Holden's Marshall wears green badge

Interview

The key to sustainability for the auto industry lies with safety, says GM Holden's newly appointed Director of Energy and Environment, Richard Marshall. More precisely, primary safety, of the kind that relieves human beings of the responsibility for the moment-to-moment determination of the velocity and direction of their cars.

What Holden's new green guy is talking about here is automotive autonomy. "If we could just stop cars from crashing, we'd be able to reduce their weight from an average, like, 1500kg to something more in the order of 500kg."

Marshall's sums show that something close to two thirds of a car's weight is devoted to secondary safety: protecting human beings from impact. The energy saving possibilities of keeping human bodies out of crashes in the first place are both profound and self-evident.

As profound and self-evident, indeed, as the rationale for the former director of innovation engineering's elevation to his new job: to help ensure the sustainability of the Australian arm of the beleaguered Detroit giant. To show they're serious about it, they've chosen a fellow with 20 years engineering experience at Holden and made him directly answerable to the CEO, Mark Reuss.

To pinch the old Charlton Heston line, cars don't kill people. People kill people. In all but a tiny percentage squared of car crashes, the responsibility for the crash does not lie with the causative car. It resides with the human element. Sometimes those outside of the car, who wander into its path, but far more often those within it -- nearly always the one at the controls.  Thus if we relieve human beings of control, we make considerable headway into resolving many of the problems Marshall believes inform the industry today.

And with the advent of intelligent management systems, integration, radar and laser sensors and satellite navigation technologies, the autonomous automobile is becoming increasingly viable by the day. There's a load of money going into R&D, via programs like the DARPA Urban Challenge -- an automotive robotics competition with a US$2 million first prize.

DARPA's primary short-term aim is to produce unmanned wartime support vehicles designed to minimise the exposure of personnel in frontline combat situations. But much of the technology it spawns will likely find all manner of civilian applications. Winners of the last round, in 2007: the 'Boss' team funded by, among others, GM, Carnegie Mellon and Intel in a heavily modified Chevrolet Yukon SUV.

A far greater issue is selling the idea to consumers and manufacturers after a lifetime of marketing the control of an automobile as necessary and pleasurable. BMW's Ultimate (Self-) Driving Machine, coming soon to a showroom near you. Not!

The consumer auto industry per se is not under threat, says Marshall. It will survive and thrive.  "I think that regardless of whatever state of flux we're in now, we can take it that private, personal transport is an entrenched, fundamental part of life," he says.

"Has been since Henry Ford found a way to flood the world with affordable Model Ts, and much of the way the world has developed since has revolved around it."

Marshall has a tendency to distil his big-picture thought processes down into clear logic paths and tidy lists.

"You can divide the issues facing the consumer auto industry into five main categories, I think," he says. "Energy consumption, environmental impact, traffic congestion, safety and the one they all feed into -- affordability."

And while they might look disparate, they're all tightly interconnected, he asserts.

This means the imperatives facing the industry don't just boil down to making internal combustion engines burn cleaner -- as important as that may be.

Despite the rising profile and hype surrounding alternative fuels, says Marshall, 96 per cent of the world's cars still run on crude-oil-sourced petroleum fuels.

"When you balance out kilojoules by volume against affordability, petroleum is still by far the most efficient energy source. But a world built on fossil fuels is not sustainable. Nor, though, is it possible just to drop crude oil as a fuel source and move on."

At the moment, then, we're between the rock of an unsustainable old and the hard place of an unpalatable trade-off for every new.  Plug-in electrics don't have the range and take all night to charge. Ethanol and assorted compressed gases don't have the range either -- plus ethanol production runs the risk of gobbling up foodstuffs. And that's just the direct, day-to-day stuff -- before you start calculating the carbon costs of the extra coal being burnt to power a nation of plug-ins, battery disposal issues and so on.

Of course there is an answer to everyone's prayers -- hydrogen. But like most realists in his industry, Marshall's not holding his breath for that one.

"You're looking probably at 20, 30 years there, I'd think. Minimum..."

According to Marshall, GM's short- to mid-term strategy has two pillars: firstly, maximise the fuel efficiency of its internal combustion engines. This has already begun, with the arrival of diesel models and technology like Active Fuel Management (AFM -- variable-displacement V8s). Secondly comes diversification of energy sources.

The latter means a dive into 'ponds' like ethanol, hybrid and plug-in electric power. But Marshall points out it doesn't necessarily mean a wholesale shift away from crude oil products.

"It includes looking to alternative petroleum products like LPG and compressed natural gas [CNG]."

This horses-for-courses approach to automotive power and its multifarious applications spells good news and bad news for consumers. The good news lies in choice. You get to pick and choose the most appropriate solutions for each purpose -- say, an E85/petrol flexible fuel wagon for family holidays, a plug-in electric for quick trips to Woolworths and so on.

The bad news lies in... choice. Because contrary to what vested interests would have you believe, consumers don't want freedom of choice. They hate it. They want freedom from choice.

What we're witnessing here, says Marshall, is the end of the one-size-fits-all energy solution.

"It forces people to think about these things, to be active in our choices. But people don't want to have to think about these things. They want simplicity. What was once simple -- you get a car, it runs on petrol -- is now complicated. Up until now, The Answer has been petroleum. Now, though, the end is nigh and we don't have another Answer in place."

Auto makers, too, just want simplicity. Especially the Big Three -- not famous for unsolicited innovation and love of risk. Why, for example, has no one gone to market with a compressed natural gas (CNG) product in natural gas-rich Australia -- especially considering it's already available elsewhere? GM, for example, runs CNG products in Thailand, and offers it as an option on its little Combo van in Europe.

Simple, says Marshall. "There hasn't been the need. While conventional fuel's still relatively cheap here, why would people bother buying it? We're looking at it closely now, though."

Like every alternative energy source, CNG has strings attached -- namely, a comparatively low energy density.

"CNG's good on the overall cost of energy. It burns clean, so works well on CO2 emissions. Where it falls down is on energy by volume. Like LPG, but more acutely...

"Where you might get 600km out of a tank of petrol, you'll get 200km out of a similar volume of CNG... That's using the standard 200-bar compression infrastructure we have in place at the moment. Getting the infrastructure ready to solve that -- to compress it further -- isn't easy. The costs are high on both sides at the service station -- the pump and the recipient car tank.

"Plus you have to take into account the carbon offset problems -- the energy expended in setting up the infrastructure from the point of getting it out of the ground through transporting it everywhere to the power we use in compressing it."

Electric cars? GM has scheduled the extended-range plug-in Volt for Australian release in 2012. It goes to market in the US next year, and it's already popping up in Cadillac and Opel drag. We asked Marshall what's involved in getting it on side with Australian Design Rules?

"Australia used to have more nuisance value for global manufacturers than we do now. We're not that special these days -- we're generally compatible with European design rules, although it's still a bugbear that the [federal government-run] Green Vehicle Guide only recognises petrol, diesel and LPG categories.

"Consumers looking outside those very conservative boundaries -- for example towards ethanol and electric cars beyond hybrids, which are still actually just petrol burners -- are left in the dark.

"The Guide has yet to acknowledge the existence of E85 -- even though vehicles that take it get an excellent green score." [Ed: in the Green Vehicle Guide's defence, perhaps it would help if you could buy E85 at more than one service station per state...]

"Policymakers aren't that responsive to the imperatives of change," Marshall says.

"Change starts by us having to formulate our responses to demand and supply, and dragging the rules and regulations along behind us... That doesn't make it easy in supplying fleets. Who's running the agenda and setting the standards we have to build to?"

On the flexible fuel front, Holden is placing most of its near-future stocks with the already popular LPG and E85. The company has already announced an E85-ready Commodore range for 2010.

"E85 will take a few years to roll out," Marshall admits.

"We're looking at getting all Holden's product E85-ready in the next 5-10 years. It's a fair bet that's how long it'll take to get the infrastructure in place."

After that, it's on to extended-range electrics. The key hurdle, again, is energy density, Holden's green boss says.

He sums up the state of play with the simplicity for which we so hanker: "It takes 180kg of battery and hours of charging to do what we're used to having done by four litres of petrol that takes about ten seconds to put in the tank at a place no more than a kilometre away.

"Of course electricity is the answer, in one way or another. But there's no short way to get there. Even the most advanced lithium-ion batteries don't come close to petrol."

So it's a matter of giving time time? "Yes."

Okay, so enough about powertrains, what about other ways of keeping the self-powered personal chariot viable? Alternative materials, for example -- especially weight saving aluminium and plastics.

"We made some considerable advances that way [the use of alloy and plastics] in the VE -- it makes lots more use of those materials than its predecessors."

So how come it ended up heavier than previous models? Marshall says you can put that down to combination of the standard kit consumers expect (all those electric motors in the seats and doors add up) and particularly to the safety measures automakers have to take to get a new model roadworthy.

Which brings us full circle. Picture an M5 tunnel or a Tullamarine Freeway without a five-car pile-up in peak hour. Picture a lonely stretch of road without white wooden crosses and bunches of flowers taped to trees on every bend. Picture tootling round town without having your good thoughts shattered by a turd in a ten-year-old Prelude with a six-inch exhaust pipe...

Then picture an M5 tunnel that doesn't put you at risk of emphysema when you open your windows. And picture a visit to the servo every three weeks.

Deck out cars with enough sensors, engine and braking management systems and the like, then put the satnav infrastructure in place, and they all become part of the same picture -- right?

Says Marshall: "Yeh, I think that captures it. I mean, it may sound like fantasy, but the technology for autonomous vehicles has already been proven in urban environments. It's already there in several industrial landscapes in Australia and around the world.

"Combine that with the work going on with advanced propulsion systems and energy diversification to reduce our dependence on oil and you can see why, economic woes or no economic woes, there's never been a more exciting time to be working in the auto industry."