Schlagwort-Archive: e-mobility

Who Gets to Build the Next DeLorean?

Decades after her dad’s iconic sports car time-traveled into movie history, Kat DeLorean wants to build a modern remake. There’s just one problem: Someone else owns the trademark on her name.

Video: Getty Images; Ángel Guerra

In the fall of 2020, bored and restless in Covid-restricted Spain, Ángel Guerra doodled a dream car. The automotive designer, then 38, wanted to make a tribute to his first four-wheeled love: the time-traveling DeLorean DMC-12 that rolled out of a cloud of steam in Back to the Future. The sketch that took shape on Guerra’s computer had all the iconic elements of the 1980s original—gull-wing doors, stainless-steel cladding, louver blades over the rear window, a rakish black side stripe—plus a few modern touches. Guerra smoothed out the folded-paper angles, widened the body, stretched the wheel arches to accommodate bigger rims and tires. After two weeks, he decided he liked this new DeLorean enough to stick it on Instagram.

The post blew up. Gearheads raved about the design. The music producer Swizz Beatz DM’d Guerra to ask how much it would cost to build. Guerra started to think that maybe his sketch should become a real car. He reached out to a Texas firm called DeLorean Motor Company, which years earlier had acquired the original DeLorean trademarks, but was gently rebuffed. The design seemed destined to live in cyberspace forever. Then, by some algorithmic magic, a different kind of DeLorean showed up on Guerra’s Instagram feed in the spring of 2022—a human DeLorean by the name of Kat. Her posts showcased her love for her puppy, hair dye, and above all her late father, John Z. DeLorean. Although the general public often remembers him as a high-flying CEO with fabulous hair and a surgically augmented chin who went down in a federal sting operation, Guerra chiefly thought of him as a brilliant engineer. He sent Kat a message with some kind words about her dad and a link to the design. Kat saw it and got stoked.

Kat DeLorean inside of the original DeLorean car

Kat DeLorean is a frequently stoked type of person. At the time, she had recently dyed her long hair in rainbow colors to, in her words, “create the rainbows in my heart on my head.” Yet for much of her life, her relationship to the DeLorean name had been an unhappy one. When people asked why she didn’t own a DMC-12, she would reply: “If there was an iconic representation of your entire life falling apart, would you park it in your driveway?” She would say, only half-jokingly, that the initials stood for “Destroy My Childhood.” A fortysomething cybersecurity professional, Kat lived in a ramshackle farmhouse in New Hampshire with her husband and a few kids. But when Guerra’s note arrived, she was undergoing a pandemic- and work-stress-induced reevaluation of her life’s purpose. She was dreaming up ways to reclaim her father’s legacy. She wanted to launch an engineering education program in his name.

One thing she insisted she didn’t want was to start a car company. It was a car company, after all, that had ruined her father. But then something happened that changed her mind. In April 2022, the Texas company that had given Guerra the cold shoulder announced it would soon reveal a new DeLorean. Kat kept her feelings about this to herself only briefly. First she drew attention to Guerra’s design, posting it on Instagram. (“A timeless classic given the treatment it deserves!”) Two days later, she made her feelings explicit: “@deloreanmotorcompany Is not John DeLorean’s Company,” she wrote. “He despised you.” Details about the new Texas DeLorean emerged a few days after that: Called the Alpha5, it would have four seats instead of two, would reportedly be built mostly from aluminum rather than stainless steel, and would be available in red. Like many DeLorean purists, Kat hated it.

DeLorean Motor Company Alpha5

As people kept messaging her about the pretty design they’d seen on her Instagram feed—some even offered to help build it—a new plan took shape. Kind of a crazy one. She started to think: Why not build one car and film the process of building it for the engineering students? Eventually that turned into: Why not make several and sell them to fund the engineering program? But then why not …

As Kat’s ideas tend to do, this one snowballed: an engineering program in every state, funded by cars; her mind could easily leap from there to notions of rebuilding the industrial Midwest and rejiggering American work culture in general, the ultimate realization of her oft-stated belief that “everyone should have the same opportunity to live their dream.” John DeLorean had plotted to return to the car market until the day he died. Now, she thought, shouldn’t she give the nerds what they wanted? Fine, she had zero experience running a car company, but she could find people for that, and anyway she’d spent, by her estimate, thousands of hours talking engine design with her dad. She described herself as having “gasoline in her veins.”

Which didn’t really change the fundamentals, including how difficult and outrageously expensive it is to bring a car to market, not to mention the itchy point that the “DeLorean” branding technically belonged to someone else. Never mind all that. Kat was a DeLorean—a name, for good or ill, associated with wild ambition.

John DeLorean

John Z. DeLorean was a suave, swashbuckling General Motors executive who dated young models and palled around with celebrities. He became automotive royalty in the mid-1960s, when he had the idea of sticking a bigger engine into an “old lady” car, thereby reinventing the Pontiac brand and launching the “muscle car” era. But DeLorean felt stifled at GM, and he dreamed of building what he called an “ethical car”: safe, reliable, affordable, and environmentally friendly. He left the company in 1973, the same year he married the supermodel Cristina Ferrare, his third wife. Two years later, he founded the DeLorean Motor Company. And two years after that, DeLorean and Ferrare, who shared an adopted 6-year-old son named Zach, welcomed their baby daughter Kathryn.

The original DeLorean Motor Company’s brief and turbulent history spanned Kat’s early childhood. She has few direct memories of the time her dad spent assembling a team of mavericks and dreamers enticed by the idea of building a whole car company from a blank sheet of paper. With a generous investment from the British government, DeLorean opted to put his factory outside Belfast, Northern Ireland. This was during the Troubles, when the idea of Catholics and Protestants working side-by-side seemed impossible. But, for a time, it worked. “There was a bog, then there was a factory, then there were jobs,” William Haddad, an executive for the company, recalled in a 1985 interview. “It was really exciting as hell.”

