Australia builds a smartphone on wheels

For many, the closing of the Broadmeadows, Altona and Elizabeth production lines signalled the end of the road for Australia’s century-long involvement in the global automotive industry.

But aside from Ford and Holden’s retained engineering and design capability, green shoots continue to emerge thanks to Australia’s network of skilled former auto-industry engineers, designers and executives.

One such green shoot is Melbourne-based start-up, AEV Robotics (AEV). Since 2015 the company, with offices in Brisbane, Melbourne and Michigan, has been quietly working on the design, engineering and manufacture of a radical new modular vehicle system that is about as far from a Camry, Commodore or Falcon as one could get.

The background of the company’s founder and CEO, Julian Broadbent, seems anything but radical, steeped as it is in mainstream automotive industry experience. He worked as a chief mechanic for Gibson motorsport during the Mark Skaife era, before studying industrial design, then joining Holden as a senior studio engineer in 1995.

At Holden, Julian worked with the company’s design department, contributing to development programs for the VY and VE Commodores and several of the brands headline-making concept cars, as well as developing applications for the global Holden RWD platform (Zeta).

Departing Holden In 2011, Broadbent took on two international executive placements at GM HQ in Detroit: Director of Advanced Concept Portfolio Planning and subsequently Director of Innovation, meaning he worked on everything from concept cars to new mobility solutions.

It was while working on mobility solutions and interacting regularly with various Silicon Valley enterprises, including Google and an outfit called MetroBee (builder of one of the first ride-sharing apps), that he began to think differently about cars and mobility.

“This was at a time that IT was beginning to disrupt traditional transportation,” explains Broadbent.

“Uber was young, Lyft was still a second-hand vehicle with a pink moustache, Apple was investigating a new HQ and Waymo was secretly testing its autonomous driving cars that looked like a little bubble on wheels.”

“It was a different side of transportation that was exciting to explore as it was less focused on a business model of car ownership and more focused on mobility as a service (MaaS),” Broadbent explained.

It was obvious that transport was being rapidly disrupted, but Broadbent says he sensed something was missing.

“No-one had created the digital vehicle that supported IT companies and universities [and] could also do the job of a traditional automobile.

“That’s where the idea of the Modular Vehicle System came from,” he says.

Given his ties to the US and that country’s strong start-up reputation, it might have seemed logical to base a new enterprise there, but instead Broadbent headed back to Australia to establish AEV, with the big idea of re-imagining urban mobility as we know it.

Broadbent and his colleagues had determined they would build a low-speed vehicle that didn't just fit new technology in traditional vehicle frames.

“What we saw as a gap in the market [was] that no-one’s really done a digital vehicle, something that has the elements of automotive, but relates more to tech companies. It can be programmed; it can be controlled; it’s configured like an electronic device…”

AEV’s vehicle idea needed to be pedestrian-friendly, rapidly scalable, lightweight and beautifully designed, says Broadbent, adding that such thinking called for clean-sheet thinking.

“What does it take to move four people and their stuff – or just stuff? You wouldn’t create something that has 2000 moving parts going through five different ratios, [using] 70 litres of hydrocarbons and pumping out poisonous gas.

“You’d never get that off the ground if you suggested the modern car as a new proposal today,” he grins.

“But taking the positive out of that, we say ‘clean-sheet, what does it take?’ Well, it actually doesn’t take that much. It can be quite elegant; it can be quite simple if you remove the things that you’re used to and you do things differently.”

As the concept came together, the AEV team realised what it was creating was essentially a smartphone – albeit one with wheels and designed by people who specialise in electronics and software, but who also happened to know how to build a vehicle.

The basic proposition was for AEV to design, engineer and manufacture a single, scalable electric vehicle base, with a view to clients putting their own pod or body on top, depending on usage; from a ride-sharing vehicle to an ambulance, delivery vehicle, taxi and so on.

With such a bold vision for future urban mobility, the company needed to attract people who were hungry to create something that challenged traditional thinking. Ironically, they found some of these thanks to the demise of local car-making.

“In Australia, we found that the disruption experienced in the car-making industry had led people to appreciate the importance of innovation and recognise the need to push the boundaries of what is possible,” he says.

The team Broadbent assembled worked diligently and largely secretly on several iterations of the project for around three years, before revealing the fourth-generation of its Modular Vehicle System at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January this year.

Described as “the world's gathering place for all those who thrive on the business of consumer technologies,” CES is the place where tech start-ups go to display their wares, gather valuable product feedback and insights, and attract seed funding.

Broadbent’s background in the styling studios of Holden and GM told him that any vehicle revealed needed to be really eye-catching.

“The brief to the designers was ‘give me an SSD hard-drive in a Formula 1 car… Because we had this nice independent suspension and we kind of wanted to communicate a smartphone in the middle.”

