AVL's Reimagine Mobility Podcast

Micro-Mobility Marvels: Powering Sustainable Transportation Innovations w/ Christopher Borroni-Bird

• AVL, North America

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In this engaging episode, Dr. Christopher Borroni-Bird, founder of Afreecar LLC, delves into the transformative journey toward sustainable mobility solutions. Transitioning from his early career in major automotive companies, Chris embarked on a mission to harness innovation for the planet's benefit. The podcast highlights the Afreecar initiative, a testament to Chris's vision of providing solar-powered mobility in developing countries, addressing these regions' unique challenges. Through a blend of sustainability and design philosophy, Chris envisions a future where global mobility is not only accessible but also harmonious with the environment. The discussion extends to the broader implications of such sustainable practices on global climate change and the potential for design to catalyze significant positive change in communities worldwide.

 
Dr. Christopher Borroni-Bird is Founder of Afreecar LLC and an expert on sustainable and affordable mobility for ALL the world’s people. This builds on his 25-year career leading advanced mobility initiatives at several major organizations as well as volunteering in sub-Saharan Africa.

At Afreecar he is a senior advisor on future mobility to McKinsey and is also sought out to provide independent technical due diligence on future mobility solutions and companies in vehicle autonomy, connectivity and electrification.

 

Separately, Afreecar is also developing an e-kit that power assists non-motorized vehicles while also transforming them into mobile power sources, which has many applications in both the developing and developed worlds.

 

He served as Waymo’s Chief Engineer for Future Vehicle Programs and has been a Research Scientist at MIT Media Lab. From 2012 to 2017, he was Qualcomm’s VP of Strategic Development, responsible for wireless automotive solutions. Prior to this, he led GM’s Electric Networked Vehicle (EN-V), the world’s first drivable vehicles to demonstrate today’s accepted vision of future mobility (and extensively deployed at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo). He led GM’s Autonomy, Hy-wire and Sequel “skateboard” electric vehicle concepts, now widely adopted by the Auto Industry, and has 50 patents. He is co-author of “Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century”, with Larry Burns and the late Bill Mitchell (MIT Press, 2010). Before joining GM in 2000, he led Chrysler’s gasoline fuel cell vehicle development. He was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame as a Young Leader in 2000 and was one of Automotive News’ inaugural “Electrifying 100” in 2011.

