Tag: Environment

Hyundai Motor Group Investing $7.4B in U.S. for Electrification and Mobility Efforts

South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group is putting an electrified stake in the ground in the U.S., announcing today it plans to invest $7.4 billion here by 2025 to advance its electrification efforts.

The parent company of Hyundai Motor America and Kia Motor Manufacturing expects to use the funds to produce future battery-electric vehicles, improve production facilities to build those vehicles and invest in smart mobility solutions.

Hyundai Motor America CEO Jose Munoz said the company plans to “lead the future of mobility in the United States.”

Mobility solutions will include things like robotics, urban air mobility (i.e. flying taxis and such) as well as autonomous driving technology. Its investment also includes further development of the “hydrogen ecosystem,” which means fuel-cell vehicles as well as the infrastructure needed to support them.

“This investment demonstrates our deep commitment to the U.S. market, our dealers and customers,” said José Muñoz, Hyundai Motor Company’s Global chief operating officer and president and CEO of Hyundai Motor North America. 

“Hyundai will lead the future of mobility in the United States and around the world. Our efforts are proof positive that Hyundai will continue to pursue excellence in our current and future product line-up.”

Where’s the money going?

First, it helps to know how the company will be structured. After being elevated to the top spot last October, Hyundai’s Chairman Euisun Chung said the company would focus on technology. He broke it down into three segments: robotics accounting for 20% of Hyundai’s future business, urban air mobility accounting for 30%, and traditional auto manufacturing at 50 percent.

Hyundai Ioniq 5 - press conference
Hyundai’s brand-within-a-brand showed off its first entry, the all-electric Ioniq 5.

To that end, the company purchased an 80% stake in Boston Dynamics from SoftBank Group Corp. for $1.1 billion. The robotics business gives Hyundai a hedge against the vagaries of the automotive industry.

So in the case of the automotive end, or 50%, the company’s three auto brands — Hyundai, Genesis and Kia — will expand their manufacturing footprint to match the demand for EVs, especially Hyundai, which will have a suite of U.S.-built EVs for consumers starting in 2022. Kia’s line-up will grow in the coming years as well.

Hyundai’s Montgomery, Alabama plant is currently capable of producing about 400,000 vehicles annually, while the Kia plant in West Point, Georgia can put out about 340,000 units. Both brands have begun rolling out new electric vehicles.

Hyundai showed off the Ioniq 5, which is the first offering from its all battery-electric sub-brand. Meanwhile, Kia rolled out the new EV6. 

Not just BEVs

Kia recently unveiled its new battery-electric model, the EV6.

The company plans to “expand the U.S. hydrogen ecosystem” as part of its investment strategy. Since it sells a couple of fuel-cell powered vehicles, the Tucson and Nexo, ensuring there are more places to refuel them is a sage strategy.

Officials said it plans to work in concert with the U.S. government as well as other business partners to do this. It reminded it already has an agreement in place with the U.S. Department of Energy “to cooperate in hydrogen fuel cell technology innovation and global expansion. This included the installation of a hydrogen refueling station and providing Nexo SUVs.”

Hyundai plans to participate on demonstration project to commercialize fuel-cell electric trucks. It’s also working with other companies to conduct a hydrogen refueling demonstration project for those trucks. It will also provide logistics between port and inland warehouses by utilizing fuel cell electric trucks.

Hyundai have previously made an agreement with Cummins Inc., an U.S. based company which specializes in advanced powertrain, to accelerate deployment of fuel cell electric systems in the U.S. market.

Wasps are the bee’s knees

Wasps are the forgotten cousin of their family tree. Bees have whole societies devoted to their conservation, while wasps, if thought of at all, pile up in yellowjacket traps.

But those wasps, doing what they do best—killing and eating other insects—are providing invaluable, if overlooked, benefits to the world, according to a recent review of decades of wasp research.

“Everybody recognizes that we have honey, and many fruits and vegetables because of honeybees,” says Alessandro Cini, an entomologist who studies insect socialization and an author of the study. “We’re trying to diffuse into society the idea that you should have a different perspective on wasps. They’re not just the ruiners of your picnic, but also allow you to eat food, to not have your garden or crops destroyed by beetles.”

The research, published in Biological Reviews, focuses on stinging wasps, a group that includes both social animals (like the hornet and yellowjacket) and solitary ones, many of which have evolved to prey on a particular kind of beetle, grasshopper, or spider.

