Andrew Koch looks into the future of the motoring industry at the Frankfurt Motorshow
Walk into the Frankfurt Motorshow for the first time and it is almost sensory overload – there is just so such to take in and absorb and so few words to tell you about it. The environment and fuel saving took centre stage at the Frankfurt Motor Show 2009, so that will be my main focus. But even in a recession-hit world, it’s difficult to put the supercars away.
Being on home soil each German car maker wants to score a home run here and their rivals know that this is the place to mount a challenge. So even with buyers shunning luxury cars, there was a plethora of super machinery and pizzazz.
An all-new $600,000 Bentley (parent company Volkswagen) and a new more affordable $500,000 Rolls-Royce (parent company BMW) set the tone, but saloons were still jostled by supercars including Lamborghini Reventon spider, the Mercedes SLS, Ferrari 458, a revised Porsche Turbo and the Aston Martin Rapide.
Their manufacturers’ talk of the market showing green shoots but they’re going to need far more than that. Perhaps the answer lies in VW’s L1 as tandem-seat supercar that trades a crashing exhaust noise for a tiny diesel/electric hybrid driveline capable of 180mpg.
But it isn’t only the recession that’s piling the pressure onto car makers. The pressure to cut fossil-fuel use is costing them huge development budgets. Intensive detail engineering efforts are paring every last gram of CO2 off mainstream cars, while they also invest in new technologies that they don’t even know the buyers will ever want.
A few years back, after all, they were all pouring money into hydrogen fuel-cell research. But of the exhibitors at Frankfurt this year, only Mercedes had a near-market example. Now all the talk is of battery vehicles instead.
Pure-electric cars are everywhere. Renault has a whole suite for introduction from 2011, and rival Peugeot has a couple too. VW’s little e-Up! seems the most convincing, but its engineers disagree with Renault saying it will take until 2013 until the battery technology is mature enough for a general audience. Ford has an experimental Focus fitted with the battery drivetrain that goes into the next Focus from 2011.
And just as Tesla has proved there’s a small market for the responsive performance of an electric sports car, Mercedes AMG is showing showed an electric version of its new SLS, and Audi an electric R8 derivative. Even Michael Macht, Porsche CEO said he was ‘convinced that one day Porsche will have an electric sports car.’
Yet for all that, buyers will probably worry that they’ll run out of power with nowhere to recharge – range anxiety as the Americans call it. That means the favoured role for electric cars is as a second car for local commuting and shopping. As an answer to the need to do occasional long trips, the show was chocas with plug-in hybrids. You recharge them at home or the office to get the capability of 30-50 miles electric range. If you’re going further, a petrol or diesel engine kicks in.
Plug-in hybrids were exhibited as concept cars by Toyota, Mercedes, BMW, Vauxhall (Holden’s sister company in the UK), Volvo and Citroen. The idea is attractive, but the final retail price could kill the technology before it ever takes off. Each of them has a hybrid drivetrain – around $8000 extra over a diesel according to Ford – and then adds a costly large-capacity battery pack.
So where what about all-new mass-market cars, whose sales should fund these expensive engineering exercises? Actually there aren’t many. The Vauxhall Astra, Citroën’s good-looking C3 and DS3 superminis, Peugeot 5008 and Ford C-Max MPVs, the rakish Peugeot RCZ coupe, Saab 9-5, BMW X1, Jaguar XJ, Hyundai iX35, Kia Venga, Toyota Landcruiser. Not a long list although we also admired Skoda’s Superb estate as big no nonsense Labrador hauler that looks set to take up that mantle from the Rover 75.
Only recently, industry wisdom was that it was vital for car companies to merge, in pursuit of economies of scale, but ‘deconsolidated’ car companies, among them Vauxhall, Saab, and Jaguar seem to be emerging fast out of the bigger companies such as General Motors and Ford. Even Porsche, a small maker but a mighty profitable one, has just been folded into the VW group in search of engineering synergies. Yet by contrast Opel-Vauxhall has been sold by GM (that’s a separate story), and Saab too. Jaguar-Land Rover departed last year from Ford and Volvo is also for sale.
Can these small independent companies flourish when they need to put colossal budgets into developing the sorts of low-carbon technologies seen all over the Frankfurt show? Perhaps in future they’ll co-operate with other makers over specifics such as hybrid engines or batteries. Perhaps they’ll co-operate with suppliers such as Bosch for bigger parts of the car, just as your computer has ‘Intel inside’.
Trouble is, at Frankfurt, there was no obvious consensus as to how, or whether, this co-operation will prove viable. For reasons that go far beyond this present recession, it’s clear the car industry hasn’t yet finished shaking out.