If you would like to be a guest on the show contact: namarketing@avl.com

Welcome to Reimagined Mobility podcast series. I'm here with Chris. Chris, you have a tremendous experience and history in the automotive space. I specifically want to talk about what you've been doing over the last several years here. It's very intriguing enough that a lot of your posts obviously about it. So but before we go there, explain a little bit your background, your history and what you're doing today. And then let's jointly here explore to re-imagine mobility opportunities we see in our future here. Well, thank you, Stephan and thank you to AVL for offering me this opportunity to talk about this project, which is near and dear to my heart. I'm British, as you can probably tell. I've lived in America and mainly in the Detroit area for the last 30 years working for Chrysler and General Motors, heavily involved in the skateboard development at GM back in 2002 with the autonomy and high wire concepts and have about 50 patents on that. And then I could see the car was becoming a smartphone on wheels. So I decided to leave GM in 2012 and join Qualcomm, which is a company that's inside pretty much everybody smartphone. And for five years I was automotive strategy vice president there. And then I decided to kind of retire so I could focus more of my attention on the Afreecar project, which I'll describe shortly. And then I was called Out of retirement by Waymo to be chief engineer on the Future Vehicle or Future Robotaxi program and moved to the Bay Area to work there. And but I left pretty soon after joining because I could realize that the Robotaxi was far away from being ready to scale and only when you ready to scale does it make sense to do a a clean sheet architecture. So for the time being, they're using Pacifica minivans and Jaguar I-Pace and retrofitting that which makes sense since it's still in the R&D phase. But over the last 4 to 5 years, I've been doing some independent consulting for government agencies and banks and companies around autonomous and electric vehicles, and also developing an exit for underserved markets. The initial emphasis being sub-Saharan Africa and off grid rural, agricultural type applications. But I see the same type of solution being very sorely needed here in the developed world for last mile mobility and maybe even some indoor applications like health care facilities and warehouses and so forth. So I'm very excited to talk about it in more detail and looking forward to your questions and hoping to answer them as best I can. Perfect. Well, let's jump right into it. Right. We've had other participants in our podcast that are looking specifically to same as you were from with with a passion, with a law for the people in the underdeveloped areas of this world that still as many of us sometimes kind of maybe ignore forget is still the majority of this world problem. Yes, absolutely. I say that my career has been focused on the 10% of the world's population, you know, that live in the developed world. And now I'm trying to focus on the other 90% of the world's population. Now, what will be matters more, right than 90% instead of well, if we don't find solutions for the 90%, then whatever we do in the developed world is not going to really address climate change at the global level. True, True. So let's jump exactly right in there with climate change, right in the in the 10% of this world. Well, let's say maybe in five in 5% of the developed world. Or again, the total pie here. Everybody talks about sustainability. Now, Europe certainly is big into it. I would say China to some degree more than ever into it. We're seeing it more and more in Europe and in the US. But again, as you just identified, that might be 10% or 5% for the whole world, right? What about the rest of the world? I mean, they use equipment there, too. They they they use machinery as well. And they need transportation, maybe in some cases even more desperate than what we do to really develop themselves and progress. So what do you from a from a sustainability from an environmental perspective, also see with what you're pushing not just transportation, but also bringing the 90% into the sustainability and an overall effectiveness of what the developed world or a small portion, at least of that is trying to push with, let's say, to the overall sustainability. Yeah, I think if we develop solutions that work for the poorest people in the world, you know, let's put it bluntly, then those solutions are going to be very affordable and practical for the developed world as well. And they're going to be very energy efficient because if you go to parts of the developed world, people, extremely developing world, people are very resourceful. They need to be so they they don't waste material. They re-use it to a much greater extent than we do here and in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and rural India. By necessity, the only source of electric power is the sun. And using solar power, because it's it's not connected to a grid. And so the basics of a a solar powered vehicle that is using recycled or reused materials and that could include batteries in the future as a second life application and being right sized. Let's put it that way. They can't afford vehicles that weigh 4,000lbs or much more. If you're talking about electric vehicles with 100 kilowatt hour batteries and 100 kilowatt motors and so forth. And if you think about the Industrial revolution and the transformation of agriculture, with just the addition of, you know, horses with one horsepower, it was a big difference versus human