It also happened to be an era of inflation and soaring gas prices. An inexperienced workforce and frequent bomb scares further complicated production. Timelines slipped, production costs ballooned, demand collapsed, debt accrued. The company had to recall a couple thousand cars. DeLorean’s original vision, described by one classic car aficionado as a $12,000 “Corvette killer” featuring “unprecedented safety and efficiency attributes,” morphed into a $25,000 vehicle with few of those qualities. Then, in October 1982, with little Kat approaching her fifth birthday, came the world-famous denouement: John DeLorean caught on tape with an FBI informant in a room with nearly 60 pounds of cocaine. The informant had pitched the sale of the drugs as a way to raise enough money to save DeLorean’s struggling company.

Kat was 6 when her dad’s high-profile trial ended in an acquittal in the late summer of 1984, on the grounds of entrapment. Her dad’s company and career were destroyed; as he ruefully asked reporters outside the courtroom: “I don’t know, would you buy a used car from me?” Also destroyed was a kind of childhood idyll for Kat, who went very suddenly from living in an intact, wealthy, and famous New York City family—complete with an apartment on Fifth Avenue worth $30 million in today’s dollars—to being a child of bicoastal divorce. Within the year, her mother was remarried to a television executive, and Kat was mostly living in California. She was allowed 10 minutes a day on the phone with her dad back East, which she extended by enlisting his help with math homework.

Back to the Future came out a year after John’s acquittal. Although a studio official had pushed the filmmakers to use a Mustang for their time machine—Ford was willing to pay handsomely for the product placement—the screenwriter reportedly replied, “Doc Brown doesn’t drive a fucking Mustang.” The selection of the DMC-12 for the honor (cue Marty McFly: “Are you telling me that you built a time machine out of a DeLorean?”) prompted John to write a thank-you letter to the director and screenwriter, who he said had “all but immortalized” his car. Unlike Guerra, Kat has no recollection of seeing Back to the Future for the first time. “It just felt like the movies were always there, always a part of my life,” she told me.

As a teenager, Kat was allowed to choose which parent to live with, and she picked her dad. She spent her high school years on a farm in Bedminster, New Jersey. (The exact site that would later become the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster.) She rode dirt bikes around the vast property, did musical theater in private school, and sometimes endured cocaine jokes from her peers. Her best friend at the time taught Kat how to fix her own computer and inspired her habit of tinkering with the machines.

She modeled for a few years after high school but stayed geeky, spending her nights on hacking competitions. Then, in her early twenties, pregnant with her first child from a brief first marriage, she decided she didn’t want to raise her son in the world she’d known as the daughter of a supermodel. (These days she refers to “that world” of fabulous wealth from an almost mystified remove, as if the visit on the Schwarzeneggers’ private jet and the pajama party with Kourtney Kardashian had happened to someone else.) Instead, she took an IT internship at Countrywide Financial—later to be acquired by Bank of America—and started working her way up. She met a systems engineer named Jason Seymour at a company Christmas party and married him a little more than a month later at a drive-thru wedding chapel in Las Vegas. (Jason had wanted an Elvis impersonator to officiate, but he wasn’t available.) The following year, in 2005, her father died. John DeLorean had spent some of his final months attempting to trademark the name “DeLorean Automobile Company” through a company called Ephesians 6:12, which he’d set up with Kat and Zach as co-owners. (The name is a reference to a biblical verse about struggling “against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”) But he passed away before application could be approved, so it was officially listed as “abandoned.”

John’s death devastated Kat. Although she remained fiercely proud of her father and kept attending car shows in her capacity as a DeLorean, she went professionally by her married name, Seymour, and maintained a separation between those two identities. But in the 2020s, as the DMC-12’s 40th anniversary approached, John’s name was popping up in documentaries and movies again, and Kat was not happy with some of the portrayals depicting him as a kind of narcissistic hustler. She became determined to get the positive story of John DeLorean out.

As a big “trust the universe” person, she believed it was meaningful that an actual angel (Guerra) had shown up in her life with a design. So through the summer and fall of 2022, Kat’s ambitions took the shape of a car. The model would be called JZD, her dad’s initials, and the company would pour the sales revenue into more education programs—expanding into underserved areas in the industrial Midwest where her dad made his career. She resisted even calling the venture a “car company”; she much preferred to say it was a “dream-empowerment company fueled by automobiles,” in the same way Girl Scouts is a youth-empowerment organization fueled in part by cookies.

Whatever the company was, the New Hampshire farmhouse turned into its de facto headquarters. Kat and Jason took video meetings, recruited talent, and entertained wild ideas about what a new car “with DeLorean DNA” could do. (She joked: “Leave it to me to start a car company right when nepo babies are a thing.”) Could they source sustainable stainless steel for their first car by melting down old appliances? Could they use recycled computer chips to control it? Could they make virtual-reality manufacturing labs for their students, to assemble first a virtual car and then a real one? This was going to be a brand-new kind of car company—among the first ever founded by a woman and likely the first intended to be a not-for-profit.

With these big visions came big promises. In August 2022, Kat posted a screenshot from John’s final automotive business plan, which promised to “shake the automotive world” with a car that would kick off “an affair with man and machine at a price point that will be affordable.” She expressed an intent to follow these wishes with her own car company. The company’s name: DeLorean Next Generation.

DeLorean Next Generation JZD

The news spread, first with an item on Fox News and then in outlets all over the world. Jason was so high on enthusiasm for the new company, and pride in his wife’s ambition, that he dashed off a public promise on the DNG Motors Instagram account. “UNVEILED SEPTEMBER 13, 2023,” read an image of white text on a black background, with Jason’s caption: “DeLorean is back in the Motor City.” He’d just committed them to building a car for the Detroit Auto Show. When Kat saw the post, she flipped out.

Soon afterward, the DeLorean Motor Company in Texas sent Kat a cease-and-desist, demanding she stop using the DeLorean name for her planned car. She and Jason had their lawyer send a reply asserting their rights and expressing their willingness to litigate, and kept going.

