Electric powertrains’ astounding recent progress often eclipses comparable
energy-saving potential from aggressively reducing tractive load, especially by
ambitious lightweighting. Both strategies are valid and important, but their
diverse benefits—transcending simple competition for fuel savings—are partly
shared, often differentiated and synergistic, and all worth capturing. Far from
becoming superfluous once traction is electrified, severalfold-lower tractive
load can make electrification much cheaper, easier, and faster, with major side
benefits. Yet these two strategies are currently out of balance, misallocating
capital, effort, and time. That imbalance is amplified by the standard method
for analyzing potential automotive efficiency gains—incremental and
technology-by-technology. This highly refined methodology is valid for modest
changes in components, but not for major changes in whole vehicles. Fifteen
market vehicles and industry designs demonstrate that incremental technology
analysis dramatically understates the fuel savings available from integratively
designed vehicles and overstates their marginal cost. This analytic deficiency
is stranding most industry strategies and government policies severalfold short
of their proven efficiency potential. Traditional analytic methods and foresight
processes thus need better concepts, sources, and formats. Industry
incumbents—already challenged by insurgents in design, technology, finance,
business model, and culture—can ill afford the further handicap of assuming that
automotive efficiency potential is severalfold smaller and costlier than
integrative design can actually achieve. And, in a world at risk from oil-linked
conflict, disease, and climate change, the industry that holds so much of both
problem and solution must not divert its unique capabilities and precious time
to suboptimal choices.
