How Startups are Navigating the Electric Vehicle Landscape

Barry: Certainly! First of all, thank you for being here. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everyone. Really excited to be a part of this podcast today. So, to kick things off, I'll give you a little bit of my background. I'll try and be as brief as I can. My degrees are in Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering.

And I started my career quite some time back at a company called Chrysler, which is now part of the Stellantis group. I had a responsibility there to do some of the very first implementation of real-time computer graphics and numerically controlled billing machines, which was a very challenging thing when you look at the landscape at that time.

These were all very big mainframe computers. Very obscure mathematics were used. And it was quite a challenge to get to that and understand it from the folks who knew it best and put that into an environment where people could interact more friendly with it.

From there, I went to another big automotive company here in the US called Ford Motor Company. And in that company, I was responsible for the first implementations of computer-aided industrial design applications. So, you can think about it as using technology advancements for doing the design, the aesthetic development of a vehicle.

Just an interesting story – our vice president at the time, because this was all new to him, went into the first presentations of this and he said “Wow, this is just amazing! Prior to this, Michelangelo could have walked into an automotive studio and been very comfortable with everything that he saw with wood and clay and plasters and things of this nature, but now, him walking up to one of these machines, one of these computers, would be just such an odd thing for him to see.”

So, super exciting stuff there. We did what you would know today as the early Adobe Photoshop and a lot of the really cool interactive computer graphics to let artistic people realize things in 3D on a computer screen. And I was part of some of the very first usage of computer graphics and animations for marketing research, along with a number of other customer type clinics that we would do for our products in the virtual space, which was super new and super cool at that time.

From there, I moved on to the IT organization where I was responsible for transferring our in-house graphic system, Product Design Graphic System, PDGS, to an interactive graphic system on a Unix platform. That was our first forte and similar to the Chrysler experience, a lot of obscure mathematics and really old code that we had to move over and put into that new environment, which is a lot of fun and very challenging.

And then after that, we decided that we couldn't really keep up, if you will, with the state of the art and where things were going in this space. So we made a big decision to move into a commercial solution, and in this case, it happened to be CATIA V5. So I was part of rolling that out globally across all of Ford – and in that time, we were a very big company.

Super challenging, but also just super rewarding because we got the latest and the greatest of what was the capability of the day and really transformed the company from doing things kind of 2D-ish, if you will, because our prior system was very 2D-focused, moving into full 3D, which was just incredibly exciting.

After that I was given the responsibility to manage all of the engineering applications for a couple of the brands or a couple of the segments, being the trucks and SUV. So you can think Ford F Series and Explorer, for those who are familiar with vehicles in the States.

Then it was about 2000 applications, give or take, that we had to manage and integrate and advance, along with the very first forays into using the web as a social platform across all the business activities for sharing of information and communications and things of this nature, which was really exciting and fun stuff to do and kind of – you can see how it's emerged to this date.

And following that I was told, as we say in the States: “Time for – Barry time for you to eat your own dog food.” So I was moved from IT into the business operation, in the Body Engineering activity. I was responsible for a couple of vehicle programs and also the methods and tools development.

So, I really had the opportunity to take much of what had been advanced in technology space and really accelerated into more of a requirements-driven and design and study and refine solution versus build it and figure out if it's going to run. Super exciting stuff, a lot of fun, very interesting to see the big picture of all the applications that a company like Ford would use across its entire space and really advance the state of art in those.

And then lastly, and most recently I was moved back into the studio environment where I was the chief engineer for basically the big stuff. That would be the trucks and vans and things of this nature. And I had responsibility for coordinating aesthetic development through engineering, packaging, and ultimately surface delivery for those vehicles.

I took my first retirement from Ford and then some folks that I knew at a little company that we probably all know here called Rivian contacted me and said, “How would you like to spend some time with us and help us get along our way?”, which to me sounded like a great fun thing to do after I had gone out and seen the product numerous times and I had benchmarked it before.

And so I joined Rivian and was responsible for – you wore many hats at Rivian, by the way, because it was a small company – maybe 400 people at the time, responsible for the body systems, electrical, a bit of chassis and whatnot. And also, a lot of our tool development and the work that we did interactively quite a bit with Dassault Systèmes, really exciting to just see a whole different picture of the world, a whole different company and be a part of bringing to the market, the R1S, the R1T and the Amazon delivery vehicle. Just great, challenging, hard work that resulted in just some phenomenal vehicles.

And then after my second retirement you folks here at Dassault Systèmes reached out and thought maybe I might be interested in joining it. And I just was thrilled to be a part of a team, a company that is doing the enablement, developing the technologies that many companies can use is just super exciting.