DeLorean Motor Company sits in a squat building off a tangle of highways in suburban Houston—you drive past some shabby lots and fields, and then the 1980s spring up around a curve in the road, where a retro-looking DMC logo looms over a row of DMC-12s in the parking lot. You might even spot a JIGAWAT license plate there. Inside the garage/warehouse is an array of disembodied gull-wing doors that evoke a flock of injured birds. Old covers of Deloreans magazines stare out from frames in the showroom.

This is the realm of Stephen Wynne, a Liverpool-born mechanic who has devoted his life to DeLorean the car—to the point of driving his son Cameron to kindergarten in DMC-12s that appeared in Back to the Future. Wynne is less impressed with DeLorean the man, however. “I have more respect for the team that he put together,” he says. “All you hear about is John DeLorean and not the team, and that, to me, is not right.” John was, Wynne said, ahead of his time as an engineer. But: “He made the company, and he also, you know, killed the company in the end.”

It was Wynne who picked up the pieces, effectively securing a monopoly on the small, strange market for DeLorean parts. This was not a decision about preserving someone else’s legacy; it was about securing his own future. “It felt to me like, to control my destiny, going forward, it was to have control of the parts,” he told me in the shop as tools clanked against cars behind us. “If someone was going to get it, I wanted it to be me.” He founded the new DeLorean Motor Company in 1995.

Wynne considers the original buyers of the 1980s DeLorean to have been “entrepreneurial, outside-of-the-box-thinking type people,” with something a “little bit different about them”—less interested in owning a really fast sports car than a piece of cultural history. (The original DeLorean did 0 to 60 in about 10.5 seconds, something my used Hyundai can easily beat.) “We believe that there’s much more wealth in that market these days,” Wynne says.

Over the years, Wynne and team made various plans to serve this market of “modern nerds” with new cars built mostly from original parts. But federal regulators were slow to relax the rules that said these historic replicas had to meet current safety standards, so the revival of the DMC-12—with its lack of airbags, a third brake light, and antilock brakes, for instance—never happened. Still, the company did a thriving business in parts sales and car service. It also made a good buck from the DeLorean brand, which it alternately licensed for apparel, video games, and the like, or zealously protected via cease-and-desists and lawsuits.

Finally, Wynne got to talking with a Tesla alum named Joost de Vries, who’d been involved in previous efforts to electrify the DeLorean. The DeLorean brand, de Vries argued, was so universally beloved, and startup costs for electric vehicles were so much less than even 15 years earlier, that they could partner up to build a brand-new electric DeLorean. Together they formed a San Antonio–based spinoff of DeLorean Motor Company, called DeLorean Motors Reimagined, with the Wynne family as the largest shareholders and de Vries as CEO. (Wynne’s son, the former time-traveling kindergartner, is now the companies’ chief brand officer.) De Vries would lead the development of the car, and funding would come largely from private investors. The company incorporated in Texas in November 2021 (smack in between when Guerra posted his design in late 2020 and when Kat got involved in mid-2022). Wynne and de Vries hired Italdesign, the same firm that had drafted the original DMC-12, to design the Alpha5.

DeLorean Motors Reimagined hoped to build 88 cars to start (88 mph being the speed at which Doc Brown’s DeLorean traveled through time), then about 9,500. The car would be “low volume, high-end, very exclusive, weird, wild technology,” according to de Vries, an imposing, bald Dutchman with the hard-charging swagger of the Silicon Valley executive he once was. “DeLorean was always attainable luxury. My price tag is not going to be attainable luxury.”

Sketches of the DeLorean Motor Company Alpha5

DeLorean Motors Reimagined went from founding to concept car within nine months. The company even bought a 15-second Super Bowl spot in February 2022, cryptically teasing the new car and setting off buzz in the automotive press. The Alpha5 premiered at the Pebble Beach auto show that August. It was only a concept, meant to show off design and technology, not a finished product that could operate on the road. But it was a real object that existed in the real world and was promised to be on sale to the public in 2024.

By that point, the JZD, Kat’s model, was still in the design phase, living for the most part in computers.

The steps to getting a new car from invention to production are standard, whether you’re General Motors, DeLorean Motors Reimagined, or DeLorean Next Generation. On average, the process takes about five years. You have to design and engineer the car; find suppliers for thousands of parts, from wheels to seats to instrument panels; get tools custom-made to stamp out your body panels; and find or build the facility and the workforce to put these things together. This is all before you can actually mass-produce something that resembles the original design.

So it is not at all unusual for a concept car to appear at an auto show and then for nothing resembling it to ever materialize on actual roads. A paint facility alone can set a company back hundreds of millions of dollars. This is in fact why the original DeLorean was stainless steel: John DeLorean couldn’t afford a paint plant. (His marketing genius, Kat says, was that “he made you all think it was intentional.”) John Z. DeLorean had his first prototype by 1976, within about a year of founding his company; the first DMC-12s went on sale in 1981.

Theoretically, then, it was possible to build a one-off JZD concept car—if not a production-ready prototype—in the 11 months Kat and Jason had between founding the company and the 2023 Detroit Auto Show. Kat projected confidence onstage at a Miami auto show in January 2023, while a digital rendering of the JZD zoomed along mountain roads on a screen behind her. But shortly after that appearance, she started getting stressed out about the timeline. Potential manufacturing partners were telling her it was wildly unrealistic. Even getting the doors to open and close the same way every time was its own feat of engineering, and Kat couldn’t tell them whether the car would run on gas, batteries, or both. (She wanted students to make that decision as part of an engineering challenge she had yet to set up.) Kat began to have visions of living the same arc of ambition and collapse that befell her father.

DeLorean Next Generation JZD

This was her preoccupation when she showed up on a warm March 2023 morning in Augusta, Georgia, as a special guest at a “DeLorean Day” event. Well before 8 am, she was stalking around the parking lot in a rainbow plaid skirt and a NERD (Northeast Region DeLorean Club) hoodie with Jason in tow, enthusing to fans about their cars, talking not just with her hands but sometimes with her feet. She literally jumped up and down after a green ’66 Pontiac GTO Tri-Power pulled onto the lot. She inspected the carburetors under the hood and declared that this model, in midnight blue, was her “ultimate dream car,” shout-laughing when the owner confessed to the absurd gas mileage—about 8 miles per gallon in the city—then apologizing, through laughter, for laughing.