The vehicle AEV displayed was basically a digitally controlled robotic base or 'skateboard'. Lightweight, electric and multi-directional thanks to four-wheel steer, it arrived with a futuristic people-mover pod on top, featuring radical full-sliding doors.

“Design is a key part of what we do. People like to see the future and make it good looking. No-one wants to see an ugly future, so everything that we do we have that focus on design and aesthetics,” said Broadbent.

He adds that the team was careful not to create a vision of the future that was so outrageous it would overshoot most people’s expectation of future mobility.

“We did something that was a little adventurous, but also a little familiar – for example, the seating arrangement is essentially like a large car couple-distance, it’s quite spacious… There’s a little shorter hood… but it’s familiar from a pod point of view.”

But, having come out of a heavy development phase to such critical acclaim in January, why has AEV now gone back to being Australia’s best-kept hi-tech secret?

“We took our concept to the world, presented it in a very simple manner, and it basically blew people away… It was a very modest kind of display by automotive standards but it had a big impact on people,” he says.

The experience validated that the team was on the right track and, having briefly come out of the skunk works, AEV went back to the design and engineering coal-face, focusing its efforts on delivering pre-production vehicles to partners.

Those partners, Broadbent explains, are B2B not B2C customers. They include various universities and technology companies in Asia, the US and Australia – some of which have already purchased and trialled early versions of the AEV product.

The fact AEV has been able to monetise its efforts by selling product as it goes, and not rely solely on investor funding, is a key reason why it has managed to grow successfully, says Broadbent.

He adds that the company is now eight months into the development of its fifth-generation base, which is the production intent.

Broadbent expects AEV to have a saleable product “in around 18 months” and that ongoing low-volume production of the base is “entirely possible here in Australia”.

“We’re taking on a global opportunity and we’re serious about it. Export out of Australia is possible when you don’t make a car… Shipping areas are a lesson well learnt from [my] automotive days [because] shipping puts a lot of money on the hood of every vehicle.

“When you start to look at a modular vehicle system, where you’re shipping a flat-pack kind of chassis, or base as we call it, now you’ve reduced that barrier to entry and the business case starts to stand up pretty damn good.”

Broadbent believes the most important feature of the AEV design is what isn't there; namely a large metal frame, with the fundamental difference between the MVS and a traditional car being that AEV has been able to slim-build a base that drives by itself.

“In essence, it’s a complete vehicle that includes an operating system, API, software and data storage capability,” he says.

“Our engineering principals revolve around the reduction of weight and increases in efficiency. We’re thinking about the vehicle design from the perspective of an electronics/robotics provider, rather than that of a traditional auto-maker,” he says.

While the production weight will depend on the eventual configuration and energy requirements of the end-user, the current base and people-moving pod weighs just over 600kg (or 1200kg when loaded), says Julian.

The base comes with scalable lithium-ion battery options, depending on range requirements, and can also incorporate other driving tech, such as a four-wheel steering.

Each base can also be individually programmed with specific end-user software, enabling the operator to use it more efficiently.

so will Australian customers ever come to know AEV as a brand in the way we know Holden, Toyota, or Tesla?

“Probably not,” says Broadbent, who sees creating scale and selling the AEV base to a range of companies that already have a customer-facing brand as the company’s main opportunity.

“At this stage we’re white label… There’s a lot of cost, a lot of effort and a lot of risk when you have a man-on-the-street-facing-brand. Right now, our strongest suite is to work with our partners. We see ourselves as being white label to these guys.”

In addition, while the AEV platform is versatile and can be lengthened or widened for different applications, it’s operating inside a specific set of regulations for low-speed vehicles; whereas stepping into the traditional automotive market is cost prohibitive, tightly regulated and highly competitive.

As such, the AEV MVS is not intended as a replacement for your passenger car; rather it’s designed to comply with a different set of low-speed (under 40kmh) vehicle regulations.

“Our [potential] customers are people who are running fully-fledged ADAS [advanced driver assistance systems]; so the Waymos of the world, the Zoox of the world, the Lyfts, the Ubers.

“There’s a million people investing in autonomous driving right now and our goal is to provide the perfect digital vehicle with a perfect interface and redundant architecture, so when their stuff fails or it needs a back-up, we look after them.

“This is the perfect solution for fleet managers, city planners and regulators... It’s a practical vehicle that makes sense.”

With the United Nations predicting that 68 per cent of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050, and as the average traffic speed in the world’s major cities slows due to congestion and legislation, Broadbent believes low-speed vehicles will begin to make even more sense.

“What we’re trying to do is have an impact on the most populated part of the world, which is our cities…

“Our cities are changing. Apartment approvals are going up and as they rise, car ownership declines, cycling and walking is rising.

“This mode of transport is just trying to complement an urban world that’s going through change,” Broadbent stated.