I was so privileged to talk to and bring you some of the world’s top experts in fuels and vehicles last year. It was hard to pick five, but take a look and sample some quotes I added from their podcast interviews.
“It would be very short sighted indeed not to invest in improving ICEs since they will inevitably be powering the transport sector, particularly the commercial transport sector, to a large extent for decades to come.”
–Gautam Kalghatgi
“I think the thing that gives the most optimism is I think we’re seeing companies cross the valley of death. I think we’re starting to see more and more companies successfully navigating across the valley of death, and so that tells other people, ‘Yeah, we can do that.’ I think when people see these stories that are real, I think it helps all of us feel like we can do this. More and more people are succeeding.”
–Jennifer Holmgren
“Regarding, our future cities, yes, we definitely want to work in more cities within Europe and then also expand outside of Europe, but Europe has some cities that are really struggling with bad air quality issues. So do many cities outside Europe and that’s kind of usually how we decide where we want to work. Cities in Asia and Latin America would probably be our next target.”
–Rachel Muncrief
“When you put all these things together over the course of time, the reality is you parsed together a lot of different regulatory programs, and ultimately they’ve all been beneficial, and now we are at a point where it may be best to actually look at where we are, and to rethink things, and come up with a more simple solution and simplify the regulatory requirements to reduce cost burden. I know the Agencies that are doing some of that right now. But if I have to pick, I guess the two programs, probably the most beneficial were low sulfur programs and probably the RFG program.”
–Paul Argyropoulos
“The entrenched system takes an enormous amount of money to keep it going. Think about new cars, there’s about 100 million new cars sold every year, with an average price around $25,000 dollars. That’s, right there, $2.5 trillion dollars just for new cars. Then, there’s all the costs of operating them, and the systems, and there’s the truck side, and everything else. It’s a lot of money. If we thought of it that way, and we just carved out some percentage of that, even if it were 2% or 3% of that, to move us in a different direction, and improve our sustainability, not to mention, improve the quality of the systems, I think it would be huge, but we’re not even willing to do that.”
–Lew Fulton