The predatory, sometimes ravenous, nature of wasps mean that they’re playing a very different role than bees in an ecosystem. Social wasps are all-purpose carnivores, killing just about any large bug they can get their stingers into. (The adult wasps actually eat sugar, giving the meat to their offspring.) One yellowjacket colony might eat as much as a pound of bugs over a several-year period, although the exact amount depends heavily on the individual colony.

“That might not sound like so much,” Cini says. “But imagine how many individual insects it takes.”

Solitary wasps, on the other hand, might hunt dozens of the same kind of beetle. Although each species of solitary wasp usually targets a single type of prey, there are so many kinds—97 percent of the 33,000 stinging wasps studied—that they probably play a role in controlling bugs of all kinds.

That means, if you’re an agricultural scientist interested in controlling pests, wasps might look like a whole quiver of tools, some reducing overall bug numbers, others targeting specific problems.

As it happens, stinging wasps also pollinate, if only by accident. Since the adults live mostly on sugar, they visit flowers to collect nectar, moving pollen around on the way. (Some species even make honey.) But some plants have close relationships with solitary wasps that can’t be replaced by another species.

Many kinds of orchid are pollinated exclusively by wasps, and lure in the insects with chemicals that mimic the smell of prey. Other plants, including members of the asparagus family, lure in pollinators with flowers and nectar that appear specifically targeted to spider wasps.

For the most part, research on insect ecosystem services has focused on pollination, possibly because bees and butterflies are more charismatic, or because pollination is a service that we’re hard pressed to reinvent.

“To replace pollination is much more difficult than to replace predation. Pollination means an intimate relationship between an insect going from one flower to another,” Cini says. “To kill something is much easier.”

But the ways in which we’ve replaced predation—mostly with pesticides—clearly has huge downsides. “You have to pollute the environment. It’s not easy to find chemicals that are specific to taxa that you want to kill,” Cini says. “Also, you need money.”

Leaving wasps to munch their way through agricultural pests is free. And while many crop pests are quickly developing resistance to pesticides, they can’t become immune to a hungry mouth.

But wasps’ role in an ecosystem depends entirely on the species and habitat. And most research has been done on wasps in temperate climates. “We lack information about African species,” Cini says. “We have no idea if they’re well or not, if they’re growing or disappearing.“

Even the wasps we do know about look very differently in different parts of the world. Yellowjackets might be critical to eating other bugs in Europe, Cini points out, but in New Zealand, they’re an invasive species that threatens native insects. (Of course, the same thing can be true of North America’s honey bees, which are essentially domestic livestock introduced from Europe.)

Cini says that people have good reason to remove some wasps, especially if they’re allergic. “Obviously, if there’s a nest in my house, I will remove it,” though he’ll try to settle it elsewhere, rather than killing the insects entirely. “The point is to avoid killing them without any reason.”
And there are almost certainly connections between wasps and their surroundings that we haven’t even begun to understand yet. One series of studies found that European wasps even act as reservoirs for wild wine-makers yeast during the winter, and might even maintain the genetic diversity of that yeast. “The point is that you never know the ecological importance that something has, because the relationships are so complex,” Cini says. “Even things that you think are really different from one another can be linked.”

Philip Kiefer

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Carmakers Withdraw from Trump Lawsuit Against California

Several automakers withdrew from the lawsuit by the Trump administration to revoke California’s ability to make its own emissions and fuel economy rules.

The ink was not even dry on Pete Buttigieg’s confirmation as Secretary of Transportation by the U.S. Senate when several automakers announced they were “withdrawing” from the lawsuit filed by the Trump administration to roll back the State of California’s right to set its own emission and fuel economy standards.

Toyota, Fiat Chrysler and Subaru joined General Motors, which pulled its support for the suit last November, in dumping the effort. Previously sided with Trump administration’s effort, encapsulated in federal lawsuit filed in the fall of 2019 to shut down California’s role in setting the nation’s automotive policy.

The automakers insisted they were not trying to punish California for its aggressive stance on climate change but to campaign for “one national standard” that could be applied across the United States.

However, the world has changed dramatically since the previous administration initially filed suit with the support of GM, FCA and Toyota as well as Hyundai, Kia, Mazda and the National Auto Dealers Association.

(GM throws support behind California in emissions court battle with Trump.)

GM pulled its support for the lawsuit against California in late November.

For one thing, after a boisterous campaign that led to record voter turnout, Trump is no longer president and California has expanded its fight against climate change by moving aggressively to foreclose the sale of new vehicles with internal combustion engines throughout the state by 2035.