Clara: All right, well that's impressive! So, you've seen different, diverse aspects of the automotive industry, as well as its evolution over the years. 

Barry: Boy, it is super exciting, right? Just at a very high level, if you want to think about it, in the past, in transportation and mobility, it was very mechanically based, right? ICE engines, big engines, big transmissions. Very focused on mechanical aspects of the vehicle – which are still important to this day, don't mean to mitigate them at all.

But it's transformational when you think about it and you move away from an ICE engine, a very complex engine, thousands of parts and you move into something that is really quite different in the way that you can do a vehicle, right?

You no longer have an engine and a transmission and these big driveline things that you have to worry about. You have these great little compact motors, electric motors, that can be placed in such exceptionally good locations of the vehicle. And then you have this battery pack instead of a fuel tank, which can also be located in really nice places on the vehicle to give you that wonderful driving dynamic when you're in the vehicle: smooth acceleration, tons of torque, just really exciting. You can have frunks now – front storage in your vehicle. Really fun stuff!

And just a couple of data points for the team. I just pulled my data last month or so, and currently right now on the road, there are about, give or take 330 different vehicles, different models, if you will, that are on the road today.

I don't have a starting point, but let's say in the last seven years, it's gone from very few, to that number. And even more exciting to think about it, if you will, is what's under development, or at least that has been publicly shared, well over a hundred models in development. This is amazing. And it's really exciting.

And when you look at that, it's not just a particular segment. It's across all of the segments, everything from a very simple, very affordable utilitarian vehicle up to – and you may have probably seen it in the news or potentially not seen it – all the way up to something like a Maybach electric, which is an ultra uber luxury vehicle. And then heavy rigs.

Just really exciting to see this transformation and see everything that's going on. And let's not forget, it's not just four-wheel vehicles or, what we consider a light truck and vehicle or heavy truck. It's also in the two-wheeler and three-wheeler world. Something on the order of, I don't know, 30% of global mobility is in, something like a two-wheeler or a three-wheeler.

It's a $150 plus billion market, very low electric penetration but we're expecting to see that change quite a bit over the future. So that's another really exciting area that maybe we don't think too much about.

Just maybe one or two other data points for you. Last year, roughly speaking, a little under 14 million units of electric vehicles, or sometimes it gets muddled with hydrogen vehicles or partial electric vehicles, which is pretty incredible. That's 12% of the market.

And going into this year, there's high expectation that will grow into something on the order of 20 million units. And what's significant about this? What to think about, is if you prescribe or you adhere, or you think it's the theory of the kind of the law of technology dispersion, right? Sort of thinking.

You've got your innovators up in the front, which are a couple of percent. You've got your early adopters, which are 12-13%. And that, kind of when you get over that hump into the early majority, that's what we refer to as a tipping point. And we're right there to the point where the growth of a certain product or a certain technology or certain usage grows pretty substantially until you get into some of the later things.

So, I think it's a really exciting time right now when we look at this kind of vehicle and its penetration and its acceptance in the marketplace.

Clara: You said it, transformational is the keyword here, right? Barry, you have extensive knowledge of EV development. You've worked both for a large, traditional automotive company, before going on to work for an EV startup that grew quite quickly. 

Barry: Sure. That's a great question, actually. Let's see how to say this really easily because there are pretty significant differences. When you look at a large company, they're large companies, right? 170, 180, 20,000…100,000 employees. They're big companies. They have big facilities. They have lots and lots of customers that use their vehicles and they have lots and lots of money they need to manage and hopefully, make a profit and help the world along.

So large companies tend to be a little more bureaucratic because of the nature of everything that's been established over time. And they tend to be a little more risk averse because they've been bitten a few times, if you will. And they know they need to put out hundreds of thousands of units of a product and do it robustly and safely and in a way that customers will come back and repeat with them.

So I use the term “risk adversity” a lot in large companies. And they put a lot of policies and procedures and things in place to do that. So, when you come into a big transformational situation where you're going from something that you've done for, in some cases, 80 years or more, into a new technology realm where you probably don't have a lot of expertise, there's a lot of caution. There's a lot of concern. There's a lot of worry of “Oh gosh, if we bring this new product, will it take sales away that we don't want taken away from some of our old products?”

So they do look at it quite a bit differently. They look at the risk adversity, they look at “What does this mean from an investment standpoint?” because it is a huge investment to move into new technologies. And so it's a challenging thing for them and something that they're very cautious about.

