Welcome, everyone, to the latest edition of the Reimagined Mobility Podcast series. I'm here with Craig Rediker from American Axle. Rick, you have a long history in transmissions. You worked at Ford for a while, were a long time now for several years at American Axle. Tell us, what is your responsibility on American Axle and what excites you about transmissions and now maybe even more so about axles? Okay. My responsibility here is I'm vice president of a team we call innovation.
So basically research, advanced research. I've got 26 people that work for me here at our Texas facility, our Advanced Technology Development Center in Detroit. And my team is is developing the. Products, not the products who are quoting. Right now, but those things that were one or two generations out. So trying to see where the technology is going in and get us get us on the right path to to intersect that.
And right now, my team is 100% focused on our transition from ICE internal combustion driven drive trains into electrification. And if you ask me what I what's interesting, I really love that. I mean, having spent 30 years in the development of mechanical automatic transmissions, all wheel drive systems and that kind of thing, this has given me an opportunity to learn some new things, to learn what an inverter is, how an inverter works, what's a mass fat, and how do electric motors work?
What are the differences between the different types of motors? And it's been it's been fascinating. And now I tell people, four and a half years ago, I couldn't spell inverter and now I can give presentations on the inverters we're developing. And it really proud that we're doing all that development right here in Detroit.
So within 100 yards of where I am at our technology development center in Detroit, where designing our own motors, our own inverters, write our own software, we do all our gears and everything housings all our prototyping right here in Detroit. Perfect. So really, if I, if I would summarize, then you are the perfect guy for American Axle right? I need to talk to David and tell him again he hired the right guy because you came from transmission team to a company that that's what they used to do.
And now you've really helped to get, obviously with the rest of the leadership team, move American Axle into electrification path that you guys started several years ago. Obviously not just now. So. Right, Right. Guy Well, you know, I didn't start that journey year. It was well underway when I came. So my job is to move the ball forward and I've really, really enjoyed it. AAM's a wonderful company to work for. It's really great to work for, offered David Dow.
He's got a lot of vision of where he wants the company to go, and our job is to make that vision into into reality. You know, migrating into electrification is obviously where we need to go and where we're we're well on our way down that path. Now, you guys have talked about, amongst others, obviously, as well about this. You know, there's three in one and you kind of alluded to it, right, The gear, the electric motor and inverter that you now know how to spell.
And also also at all present what's inside and on the outside. That's great. I love that. What's what's the big deal about the three in one? And is really everybody looking into integrating in or is there still some that say maybe for assembly purposes, repair purposes or other types of purposes they want to have it separate. Share a little bit about that. What what do you see what American Axle sees and where do you see the future of that going, Right.
Well, that is a great question because it's it's central to a lot of what we're we're working on now. And for your audience, when we say, hey, three in one drive unit, the three devices are the the electric motor, the gearbox and the inverter. And the inverter is what converts the DC from the battery to three phase, alternating current to run the motor. And when we put them all together in
one unit, we call that a three in one. And what, what I see is there's there's there are going to be two approaches to this. One approach is to not integrate very much get the inverter to be kind of a commodity, standalone commodity, have the motor be a standalone commodity, gearbox a stand alone commodity and you just bolt those three together and then it's a fight for who can make the cheapest device of of of either kind of any those kinds.
And, and that's a path, you know, that is not a crazy path. That is a path that a number of people are going down. And it could in the long run, be a successful path. That's if our customers want to be on that path. Our job is to is to help our customers along, if that's what they prefer. If that works well on their vehicle, then we'll work with them on that. What I've been doing here is is developing a different path, a path that I think is going to be very successful.
In fact, Tesla is demonstrating that it can be extremely successful, and that is to totally integrate all these designs, the inverter, the motor in the gearbox, have them all engineered by one team so that we can share physics and integrate to a level that's not really possible when you're just taking three specifications and trying to bolt it together. When you do that, you find opportunities to do things like for lubrication, quite.
Cool. The motor, the inverter in the gearbox, all with one fluid so you don't have to separate these cavities anymore. And then just a physical integration and the device can be physically smaller when it's better integrated. The Tesla model three is really, in my mind, the first big step in that direction where they fully integrated the inverter. And what we've done here is we think we've taken that a couple of steps farther down the path to the point where we develop a round inverter.