By 8 am she was posted up behind a mic to discuss her father and her own plans. “My father was my best friend in the whole world,” she said. “In the summers, I sat and played gin rummy with him on the couch, to the point where there was a worn spot in each place where we sat—a big one and a little one.” She got teary-eyed during the Q&A period when a kid of maybe 10 told her of his plans to be a robotics engineer. He hoped, he said, to make cars that could turn into robots that could “help people and protect humans from like, anything bad that can happen.” She would later tell me that this moment and others like it in Augusta added up to a turning point for her—that “all of a sudden it was like, OK, whatever I have to do, whatever pain I have to go through, if it means building a car company, then I’m going to do it, because I want that moment every day for the rest of my life.”

And when a well-meaning questioner brought up the Alpha5, she spoke carefully through a tight smile. “That is being made by the company DeLorean Motor Company Texas, and they’re not affiliated at all with the family or the original car. And I think that’s about all I’m going to say about that one.”

When I asked Joost de Vries about Kat DeLorean’s efforts a few weeks later, he was less diplomatic. “There’s just something loose in her head,” he said. “Kat’s thing is illegal. And she’s being shut down.” He said in a later conversation that she would be “hammered with lawsuits” as soon as her car appeared at the Detroit Auto Show.

De Vries and I were in a bland tech office park in San Antonio, where he sat in his glass-walled office. He was well aware that the Alpha5 design was polarizing in the DeLorean community. (Some DeLorean forum users had groused that the model just looked like another Tesla with gull-wing doors; one called the whole effort “little more than slapping the name of a beloved car on an unrelated vehicle.”) He also knew the discouraging fate that had befallen many an EV brand before his. Other high-end EV companies such as Lucid, Rivian, and the failed-then-resurrected Fisker had burned through billions and missed production targets, and even market leader Tesla was then struggling to bring its hyped (stainless-steel) Cybertruck to market. DeLorean Motors Reimagined had hit supply-chain snags and cut its planned production run by more than half, to 4,000 cars. But de Vries had something most EV companies didn’t: a brand that much of the world already knew. “The only thing I need to do is put good product into an existing brand,” he said.

The question, of course, is whose brand “DeLorean” really is. Both companies insist on their own rights to use it. And each calls the other’s claim transparently illegitimate.

Stephen Wynne registered and enforced trademarks on “DeLorean” and “DeLorean Motor Company” in the 2000s, as John’s trademarks were canceled or abandoned, and he has renewed and protected them ever since. Furthermore, in a 2015 settlement with John DeLorean’s estate, a woman named Sally Baldwin DeLorean, acting as John’s widow, acknowledged “the worldwide rights of DMC to use, register, and enforce any of the DeLorean Marks for any and all goods and services” related to cars, clothes, and “promotional items”—for which DMC paid her an undisclosed sum. So, yes, it is Kat’s name. But it’s someone else’s trademark, and it’s one she has never tried publicly to contest until now.

Kat’s argument includes that seemingly simple but possibly irrelevant part—it’s her name—but also a convoluted part. She doesn’t believe John actually ever married Sally. Nor do several people I spoke to from John’s orbit at the time, including his son, Zach, none of whom can recall John mentioning a marriage to her. Kat told me she searched for and never found a marriage certificate. Nor did a private detective she hired. (Sally Baldwin DeLorean’s lawyer did not return requests for comment, and attempts to reach her directly via listed phone numbers were unsuccessful.) John’s will names his son as executor. Zach, balking at the prospect of attorney’s fees, never actually filed the will. Kat contends that Sally’s settlement with the DeLorean Motor Company is illegitimate, as she was never in a position to act on behalf of the estate in the first place. What should have happened, Kat thinks, is for the US Patent and Trademark Office to reach out to her and Zach, as co-owners of Ephesians 6:12, about her dad’s pending application.

Then there is the question of infringement, a key standard for which is “likelihood of causing confusion.” Kat’s DeLorean Next Generation is not using the exact same set of words as Wynne’s DeLorean Motor Company, but it is fair to say, based on the Alpha5 question that Kat got in Augusta—and on a well-meaning Reddit commenter who’d tried to buy Kat’s car only to accidentally reserve an Alpha5—that some members of the public are indeed confused. Yet each side accuses the other of doing the confusing.

Both sides have told me a lawsuit is inevitable. No jury decision is guaranteed—determining “likelihood of confusion” itself involves a (confusing!) 13-factor test. But New Jersey trademark attorney Richard Catalina, who is not affiliated with either party, told me that the “stronger legal arguments” belong to the Texas company. “Trademark rights only accrue with use. If you’re not using the mark, you can lose your rights to it,” Catalina said.

“I just learned the. Craziest. Thing,” Kat told me on the phone last summer. She’d recently come across the 1985 interview with William Haddad, the executive who’d found it “exciting as hell” how much good DeLorean Motor Company had achieved in Northern Ireland. Haddad had been crushed by the company’s collapse, and now, in 1985, called it a “scam” and John himself a thief. (John had always denied this and was never convicted of financial misdeeds.) But Haddad was wistful about John’s squandered ambition to locate factories where they could do the most social good. “If only he had done it … Can you imagine it?” Haddad mused in the interview.

Kat knew the Northern Ireland story well already, but Haddad had put John’s goal and his downfall in terms that suddenly clicked for her. She and Jason had been so caught up in the crazy timeline they’d set for themselves that they were risking following precisely her dad’s path—letting one car distract them from their bigger goal of supporting young engineers. “If my car company fails, that’s OK,” Kat said. Her goal had always been to create an education program for students who have “dreams that have been robbed from them,” she said. “And if I can’t do that with this car, then it’s not worth the car.”