power. So very modest power requirements and energy requirements can transform people's lives and really make a big difference in giving them economic development opportunities that they don't have today. A simple example of that would be if you look at rural areas in many parts of the world, the produce that is grown, you know, vegetables and plants and so forth that are consumed, maybe there's extra that could be sold at market, but the market might be five or ten miles away and it's very difficult to reach the market. and so a vehicle, a lightweight vehicle that may maybe with a one kilowatt motor and a maybe a two kilowatt hour battery, you know, trivial by Western standards could really make it practical for people to take this stuff to market, you know, when it's ready. Other other than just leaving it to lie fallow on the ground and go to waste and so it's a big, big enabler and also power. We talk about transportation, but the the same solution provides electric power, which is equally as important. So market that I'm developing is basically the size of a briefcase. It contains a small battery, which in principle could be a reused battery, roughly 48 volts, two kilowatt hours and small motor, maybe one kilowatt motor. And then you have solar panels that form the roof and this kit would be retrofitted to vehicles that they already have. So like a handcart, because I don't want to be in the business of figuring out what type of vehicle makes the most sense. But I do want to enable them to have electrified assist to whatever vehicle they're comfortable using today, which is typically a handcart or a wheelbarrow in health care facilities, which I think is quite interesting. It could be a wheelchair or hospital bed or a linen cart or a meal cart. But again, this idea of a retrofit kit that can be universally applied to any Non-Motorized vehicle is the overriding approach that I'm trying to take it, rather than trying to develop a vehicle per say. And if you have such a kit, it not only can provide electric power assist making it much easier to transport people and goods, but it also provides much needed electric power. So charging cell phones is an obvious example. People today will charge will pay $0.15 to for somebody to charge their phone in sub-Saharan Africa. And that's a lot of money. If you think about the average income of people in sub-Saharan Africa is $2 a day. So charging cell phones, pumping water in many parts of the world, especially those affected by climate change, you're beginning to see erratic rainfall and droughts that are occurring. And if you could have a reliable access to underground water, you could reliably have three planting seasons a year instead of relying on the rains once a year so you could triple your income. But again, if that needs electric power or hydraulic power to access that water that's underground in a health care application, it could be powering a ventilator or dialysis machine. So the idea of a kit that can provide power, assist to an existing non-motorized vehicle and also be able to charge or power electrical devices on the go is a very powerful idea in my opinion. And my vision is that this kit would be so simple that it could be assembled locally and that could be in sub-Saharan Africa, in a big city like Nairobi or Harare, where there's the resources to assemble this kid from, you know, available components. But then it would be distributed locally to nearby villages and rural areas. But take the same idea and apply it here in Detroit. You could easily imagine a small factory in Detroit cranking out these kits. You know, we have all the skill sets you need in Detroit to make these kits, and it could actually be used to provide last mile mobility to tricycles to allow people to transport produce from the urban farms to the eastern market, for example. Or think about health care facilities where you have hospital beds and wheelchairs and linen carts and meal carts that are non-motorised. And imagine if you had a kit that could be shared among all of them, because a bed doesn't have to be moved 24 hours a day. It only needs to be moved to small amount of time. And then once it's moved, you can take the kit off and then recharge it and then use it for a wheelchair that needs a power assist, for example. So I see lots of different applications for this, but the starting point for the stimulation for this was my volunteer work in Africa that I was doing 15 years ago. Even when I was at GM, I was taking what I was developing at GM, which was a small electric vehicle store for the Shanghai World Expo, as a vision of personal mobility in the future and basically applying that to Africa. Interesting. So, I mean, Chris, when you explain this to me, right, and we've talked about this before, is makes, for lack of a better word, perfect sense. And I would say well duh, right? So the question as we reimagine mobility, why why do I only really hear you talk about why about this? Why are there not or other companies involved that I mean, we're not the only wants to care about the third world countries, right? Why aren't they are not other ones there? Is this is this because at the end of the day, it's again a matter of, let's say, capitalism for a moment, that if I can't money, why make money? Why should I? Is it a matter of we're looking at it the wrong way. We're looking at it from a way of we got to find a vehicle that fits there versus what you're saying. No, we got to develop something that fits for everything. So this kick that you're talking about, but as we're again, reimagine mobility or discuss these things in these