Actually, I've got one right here. So you are what we call a ring inverter, and this inverter slips on the end of the motor. So there is no big inverter housing anymore. It's just making the motor housing about that much longer. The inverter slips on the end and it's another level of integration that then makes things smaller and lighter. And then honestly, the customers we're working with, they're going in both directions.
Some of them are trying to make that decision as to where they want to go, and we want to work with them wherever they are. So we may have a customer that says, I've got a motor that I want to make, I've got an inverter that I want to make, but I need a partner to integrate that into and an axle or a drive unit were perfectly happy to work with those customers and and be that integrator for them and provide that axle structure or gearbox structure.
But we'll have we have other customers that have said, no, we want you to do everything. We want that fully integrated, integrated device. You do, you see, which is what we just talked about, the three in one, but also again, some wanted it all integrated, some wanted separate. You see a trend. You work in passenger vehicles, you work in in in trucks as you see in the back. And you also work in class, whatever, five and up. Right a little bit as well.
I believe you see a trend in any of those in any of those segments or is really customer dependent. I think the general trend is for more integration. I think everyone has realized those fundamental benefits of integration are good. I think it's just a matter of how quickly they're going to get there based on perhaps existing supply agreements for inverters that exist and the willingness to redesign everything to be to be integrated. But we see that trend more, more and more for for integration.
Now, I in particular, the area that we've been focusing on are truck axles. And with truck axles, the mass of the axle bouncing up the hill is very, very important and integration can help with that. Another technology that helps with that is to increase the motor speed. That's another innovation we've been pushing down. Is the motor in this truck right behind me here?
That's a 24,000 rpm motor in the rear axle, which allows the motor to be relatively small, you know, much smaller than a motor that's going, say, 15,000 R.P.M.. So if a high speed motor and an integrated inverter, the overall mass and size of that device can be small. And that's incredibly important for a beam axle that may be bouncing up and down as the vehicle hits its potholes, what we call the unsprung mass of the of the vehicle.
So I do think that integration is going to be the long term way to go, but everyone may not get there at the at the same speed. Many of us are pushing to just get a product in the market quickly with relatively low risk, you know, So they want to use a proven technology and inverter or a motor that they know. And then over time, I think the opportunities for integration will become will become greater.
When we touch upon something That's that that's that's interesting the speed right now RPN we mentioned 50,020 4000 and the one that's in the back there on the on the pickup truck and at AVL we’ve developed a high speed e-axle rall integrated as well. Similar to what you talked about, we call it the hummingbird 30,000 R.P.M.. Right.
Is there an end to because I mean, when I first started getting familiar with electrification about ten, 15 years ago, right, we've talked 10,000 rpm, everybody was like, Oh man, we're pushing it. You know, that's as it gives leaders like, wow, we need to go to 20,000. And then now we're hearing 2530. I think the other day we've seen something that goes up to 35 or even 40,000 RPM. I mean, what do you see the trend? Is there a never ending push? And we're going to see at some point 100,000 RPM?
Or is it is it more we're pushing technology, we're really going to settle around the 20 to 30000. What is it that you're seeing? Well, first, before I answer that, I do want to congratulate you on the hummingbird technology. We've met with your team a number of times and we've seen what Avio is down there. We'd love it because you're in the same boat and you're moving up and down that same that same path. It's been a very impressive effort with that 30,000 RPM motor.
So to your question, I think there's no question the speeds are moving up there. No question you're going to see 20,000 RPMs motors are going to become fairly common pretty soon. But I see a couple of breaking points. 20,000 RPM is about as high as you can go with a relatively simple gearbox, or you just have a gear on the motor one and then a two stage reduction for a simple gear set like that, the bearing loads start to go bad at about 20,000 rpm.
What we've developed is what we call a dual shaft design. We've got you bearings on both sides of the rotor shaft which balances the loads on the rotor. So now there's no more rotor loads that breaks that there's now the motor speed can go, can go up. Now the next barrier is typically the centrifugal force and on the rotor, particularly for a permanent magnet motor and I don't know if there's a specific limit for that. We're comfortable up to 30,000 RPM. Obviously AVL is as well.
And you see people like Tesla developing technologies to try to continue to push that, such as carbon fiber wrapping the rotor. Now, if you put carbon fiber around the rotor, you have the opportunity to go up, go up farther. So I think that speed limit will be broken. One of the ones that's left then is unfortunately the wheels on the vehicle do not turn any faster, so the higher the motor speed goes, the more gear reduction you're going to need to do.
