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Grayson Brulte:
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Hello, I'm your host, Grayson Brulte. Welcome to another episode of SAE Tomorrow Today, a show about emerging technology and trends in mobility with leaders and innovators who make it all happen. On today's episode, we're absolutely honored to be joined by Dr. Rodney McGee, chairman of the newly formed SAE J3400 NACS Task Force, and Christian Thiele, Director of Global Ground Vehicle Standards, SAE International.
On today's episode, they will discuss the evolution of industry standards in the electric vehicle sector. We hope you enjoy this episode.
Gentlemen, welcome to the podcast. I'm excited to have you here and as cliche as this sounds, it's very true, standards make the world go round. Without standards, ground vehicles don't scale.
It's simple as that. Christian, as I emphasize the importance of standards. In your opinion, what is the current state of ground vehicle standards?
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Christian Thiele:
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Current state of ground vehicle standards is very strong. What we have to understand and recognize too, there's a technology revolution that's happening right now, and we are moving quite rapidly and quickly into the emerging tech space, be it EV, ADAS, AI, etc.
So from an electrification point of view, as we know here in the last three to four years, it's really been moving at an extraordinarily fast pace and it's all new technology, so to speak, emerging technology, which makes it somewhat challenging to standardize.
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Grayson Brulte:
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That raises the question you mentioned there’s a lot happening around electrification, there's a lot happening around automation.
The marketplace is, let's use the term, shifting, evolving, progressing. It's moving into the future. We're not the jet yet, but it's technical. It's moving there and maybe it will get there. How is SAE and the Ground Vehicle Standards committees, how are you staying ahead of the curve there? Christian, do you have a whole task force with individuals such as Rodney, that are looking at new technologies or things that might be standardized or what are you doing?
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Christian Thiele:
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Yeah, absolutely. And these things didn't start just yesterday. The electrification side started many years ago and it's obviously grown and evolved, and we are pulling in those experts that we need like Rodney and the team to identify, especially those areas from electrification, automated driving, etc. And it's been an ongoing process where we could see basically the future, what was coming at us from an emerging tech space, and make sure that we define the categories in the areas where we wanted to get into and involved in, especially from a standards organization to help drive industry as well as benefit humanity at the end.
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Grayson Brulte:
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And Rodney, from your perspective, how are you helping to keep your committee ahead of the curve?
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Rodney McGee:
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My committee's focused on basically, taking the connector, which is, currently in North America, just, used by Tesla. But recent announcements have come from a number of OEMs mean that more than a majority share are now aligned on the NACS connector, and we're really focusing on getting that standardized and published to basically allow the adoption of that connector in the North American market.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Rodney, for individuals listening to this and says, you're gonna standardize it, what does that process look like? How will you take what Tesla built with the NACS and then standardize it for across the industry for use?
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Rodney McGee:
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Typically, a lot of standards start off at the very conceptual stage where experts basically say, how do we want this to work? And so you literally start with a blank piece of paper and then you get some proposals and then, in, you basically, coalesce on a single sort of solution. And that process typically takes some time because, you're creating something where there was nothing before or there were things before, but they were different, had different requirements. The NACS standardization process is a bit different in that, today that connector represents both a majority of use in full electric vehicles and also a use market share in charging stations, especially DC charging stations. So what we're gonna be doing in the standards is really capturing the existing mechanical connector to make sure that when other manufacturers want to be interoperable with it, they have a standard to follow that will ensure that things work well.
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Grayson Brulte:
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And Christian, there's been some photos recently that have been popping up on the inter internet on a version four of the Tesla charger. The interesting aspect there is there's a credit card slot in there. Let's say when you're developing the standard for the charger, when you look at that whole aspect, so when a consumer goes there and they put their credit card in, that there's a best practice for uptime or you're only gonna focus just on the connector.
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Christian Thiele:
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The J3400, which is the NACS connector that we're focused on that currently is just focused on the charger unit. The fixture itself. At the end of the day, we have other standards that are out there, that exist out there, that are working for the interoperability point of view, the communication point of view, because if you remember, SAE obviously the standards back in the day were always focused just on the vehicle, and the vehicle was a standalone entity. Now, with how things are working, there's communication protocols that are happening with the vehicle, with the people, with infrastructure, with other places.
So there is a wide variety of things that we are looking at from an infrastructure point of view and from a communication protocol point of view with the vehicle, the people, and infrastructure and other industries, i.e. credit cards.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Is it a fair statement that the SAE is taking a holistic approach to all the things that connect to the vehicle to ensure that the consumer has a wonderful experience then for the industry partners that it is scalable?
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Christian Thiele:
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Absolutely. Right now, we have over 50 plus just standards and whips that are in process right now, just from a charging experience point of view. And so we are looking from an electrification point of view. We have well over a hundred standards that we are currently working on. Or have already published.
So that's just electrification, which also includes communication protocols and things of that nature where cybersecurity, et cetera, credit cards, things of that nature. The financial institutions are important, we're working on and focused on.
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Grayson Brulte:
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It was a very big move. Covered documented even a mention from the White House when SAE announced that they're gonna be standardized in the Tesla developed North American charging standard connector. How did that come about. Was there a phone call from industry? Was it a phone call from Tesla? What started that whole process to got us to the point today where it is now becoming a standard?
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Christian Thiele:
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Let's understand. First and foremost, the J1772 was obviously started many years ago. And has evolved and it's a solid standard as well. What we have to recognize and understand from the electrification point of view, the emerging space, emerging technology point of view right now is evolving so fast and so quickly that you can't really put your thumb on what's going to react and be best.
And best practices are best in industry or for humanity at the end of the day. I.e., you mentioned the Jetsons earlier. Think about the flex capacitor is the battery technology that we currently have. The end all, be all, we don't know yet. So that goes just the same for charging and charging stations and how we manage that and move it to the future.
We were at horse and buggy many moons ago and we went to gas and diesel and things of that nature. How did we fill up those vehicles? How did we go through that protocol and that interchange, and how did that evolve over time? It takes time and you never know which direction, i.e., Beta, VHS, right? You don't know which direction, especially when the emerging tech space is moving at such a rapid rate.
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Grayson Brulte:
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But I wanna highlight where industry goes, SAE goes, and that's an important thing where the heels aren't dug in and say, Nope we're on the beta max camp, or we're in the VHS camp, industry says we're going here, SAE goes, and that's a really an important thing to highlight. And I also wanna highlight too, Rodney, that of all the research that I've done, that the standard for the NACS connector is gonna go faster than your traditional standards process. How is that going to be achieved?
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Rodney McGee:
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So you talked a little bit about, how a lot of the SAE stuff came together and I think once, Tesla realized that they needed to have with the companies adopting it, they needed to have a standard that was published by an organization. We use the term SDO Standards Development Organization. They looked at the options in front of them. The two sort of, ones that would cover this kind of area are the IEC and SE.
And I can just give one little example. I was recently in an IEC meeting where they were discussing when they could get the NACS connector into the IEC standards, and they were discussing, what seemed to be the more likely option, which was in 2029 or the closer option, which was in 2026, didn't seem to be open to 'em.
So some of the international standards can take quite some time. This is due to the way that they, they're essentially through national committees. And anything that happens at the international level gets sent out to many different countries. And then those countries have to then take their technical committees and respond in SAE the standards are developed by individual experts from a variety both internationally from different suppliers, different automakers, general interests, and the process is, the people involved writing the standards are the people involved commenting, and there's a much shorter process to take into account revisions.
The second thing I alluded to earlier, which is the fact that NACS is unique in that it already exists in large numbers in the real world. And we're not starting from a blank piece of paper. So it's really two things. We're starting with something that already exists and has been successfully in use for almost a decade.
And number two is just the SAE process can, when there is consensus on what we're doing, and in this case, there is because it's already out there, especially, when we talk about the mechanical coupler, we can move much quicker than would be typical.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Is it a fair thing to say, Rodney, that you're able to reverse engineer the charging plug now to help accelerate that 'cause you said it's clearly out there in the fields for over a decade?
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Rodney McGee:
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Luckily, we don't have to reverse engineer. We can just get the drawings directly from the organization. But certainly I, I will say that one of the reasons I volunteered and took initiative on some of these efforts is I was quite knowledgeable of how the Tesla system worked. Certainly, in the early days of electrification, it wasn't clear at all that Tesla would have a majority market position in terms of vehicles and couplers, and so I think a lot of manufacturers weren't watching as closely about some aspects of their technology. I think there was a lot of tension on their battery technology, their propulsion technology, but the charging stuff was not widely known. Understood. So it has been helpful to, We have Tesla's been involved with this process, but also bring in, people who have knowledge of how Tesla charging works.
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Grayson Brulte:
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You're sitting here as the chair. What are some of the challenges that you're gonna have to overcome to standardize the NACS connector and don't say Christian?
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Rodney McGee:
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To the extent that NACS does mean people have to make changes, even if it's just at the mechanical level. There are electrical differences between KNS and J1772 that will require manufacturers to make changes.
And if, it was a different situation and Tesla hadn't already had a lot of stuff in the field, I think there would be a lot of pressure to, really. Maybe it would be more open-ended. What exactly would be the standard? But in this case, most of the people who have joined up with Tesla and their charging system, they very much want to take advantage of the existing infrastructure.
So when you want to take advantage of the existing infrastructure, it bounds the work. So one of my sort of challenges, we'll be continuing, remind people that. This is a deployed system, looking forward. Certainly, there's gonna be things that'll be added to it within the standards development process, but just reminding people that nobody wants to adopt or build a NACS standard that's incompatible with the existing deployment of NACS charging stations.
Because that's part of the big reason to move. And a lot of people involved with standards are very much used to starting with that blank piece of paper where from the beginning, you're able to sketch it to whatever you want to be. In order for us to hit our sort of goals in terms of timelines for getting, the standard out, and also just the goals of people who are adopting NACS and compatibility, interoperability with existing equipment that. That helps mitigate those challenges of people wanting to reinvent the wheel, so to speak.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Christian, what is that timeline for the standard? Has SAE or the committee made a public statement around a timeline?
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Christian Thiele:
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Yeah. We're looking at publishing something inside of about six months and it'll be a technical information report is what we are looking at publishing. So towards the end of this year, we are looking to publish that and the, and then we will vet it out. Through continued best practice publication that'll happen about a few months after that, and ideally end up being a standard once it's vetted even further within the industry organization. So ideally a standard usually is developed anywhere from 16 to 18 months as typical timeframe.
We have been as quick as 10 to 11 months and this will fall around the 11-month window. To be a complete standard, although something, the technical information report, which is critical and vital to a standard development, will be released and published by the end of this year.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Could this become the fastest standard in history, just based on the way that the industry is moving at such a rapid pace every day You open the Wall Street Journal, there's another announcement from a global EM that there were adopting. It seems every day I'm waiting for another OEM to go.
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Christian Thiele:
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And recognize and understand, as Rodney put it very clearly. Obviously, this has already been engineered, this is already out there and there's a reason here in North America, everybody is starting to head in this direction of the next charger.
That is because it's deployed in large numbers. There have been some issues from customers, certain dissatisfiers with charging and the charging experience, which we want to avoid, obviously. If you wanna start selling vehicles and getting vehicles out there to scale, you wanna avoid that.
And by adopting the NACS charging system, you have more to choose from and more to grab onto. And that allows the GMs, the Fords, Mercedes-Benz, et cetera, Teslas of the world to sell more vehicles because now you make it easier and more customer friendly at the end of the day for people to charge your vehicles.
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Grayson Brulte:
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And I'm a very proud EV owner and there's nothing worse than broken chargers. I was in Orlando earlier this week, and I get there, there's four chargers. The hotel had 400 rooms. Three of the chargers were broken. The only one that worked was the Tesla Charger. Okay thank goodness. And it was just that, oh, otherwise I have 20 miles of battery, then I'm gonna have a problem.