podcasts. What are we missing? Why is it you pushed? Well, not others. Maybe I'm approaching this in a way that's counterproductive. To what? To people who want to fund it. Because my my vision is that this this kit would not be mass produced by big company and then exported all around the world is to really empower local communities, whether that's in Detroit or whether it's in sub-Saharan Africa, to actually assemble this kit initially from assembled components like imported solar panels and batteries, but ultimately potential to make it including the batteries or recycled batteries from used electric cars. So my vision is really to really enable economic development for the most underserved populations in the world, not to necessarily make big companies richer. And that's not a mess. So my endeavor is really a philanthropic in nature. So I'm in this not to make money myself or to create a business that makes money, although that might be the right approach, you know, enlightened self-interest and all that. But it's really to try and find resources, funding resources or engineering resources, to put it bluntly, to take what's been developed so far and to take it to another level of engineering refinement and development. We built prototypes. I've worked with local universities. We we've built prototypes and demonstrated them. We need to make it much more rugged and lighter and smaller and make it so it can operate in a pilot program. Whether that's in Detroit or it's in sub Saharan Africa or elsewhere without it failing on the first day. You know, when you work with university students, they're really good at designing projects, but it's not really their mission to engineer and refine. That's more business, does that sort of thing. So that's what I'm really looking for. That plus the business case, which I'm working with the University of Michigan, to with a class there to really understand the business case, I do believe and again, this is almost farmer's math, that this could make a lot of sense financially if you have something that could cost $1,000 or less. And if you go on Alibaba website, for example, you see a lot of kits from Chinese companies. They're not exactly the same as what I'm talking about, but they're they're on the way. And you can buy them for $300. So I firmly believe that a solar panel that's roughly the size of a car roof and a battery like two kilowatt hours and maybe a kilowatt motor and the associated electronics and housing and the wheels that this could be made for $1,000 or sold, I should say for $1,000. And that works out to roughly a dollar a day. If you have a three year life for the product, which I think is reasonable to imagine. So a dollar a day is not a huge amount of money, especially if you can charge $0.15 to charge a cell phone, because I could charge ten phones easily in a day with this kit and still have more than 90% of battery capacity left for transport applications. And I would be paying that dollar a day cost of ownership. So finding out a business model and a financing mechanism is something that I want the class to work on. So I'm hoping that with support from a company to help take this to the next level of engineering development, to build a real practical prototype that could be used in a pilot program. And then with the associated business case that I could persuade or convince partners that there's a real opportunity in assembling or making this kit and deploying it. And so that's where I'm at right now. Okay. Let's let's take this for a moment and kind of move it into mainstream back to the development work, the developed world. Sorry. So either Europe, the US, over the last, let's say seven years, let's say seven, maybe five years, we've seen a rise and I think at the same time fall off companies. I think they had a similar idea to you instead of saying let's build all brand new electric vehicles, they said, here is a kit that you can upgrade your existing vehicle you to to a pure EV or at least to a hybrid right? We've seen a surge in fleet sales. We've seen also in passenger vehicles, but I would say may be heavily in medium and heavy duty trucks. Right. But many of them I've seen going away again. But what to me, it's a similar approach to what you were going is saying instead of coming up with a with the perfect vehicle for sub-Sahara Africa, you come up with a kit and the you let the local people figure out what to do. And probably between you and I, if we bring it out today, in a year, we go over there and we look and say, I never even realized it could be used for this is brilliant. I didn't think of this. Right. And I think that's. ingenuity you talked about it before, but what did we miss? And to apply this idea in in the U.S., when I thought, again five or seven years ago, these these outfitters so to speak, to that make a a hybrid or maybe a pure EV out of a standard F-150 pickup truck or out of medium duty Isuzu vehicle or something. Did we miss something there? I mean, you worked in the space, Chris, for, again, 30 years before you started looking at what could you do for the underdeveloped world? Did we miss something? Did we not pick up the right opportunity with these conversion or up feeder companies, or were they just at the right time or the wrong time? Right place, wrong time, wrong time, right place? What do you see there? Well, I think it might It might be too early to dismiss the idea, even though some of those companies may have gone belly up. I think it's you know, as companies are beginning to rethink electric vehicle strategies, given the materials challenges and the costs, there may