California Governor Gavin Newsome tweeted his support for the move, offering his thanks for “dropping your climate-denying, air-polluting, Trump-era lawsuit against CA.”

He added, “Good start. Now it’s time to join forward-looking carmakers in the CA framework to protect our air and planet.” Other automakers, including Ford, BMW, Honda and more forged a new deal with the state on mandates that were tougher than the Trump standard, but less stringent than the Obama administration’s benchmarks.

Edmunds, the internet-based car buying service, is predicting sales of electric vehicles will set a record in 2021 and as of last week, General Motors is saying it plans to exit the business of selling cars with combustion engines by 2035 and become carbon neutral by 2040.

The Coalition for Sustainable Automotive Regulation, which also sided with the Trump administration in its battle against California, reiterated its support for having just one nationwide emissions standard, but said it was leaving the litigation “in a gesture of good faith,” towards the Biden administration.

Toyota was joined by several automakers in the move to pull out of the legal battle with California.

In his first full day of office on Jan. 21, the Biden administration had asked to “pause” the litigation around the California standards.

“In a gesture of good faith and to find a constructive path forward, the CSAR has decided to withdraw from this lawsuit in order to unify the auto industry behind a single national program, with ambitious, achievable standards,” the CSAR said in a statement.

CSAR’s move follows the lead of General Motors, which was also initially on the side of the Trump administration but exited in November following Biden’s election victory, according to The Hill, an online publication that follows development on Capitol Hill.

(California moves to block Trump fuel efficiency standard.)

The list of CSAR members include Kia, Mazda, Mitsubishi and Subaru, according to the organization’s website.

And it comes following the Biden administration’s decision ask the court to pause the litigation, after it identified the former Trump administration’s rule as one it would seek to review and potentially reverse course on.

“Abeyance will further the Court’s interests in avoiding unnecessary adjudication, support the integrity of the administrative process, and ensure due respect for the prerogative of the executive branch to reconsider the policy decisions of a prior Administration,” the administration said in court.

It is also seeking to hit pause on other rules including the prior administration’s methane regulations.

Meanwhile, Buttigieg, the former mayor South Bend, Indiana, who has been tapped by Biden to serve as Secretary of Transportation, and to help lead the new administration’s fight to curb climate change, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

The automakers’ decision to withdraw from the lawsuit makes it easier for Buttigieg to discuss a new round of initiatives for the industry and bring California’s interests into the discussion. Relations between Washington and California had been strained during the Trump era.

California, however, has a well-established role in setting automotive policy on issues relating to air quality since the late 1940s and early 1950s when the collision between Southern California’s unique environment, vibrant automotive culture and explosive economic growth had led to the creation of a smog layer that threatened the health of young children and older residents.

The choking smog led to a series of laws, regulations and subsequently court decision that gave the state of California’s statement government, which is now in the hands of Democrats beholden to environmental groups rather than the oil industry, the right to control air quality.

(Trump confirms mileage standards cut, elimination of California clean air waiver.)

In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court in Massachusetts vs EPA, gave states the authority to curb emissions of greenhouse gasses, which contribute to climate change.


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Stellantis Plans No Job or Brand Cuts, Expects to Have 39 “Electrified” Vehicles by End-2021

Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares and Chairman John Elkann are all smiles during the official debut of the new company.

Despite aims of achieving about $6 billion in synergies through the merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and France’s Group PSA, there are no plans to drop brands or eliminate jobs, Carlos Tavares, the CEO of newly formed Stellantis, declared Tuesday.

If anything, the company expects to see opportunities to enhance the performance of its 14 brands and gain traction in markets and market segments where it is weak, Tavares said during a nearly two-hour media briefing. But the Portugese-born executive did warn that “headwinds” could force Stellantis to pull back in some places, notably Latin America, if it can’t maintain a profitable business strategy.

“Our commitment on this merger is that we will not shut down plants as a consequence of the merger,’’ Tavares said, later adding that there are no plans to eliminate any brands, either, though a formal strategy for rebuilding some of the weaker marques, such as U.S.-based Chrysler and Italy’s Fiat and Alfa Romeo, is still in the works.

(Stellantis enjoys warm welcome from European investors.)

The merger was formally announced in December 2019 but took more than a year to pull together as FCA and PSA not only negotiated terms but also had to deal with unions and regulators around the world. The final details fell in place last month and shareholders from the two companies each voted in favor of completing the deal by margins of more than 99%.