One thing was obvious: They were moving too fast. Kat decided she would not unveil the prototype of the JZD until her father’s 100th birthday, in 2025. In the meantime, they would have students build a clay model for Detroit—not a full-size one, as automakers typically do during development, but one about the size of a shoebox—and debut it not at the Auto Show but concurrently at the Detroit Historical Society. Later on, they’d enlist students to help build a prototype of their Model JZD on top of a Corvette C8 platform, picking participants through an online contest in which students described their dreams. After that would come a separate line of cars under something called Project 42, involving a hand build of 42 customized cars. These would have a sales price of probably over a million dollars each (which would also include driving outfits and a motorcycle to go with each car). They’d use the proceeds to fund the education program. So if the Alpha5 was going to be “unattainable luxury” and its likely market rich tech bros, then these custom cars would be yet less attainable and probably serve a market of billionaires.

DeLorean Motor Company Alpha5
DeLorean Next Generation JZD

It’s been two years since DMC Texas and Kat DeLorean both announced their new car projects. Neither has sued the other yet, and both are cagey about plans to do so. Joost de Vries stepped down from the helm of DeLorean Motors Reimagined last October, for reasons the company won’t disclose. A lawsuit against de Vries and other DeLorean Motors Reimagined executives, in which de Vries’ former employer Karma Automotive accused him and others of stealing the EV maker’s intellectual property, was dismissed after a reported out-of-court settlement. Timelines have slipped enough now that Cameron Wynne won’t specify exactly when the Alpha5 will be on sale—he says sometime in 2025. For Kat’s venture, meanwhile, Ángel Guerra continues to revise the design. The car will not be stainless.

DeLorean fans have been burned many times by promises of the next car, and given the delays in both projects, skepticism about both potential new ones pervades DeLorean-related internet forums. (Indeed, as this story went to press in April, a San Antonio paper reported that DeLorean Reimagined had shut down its headquarters; a DMC executive told me the company was just moving locations.) Both companies continue to promise big things. Promises, after all, are part of the DeLorean legacy too.

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/delorean-showdown/

Save Your LifeTime by 3 Simple & Effective Steps

Source: https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/the-average-worker-spends-51-of-each-workday-on-these-3-unnecessary-tasks.html

There are thousands of books on time management, and thousands more on work/life balance, but almost all of them either nibble around the edge of the problems or pretend they don’t exist. So, here’s the straight skinny: The reason most people are stressed for time is that they are wasting more than half of each working day on time-wasting tasks.

Here are the culprits and some simple solutions to get recapture the time that you’re otherwise destined to waste.

1. Unnecessary Commuting (13 percent)

As of 2018 (the last year measured), the average one-way commute to work is 27 minutes, nearly six minutes more than in 1980, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And that’s just the average, which means that some of us are spending a lot more than that. (I’ve known people with three-hour commutes–one way.)

Let’s suppose that you have a commute that’s only of average length. By the time you retire, you’ll have spent approximately 5.6 years behind the wheel, which is roughly 13 percent of the time that you’ve committed to work.

While some jobs (like equipment maintenance) require an employee to be on site, almost all office jobs can be conducted from a home office. Therefore, in almost all cases, time spent commuting to an office job is wasted.

2. Unnecessary Meetings (16 percent)

According to a study at MIT that I described in a previous post, the average worker spends approximately 22 years of their 45-year career in meetings. An estimated third of that time is spent in meetings where there’s no value added.

By the time the average worker retires, they’ll have spent at least 7 years in useless meetings, which comes out to about 16 percent of the time you’ll spend at work during your lifetime.

3. Unnecessary Emails (23 percent)

According to research cited in Forbes, the average office worker spends 2.5 hours a day reading and responding to an average of 200 emails, of which approximately 144 (mostly CCs and BCCs) aren’t relevant to their job.

Since the average office worker spends 2.5 hours a day doing email, that’s around 1.8 hours spent on those irrelevant emails, which comes out to a whopping 10 years spent on useless emails, which would be 23 percent of a 45-year career.

Add up those three huge time-wasters and it comes out to roughly 51 percent of your working life. Think about that for second. How much more could you accomplish if you were twice as productive? How much better your life would become if you always had plenty of time?

Fortunately, these three huge time-management challenges have some fairly straightforward solutions:

1. Implement company-wide work-from-home.

While some jobs (like equipment maintenance) must be performed on-site, most office jobs can be accomplished remotely. Indeed, several studies have shown that remote office workers are much productive than on-site workers, without even counting the time they waste commuting.

Of course, implementing company-wide work-from home would mean that management would need to be nimbler. It also means top management must admit to themselves that their brand-new open plan office was a dumb idea. However, smart bosses don’t throw good money after bad, so it’s time to bite the proverbial bullet on this one.

2. Create an efficient-meeting culture.

Some of this gets solved simply by implementing work-from-home because remote workers have fewer meetings. Beyond this, there are specific policies that reduce or eliminate unproductive meetings:

  1. No meeting without an agenda.
  2. No „status updates“ during which you „go around the room.“
  3. No meeting longer than 30 minutes.
  4. Leave a meeting the moment you realize you’re not adding value.
  5. Replace PowerPoints with a group reading of a briefing document.

3. Throttle your email system.

Here’s are some approaches I’ve seen over the years:

  1. Turn off email during peak working hours.
  2. Limit the number of emails an employee can send each day.
  3. Discourage CC, BCC, and Reply All emails.
  4. Discourage Sisyphus-like behaviors like trying to achieve „zero Inbox.“

Here’s an idea: Customize the company-wide email client so that it’s impossible to close any internal email until you’ve rated its usefulness to you and your job.

Track those ratings and it will quickly become clear who’s wasting everyone else’s time with unnecessary email. Then adjust their compensation accordingly (all the way to $0 when appropriate).

 

BMW and Apple are have cut ties amid an electric-vehicle arms race

For investors, the attempts by many of the tech industry’s most powerful incumbents to disrupt the auto industry make for some exciting, and potentially lucrative, opportunities.

For the auto industry, the barbarians are at the gate.

A BMW logo is seen at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, January 12, 2016.   REUTERS/Mark BlinchA BMW logo is seen at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit

This understandable tension underscores much of the back-and-forth between the technology and automotive communities at the moment.

Initially friendly and collaborative, relations between the two industries have turned increasingly adversarial as each develops its own self-driving cars.

Take, for example, tech giant Apple and luxury automobile standard-bearer BMW — one-time potential collaborators whose relationship appears likely to turn increasingly competitive, as a recent move by the automaker demonstrates.

BMW unveils now tech-heavy strategy

Earlier this month, BMW’s new CEO, Harald Krueger, announced an important official shift in the company’s strategy, one that clearly seeks to counter the looming competitive threats from the likes of Apple, Alphabet, and Tesla. Claiming, „We will lead the BMW Group into a new era,“ he said the company’s plans now involve launching additional versions of its i-Series of electric vehicles, including a model dubbed iNEXT.

The iNEXT will feature BMW’s forthcoming electric powertrain and lightweight body materials, and will feature an optional self-driving mode. The company will also place a greater emphasis on in-car software and services. Mobile software giants like Apple, Alphabet, andBlackBerry have each tried to consolidate market share in the budding market for smart-car software, but BMW remained largely mum on the topic in its strategy presentation.

BMW’s iNEXT vehicles won’t reach market for at least five years, which largely mirrors the product launch schedule at tech firms like Apple. This raises the possibility of a glut of electric, fully autonomous cars reaching market at roughly the same time: Google, for example, hopes to have its autonomous vehicles ready for market by then. Only Chinese search giant Baidu has an appreciably earlier target launch date for its autonomous driving project — 2018 — though its applications may be relatively limited early on.

electric vehicles hybridsREUTERS/Robert GalbraithA hybrid Toyota Prius is electrically charged at a municipal charging station near City Hall in San Francisco, California August 6, 2009.

Circling the wagons

BMW’s moves could signal the end of its relationship with Apple, with whom the German auto giant has held meetings in the past. As recently as last July, Reuters reported that Apple and BMW had met to discuss potentially working together to realize their electric-vehicle ambitions. However, Reuters said, caution on BMW’s part led to a cooling of sorts. BMW likely wishes to avoid simply becoming another parts supplier for Apple, a la Apple’s infamous assembly partner Foxconn.

More broadly, this exemplifies the natural tension currently playing out between automakers and tech companies today. Though virtually everyone sees a massive economic opportunity in revolutionizing the transportation of people and goods around the world, the automotive and technology industries each, by and large, lack a core expertise the other possesses.

Apple’s software is used and beloved by hundreds of millions of people around the world, but at present, it lacks the requisite manufacturing skills to bring its Project Titan to market at scale. Conversely, BMW produces millions of cars annually, but lacks expertise in developing software and services.

Both industries are hard at work poaching talent from each other in an effort to cover their knowledge gaps, which has led to the arms-race scenario we see playing out in the headlines. So while BMW’s more revolutionary EVs won’t reach the market for at least five years, the company’s recent moves speak to the broader continued race to shape the future of the auto industry.

 

http://www.businessinsider.de/bmw-apple-cut-ties-over-electric-cars-2016-3

The Electric Car Revolution Is Now Scheduled for 2022

2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV

www.wired.com/2016/02/electric-car-revolution-now-scheduled-2022

McKinsey: Batteriepreise sinken bis 2020 auf ein Drittel

McKinsey: Batteriepreise sinken bis 2020 auf ein Drittel

Die hohen Batteriepreise für Elektroautos werden nach einer noch unveröffentlichten Studie der Strategieberatung McKinsey in den nächsten Jahren so drastisch einbrechen, dass schon 2020 Elektroautos im Preis mit herkömmlichen Fahrzeugen konkurrieren können und in den Folgejahren so günstiger sind als Benzin- und Dieselfahrzeuge. In der Studie, die den VDI Nachrichten vorliegt, prognostiziert McKinsey schon in acht Jahren einen Batteriepreis von nur noch 160 Euro pro Kilowattstunde. Aktuell liegt der Preis zwischen 400 und 560 Euro. Bis 2025 erwartet McKinsey sogar Preise von unter 130 Euro pro Kilowattstunde. Dabei stützt sich die Studie auf eine Befragung von Experten aus der Automobil- und Batterieindustrie weltweit.

Quelle: http://www.technical-news.de, 28.06.2012

Hans-Werner Kaas, Leiter der McKinsey-Automobilberatung
Preissturz bei Lithium-Ionen-Akkus bringt Bewegung in den Automobilmarkt

Elektromobilität: Schon bis 2020 dürfte der Preis für Lithium-Ionen-Akkus laut einer aktuellen McKinsey-Studie auf 200 $ je kWh sinken. Tritt diese Vorhersage ein, hätte das für Automobilindustrie, Mineralölwirtschaft und weitere Branchen weitreichende Konsequenzen.

Hochvolt-Batterien für Elektrofahrzeuge kosten aktuell noch mehr als so mancher Kleinwagen. Laut einer aktuellen Studie der Strategieberatung McKinsey & Company dürfte sich das schneller ändern als vermutet. Schon für 2020 prognostiziert sie Batteriepreise um 200 $/kWh und bis 2025 sogar unter 163 $/kWh.

Zum Vergleich: Aktuell bewegen sich die Preise in dem unter starken Druck geratenen Markt zwischen 500 $/kWh und 700 $/kWh. „Einige Hersteller betreiben eine aggressive Preispolitik“, erklärt Hans-Werner Kaas, der bei McKinsey die Automobilberatung in Nord- und Südamerika leitet. Es gehe momentan darum, Claims im Zukunftsmarkt Elektromobilität abzustecken und trotz der schleppenden Marktentwicklung Erfahrungen zu sammeln.

Überkapazitäten drückten aktuell den Preis und die Hersteller versuchten daher, ihre nagelneuen Batteriefabriken ohne allzu große Verluste über die heikle Phase zu bringen, bis der Markt Fahrt aufnimmt.

