AD MAGAZINE 342

20 AUTODATA ASK » ELECTRIFICATION March 2018 | AutoData By Leandro Alves, from Santiago, Chile Disclousure/ABB Graduated in electrical engineering in 1983 from the University of Delaware in the United States, the same year he started working at Westinghouse Electric in product and sales management. In 1986 he moved to Allen-Bradley, now Rockwell Automation, where he became vice-president of sales. In 2000 he was appointed CEO and Chairman of Source Alliance, acquired by ABB in 2001. In the Swiss company he was named Head of Global eBusiness. From then on, he passed several positions until he was appointed as a member of the board in 2012, a position he has accumulated since 2015 together with the positions of president for the Americas region and also of the Group of Services and Business Integration. He is also a board member of NEMA, the national association of electric industry manufacturers in the United States. Greg Scheu, of ABB We will see fleets of cars as part of large systems, such as the vehicles used by governments, powered by electricity. They will be made to be more affordable because the cost of technology is clearly falling: the batteries, the engines. As soon as carmakers adopt these standards, what will come will be mass production as well as what is happening with the Tesla Model 3. They offer the car in a basic version for $ 35 thousand and the idea as a whole is get more people to drive them. What we see is the emerging model that more and more cars are becoming electric. And we are still on the first days of that. There is no doubt that car manufacturers will move their product lines to offer low emission. We see this happening even with high-performance cars: BMW, Porsche and, of course, Tesla. People are becoming more socially aware and want to drive something green so they can have a sustainable return. 2 3 1 Is the automotive future, inevitably, low-emission? In this movement, what is the next step? What is the model to supply the electric cars? Is it similar to the fuel stations we have today? What needs to happen is a joint effort by the governments with private initiative to ensure that we have charging stations, as people need to have the same freedom to drive an electric car as they do when driving a gasoline-powered car so they can go wherever and whenever they want. There will not only be the possibility of charging them at home, but also in stores, or also charging stations that offer not only gasoline but also electric charging. All of this will happen after the initial steps.