And what we have found is up to about 30,000 R.P.M., we can make it make it work. With just two stages of gear reduction above 30,000 R.P.M. almost for sure you're going to need three stages of gear reduction and then every stage that you add, you lose a little bit, maybe a half a percent efficiency with each stage. So I think there will be some tapering off at that speed.
The next other limit is as you go faster, you've got to come, you take the motor faster and switching the switches up to turn on and off faster and the switching losses start to start to go up. So I don't know that there's a hard limit, but I think that I'd be surprised to see an automotive application above 30,000 R.P.M. any anytime soon. Most of the electric motor people say there's really not a huge a huge limit.
And in terms of inverters, there's the gallium nitride switching device that's out there that can switch at hundreds of thousands of hertz and therefore could handle can handle higher frequencies. And maybe someone will employ that specifically to get those motor speeds up above up above 30,000. But I think moving into the twenties is what you're going to see over the next four or five years. And Tesla, as usual, kind of leading the way on that with the plaid, I think 23,000.
And then our first production application for our technology is about 24 and now we've are stretching that too to throw in my sort of my research area of interest. So you kind of touched upon the the different technologies and the different things different companies are applying. You mentioned Tesla, obviously, let's go let's go to motor technology to maybe what Tesla announced several months ago about trying to go to rare earth metals free. I think I think I think I'm saying this right.
What what do you see technology wise when it comes to the motor piece of of the e-axle right? again again the gearbox, the inverter, the electric motor what technology developments do you see there and in what are you guys specifically focused on. Another excellent question. There are so many alternatives that are out there right now and most OEs I think right now are focused on getting the rare earth content out of the motors.
As you know, the rare earth magnets they have to be mined, processing the high the particularly the the heavy, rare earth materials take a lot of processing. Not easy to do some environmental challenges with that. Most of that all comes from China right now. So trying to eliminate those heavy rare earths are they are the key. And what we see are kind of four ways of going about that. The first one is just develop a magnet that doesn't have any rare earths.
There's a really interesting company, a U.S. based company in Minnesota called Niran that's developing a magnet that only uses iron. There's no rare earth in it at all, and it's more of a research type project right now. But in theory, if they make it where they're going, they'll be able to provide the same strength of a magnet without any rare earths at all.
The second is a variant of that where you just take the same concept and keep tweaking the chemistry of the magnet to reduce the amount of heavy rare earth materials that you have. I don't know for sure, but I think that that's what Tesla means by a rare, earth free magnet. They're going to keep adjusting and tweaking and take out the most onerous materials and keep the ones that are that are a little bit easier, easier to obtain, but yet still keep essentially a permanent magnet motor.
Then separately from that, there's a lot of investment and a lot of always that have invested in in eliminating the permanent magnets by replacing them with electromagnets. So at a and we call that an EESM, externally excited synchronous motor where instead of a permanent magnet in the rotor you've got a coil wire that can become an electromagnet and then you feed power to that electromagnet and you provide that same function that the permanent magnet does.
You've seen big investments from BMW in that tech. Now, as you we believe Renault is investing heavily in that technology and others as well because it provides a motor with absolutely no rare earths in it at all. It's got some advantages. It's got some trade offs as well. It tends to be a little bit longer to make that to make that work. Then the fourth variant is this one that we've spent a lot of effort on in the last few years. It's simply an induction motor.
You know, an induction motor, as you may know, has no rare earth magnets at all. And we've been on a little bit of a quest to see There's there's a tradition, traditionally an efficiency gap between a permanent magnet and an induction motor. And we've been trying to push the physics of the induction motor to say how good an induction motor can we make?
Can we get an induction motor close to the same efficiency as a permanent magnet motor, and then take that motor and offer a permanent magnet version of it, which is what we're doing. So we have a very optimized IM, but we take out the induction rotor, we put in a permanent magnet rotor that we can offer. We can offer both because we think there are going to be some applications in the vehicle or the induction motor makes a lot of sense.
Most electric vehicles we're going to see are going to have to drive units. They're going to have a primary and a secondary drive or that primary drive. You want as much efficiency as you can possibly get for range and for cycle efficiency, but then you may be able to use a slightly less efficient but very torque intense motor to provide your peak performance. So a vehicle with maybe a smaller PM to handle the cycle, but then a bigger secondary IM to give you all the torque that you want.