Doch das Autorenteam der Studie nennt andere Ursachen für den Preissturz bis 2025. Ihre Prognose basiert auf einem Modell mit 40 Einflussfaktoren auf den Batteriepreis in den Bereichen Fertigung, Lieferketten und Batterietechnik. Befragt wurden dazu Experten aus unterschiedlichen Bereichen und aus allen wichtigen Industrienationen rund um den Globus. Ihre Aussagen haben die Autoren in ihr Modell eingepflegt und Preisprognosen für 2015, 2020 und 2025 abgeleitet.

Noch gibt es in der Branche ein Nebeneinander kleiner Fabriken, die kaum 20 000 Batteriepacks pro Jahr produzieren, und hoch automatisierter Werke mit 10-mal höherer Jahresproduktion. Schlankere Prozesse, Fließfertigung mit weniger Ausschuss und sinkende Personal- und Fixkosten je kWh sorgen bereits für sinkende Preise. Forschungs-, Entwicklungs-, Kapital- und auch die Vertriebskosten lassen sich in den großen Werken auf deutlich mehr Zellen umlegen.

Neben dieser Entwicklung werden bis 2015 die Margen in den Lieferketten um 20 % bis 40 % sinken. Zugleich erwarten die Experten rund 10 % Kapazitätszuwachs auf Zellebene und einen deutlichen Rückgang beim Ausschuss, der bisher mit 20 % bis 30 % noch hoch ist. Standardisierung, verbesserte Prozesskontrolle und voranschreitende Automation lassen diesen Wert bis 2015 auf etwa 6 % sinken. Alles in allem bringen die Fortschritte laut McKinsey Einsparungen von 177 $/kWh, was den Preis der Hochvolt-Akkus bis 2015 auf etwa 383 $/kWh senke.

Bis 2020 sagt die Studie, neben jenen 3 %, um die Fertigungsprozesse in der Autoindustrie Jahr für Jahr effizienter werden, weitere Skaleneffekte und Reifeprozesse voraus. In den Lieferketten werden vor allem die Preise für Anodenfolien und Separatoren unter Druck geraten. Genannte Faktoren sorgten für gut 52 $ Preisreduktion.

Stärker dürften technische Weiterentwicklungen auf Zellebene ins Gewicht fallen. So hegen die Befragten große Erwartungen an Kathoden, die auf abwechselnd aufgetragenen µm-dünnen Schichten elektrochemisch aktiven LiMO2 und inaktiven Li2MnO3 basieren.

Laut Prognosen wird die „Layered-layered“-Technik zu 50 % mehr Speicherfähigkeit führen. Optimisten erwarten gar eine Verdopplung. Die Studie setzt bis 2020 einen Wert von 40 % an und stellt weitere 30 % Speicherzuwachs bei den Anoden in Aussicht. Hier löse der Wechsel von Graphit zu Silizium-basierter Technik den Schub aus. Kapazitätszuwächse auf Zellebene senkten den Preis pro kWh um knapp 122 $. Weitere 13 $ seien durch sinkenden Ausschuss auf dann 3 % zu erreichen.

Tritt die Prognose ein, läge der Preis für Lithium-Ionen-Akkus 2020 bei 197 $/kWh. In den folgenden fünf Jahren sind laut Studie weitere 34 $ Preissenkung drin. Schon diese Preis hätte laut Kaas weitreichende Konsequenzen für Automobilindustrie, Mineralölwirtschaft, Maschinenbau und Andere. Denn imTotal-Cost-of-Ownership (TCO) -Vergleich nimmt die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit von Elektrofahrzeugen ab Batteriekosten um 220 $/kWh rasant zu – bereits bei aktuellen US-Kraftstoffpreisen um 0,80 €/l (1,00 $/l ).

Wenn die Batteriepreise bis 2025 tatsächlich auf 163 $/kWh sinken, dürfte Kraftstoff noch 0,40 €/l (0,5 $/l) kosten, damit Verbrennungsmotoren im TCO-Vergleich mithalten können. „Unternehmen aus der Mineralölwirtschaft müssen sich ernsthaft Gedanken über mittelfristige Alternativen zu ihrem bisher noch hoch profitablen Kraftstoffgeschäft machen“, so Kaas.

Hinter den prognostizierten Fortschritten bei Kathoden, Anoden und Elektrolyten stehen jedoch noch Fragezeichen, dessen ist sich Kaas bewusst. Er empfiehlt: „Hersteller tun gut daran, bei der Entwicklung ihrer Antriebstechnik weiterhin mehrgleisig zu fahren.“

Wirtschaftlichkeit von Antriebskonzepten

Perspektiven von Elektromobilen: In einer Betrachtung der Gesamtkosten (TCO) über fünf Jahre kommt die Studie von McKinsey zu dem Ergebnis, dass Elektrofahrzeuge 2020 wirtschaftlicher sein werden als Fahrzeuge mit Verbrennungsmotor.  Die Analysten gehen davon aus, das die gespeicherte Energie im Verhältnis zum Batteriegewicht steigt und die Herstellung kostengünstiger wird.

Quelle: http://www.vdi-nachrichten.com/artikel/Preissturz-bei-Lithium-Ionen-Akkus-bringt-Bewegung-in-den-Automobilmarkt/59446/2

Der e-Sound von Audi: Akustische Innovation für künftige Audi e-tron-Modelle

Soundengineering by Audi.

Die künftigen e-tron-Modelle von Audi fahren weite Strecken elektrisch und damit fast ohne Motorengeräusch. Damit Passanten sie im Stadtverkehr hören können, hat die Marke einen synthetischen Klang entwickelt — einen der ihn als Elektroauto identifiziert, aber dennoch seine Sportlichkeit unterstreicht.
Durch die Verwendung von 40 Watt Außenlautsprechern inklusive Hoch- und Tieftönern kann jeder beliebige Sound an Passanten abgegeben werden. Innovative Pricing Modelle wie z.B. ein Standard-Beschleunigungs-Sound sind ebenso möglich wie optionale Aufpreis-Sounds, die an Hollywood-Produktionen (Wanted, Salt, Back to the Future oder Star Trek (TM)) erinnern sollen.

further reading & video: Audi Reveals ‘E-Sound’ Engine Noise

Soundprobe vom e-tron auf spiegel.de Auto

Nicht genug Elektro-Beschleunigungs-Sound? Hollywood legt die Latte hoch. StarTrek @Youtube – Copyrights by Universal.

