In an interview with Automotive News Europe (subscription required), the head of Bosch Mobility Solutions, Stefan Hartung, discusses a whole range of auto industry issues related to electrification, fuel cells, the internal combustion engine, and autonomous vehicle technology. According to Bosch’s website, the Mobility Solutions division has a vision of making mobility “emissions-free, accident-free, stress-free, and accident-free.” This reminds me of GM’s stated vision of Zero, Zero, Zero (zero crashes, zero emissions, zero congestion) which all seems to point toward a non-internal non-internal combustion engine, autonomous driven future world. In the AutoNews interview, Hartung believes that 75% of all vehicles will still have internal combustion engines by 2030 with many of those vehicles still having some form of electric assistance. On the subject of fuel cells, Hartung thinks that in ten years, 20% of all electric vehicles will be managed by fuel cells which Bosch believes is a good solution for the electrification of commercial vehicles. Regarding electric charging station infrastructure, Hartung thinks the auto industry and power generation companies all play a part in developing the EV charging infrastructure. And if EV’s become a big market, we’ll see a pure infrastructure player going into the space. (Note: In May of this year, GM and Bechtel announced plans to build charging stations across the U.S. And VW’s subsidiary, Electrify America, has been rolling out charging stations in the U.S. for over a year.) Hartung stated that autonomous driving “is the biggest challenge that engineering has ever encountered.” He believes the hurdle for autonomous vehicles to overcome is the lack of acceptance of mistakes from AVs that we are willing to accept when those same mistakes are from human driven vehicles.
What Does Bosch Think?
