedan and the taller X crossover.
I regularly run into Borroni-Bird at conferences on connected and autonomous vehicles including a recent event I attended in Silicon Valley and a few days later I sat down with him over a cup of coffee to discuss the birth of the skateboard chassis of which he and his team at GM R&D can reasonably be called the creators.
Inspired by an ill-fated relationship
The tale of this novel layout begins with the 1998 “merger of equals” that led to an acrimonious split after less than a decade. Borroni-Bird was plucked from his position in Chrysler R&D to be part of the post-merger integration team with Daimler. “Under the leadership of Tom Gale, Chrysler was widely seen as a design-driven company,” said Borroni-Bird. “We didn’t have huge technical resources like Daimler although we did have some novel ideas like the Liberty flywheel hybrid race car.”
As part of the integration process, Borroni-Bird got to look into the many research groups within Daimler and began thinking about technology could be used to enable more creative design. Among these were the sandwich floor design of the original Mercedes-Benz A-Class that enabled the engine to slide down underneath the passenger compartment of the sub-compact car in the event of a crash. Unfortunately, the cultures of the two companies never really meshed very well and the thought of giving away some of their best technologies to the Americans never gained much traction in Stuttgart.
Looking to the future
Fortunately for Borroni-Bird, Larry Burns was much more willing to experiment with new ideas than many in the auto industry. For more than eight decades since being established by Charles Kettering, GM Research and Development had been focused on basic research that may or may not ever make it to production. GM had invested more in this type of work than almost anyone in the industry and while some of the ideas weren’t always executed when they moved to production, they were at least born within the company.
One of the first big projects undertaken by Borroni-Bird was the skateboard. GM created the first hydrogen fuel cell vehicle in the form of the 1966 Electrovan. It used technology that R&D developed for the space program to propel a zero-emissions vehicle on earth. By the beginning of the 21st century, the fuel cell had come a long way and both the stack and hydrogen storage had become much more compact.
Borroni-Bird and Burns have long thought about the future of transportation, especially in world that was becoming increasingly urbanized. With fuel cell electrification and some of the other advances that were coming together at the time, they saw an opportunity to do something truly unique. At the 2001 Geneva Motor Show, SKF and Bertone showed off a concept called the Filo that harnessed technology from the fly-by-wire systems that SKF provided to Airbus.
Since by-wire systems run on electrons both for the actuators and the necessary processing power, it made perfect sense to blend this with an electric drivetrain. Since experiments with using lithium-ion batteries for vehicles were just getting started at this point, Borroni-Bird used the fuel cell technology GM was developing and added in-wheel electric motors. All of the pieces were packaged into a concept first shown at the 2002 North American International Auto Show in Detroit.
The Detroit concept had no body yet, just an independent platform with all of the pieces needed to provide, propulsion, energy storage and directional control along with a single umbilical cord that could be routed into the body or coach as it was referred to. At the time, GM didn’t conceive of this concept as self-driving, but in retrospect, if built today, that would surely be added giving even more legitimacy to the AUTOnomy name.
Later that year, a body or coach as Borroni-Bird calls it was added to turn AUTOnomy into the Hy-Wire concept. As designed, a wide array of coach styles could be installed on top the same type of AUTOnomy chassis using just four to six attachment points and that single umbilical cord to send control inputs to the drive-by-wire system. GM was granted at least 25 patents for the AUTOnomy-related technology.
The fusion of technology and design
Even then, Burns and Borroni-Bird were looking well beyond the next product cycle. They envisioned a future where a substantial majority of the world’s population was living in increasingly crowded megacities. While the automobile enabled personal mobility in the 20th century, it also created a host of new problems including pollution and congestion on the roads. Individually owned vehicles needed a place to be parked and those lots and garages consumed increasingly valuable plots of land in cities. Considering that individually owned vehicles, sit idle much of the time, this is an enormous waste of resources.
A road-going version of the skateboard as used in the 2006 Sequel concept (photo credit: Sam... [+]
As envisioned, the AUTOnomy skateboard could be scaled to a variety of sizes for different applications. Going back to the idea of technology-enabled design, Borroni-Bird described what could be done with these skateboards. “With this self-contained architecture, production of the coaches could be localized to where the vehicles are being used. Every city could have taxis with designs that emblematic of that location.”
Unlike today when most vehicles are owned by individuals, in the future “OEMs and service providers will have a vested interest in owning the vehicles,” adds Borroni-Bird. “Increasingly, everything is controlled by software and electronics that is changing rapidly.”
The average age of cars on the road in America is 11.5 years and 20 to 30 year-old cars are not uncommon. The increasing software dependence also brings with it security threats. Once a car is sold to a customer, there is no way to force that customer to get updates to address either functional or security issues. If the ownership model is changed, vehicles can be designed so that the elements that most need frequent upgrades such as software and connectivity systems can have shorter lifecycles. The OEMs or service providers can keep them up-to-date and safe.
Dr. Christopher Borroni-Bird discussing the GM EN-V concept at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show... [+]
A transition toward mobility services where the vehicles have a much greater utilization rate than today’s cars that are parked most of the time would also see them wear out faster. Hardware could be upgraded every three to four years so that obsolete technologies rotate out of the fleet much more quickly.
While some of the ideas from the AUTOnomy were utilized in the 2006 Sequel concept, a more significant manifestation came with the EN-V program that was shown during the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. Using a two-wheeled, self-balancing version of the skateboard developed with Segway, GM designed three distinctly different coaches to sit on top.
The full name of these two-seat urban pods was Electric Networked Vehicle. In addition to the skateboard underpinnings, Borroni-Bird and his team added cellular telematics based on OnStar technology, vehicle-to-vehicle communications and autonomous driving capability derived from the efforts that won the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.
EN-V was the ultimate manifestation of Borroni-Bird’s vision of maximum maneuverability, minimum footprint, urban transport with technology-enabled design. With its two-wheeled platform, EN-V could turn on its own axis and took up little more space on the road than a pair of pedestrians. With its connectivity, it could be parked automatically, summoned when needed and platooned if larger groups were travelling together. The suspension-less two-wheeled version was clearly impractical for the real world and a second-generation four-wheeled version that is only slightly larger is now being tested in China.
Media demonstration rides in the GM EN-V concept at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (photo... [+]
“Cities could fund the necessary infrastructure upgrades to provide these mobility services by selling off the highly valuable parking infrastructure that currently occupies large swaths of urban landscape and optimizing the mass transit for the highest volume routes,” said Borroni-Bird.
“Fleets of small, electric, connected vehicles could enable personal mobility for everyone regardless of age, income or ability.”
We’ll probably see these types of services begin to emerge in the next few years as Borroni-Bird’s former colleagues at GM start testing autonomous Chevrolet Bolts that are expected to be deployed through the company’s investment in ride-hailing company Lyft. Uber has also begun road-testing its own self-driving prototypes. Even Apple has made a major investment in Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing which could be a precursor to how it may deploy its vehicles if it decides to go down the transportation path. A future iteration of Tesla’s platform may also come closer to the AUTOnomy configuration, enabling Musk’s company to more easily offer multiple body styles at a lower cost.
Like so many of the true innovators in history, Dr. Christopher Borroni-Bird may never get the widespread recognition he deserves, but for those of us that have been paying attention, he is definitely one of those that have been instrumental in making the future happen.
The author is a senior analyst on the Transportation Efficiencies team at Navigant Research
