Taiwan consortium's project to develop adaptable EV architecture
台灣集團開發開放電動汽車架構平台
| Auto veteran speaks to Startup Island TAIWAN Podcast about helping new players in industry
TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Jack Cheng (鄭顯聰) is the chief executive officer at MIH Consortium, and recently spoke to Startup Island TAIWAN Podcast about the group's work to create an open electric vehicle (EV) platform and reduce development times for new entrants to the EV or electric vehicle market. Cheng has a long history in the automotive industry, joining Ford in the 1980s when the company was developing Taiwan as a manufacturing base for vehicles sold in the North American market. Cheng said he began working with EVs when he was asked to collaborate with Chinese companies in 2015, which led him to work on building the Nio EV brand. Cheng said Nio developed an EV to production stage in 30 months, when normally it would take a new company three to four years. He said that MIH hopes to help other EV startups develop vehicles in similarly short timeframes by developing an open architecture upon which new EV companies can build their end user product. Cheng used the example of the Jaguar X-type, built on the same platform as the Ford Mondeo, a basic family wagon. Manufacturers with very different end users were able to develop vehicles that suited their customers’ needs using the same basic platform. “There are ... a lot of new brands for EVs, they never get the components or the architecture platform to begin," Cheng said. “It’s such a rigid process for them to go bidding and do all this benchmarking and try to get a business where there is already a supply base for the traditional guy.” Cheng said that MIH creates a “half complete” vehicle, akin to a simple battery pack on wheels. Companies can then take this platform and build on it, adapting the form to their user base. MIH was founded by Taiwan's electronics giant Foxconn, which purchased an EV production facility in the U.S. state of Ohio in May last year to manufacture the EV platform. In November 2022 the company broke ground on an EV production facility in Thailand, which reportedly will also be a production base for the MIH platform. |
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| Jono Thomson, Taiwan News, Staff Writer | |
| 2023-03-14 |
