Olabisi Boyle is all about anticipating the future of the motor business at Hyundai.
Recently, the vice president of product planning and mobility strategy of Hyundai Motor North America sat down with rolling out to discuss some incredible advances in electrical vehicles.
What should we know about the IONIQ 5?
If we can break it down to a couple of parts, let’s see why electrification is important for us all. I’m the vice president of product planning and mobility strategy, and part of that role, what we do is monitor as we’re making this transition to electrification.
Who are the people intending to buy EVs, people who are going to make an EV their next choice and people resistant to EVs? What do those numbers look like? What we’re seeing is people intending to buy EVs are going up and the people resistant to buy EVs are going down. So, from a research standpoint, we saw that insight.
Secondly, what are some of the reasons for that now? Now, there are so many choices for EVs that make it something that can work in your everyday life. One of the things we also found in our research are the things they’re saying that don’t make it work in their everyday life.
“Well, I don’t know if I’m going to get all the way to where I need to go because I don’t know if I have a place to charge the vehicle. Maybe, I can charge it at home, but I can’t charge in the public, or maybe I don’t have a charger at home and I don’t know where I can charge in the in the public. If I need to charge, they tell me it takes overnight! Oh, my goodness, what am I going to do about that?”
So, let’s really understand the consumer, because it’s not just about coming correct with the technology, because we come correct with the technology. It’s about how does it work in my every day life, not the experience.
One of the things, when we developed on our first dedicated electric platform, was saying, “OK, how do we take care of the, ‘it’s going to take me eight hours to charge?’ So, we have this 800-volt charging architecture that lets you go from 10 to 80 percent in 18 minutes. Now, we’re bringing that time for charging very close to the time that it takes to maybe fill gas in an internal combustion engine. How do we bring that time down? Eight hundred volts lets us do that ultra-fast charging, so that was one.
Watch the full interview here for more:
