Unique Aussie EV bid revealed
A modular family of autonomous electric vehicles could be the cornerstone of a rebirth of the Australian automotive manufacturing industry.
That’s the prediction of the Society of Automotive Engineers – Australasia (SAE-A), the peak Asia-Pacific body for mobility engineers, which envisions up to 100,000 specialist vehicles such as police cars and ambulances being built for both local use and export.
It has even issued these sketches of a police car by transportation design company Delineate to demonstrate what it’s campaigning for.
“COVID-19 has shown the importance of car manufacturing, and we propose to start with a car that no other country could build,” SAE-A chairman and CEO Adrian Feeney said.
“We would design it at the cutting edge of near-horizon technology, and we would build it in the medium volumes which Australia has always excelled in.
“So what would it look like? It would be electric, substantially autonomous, built of advanced composites and made in a total volume of 50,000 to 100,000 per year.
“It would be a modular family of specialist vehicles for world markets – imagine a police car, an ambulance, perhaps even a light military vehicle all off the same platform.”
Mr Feeney said the key to a reborn Australian car industry was to make the most of what our car and component manufacturers had always done better than others.
“We have always achieved more with less – more performance, greater strength and value for money, with smaller budgets, fewer engineers, and tighter economies of scale,” he said.
“We still have the core engineering and manufacturing skills here, and if we have learnt anything from this current situation, it is imperative that we do it and do it now.”
Australia’s last two mass automotive manufacturers Holden and Toyota shut their plants down in 2017, a year after Ford stopped local assembly.
Ford retains significant vehicle development facilities in Australia, while General Motors has axed Holden and is closing its local engineering and design centres.
Many Holden engineers have joined the Melbourne engineering centre of the Vietnamese start-up VinFast and are working on its new battery-electric vehicle, due on-sale in 2021.
The fuel cell electric vehicle start-up H2X has proposed to kickstart local production from 2021 using an assembly plant in Port Kembla NSW.
“The time is right to put money and political will behind our engineers and our manufacturers and rebuild a specialist car industry that can be the envy of the world,” Feeney said.