But to charger reliability is a very big issue and we've seen that across the board. And if you read. Public documents around the Tesla charges. This is not an opinion that's based on public data. They seem to have a higher uptime average across the board than traditional chargers. So we're, the NACS is becoming standardized. What happens, Christian, to the J1772 standard? Does that continue to live on and does it live in other markets or where does that go?
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Christian Thiele:
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Oh yeah. It will continue to live on. You have to understand there's many vehicles that are out there. Obviously with the J1772 standard. So that will continue to live on and evolve depending on who adopts the next standard. Europe, we don't know yet if they're going to adopt in Asia, the Asia Pacific Rim, we don't know what's going to happen in emerging markets south America, Africa we won't even go there yet because we're still focused on certain levels of ice engines and things of that nature that is going to go into the future just based on infrastructure alone, right?
But ultimately the focus here should be clearly, to see what we continue to do and develop a Rodney's now focused on the next, we continue to focus on the J1772 to deliver the best standard for that particular application.
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Rodney McGee:
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It's important to remember that J1772 is used in Japan and Korea, South Korea also. Yep. And so there's, no indications at the moment that's changing. There are a number of other smaller countries that, may continue to use that plug and even if the, if, even if over time the plug becomes more common, it's a lot of the descriptions of things that live in J1772 may continue to be described within that document.
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Christian Thiele:
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Yeah. And even in the J3400, I think we will be referencing J1772 document because of some of the intricacies that are there from a communication protocol, et cetera, and technical statements that are in there just so we don't repeat ourselves.
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Grayson Brulte:
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That’s really smart. Do we get to a point then where certain cars are only manufactured for the European market, the Asian markets and the American markets, since they have different connectors? Is that where this will ultimately go?
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Rodney McGee:
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It'll, yeah, that's the case now. You have the type two in Europe, the J1772 connector is also called the type one. So you know, as it stands now, there's a lot of countries that use the type two connector, that was originally developed by Mennekes and then, J1772 sometimes called the Type one developed by Yazaki is of course currently that's what's defined in J1772.
But, and then in China, the only other really connector configuration is they have their AC and DC connectors, which are unique for the China market. So right now, a company like Ford provide with their, global. Markets provide cars with a variety of connectors currently. Yeah.
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Christian Thiele:
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And just so we're clear too, the automotive industry, I played a role in for 30-plus years as a supplier I've supplied to right-hand, left-hand drive vehicles. European specifications on vehicles are different than North American, so you would always have. Different types of vehicles that would be exported or built in, in, in different regions. So this is nothing new. The auto industry and the automakers and the tier one, tier two suppliers are able to accommodate.
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Grayson Brulte:
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And I have to ask this because it's just me being me, and I'm more curious than anything. We had the ruling outta the EU where the iPhone has to go to the U S P C standard, which was a ruling from a government body. Do we see anything that you've historically can look at or where a government body says, okay, we're going to this standard and to scale, and that has a dramatic change like we saw with the iPhone plug would gonna USBC in the EU?
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Rodney McGee:
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So certainly, I think with the NEVI rules, there's not a requirement to, for vehicles to use a certain connector, there's requirements that charging stations have certain connectors on them to qualify for funds. There have been on the ongoing discussions of when and if NEVI rules change as a result of the North American industry going in the next direction. And we're about to put a lot of money into infrastructure. And the last thing and that's why the government's been very in interested in the standardization of NACS, is because they don't want to put billions of dollars into a connector which may not be the sort of the future default, sort of normal connector and use. So there are already some provisions in the NEVI rules to allow charging stations to have multiple connectors. And this is primarily partially due to Tesla, but also, the prevalence of Chato.
So I think you have to stay tuned to see how that all plays out. 'cause I don't think anyone quite knows what the rules will be after n has been published by a standards development organization and after interoperability with different manufacturers. It's demonstrated.
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Christian Thiele:
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Yeah. And the industry just to just FYI back in the seventies, catalytic converter, right? California versus Europe, it wasn't there. And the industry, from a safety perspective too, has always looked at safety in different regions, different countries differently. The bumper systems here in the US were a little different than the ones in Europe, so you always had to accommodate. But eventually, Scale does win out and standardization helps develop that scale to reduce the cost from the industry and development perspective, and ultimately benefits humanity through the long run of scalability.
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Grayson Brulte:
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From a cost perspective, from the savings perspective, let's go into the higher class of vehicles. The Class six, class seven, class eight with the NACS announcements. Was there any movement there where the large global OEMs around the Class eights, the Class six, came together and said, okay guys, we have same customers that run a class six, and they run a class eight. Can we come together and work with SAE to build a standard? Have you had any of those?
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Rodney McGee:
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So you know, then the NACS Task force is, if you know anything about that, standards are done, se you got ground vehicle standards and under that you have the truck and bus Council and the Motor Vehicle Council.
So the Na n Task force lives under Motor Vehicle Council. I'm also have standards that I work on over in truck and bus. I think one of the things that come out of this discussion, and we met, it is a good analogy. If you've ever go to one of those gas stations that service semi tractor trailer trucks, you know that they have bigger, filling nozzles that they can use because those vehicles need to more energy quicker delivered, via diesel in those cases.
One of the things as a result of the next announcement is the medium and heavy-duty guys saying 'cause previously they had just been riding the coattails of the passenger car guys because electrification of medium and heavy duty, like everything with medium and heavy duty and passenger cars is about 10 years behind generally. And so if you look at the electrification, takeoff with passenger cars, you know that curve has shifted to the right forward in time. For me, heavy duty. One of the things that I've heard is take away is that. We should focus on connectors that meet the requirements of our users, not just ones that are focused on passenger cars.
Now, if there's a line that's great, but the max announcements have opened the door to the medium heavy-duty guys that says, you know what do we really want? And so, one of those answers is they want higher power DC charging, and that's where sort of the megawatt. And SAE has a megawatt level DC charging standard, really focused on those vehicles for plugin charging.
And a couple years ago, SAE has published overhead charging non handheld couplers. And the J3105 series, which is basically about, electrifying city buses and vehicles like this. So I think what you're seeing on the medium and heavy duty side is basically, what do we want in terms of.
If this vehicle has AC charging, what do we want in the medium heavy-duty space? DC charging, we want, higher power levels than what the passenger car guys generally do. 'cause we have batteries that are three and four times bigger.
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Grayson Brulte:
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I think about this and have done research on this and there is no standard on this that I could find, but you might say no, it can't be a standard.
But I'm curious, so I'm gonna ask you, Rodney, when you look at a Class eight, Truck when you, when you put the charging plug, you whatever, number one role. When I speak to friends at UPS and FedEx, you don't wanna unhitch. They said we can't unhitch 'cause it's gonna take us time to unhitch in this. Is there a standard or best practice of where those plugs are located on those Class A trucks? Since the most important metric for them is uptime?
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Rodney McGee:
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Oh yeah. As mentioned earlier, reliability of charging stations and things. The truck guys have much higher expectations on reliability than we do in the passenger car world.
Those vehicles may have goods, millions of dollars’ worth of goods on them. They can't fail. They need to get to their destination. I definitely think, and that is one of the legitimate reasons that those vehicles generally lag behind passenger car stuff because the truck guys want stuff that's known reliable and that's well, understood.
Proven while passenger car manufacturers get to be a bit more experimental in trying out new features. And so as far as placement goes, there actually has been some discussion and I think one of the places that is obvious is with wireless charging. 'cause the vehicle has to be like located over top of a pad and so there they very much specified, where the vehicle needs to be.
And there have been discussions on charging port locations with different class of vehicles, pull through kind of island situations. I think there's gonna be more discussions with that cable management issues, length of cables, that stuff is starting to be taken on. In the truck and bus council in s a e, but again, they're just beginning that electrification sort of takeoff.
Even though there's been some high-profile deployments of things like electric school buses and things, they're really leveraging passenger car standards for that they haven't really thought about, like what do we actually need in the truck and bus world and next. Is giving them an opportunity to say, Hey, we'd really three phase AC charging when we do AC charging.