Workers take the covers off the new Stellantis sign at North American headquarters in Auburn Hills, Michigan.

The merger created what is now the world’s fourth-largest automotive manufacturer, behind Toyota, Volkswagen and the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance. And its size, diverse brand, product and market portfolios will serve as “a shield” said Tavares. That “helps keep affordability, helps keep the customer base and helps prevent bad things from happening.”

Tuesday’s lengthy media session was aimed at providing a sense of the direction Tavares sees for Stellantis while also addressing some of the many questions that have popped up during the last 13 months.

There has been widespread speculation that brands such as Fiat and Chrysler could be eliminated considering the challenges of maintaining a portfolio of 14 separate marques. But Tavares insisted Stellantis is up to the job, pointing to how it has handled its acquisition of Opel/Vauxhall from General Motors. Prior to that deal, the German-based unit had run up nearly two decades of losses. But it was profitable within a year of the purchase, Tavares noted.

One of the keys to the merger will be taking advantage of scale, the CEO said. That will allow more efficiency in product development and purchasing – which should yield 80% of the 5 billion euros in “synergies” Tavares has promised.

For one thing, weaker brands will benefit by being able to share product platforms and components developed for the broader enterprise – though Tavares stressed that it will be essential to make sure buyers can clearly differentiate between what he described as “sister cars,” say, Dodge, Fiat and Peugeot models that share the same underpinnings.

A mix of new and old with the new Stellantis sign in the foreground and the Chrysler Pentastar in the background.

“The importance is scale and the opportunity to purchase more effectively,” said Stephanie Brinley, principal analyst with IHS Markit, adding that Stellantis “also will benefit from having more cash that can be used to develop systems for more vehicles than (FCA and PSA) each could have done alone.”

(Chrysler is no more as Stellantis comes to life.)

That should prove particularly important when it comes to developing the electrified and autonomous vehicles that are expected to radically transform the globally transportation industry over the coming decade. While it’s unclear how soon self-driving technology will be ready for market, EVs are expected to gain significant traction over the next several years, Tavares expecting that they “will represent more than one-third of vehicle sales, possibly more in Europe,” by the end of the decade.

“Our company will have to be carbon neutral,” Tavares said, adding that he expects the new Biden administration will push for further reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. “This is going to be at the core of our long-term strategic plan.”

At the time of the merger – officially completed last weekend – Stellantis had 29 electrified vehicles, ranging from hybrids to plug-ins to pure battery-electric vehicles. Just by the end of 2021, Tavares revealed, that will grow to 39 models. And, by 2025, he said, “There will be electrified versions of all new models.”

What Tavares and Mike Manley, then CEO of FCA, started is now complete.

How many of those will be BEVs, however, he did not reveal, raising his concerns about the higher cost of producing all-electric vehicles and how that could price some traditional buyers out of the new vehicle market.

The reality is that many key strategic decisions have yet to be formalized, Tavares indicated during the Tuesday briefing. That includes how to prop up weaker brands and improve the presence of Stellantis in weaker markets. That notably includes China, where neither FCA nor PSA were strong players. Latin America is another challenging region — as was underscored by Ford’s announcement last week that it will end manufacturing operations in Brazil.

While analyst Brinley said she believes Stellantis can largely hold to its early goals, especially finding ways to maintain its current brand portfolio, she said the company ultimately might wind up cutting some jobs. But she doesn’t think factory workers are the ones who should be concerned.

(Fiat Chrysler and PSA not exactly a “merger of equals.”)

“There will be some areas where there will be job redundancies,” though not in plants, said Brinley. More likely this could occur in places like marketing and purchasing, and even some in engineering, “operational areas where they just won’t need as many employees” as they did when FCA and PSA operated independently.


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Japan Joins Growing List of Countries Set to Ban Sales of Gas-Powered Vehicles

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga supports the move to ban the sale of non-electric new vehicles staring in 2035.

Despite strong pushback from the country’s largest automaker, Japan has announced plans to halt the sale of vehicles relying solely on internal combustion engines after 2035.

The move means the Asian nation will join a growing list of countries planning to phase out vehicles powered by gas or diesel, including both the United Kingdom and Norway. A number of other countries, including France and Germany, are considering similar bans.