Now, juxtaposing that with a younger company, a startup company… it's a clean sheet of paper, right? You don't have any of that legacy challenge ahead of you. And in many cases, certainly in this space, you're engaging people from a lot of different perspectives, which is really super awesome.

And you're engaging people that maybe come at it from a different angle, flipping the script a little bit: “It's not such a mechanical thing that we're doing. It's more of a software-defined vehicle that happens to have a bunch of mechanical attributes.”

So, it's a different mindset when you go at it. And then risk adversity: while you still acknowledge, and of course, you're not going to put anything that is unsafe on the road. You're a bigger risk taker. You want to bring something to the market that's unique. If you just bring the same old car with an electric powertrain that somebody else is already selling, or maybe an OEM is developing, that's not going to be very exciting to people out there.

So, you do a lot of things more openly. You definitely embody the spirit of entrepreneurship and you look at what are the things that are going to get you there in a hurry, right? You don't have forever to build your own CADCAM system, right? You have to look at folks out there that can help and provide tools for it.

So it's a very different thing. But it's a very exciting thing to be a part of a young startup company and really cut your teeth on something that's incredibly difficult, incredibly visionary, and just looking at the world in a different perspective.

Barry: Certainly, there's a lot of startups. Harkening back to the prior question, when you think about an established big company, they have massive research and development budgets, right? They're measured in billions, and that's just for doing a program, right? When they look across the entire portfolio of what they do, it's multiple billions of dollars.

So funding is always a very challenging thing for a young company because it is still a capital-intensive business when you look at it. And then as you go through the other dimensions of it, your human resources, your people. You're a startup company, maybe you'll have a couple of founders, maybe you leveraged an engineering firm to help you a bit.

To realize that dream you've got to bring in that resource, that technical knowledge, the capability to really cover all aspects of what the product is going to be. And it's hard because it's a mixed bag of what would be traditional skills and abilities more in the mechanical spaces. But yet, folks that are maybe not even automotive at all, that are more into the software space and these kinds of things.

So it's really challenging. If you just look at a company I worked for as a startup, there were maybe 400 of us, give or take, when we were a few years into it, when I joined, and then we had to scale to 12,000 people to really realize and be a presence in the marketplace.

And you just think about all the interactions and all the organization that you have to do and all the capabilities and communications and collaborations you have to do. It's really tough. And then to go even more fun into it is.

Now that you're down that road, you've got a lot of information to manage, right? You've gone from what are just maybe personal conversations and a couple of things that you've kept on your computer, to large team conversations, large projects, interfacing with suppliers, tons and tons of information being developed, being saved, being managed, being lifecycled, following the regulations.

It's just a lot of data that has to be managed, and you don't have a hundred-year-old system, which is good in many respects. But you gotta have something in a hurry to manage all that data and do it well so that you can progress that product. That's a really difficult thing.

And then I think, the other thing, and it's been said by some out there, they talk about manufacturing…But just think about it for a minute. When you're developing a product that you want to get out to the customers – and I'm way over simplifying, but bear with me – you're just working to make that one, right?

“I just want to make that design and make it a really good design and incorporate as much as I possibly can for everything that I know that's going to happen downstream of design.” But then you get into all those downstream things and you get into manufacturing, which is really hard. You go from a few people, like I said, the 400 number up to thousands of people and hundreds, if not thousands of suppliers and logistics and all these things.

It's really hard to scale a business. And that's, I think, one of the major challenges every young company like this has and that necessarily their wheelhouse, their innovators, their folks that are really smart about thinking and doing it. And when you get into the manufacturing space, you're more into doing it, right? The repeatability of manufacturing.

So, I think there are many other challenges, but these are just a couple of the key ones that younger companies, startups, need to deal with every day in, day out.

Clara: All right. Yeah. So you talked about the funding challenges, HR, data, and scaling up. And EV development is quite complex in terms of process, especially for smaller companies. As you mentioned, there are a lot of different factors that need to be taken into account.

Barry: So this is a cool topic to talk about. One thing that you'll see, and you're even seeing it in some of the major OEMs also is, the smaller companies, the younger companies really embrace technology.

They really embrace the digital space, right? Because they don't have the money to, you know, “Let's make one and crash it against the wall and see what happens.” That's just not even plausible in any way, shape or form.

So they're very amenable. They're very acceptable to using digital technologies, using the latest and greatest of what we do and some others do to realize how the entire process can be done in a digital space.

We've referred to it as a virtual twin. If you read the press on a number of companies, they'll refer to it as the digital developer, the digital sibling. They'll use a lot of different terminology, but it's basically doing all of this work in the digital space before you do any of it in the physical. And certainly, for a small company, it's super important to do all that and have a high degree of confidence.