So maybe we should look at J 30 68 an SS a E standard, or maybe we're, a city bus. So we pretty much drive these buses 23 hours a day, so we need overhead charging at above a megawatt, so it's really about. It's really about the truck and bus guys deciding to electrify and then figuring out how they get there from the here and making standards that sort of enable the mass deployment.
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Grayson Brulte:
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When I think about, let's say a standard, a hypothetical standard port from an infrastructure standpoint, it allows 'em to scale that infrastructure. 'cause you know exactly where the truck is going to be. The length that you're gonna have to view for your fueling, which should be for electrification that creates scaling.
I think one of the biggest opportunities that the, at least with the autonomous trucking guys, and then when they eventually go electric trucks, they're gonna have to come together and figure out what does the depot the future look like? What does it look like from a charging standpoint? What's it look like from a server standpoint?
And they're gonna have to come together if they want that technology to scale. And then you are gonna need micro grids and all sorts of other energy technologies that go with it. Which brings me to, to this question, Christian, I think a lot about. Rodney sits there as chair on the Committee for electric vehicles.
When you bring the electric vehicle companies together, the individuals the trucking companies, who has a seat at the table? Is it just individuals involved in academia, individuals involved with the OEMs, or are the utilities coming to the table? Are the infrastructure providers coming table? Could you paint this broad picture of who's coming there and what impact they have on the standards?
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Christian Thiele:
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Yeah. 30, 40 years ago, it may have been just the automotive engineer at the end of the day, today who sits on these committees is we have governments sitting on it as liaisons. We have industry sitting on it. We have financial banking people sitting on it. We have insurance people sitting on these, especially from an ADAS.
And things of that nature. So we, the industry is not just stuck there confined to the automotive space anymore. The industry now, as we see it, is the complete ecosystem from the transportation side, the infrastructure road, infrastructure from the communication side, your five G. Four G communication protocols that are out there.
The infrastructure communicating with signals, traffic, signal, safety signals, communicating with the people is also now an issue, especially heavy, we're focused on in Korea right now from an ADAS perspective, focusing on how do we communicate with people to, to prevent and protect the vulnerable road user from getting hurt, it is all encompassed, all involving. It is not just the automotive engineer anymore. You have people from all walks of industry that are interfacing with that vehicle.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Christian, we talked about scale a lot during this podcast and as electric vehicles scale, The charging infrastructure becomes more readily available. What can we learn as a society from gas stations?
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Christian Thiele:
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Gas stations at the end of the day right now it's somewhat seamless, right? And there was a unique study that was done in California that showed how the gas stations worked, where you would have hundreds and hundreds of vehicles exiting that gas station within an hour or two.
And here, every now and then a 20 station EV center, you'd see one moving out every. Few minutes. The key is obviously from a future perspective and a growth perspective and evolving perspective, how do we charge cars more fast or more quickly, faster? Get 'em on the road again. That's the key and vitally critical because that is a dissatisfier.
People don't wanna sit there for, an hour to charge their car. They wanna be gone in five minutes. They want that quick experience. That didn't happen overnight in the gas industry either. That took time. And obviously this is going to be evolving as the technology evolves into the future, i.e., the flux capacitor.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Rodney, as we look to the future, what new standards will be needed to ensure a healthy mobility ecosystem?
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Rodney McGee:
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So right now, I think there, there are some gaps in terms and some of this has, already been, discussed in some of the press releases SAE had about next. Right now, there are some problems with the public key infrastructure. We do not have a situation in the US. What we have with cell phones where you could simply roam across to different networks. And nowadays your cell phone just works. You pay your cell phone bill.
You can remember the old days where it very much mattered. Who's, roaming charges and things like that. So that's stuff to be sorted out. What we. One is the ability for cars to, plug in and charge without a lot of hassle. Around, it's not just payments, it's also just simply identifying who's who.
