Two years ago, an IndustryWeek editor traveled to San Antonio, Texas, for the grand opening of Navistar’s truck assembly plant, where gas-powered and electric trucks can be assembled on the same line.
Well, the electric trucks built in San Antonio didn’t take off as temporarily as their bright yellow cousins built in Tulsa, Oklahoma — namely, Navistar’s electric school buses.
“Lately we’ve been promoting more electric school buses than trucks,” A. J. said. “There’s a lot of investment to be made for school buses. The [total ownership charge] for the trucks has not yet arrived. “
Palmisano and his team debuted the new Navistar school bus with third-party charging systems at the CharIN “Testerival” in Cleveland. He fiercely responded to reporters’ questions about everything from “Does this bus do donuts?” (“Oh, maybe”) to the number of school buses in the US (480,000).
Navistar’s bus business has “grown a lot,” he explained, “because if you have compatibility with a specific demographic, you can almost get a single bus. “
Through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, “there’s enough government funding that the bus will be free—and the charger, if it’s a small enough charger, will also be free. So if you’re in a disadvantaged area, rural area, that kind of thing, you can just about get a free bus.”
Summer, when buses are mostly idle, is a prime opportunity for school districts to monetize vehicle-to-grid charging. “This [bus] has a 315-kilowatt-hour battery pack, which is just sitting somewhere all summer long,” said Palmisano. “That is a perfect opportunity to send energy back to the grid, where somebody can buy the energy, cheap, and sell it back a little bit more expensive. Resiliency on the grid, that kind of thing—school buses are natural for that application.”
Over time, truck sales will grow faster than school bus sales, he said. “The same number of school buses are sold, period, in the country. “
Palmisano and his team have brought the electric buses to a number of international events. “You know what’s a lot of fun? We get people from Europe asking, ‘Can I go inside the school bus?’ Because it’s a purely American thing. ‘I’ve seen it on Napoleon Dynamite, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Can we sit inside this? Everyone take a picture.’”
—Laura Putre
—Robert Schoenberger
Rodney Brooks is doing it again, updating his predictions he made in 2018 about driverless cars, robotics, synthetic intelligence, device learning, and manned space travel. On Jan. 1, Brooks released his sixth annual update in rodneybrooks. com and promised to revise his forecasts early each year until 2050, when he will have turned 95. I myself am guilty of those predictions. How right was he?He reflects on his blog post.
If you’re not familiar with Brooks, here’s a quick sneak peek. The former director of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab is one of the founders of iRobot, maker of Roomba, and Rethink Robotics (think collaborative robots Sawyer and Baxter with their virtual eyes). ). He is currently the founder and CTO of Robust. AI, another company focused on robots in factories. Brooks has written books and clinical articles.
If you think all that scientific background translates to a blog full of dry reading, you’d be wrong. For example, in reference to predictions he has made around autonomous vehicles, as well as recent news that Cruise robotaxis relied at times on remote human assistance, Brooks wrote, “We were told by the companies that their vehicles were safer than human driven vehicles, but in fact they routinely needed humans to monitor and to control them. At one level I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you. At another level I am embarrassed that they fooled me. I had thought they were driving with no person monitoring them.”
He continued, “The reason I published my forecasts and communicated about them every year to try to trump the hype that misleads other people about the state of technology. “
IndustryWeek has interviewed Brooks several times over the years and in 2016 he accepted an IW Lifetime Achievement Award for his leadership in production technology.
Brooks’ most recent prediction package is a long read, but whether these future-oriented topics intrigue you in any way. I’ll end with an update he gave on the “regular Hyperloop service between two cities. “Not in his lifetime, not at NIML,” Brooks said in 2018. Their 2024 update: “I’ve been calling this for 26 years. To this day, no one applies there in an operating company. “
Admittedly, it doesn’t take much to highlight the relatively quiet pre-holiday news cycles, but we still failed to realize that December 21 was a pretty auspicious day for production deal announcements. Within a few hours, the news broke:
Is a broader wave of mergers and acquisitions brewing after a year in which the price of global deals was, according to Bloomberg, on track to fall below $3 trillion for the first time since 2013?Let’s insert here some caveats related to the fact that many investors need to close deals before the end of the year and, more importantly, investment bankers might be talking about their e-book after a rough year.
But the financial flurry we saw before the holidays also speaks to a key trend that strategy and corporate finance pros at KPMG have been following: Many company leaders and financial sponsors are fine-tuning their portfolios, divesting units considered non-core and buying businesses that help them dive deeper into target markets. Add to those goals the expectation of lower interest rates in 2024 and activity seems to poised to pop.
—Geert DeLombaerde