Certainly some of the places that I’ve been at and even in major OEMs for that matter – we did all of the work digitally, right? Before we went even to any physical form, because we didn't have the money to make a hundred prototypes. We had the money to make three, maybe four prototypes.

So when you look at that and you boil it down, you think about those things that you can do in the CAD space, design space, you think about things that you could do in the simulation space, you can think about things that you can do in basically modeling every aspect of your business.

Modeling how you're designing, how you're engineering, how you're simulating, how you're manufacturing, how you do logistics management, how you do service, all of these things. And that's what I think, really excites me about being at Dassault Systèmes is we cover that field really well with some incredibly good applications.

And it's impressive when you look at how those things really culminate in delivering one, a great product, but doing it incredibly efficiently. Gone are the days of having thousands and thousands of people working on a vehicle program or on a product. And you're talking, hundreds in some cases, maybe even less designed on the size of the scope. So hopefully that answers the question for you.

Clara: Digitalization is really helping with all aspects of the business, as you mentioned.

Barry: Absolutely.

Clara: The demand for EVs has really skyrocketed. And so has the number of available models on the market, whether we're talking about cars, two/three-wheelers as you mentioned, or even trucks.

Barry: A few years back, this was – relatively speaking – easy. Nothing is easy, but relatively speaking. And the way you could go at it and look at it is, there weren't a lot of offerings for one. And two, the offerings that were there were pretty stratified into certain spaces of vehicles. When we talk about vehicles, we talk about cars and trucks and heavy trucks, light trucks, SUVs, four door and two door-stands, so forth and so on.

And there just really weren't a lot of options out there. So one of the things that you could do is you could find that hole. You could find that donut hole where there really isn't an offering, but yet a perceived need or certainly a need where you felt something would fit very well into that as an electrified vehicle.

You would go at that and you would go after all the elements that make that, in people's lifestyles today. Now it's more challenging. As I had mentioned, there's, I don't know, 400 plus vehicles either on the road or being in development. So it becomes a little more challenging.

So you have to look at a lot of the attributes and the way that you are going to bring your product to the market through the whole value chain. Not just the product itself in terms of, what really cool software is it going to have in the vehicle? How is it going to perform? How is it going to be for a customer to sit in it and carry the things that they want around with them?

But you often have to expand into the total ownership picture, right? How are you going to get this product to the customer? How are you going to serve this product? It's a little more challenging for startups today to do these things. Many of them, and it's a good thing, will still look at these little windows, these donut holes, if you will, where they can get vehicles.

But now they also have to look at diversifying their product line and providing offerings across many areas. Something to think about just as a data point of interest. When we look at this early majority type of pool of people. There's a couple of things that resonate very strongly with them that many of these young companies have really embraced, right?

The first is: the vehicle has got to be at a reasonable price point. Lucid Air is, just as four-six seater – are very expensive vehicles, right? And for the early adopters and some of the innovators, that's a fine thing. But when you get into the broader space, there's a target point of around $50,000 that's really important to people.

There's a target point of about 350 miles of range. That's really important to people. There's a target point of about a 20-minute recharge when you're not at your residence, let's say, that is really important to people.

And these are the kind of things that these smaller companies surprisingly are really good at identifying and getting into along with some of the tangential business opportunities available for them, such as autonomous vehicles, right?

As I had mentioned earlier, a lot of these companies come from a strong software background, so they're really well equipped to deal with these really neat tangents that are going on out there. But that's what they do. That's what they do, they find a niche and they really exploit that niche and they leverage it to be very good in the marketplace.

Clara: So for any startups listening to us out there, find a niche is your advice.

Barry: Yes, find that donut hole.

Clara: So regulations play a strong role in this industry. The best performing car can't get to market if it isn't compliant with environmental standards. And so sustainability is really at the core of EV development, but improving environmental impact isn't limited to the final product, right? Materials, transportation, and fabrication processes also account for the environmental footprint of a vehicle.

Barry: Certainly, this is – I will speak pretty broadly when I say this – but every company out there that's in this space understands and appreciates their footprint on the world, right? Just because they're a big company doesn't mean that they don't respect the world around us.

They all do, right? They are all conscious of this. And I think if you look across the leadership of many companies, you will see a title, maybe VP of sustainability or chief engineer of sustainability or president of sustainability.