You know that this particular Ford vehicle is plugged into this particular ChargePoint station, and they have a plan that allows them to charge, right? That is where standards and business relationships meet and it generally some standards. It's not just SAE, ISO and IEC standards have fallen flat when the rubber hits the road in terms of interoperability across different charging networks. So that's some gaps that really need to be addressed.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Christian, underpinning the transition, the global transition to electrification, whether it's infrastructure, ground vehicles, heavy duty vehicles, school buses, for that matter of fact, is a global supply chain that is, murky and in some cases no transparency.
We don't know where the minerals are coming from or how they're being outta the ground. We don't know how they're being refined with it. We don't really have a good understanding of the amount of carbon that's being generated through that process. At some point, will ss a e work to bring the EV ecosystem together, develop traceability standards for circular economies. You're gonna bring the miners to the table, you're gonna bring the shippers to the table, the refiners and say, okay guys, we need to do something.
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Christian Thiele:
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Yeah, there is a focus on that. And right now, we did establish here a committee, a traceability committee. For SAE just recently it's been about a battery traceability committee established about a month ago maybe six weeks ago now. So where we wanna identify and because governments and regulatory agencies wanna identify i e if you remember the days of the conflict minerals, the Congos and stuff like that, that they wanna identify what's going on.
And I think they want to, the government and industry. Let industry make that call because on the conflict mineral side, the government made the call and then there was a lot of bureaucratic and challenges that the automotive industry had to deal with to identify, record, monitor, and track and trace what was going on there.
Industry will identify what's important and vitally critical, especially you need all of these. Specific battery minerals identified for recyclability use and sometimes you're going to have batteries that are going to be used for a different purpose and still have that traceability and tracking capability to identify where they are, where's it located and how good we are actually doing from a recyclability point of view.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Will a committee be spun up to develop standards for battery recycling? And will it be based on how reusable it is or? How sustainable it is.
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Christian Thiele:
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We're already doing that. We are already doing that, and we are working with industry in regard to that. Understand they're not near at scale yet.
There are many different paths right now of how to recycle. And we need to be very careful because obviously recycling lithium batteries is not the easiest. And there's risk involved, and you need to be very careful on how you recycle the batteries.
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Grayson Brulte:
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There's a lot to unpack in standards world.
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Christian Thiele:
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Yes. Yeah. And that's it. It, like I said, we went through a revolution about a hundred years ago when Henry Ford joined and helped us out here at SAE. We're going through another evolution revolution in industry as it relates to EVs and automated driving. It is an exciting time, a fun time, a challenging time, but truly a time that is going to improve the lives of all of us on this planet.
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Grayson Brulte:
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I would sum it up. It's a rewarding time. Absolutely. It's creating a lot of good in the world.
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Christian Thiele:
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Absolutely.
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Grayson Brulte
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That's the best. Rodney, you have this really unique experience from academia and chairing a committee. In your opinion, what does the future of standards look like?
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Rodney McGee:
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One of the areas that, we originally started working with electric vehicles. The university was vehicle to grid. And if there's, that is power, bidirectional power flow in and out of electric vehicles and. That really requires a coordination. You have two industries. You have the electric power industry and automotive industries, which are regulated by two very different federal agencies that have that.
Industries that are used to working very closely with government on how the regulations are written. And honestly, they're usually focused on getting their own way most of the time. And so you have two industries, the power industry electric power industry and automotive industry have to work together for electrification to really take place.
And I think. Where it gets more complicated is when you have things like electricity markets and automobile manufacturers all coming together. It's quite a big regulatory burden. And so bringing people in standards that are really experts in the rules that are almost like policy people you might groan, but the thing is you can't do things like V two G unless you meet regulatory compliance.
And that goes from, just. Technical standards. There's this sort of unique area where technical standards meet policy and that's one of the places that we work in our group, we actually have policy people across the hallway that we work together to actually make standards happen. It's just great if a university comes up with something in a lab.
But if it's literally illegal to use you've, as you've invented it, you either need to advocate for those rules to change or you need to meet the regulations. So I think the future of standards is, the word holistic gets thrown around, but holistic in the sense that you don't just have engineers that are just focused on the technical.
