Mercedes and BMW engineers want shared electric car components. A viable plan?

As electric vehicles begin to trickle onto public roads in the coming years, automakers are gaining a clearer understanding of what exactly it entails to develop a viable electric model. In short, all it takes is a lot of cold hard cash, something not easily attainable given the current economic crunch.

At a recent 2008 World Automotive Congress in Munich, Germany, top engineers from Mercedes-Benz and BMW called for a collaborative research and development plan that looks to share the expected huge costs, reduce duplicate technologies, and implement electric-vehicle componentry standards.

According to a report by Automotive News Europe, Daimler head of research Thomas Weber stated that automakers are faced with enormous costs associated with the development of electric vehicles and that the reengineering of gasoline and diesel engine to meet lower emissions standards only compounds the amounts.

At the conference, Weber called for the manufacturers to share expenditures in order to reduce the investment needed in the creation of key components such as next generation lithium-ion batteries. Primary to this plan is a standardized specification designed to be utilized by all manufacturers. Automakers will later be able to customize the components per their applications once the parts are finished and deemed producible.

BMW development chief Klaus Draeger believed in a similar industry-wide electric vehicle component/platform standard and concurred there will be a viable need in the future to cut expensive duplicate technologies.

"The race to use less crude oil is a major challenge but we need to share the burden among all parties," Draeger said. "This is not just an auto-industry issue."
 
Additionally brought up in the discussions was the topic of globalized emissions standards. According to Draeger, the current region specific regulations are "nonsense" and the need for harmonization of emissions laws in the U.S., Europe, and China is significant.

[motortrend]