be an opportunity for hybrids, you know, plug in hybrids and so forth with smaller batteries that could enable vehicles to meet regulatory requirements or just have a cost of ownership. That makes sense. So I think in places like Europe, many cities are looking to ban internal combustion engine vehicles from the city center. So the question becomes, do you use pure electric or do you electrify an internal combustion engine vehicle maybe as an aftermarket approach or retrofit approach? And I think there's a it's something that needs to be closely looked at because it could make sense, given the challenges that these all these companies are going to face, trying to secure enough material supplies with pure electric vehicles, and especially with trucks requiring such large batteries if they're purely electric, that could be a good economic argument for the extended range electric vehicle case. But, you know, until recently, everybody seemed to be at going from one extreme to another, flipping from internal combustion engine to pure electric without thinking about. I mean, Toyota is an exception. They've been looking at hybrids for a long time. But but most of the U.S. carmakers were following Tesla's lead and just abandoning plug in hybrids, basically to a large extent. And maybe there's an opportunity now to rethink that. Going back to your idea, what kind of intrigued me listening to this, right? You sort of with your kit, right? You would really solve the transportation ocean issue. You would solve a to overcome the barriers of upward mobility from an economic standpoint standpoint for many of these people, but at the same and many other things as well. But at the same time and this is what kind of gave me in a wow moment is you're also solving the infrastructure problem, right? Instead of coming up with the large charging stations and coming up with a solution of whatever, sending kilowatt of power over high power cables to remote places, you're saying, No, no, no, no. Just like we're talking micro mobility. I think you're talking microgrids, too. So. Absolutely. And those are already beginning to take off in Africa, you know, to to supply lighting, LED lighting and cell phone charging are good applications of that. So it's out of necessity, but it could be the future, just like they they leapfrogged America when it came to finance payments, you know being electronic and wireless communications for telephone telephony. So I think it's it's true the improvements that are being made in solar panels and batteries are really beginning to to filter down now to the the poorest parts of the world. And, you know, whether this solar panel is part of the vehicle itself. So the vehicle can basically stay charged as it goes or whether it's part of a the stationary, inside the village, for example, and the vehicle gets charge statement over not overnight, but during the day. And then it can be used the next day. There's pros and cons to that. Obviously, if you mounted in a stationary application, you can optimize the angle of the solar panel and it's less likely to get abused, but there's an advantage to having it on the vehicle as well. So you're not stranded as easily. But yeah, I'm open to both approaches. But so the kit is basically a case size kit. The solar panels would obviously be separate and they would be mounted maybe on four posts and provide shade as well. Weather protection if it's under the roof. Yeah. So, so when we take this, Chris, and we kind of put it into perspective and say, let's see for a moment that's going to happen in, in Africa, okay, let's say it's going to happen in Africa. What do you think what impact that would have for the developed world? So the U.S. and Europe for a moment, okay, it's not the only developed world, but it stay with those two regions for a moment. What do you think what impact that would have from the constant discussions we have today about Micromobility? We talk a lot about it, but, you know, all I see is maybe some some scooters flying around in California in back with and after time I fear for my life because they if they come around corners without any, you know, helmets on and I myself am not riding. So we talk a lot about it, but I'm not sure we're really pushing it to where everybody is talking about or it's not getting there. We're talking about the constant problem, at least in this country right in the U.S., about the infrastructure as it relates to electric vehicles. Right. What do you think? What would actually not just the impact on, let's say, Africa, maybe, but what would that successful implementation as we reimagine mobility? What do you see that would do for a country like the U.S.? Would we learn something and what would it be that we learned from it or in Europe as well? Interesting. Your perspective. I honestly think Europe is far more promising application here because many cities in Europe are looking seriously at banning cars, not just internal combustion engine vehicles, but electric as well, because of congestion and safety and parking and those issues. So if you ban internal or cars in general from the downtown areas of the many cities in Europe, you open up the opportunity to create a new class of vehicles that can be much lighter and don't need the crash structure integrity or the high speed capability or the long range capability the cars have. And they could be so much lighter and cheaper to operate and they could actually be made from a much wider variety of materials because, again, the structural requirements go way down the ride and handling stability, stiffness, all those things change. So you