Siemens Austria, Verbund & „E-Mobility-Provider“ Start Mitte 2012

Das neue Unternehmen soll mit 20 Millionen Eigenkapital ausgestattet sein und ein Investitionsvolumen von rund 300 Millionen bis 2020 haben

Wien – Siemens Österreich und der Verbund gründen gemeinsam ein Unternehmen für Elektromobilität. Der neue „E-Mobility-Provider“ – so der Arbeitstitel – soll mit 20 Mio. Euro Eigenkapital ausgestattet sein und ein Investitionsvolumen von rund 300 Mio. Euro bis 2020 haben. Der Geschäftsführer und die rund 35 Mitarbeiter werden noch gesucht, im Sommer soll der offizielle Startschuss erfolgen. In den nächsten acht Jahren sollen 80.000 bis 240.000 E-Autos unterwegs sein, ab 90.000 Fahrzeugen werde das Partnerunternehmen den Break Even erreichen, so Verbund-Chef Wolfgang Anzengruber.

Das Modell soll sich an den Pauschalangeboten der Mobilfunkbetreiber orientieren, subventionierte Elektrofahrzeuge vergleichbar mit den gestützten Handys wird es allerdings nicht geben. Angedacht sind Unterstützungen der öffentlichen Hand bei Steuerbegünstigungen oder Gratis-Parkpickerl. Dies sei für den Staat jedenfalls günstiger als CO2-Zertifikate zu kaufen, so Anzengruber am Dienstag vor Journalisten. Umweltminister Nikolaus Berlakovich (ÖVP) hatte vor kurzem um 160 Mio. Euro Umweltzertifikate im Ausland zugekauft, um Strafzahlungen für Österreich wegen der Nicht-Erfüllung des Kyoto-Protokolls zu vermeiden.

E-Autos für den eigenen Fuhrpark

Siemens und Verbund wollen mit guten Beispiel vorangehen und schon in nächster Zeit mehrere Dutzend Elektroautos für den eigenen Fuhrpark anschaffen. In der ersten Phase sollen auch primär Großkunden angesprochen werden. Von den derzeit in Österreich angemeldeten knapp 1.100 E-Autos werden 80 Prozent in Betrieben eingesetzt, so Berechnungen der Wirtschaftskammer Österreich. Selbst wenn die optimistischen Prognosen von 240.000 Autos bis 2020 eintreffen, ist das nur ein Bruchteil des bestehenden Autobestandes von rund 4,5 Millionen Pkw.

Durch den verstärkten Einsatz von E-Autos könnten die Fahrzeuge auch als Stromspeicher dienen, was für einen Energiemix aus Erneuerbaren Energien wichtig wäre – ebenso wie die Stärkung des Technologiestandortes Österreich, so Anzengruber. Auf die bestehenden Kooperationen in der Interessengemeinschaft „Austrian Mobile Power“ ändere die Partnerschaft zwischen Siemens und Verbund nichts. „Wir sind eine Gründungsgesellschaft und streben keine Exklusivität an“, so Siemens Österreich-Chef Wolfgang Hesoun.“

 

Bildquelle und Originalzitat: http://derstandard.at/1333528746770/Siemens-und-Verbund-E-Mobility-Provider-startet-im-Sommer

VERBUND-Vorstandsdirektor Wolfgang Anzengruber im Interview über E-Mobility und Smart Metering

Wolfang Anzengruber über das Jahr 2025

„Die Kommunikation der Verbraucher mit dem Energieanbieter wird enger vernetzt sein, Stichwort Smart Meters. Es wird einen großen Anteil von Elektrofahrzeugen geben und es wird der Anteil der eigenen Autos zurück gehen.“

Zum Thema Vezicht auf das eigene Auto

„Das Car- bzw. Transport-Sharing wird stärker ausgeprägt sein. Vielleicht in jene Richtung, dass nicht das Mobilitätsmittel, also das Auto im Vordergrund steht, sondern die Mobilität. Ich will von A nach B kommen und das will ich möglichst bequem, günstig und einfach. Das wird die Welt werden.“

Zum Thema Invidualverkehr

„Ich glaube nicht, dass der Individualverkehr zurückgehen wird, die individuelle Mobilität hat uns sehr viel gebracht. Wir sind beweglicher und weltoffener geworden. Es wird – und da setze ich auf die nächste Generation – nicht nur das Auto oder der Typ des Autos im Vordergrund stehen, sondern die Verfügbarkeit. Man wird sich künftig relativ einfach an Knotenpunkten ein Fahrzeug nehmen können. So ähnlich wie heute die Bank-Infrastruktur funktioniert. Früher musste man zu seiner Hausbank gehen, heute hat man an allen Ecken einen Bankomat.“

Wann wird es den Rollout von Smart-Metering-Systemen geben?

„Bis Mitte 2012 sollen jedenfalls die Standards beschlossen sein, dann kann der Rollout beginnen. 2016 sollte es dann ein flächendeckendes Smart-Grid-System in Österreich geben. Flächendeckend heißt 80 Prozent.“

 

Smart Grids und Load-Balancing

„Die Autos wären ein klassisches Anwendungsgebiet. Man kann etwa dem Kunden eines E-Cars garantieren, dass eine 80-Prozent-Ladung nicht unterschritten wird. Der Kunde gibt mir die Freiheit, zwischen 80 und 100 Prozent zu liefern. Darum interessieren wir uns als Verbund für Smart Grid. Da geht’s nicht um den Stromverbrauch, es geht vielmehr um ein Instrumentarium, um die Balance des Stromnetzes leichter realisieren zu können.“

Quelle: http://futurezone.at/future/5630-auch-google-koennte-strom-verkaufen.php