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Corus

Jon King, director, Corus Automotive Engineering

The EU public will have a low-carbon mindset firmly embedded by 2018. Partly because of legislation and energy costs, partly because of the need to reduce CO2 absolutely. European consumers will be directing their spending much more responsibly than today.

There’s a risk of electricity rationing unless more nuclear or alternative energy sources come onstream.

A greater proportion of the population will be prepared to take part in car-sharing schemes.

I doubt we’ll want less content in cars, but we won’t want it to be profligate – we’ll expect miniaturisation and integration.

We’ll see the beginnings of luxury vehicles with sub100g CO2 emissions. They’ll still need the ride comfort and handling, so they’ll have a fairly long wheelbase, but will be a relatively smaller car. They’ll still need an element of performance. Still premium and not low-cost.

Europe will still be an affluent market on the whole and we’ll want to spend our money on luxury products.

China’s currently emerging as a leader in battery technology, but Europe could take a lead in this field.

We could see a 1kg wiring harness (instead of 40kg) with different distribution technologies and wireless technologies. There’s a breakthrough waiting to happen in electrical distribution.

Steer-by-wire, brake-by-wire, will simplify vehicle engineering and body construction.
If we can miniaturise more of the electrics and electronics, then we can smaller cars with more interior space. The Volvo floating console kind of thing.

Over the next ten years, we’ll see greater use of TWIP steels and high-strength steels that will give us thinner pillars. As we move closer to the one-box style with very raked pillars, this will become more important.

Skills
We’ll need engineers to be more multi-skilled – experts in more than one thing. Bringing single line specialists together to integrate ideas will become too challenging – it’s already often quite difficult.

We’ll need more language skills. A significant proportion of Americans will have Spanish as their first language by then. Mandarin lessons would also be a sensible option to take.

Engineers will also need better presentation skills and commercial understanding. We’ll have to be able to present increasingly complex technical ideas more simply to get ideas to market faster.

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