could actually open up the opportunity to re recycle components, plastics, bamboo, wood. We kind of smile at these ideas, but it becomes practical if you don't have to worry about crashing into a car or surviving a crash from a car and you're only operating at 10 to 15 miles per hour, which is the traffic speeds anyway in the city center today. And it's safer, similar to a bicycle speed. So you could get a significant fraction of the energy from solar, especially in the summertime with such a lightweight vehicle, because it would be so much more energy efficient than a car. And and so you could reduce the strain on the electric grid. These vehicles could be made locally. I mean, that's not a great vision for car companies to think of local communities basically building and designing their own vehicles because they're so much easier. They're almost like golf carts. They're that simple and potentially they could be autonomous in the future as well. But it's a vision that I think is very exciting because mayors and city planners are looking to solve traffic problems, obviously, but they're trying to create jobs. And wouldn't it be a great mission to create jobs in the city, factories in the city, design and development facilities in the city to create your own, you know, vehicles and you might export them to other cities as well. So I think it's a great vision and I think it could be enabled if you actually ban cars from the city center, which European cities are looking to do more and more in America, it's going to be much tougher because I don't see that same movement in America. So I think the opportunities in America more like last mile delivery vehicles that can operate in the bicycle lanes. but again, some people are concerned about safety even when in the bicycle lane. But if cities can open up bicycle lanes for not only bicycles but, you know, covered vehicles that could provide transport of goods and and low cost people movement, that could be an opportunity. I did partner with another company to apply for funds from the Central Station, the Corktown project. We became finalists with this vision or this opportunity to create a tricycle that is that powered that could transport low income people in that area using the bicycle lanes. So we were finalists, but we didn't actually win the award. But I still think it's a good idea. But I think Europe is going to be further along. And then if you think about where the batteries from European car companies go at end of life, they might end up in Africa. And so that could be a good market for these used electric vehicles in the batteries to go to Africa for the kit. Wow. Very good, Chris. I think we could go on here. I mean, I have more questions and we're running out of time, so, I mean, very provocative, but again, very visionary, but also very, I think, very appropriate to what you're looking for specifically, again, for places like like Africa. And certainly, again, I firmly believe we can all learn from from this and kind of challenge our mindsets. And what we're looking at is how we reimagine mobility in places like Europe or the U.S.. So maybe, Chris, to end it, a totally different question. I'll be interested in what you're saying, because make sure you answer with are you going to buy a bicycle? I don't know. What's your next vehicle you're going to buy and why? Well, we have three vehicles in our household because there's several of us. And we just bought a Chevrolet bolt last year and we have a Chevrolet Volt extended range electric vehicle, which I think was discontinued before its time. I think that's a great solution. I think that the challenge with buying another electric vehicle when our internal combustion engine vehicle disappears or runs out of gas, so to speak, is the challenge in what happens when the grid fails or if you're stranded somewhere? It's at this moment it makes sense to have an internal combustion engine vehicle as a as a backup vehicle. And if you go long distances, it makes sense to use that internal combustion engine vehicle. And I think most people who currently own a electric vehicle probably have a second vehicle because they're relatively expensive and you have to be relatively well off to afford an electric vehicle. So I've never used a charging station in my life because the electric vehicle we have is perfect for driving around metro Detroit, going to the airport and so forth. And if we need to go much further, we just take the internal combustion engine vehicle. So my vision is that car makers look at reducing the size of the battery significantly in their vehicles. Making the vehicle smaller is a bit of a challenge, but making the vehicles have a smaller battery and having much better charging infrastructure, I think that's a much smarter solution then from a resource management and a national security and a climate change perspective than having huge batteries in all of these vehicles. So I would like to see more smaller vehicles that maybe have two or hundred mile range instead of 300 miles. And but to complement that with much more intuitive and ubiquitous charging infrastructure to put people's minds at rest. But at this moment, I don't have an issue with range anxiety because I always have a an internal combustion engine vehicle for really long drives. But I know that that's not a long term solution. Right, Right. Chris, very good. Thank you so much for Thank you. Sharing a little bit of all what's going on in your life and what your vision is and your passion. I can feel it and I can see it just talking to you and see. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.