Vehicles with internal combustion engines won’t be banned entirely. Automakers will still be able to market hybrids in Japan, regulators ruled. Even so, the plan released on Christmas Day was a significant victory for Japanese environmentalists considering it was strongly opposed by key industry leaders, including Toyota President Akio Toyoda who warned earlier this month that a broad shift to electric vehicles could cause the auto industry’s traditional business model “to collapse.”

(Toyota boss Akio Toyoda remains EV skeptic.)

Akio Toyoda, Toyota’s top officer, is against the ban.

As the head of Japan’s largest and most powerful company – and in his role as the head of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association – Toyoda hoped to convince regulators to back off on the proposed ban. But it had widespread backing from other quarters, including Japan’s new Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga.

In October, shortly after assuming his post, Suga had pledged to cut Japan’s carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050 while indicating he supported a shift to battery-powered vehicles.

Global sales of electrified vehicles remain modest, running in single digits in all but a handful of markets, even when including hybrids, PHEVs and fuel-cell vehicles, as well as pure battery-electric vehicles. But demand is expected to increase sharply as key obstacles, such as range, cost and public charging, are addressed. It also will help that scores of new BEVs are scheduled to go into production in the coming years, proponents say.

While Japanese automakers were pioneers with their early push to bring hybrids to market, “Japan is very far behind” in terms of developing more advanced products relying solely on battery power, Masayoshi Arai, an official with the country’s

Nissan is one of a few Japanese automakers dedicating resources to a move to EVs.

Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, said last week.

Toyota only recently introduced a BEV model in Europe, though it has announced plans to add two more – one through the flagship Toyota division, a second under the Lexus badge. It also this month revealed an all-electric microcar targeting the Japanese home market. Only the Nissan and Mitsubishi brands, among Japanese automakers, have committed significant resources to the development of pure battery-electric vehicles and, even then, they have fallen behind key foreign rivals in terms of bringing new products to market.

(Toyota hopes to boost interest in hydrogen tech with second-generation Mirai.)

Toyota officials have, throughout the years, pointed to numerous concerns about BEVs, including their cost, limited range and other obstacles to widespread consumer acceptance. For his part, company chief Toyoda said this month that he feared a switch to all-electric models would seriously disrupt the classic automotive industry business model. He also raised questions about whether Japan’s electric grid could supply the needed energy — and, if it did add the generating capacity, he warned, that could actually increase the country’s reliance on fossil fuels.

With the debut of the 2021 Mirai fuel-cell vehicle, Toyota’s hoping to spur interest in the tech again.

For his part, Japan’s new prime minister is downplaying such concerns and said that efforts to address greenhouse gas production “should be tackled as a strategy for growth, not as a limitation on growth.”

Downplaying the need for new coal or natural gas plants, the plan released by the Japanese government would add up to 45 gigawatts of new offshore wind generating capacity by 2040.

With the Christmas Day announcement, Japan becomes the second member of the Group of Seven, or G7, to lay out specific plans to ban non-electrified vehicles.

The UK originally had planned to do so by 2040 but now has pushed that target date up to 2030. Like Japan, its ban will continue to permit the sale of hybrids – but only through 2035, at which point only pure, zero-emissions vehicles will be able to be sold in Great Britain. That will include both BEVs and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles.

Despite its reticence about EVs, Toyota rolled out a new battery-electric car Dec. 25: the C+pod.

A handful of other countries, including Norway, have also laid out ZEV transition plans. So have some states and regions – including California and the Canadian province of British Columbia. A number of cities, such as London, Paris, Berlin and Mexico City, plan to bar vehicles not running in zero-emissions mode, meanwhile. China, meanwhile, has laid out plans to have “New Energy Vehicles,” plug-based models, reach 20% of the market by 2025. It is considering a total ban at a later date.

(Britain to ban sale of all new gas and diesel cars by 2030.)

With most of the country’s automakers reluctant to bring plug-based models to market, demand has grown far more slowly than in many other major regions. The Ministry of Economy, Industry and Trade noted that consumers purchased only 6,000 PHEVs and BEVs during the third quarter of 2020. By comparison, demand tripled in Europe to 270,000 – all-electric models accounting for roughly three-quarters of Norwegian sales. China, meanwhile, is expected to again top 1 million plug-based models for all of 2020.

Check out the breathtaking winners of the 2020 Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest

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The US has more power outages than any other developed country. Here’s why.

Many products featured on this site were editorially chosen. Popular Science may receive financial compensation for products purchased through this site.

Copyright © 2020 Popular Science. A Bonnier Corporation Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

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