Hyundai’s vice president of corporate and item planning, Mike O’Brien, is a vehicle guy. With a garage that includes a Ferrari 308, a twin-turbo Mazda RX-7, and a Swift DB4 racer that the executive is restoring himself, O’Brien is clearly portion of the brethren. But even though his garage could be a shrine to a bygone era of sports vehicles (and vintage motorcycles, and at least one particular fighter jet), in his day job O’Brien is obsessed with the future of Hyundai Motor America. And, at least indirectly, that has to do with poop.
To be fair, when we sat down to chat with O’Brien at the New York auto show this week, he never really stated the word “poop.” But he spoke at length about human waste—and the role it plays in Hyundai’s bullish attitude about fuel-cell cars.
“We’re quite high on hydrogen, and I’ll tell you from our best management perspective, we’ve been functioning on this for over 15 years,” he told C/D. “We continue to invest each and every single year in hydrogen. We’ve never stopped.”
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“Every time you flush a toilet, you’re basically fueling a auto.”
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What’s this have to do with sewage? Allow Mr. O’Brien to clarify:
There’s a [hydrogen] station open across the street from our headquarters. This station runs off of human waste. Every time you flush a toilet, you’re essentially fueling a automobile. They’re taking the vented methane gas which would certainly harm the environment, they’re turning that into power [....] That is obtaining funds on the ground. Let’s face it, everybody’s gotta consume, we can not stop consuming. So rather of relying on the Persian Gulf or South America, it is anything that occurs each day anyway.
Can’t argue with that.
Of course, the Hyundai on everyone’s mind is still the Santa Cruz idea, a tiny crossover with an open pickup bed and the promise of diesel propulsion initial exhibited at the Detroit auto show this year. Rumors have been swirling that Hyundai will really build it, so we asked the executive regardless of whether it is a realistic daydream.
“We’ve been functioning on that quite actively,” O’Brien told C/D. “It’s still not an approved production plan, but we’ve got a important, big team of engineers working on it. As soon as we recognize the cost and feasibility, then it gets raised up via our item arranging. It is generally progressing, and so far very good, but no production go-ahead however. We’re nonetheless operating on that.”
O’Brien says the Santa Cruz would fill a void in the market place in terms of size, price tag, and capability. “It’s for people that usually end up in a compact or subcompact SUV, but that’s not really what they wanted,” he mentioned. “From our perspective, there’s this large unmet want, folks that want some thing that is simple to park in a a lot more urban environment, that is easy to garage, that gets great fuel economy. There’s no open-bed item that gets 30 mpg but.”
The Hyundai executive created a very good point: Years ago, you could acquire a new compact truck for roughly the same cost, and with the identical functions, as a comparable economy car—a Ford Ranger for the price of an Escort was O’Brien’s instance. “For us there’s all these factors that are basically boiling with each other and generating a good planetary alignment for a solution like Santa Cruz.” And the value? “Our image all along has been to keep it priced equivalent to a subcompact CUV,” O’Brien told us. “So you believe of a RAV4 or a Tucson.”
Speaking far more broadly, even though Hyundai’s items have come a long way from the company’s ignominious early days, in testing we’ve located most of the brand’s offerings to be, properly, significantly less than thrilling. Does Hyundai have a plan to inject some enthusiasm into the lineup?
“It’s so considerably of a concern that we’ve reallocated a lot of our engineering sources to that extremely problem,” O’Brien mentioned. “It’s all about generating our vehicles more intuitive in the way driving dynamics work. We’re now spending more of our engineering work in the area of dynamics.”
What does Hyundai appear like 5 years down the road? “A firm that is significantly a lot more in tune with the nuance of clients, the items that make them satisfied,” O’Brien told us. “Now, compared to 10 years ago, we’re excellent at obtaining the spec right: the right size, the right horsepower, the right steering-wheel diameter. But maybe the components didn’t sync so effectively collectively.
“I think far more and much more you’re going to see, 5 years in the future, that automobile integration is going to be significantly greater. Where the automobile feels like it was created by one engineer, rather than 1000 engineers. You are going to see things that look like they’re all analogous, all supporting a single yet another, whether or not it is electronics or driving dynamics.”
Lastly, we asked O’Brien to name an automaker that is carrying out some thing impressive in the marketplace today. “In terms of expanding functionality, and expanding greenness at the same time . . . appear at the [BMW] i8. What a marvel,” he said. “To believe you can have each. When I appear about the market, I consider about what’s going to be Hyundai’s i8.”
Speaking Poop and Santa Cruz With Hyundai’s Head of Solution Organizing
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