You also have policy people that can say, here's the new tech, here's where the technology's going, here's the rules that we need to facilitate that. And you develop those in parallel, because if you don't, you're not ready to have things go out to the market. Wow.
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Grayson Brulte:
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I that's fascinating to hear, and it's refreshing. I know on the private sector, an individual inventing something and right over the right shoulder is the patent attorney getting ready to patent it. But you're, but it's really interesting from your perspective where you're having the policy person say what, you're developing the university, oh, by the way, it's legal, or, hey, you've gotta tweak this to make it legal. That's really interesting. Christian, you're sitting there as the leader for the global ground vehicle standard, SAE. You have a wide variety of insight into the marketplace. Not just standards, but the marketplace as a whole 'cause your background in automotive, what is your opinion? What does the future of standards look like?
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Christian Thiele:
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The future's standards is going to really drive. And the focus is now really on the benefit of humanity, the environment and safety. And those are very critical. And it's even that much more vital right now that we have seven, almost 8 billion people on the planet.
And for us, we need to focus not only on, on the emerging space, but continue to focus on our traditional space too, because of the emerging marketplaces i.e., South Africa or Africa, South America. In other regions of the world that are not quite there from an infrastructure point of view, structural point of view.
So we need to still help and benefit those areas too with some of the traditional technologies that we focus on to improve those until right the time comes where the future is available to them to evolve into the new emerging tech space. EVs, ADAS, things of that nature. Heavy focus on safety and the environment to benefit humanity down the road.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Will standards always evolve? No matter where industry goes or where society goes? Will standards always evolve to, to meet those needs and demands?
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Christian Thiele:
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Yes. And I'll tell you why. Because industry and people demand it and it without that, if there was no demand or necessary demand from industry or people, it would not happen.
I.e., the perfect example is the J3400 right now. Industry has demanded that we need to utilize the next, or the Tesla charging network to help out, to get the wheels going, so to speak, no pun intended for electrification and moving electrification forward and the adoption electrification.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Thank you for that, gentlemen. This has been a fascinatingly awesomely insightful conversation. I learned a lot. I really thank you for the work that you're doing around standards and committees, because without it, the world doesn't go around, and I can't drive my daughter to school without standards. As we look to wrap up this insightful conversation, what would you like the listeners take away with them? And Christian, we'll start with you, please.
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Christian Thiele:
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Recognize and understand that there's a huge focus from the industry to get this charging electrification on the right path, even though there may be hiccups and curves and change in directions at times they are doing what is in the best interest right now of moving the industry forward to help out and benefit humanity.
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Rodney McGee:
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I wanna encourage anyone, when you think about electric vehicles, if you're a supplier if you are, people making charging stations, an OEM making vehicles is to, I think one of the reasons Tesla has had a pretty successful time with n is their interests with their charging network and their interests are ideally to make the driver experience pretty good.
And there's a lot of people in the industry who they don't necessarily make more money if the charging stations are working right. The, they're hoping that other people pay for that infrastructure. And then if that infrastructure stays expensive, that's good for them. That's not really gonna grow the industry.
What's gonna grow the industry is something that's scalable and I think really focusing on delivering good experiences, reliable maintainable infrastructure is gonna lead to a less painful transition to electric vehicles.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Well said, Rodney, well said. The bottom line is the experience matters. The consumer has to have a great experience that they don't. Electric vehicles won't scale, and without the right standards, electric vehicles won't scale. But it all comes down to the experience. Today is tomorrow. Tomorrow is today. The future is and has always been standards. Christian. Rodney, thank you so much for coming on SAE Tomorrow Today.
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Christian Thiele:
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Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
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Rodney McGee:
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Thank you.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Thank you for listening to SAE Tomorrow Today. If you've enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, please kindly rate review and let us know what topics you'd like for us to explore next.
Be sure to join us next week for another episode of SAE Tomorrow Today Unplugged, where I'll share my insights into markets and on the future of mobility.
SAE International makes no representations as to the accuracy of the information presented in this podcast. The information and opinions are for general information only. SAE International does not endorse, approve, recommend, or certify any information, product, process, service, or organization presented.
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