Research center hopes to contribute to research and development
Clemson’s International Center for Automotive Research is in talks with BMW to expand its partnership in research and development beyond manufacturing at the German automaker’s Spartanburg plant.
The initiative comes at a time Clemson is adding breadth and depth to CU-ICAR’s academic and research capabilities to raise its prominence globally just 10 years from inception as a “simple idea.”
CU-ICAR’s new executive director is Frederick Cartwright, a retired GM executive with vast experience in technology, including electric and hybrid vehicles, and in building research partnerships with other domestic and foreign automakers. He took office April 1.
The discussion to expand collaboration with BMW took off on a high level March 18 when Clemson President James Barker led a delegation for a presentation to BMW’s entire global network at its Munich headquarters in Germany.
Suzanne Dickerson, director of international business development, who was on the trip, said the visit was designed to present “what we have done for BMW over the last five years and where we think we could do even more.”
Expanding Into Product Research
She said the collaboration to date “has been focused mainly on what is going on in Greer, and a lot the stuff we have been doing can be transferred” to BMW’s other plants in Germany, China and Great Britain.
The other dimension, she said, was “how to get more into product and development and engineering parts of the company with our research” at CU-ICAR and from Clemson University as a whole.
“We see strong opportunity in the area of power train,” Dickerson said. “BMW is leading the charge in a number of areas with respect to power train technologies, and we have a new chair in Dr. [Zoran] Filipi. A good alignment now with real world-class capabilities here and a world-class partner in BMW.”
Dickerson said the presentation was informational and an immediate decision was neither made nor expected. She said, “We could see something even this year, but it is hard to say. There will be more than one trip to Germany this year.”
Asked for BMW’s view of an expanded relationship, a spokesman based in Spartanburg would say only BMW “has had a successful 10-year partnership with CU-ICAR, and we look forward to continuing that collaboration.”
‘Very, Very, Very Futuristic’
Clemson is moving quickly on the deeper commitment to power train research and development. It is spending more than $2 million for high-tech equipment to support Filipi’s work.
University trustees Friday gave approval to the concept, and CU-ICAR is moving labs around to tie in existing related technology into what Dickerson described would be a “very, very, very futuristic power train lab.”
When operational, she said, “In the power train area, pardon the pun, we are going to be a powerhouse as far as universities go.”
She said the work is not intended to be exclusively with BMW, and CU-ICAR plans to make presentations to Chrysler, Ford and other automakers as well.
Filipi, an internationally recognized expert in power trains as professor of engineering at the University of Michigan for nearly two decades, is himself a draw of research dollars.
Prior to joining Clemson Jan. 1, 2012, as Timkin-endowed chair of vehicle design and development, Filipi was deputy director of the Automotive Research Center at Ann Arbor. Much of his research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science Foundation.
“He has a lot of new projects on the horizon here. Pretty impressive,” said Cartwright.
Transportation’s ‘Whole Spectrum’
Cartwright’s 30 years of experience at GM fits well with Clemson’s vision to raise CU-ICAR’s prominence in development of more fuel-efficient and less-polluting engines and finding ways to get them to market.
“For probably 20 years of my career, I’ve been focused primarily on new technology and accomplishing that development in the auto industry through partnerships with other companies,” he said.
In the early 1990s, Cartwright developed the first business case for GM in the area of electric and hybrid vehicles. He was involved with the first electric vehicle, GM’s EV1, a two-seater sports car that gained wide praise but was junked by GM in 2002 as unprofitable. It remains a controversial decision.
“We took some components from EV1 and stared to apply them to buses of all things,” said Cartwright, who was with a small “skunk works” team in Indianapolis. Working with a small team in Indianapolis, the group built some shuttle buses, adding small engines to make them into hybrids.
When Toyota launched the Prius for sale in the Japanese market in 1997, “GM did not have a whole lot to counter, except for what we were doing. They left instructions to us to determine what it would take resource-wise to get us seriously in the hybrid business.”
By 2002, Cartwright said, “We had a team, developed the technology, built a positive case for hybrid electric vehicles – small transit buses first.”
Cartwright moved to Detroit to develop the program further for full-size trucks and SUVs, and he was given responsibility “to negotiate partnerships” with Chrysler and BMW to share in the development.
“It was a big success for each company. It got each of us into the hybrid business seriously and affordably. We shared the investment, we shared the risk.”
Cartwright believes CU-ICAR will build prominence by establishing its relevance in the “whole spectrum” transportation globally.
“Most of the world population by 2030 is going to be living in mega cities. Our focus needs to be on smart urban mobility, connecting vehicles to get from one point to the next. That’s how we become relevant in time.”
While he has “not completely sized up the job,” Cartwright said he’s seen enough to know CU-ICAR has “a lot of the pieces here, probably not all the pieces. These need to be knit together, and we must fill in the missing parts to become relevant.”