It's an important factor and it's an important factor, both from just the world that we live in and making it a better world, but also from how these companies need to operate going forward in light of things like regulations, in that – chrome, back in the day if you will, chrome was everywhere, right? Incredibly caustic process, incredibly toxic materials, both for the Earth and for humans. And you don't see that anymore. We get the same look using some different kinds of technologies that are a little less, let's say, terrible for our world.

And in many ways, there's a lot of other cool things that are going around this that are, maybe preemptive because the regulations haven't come forward, but certainly companies are thinking about that.

So you'll hear the terminology a lot out there of vegan leather, right? So we're not using actual leather and going through that whole process. We're using something that's a little more, in many cases, sustainable.

You'll see cases where recycled materials are used quite effectively on vehicles. We can take vehicles that are no longer in service and we can take the metal from them. We can take the plastics from them and so forth and so on, copper, what have you. And we can repurpose that into the vehicle of today. We can use organic products. Soy is an incredible product in many ways and can be used for things like the foam in a seat. And it's really exciting to see this.

And the reason they're doing this one is certainly because maybe it's a better solution. Recycled products often are aless costly solution in many respects. But also, they're being a bit preemptive and thinking about what could come down in the future. It would not surprise me at all – just my position – that as we go into the future, governments will impose regulations around recyclability of a vehicle, right?

Batteries, right? What do you do with a big battery cell when it's reached its end of life? And there's companies out there that are actually servicing that, doing that thing. So I think when you look at that, you have to look at it both from the way we respect the world around us also in the way that governments and other communities are going to impose certain requirements either on the usage of the vehicle, being a clean energy vehicle per se, or on what is in the vehicle, what it's composed of, or on what it's done at end of life.

Clara: So all in all, the entire lifecycle of the vehicle, right?

Barry: Correct. Yes. I think that's going to be very much a big deal as we go forward. There's lots and lots of things you can look at on the web where they talk about vehicle graveyards where the vehicles just get put somewhere because we don't know what to do with them and that is not going to bode well for the future.

Barry: Yes, certainly a lot of things. I think this is just such an exciting time when you look at how technology has evolved and all the different transformations that have happened.

And I often think a lot about what an order guide on a vehicle was back in the 60s or 70s, and it was super limited, right? You got some color. Maybe you got a different engine or two to pick from, and maybe you could have a radio or no radio.

And when you come into today's world, the list of options on the vehicle and the diversity of offerings – all the way up to, some level of self-driving, which is very predominant now…

I think, gosh, there are just a ton of vehicles out there that have all the way up to, level two is just commonplace, level two autonomous driving, level two driver assistance as a commonplace thing. And quite a few that are getting into the level threes.

So I think as you look forward, you future into the world that ability of driver of the vehicle, of your car, your truck, your motorcycle, to help you, in your world, be safer, be more personalized, is really just going to grow exponentially.

Some signposts of it out there are, just simple things like having Alexa be in your vehicle, right? “Alexa, turn on my lights in the house,” right? That seems like such a trivial thing, but it's really cool, right? Things like vehicle-to-vehicle communication so that vehicles that are getting in proximity of each other, maybe help avoiding an accident.

Vehicle-to-everything communication, vehicles talking to cities and helping you with congestion, right? “Don't take this route. Take this other route because you're going to run into congestion. Oh, by the way, I'm smart enough to tell you that you need to pick up your dry cleaning. So you better go over there and do that today. And oh, by the way the kids have a guitar lesson or whatever. So don't forget about that thing.”

And all the way into your home appliances, right? Hey, the refrigerator “I think the milk in there is getting old. So you might want to stop at the store and pick up some milk.” So I think you're going to see quite a bit of what I call a ubiquitous environment between your vehicle and your lifestyle, your mobile device, the devices that are in your home, the devices that are in your community, helping you with finding charging stations, helping you with route planning, helping you with vehicle maintenance and then all of the safety stuff.

The safety systems have advanced so much over the last decade or so and it's a really good thing, right? It makes our roads safer. It makes it better for us as commuters to be out there and have the vehicle help you with your driving experience. I think it's something that's going to be exciting all the way up and to autonomy.

Already some of those vehicles are out on the road but you're just going to see that technology and that advancement, that learning, that knowledge, that teaching and that integration just exponentially grow over the next few years.

Clara: So, we're looking forward to smarter, safer vehicles that are increasingly integrated in all aspects of everyday life.

Well, this was a really interesting conversation, Barry. Thank you so much for your time today.

Barry: Oh, happy to do it.

Clara: Thank you for listening to Designing Impactful Innovation. To find out more, go to 3ds.com/cloud. Don't forget to subscribe for more insights and stories from our guest experts!