Could be a very cost effective equation and you've seen people do that. Tesla is doing that and one of their applications today we call that like a mixed mode type type application. So we think it's very important to develop the world's best induction motor and the world's best permanent magnet motor. I think we're going to need both in the end are some. Interesting let's shift topics for a second because you mentioned, I think before what what you guys are doing.
I mean, your American Axle in manufacturing. So you doing manufacturing what you want to do, Right. I assume at the end of the day, with all that great technology that you were working on and the product teams are working on, but share a little bit from your perspective, what do you see? Because we see globally the OEMs very, very different strategies, right?
So I mean, the U.S. the OEMs are saying we're going to pull in inverter development and in fact during e-motor development and manufacturing, battery development and manufacturing, and then we see other ones that say, no, we're going to stay with traditional model that we have where we go to companies like AAM. So they come to you and say, Hey, build me a three in one system design and build it, deliver it to me.
We just integrated at the end of the manufacturing and then you really have globally again speaking anything and everything in between. But give me a little bit of perspective. Are you guys seeing the same thing? You see a trend where it's like so much the stuff that they really consider highly technical, highly confidential or highly capable of differentiating a product? We the OEM want to pull design. We don't want to give this to you.
Or is it still again, no, we're still going to give it to you even though we want to use that technology to differentiate ourselves. Well, I would I think you summarized that well at the beginning. There's a lot of OEs and they have a lot of different approaches now. We are primarily today a large portion of our volume are with the big three domestic producer. So between Stellantis Ford and GM and you I'm sure are well aware of what they've been interested in doing.
And I know that you know, they've got they've got labor issues to deal with. They've got a bunch of engine and transmission plants that they don't need as much anymore. So there's definitely going to be a lot of pressure to in-source a lot of that work for labor reasons alone, you know, and then just the control of the of the design in particular. We see a lot of OEs that really want to control the software for the inverter.
But if you want to control the software for the inverter, you really need to be controlling a bit of the design of the hardware of the inverter as well. So if all of those parts we see a number of what we use that say we maybe you can get an inverter, but we want it to look a certain way, you know, we want it to be able to run our software and look a certain way. And now, you know, can you make that or would you provide a find a partner for it or would you use ours?
And then there is other others that are saying, we're going to do both. We're going to make our own inverter and we're to make our own motor and we'll give it to you and you and you bolted together.
So yeah, it's it it really varies by OE where we still think there's a great role for for a company like AAM is is is one there are a lot of vehicles out there and for the always to take on every drive you know primary and secondary and every vehicle from the smallest vehicle to the largest vehicle, there's just a lot you know, that's a lot of a lot of engineering and it's a lot of tooling and all that kind of thing.
So we think there are going to be a lot of opportunities for the supply base to to to participate. And again, our strategy is to participate in the way they need us. You need us to do the the gearbox and the structure and integration with your motor. You're fine or you want the whole thing. Turnkey will be able to do that. We'll be able to do that as well, and we'll just have to tailor that for the different customers that we're going after.
But it's a very important conversation for us because, you know, our our customers are very important to us, but in some cases they're our competitor as well because they're trying to decide, you know, do we do this program inside or do we give it to give it to you or to you? And that's probably a little bit more prevalent now than it was purely in the axle and four wheel drive world. A little bit are prevalent again, largely due to that desire to control the software and the and the inverter.
So it's a very important topic to us. And we talked to a number of OEs we're very fortunate to have that opportunity to do so. And again, we'll tailor our approach depending on what they're, what they're looking for and what they mean now. And interesting. So again, with the truck in the background, one of the questions I have, we see now electrified pickup trucks coming out right to Ford Lightning has very good reviews. Several people that I know have it and they just say it's it's it's great.
Even even pulling for names. It's absolutely fantastic. Again, let's not talk about necessarily charging time and all this stuff, but just consumer demand. Right. Generally speaking, what do you see? Because you guys really been in this space for ten plus many, many years. Right. Well, before this latest electrification round came, you guys really supported heavily pickup trucks and other products, all these slate.
What do you see somewhat the timeline timeline to when the majority of customers I'm not necessarily talking OEMs right now, so I'm putting you a little bit on the spot more from the consumer side when when more than 50% of the consumers are saying, you know what, I'm done with my diesel pickup truck, I want an electric pickup truck. What do you see there? Well, again, a huge area of of debate. A huge chunk of that is going to depend on what the government does.
You know, if these latest legislation if the latest legislation goes through, we're essentially going to be mandating a very large percentage of electric of electric vehicles. Without that, then you're going to be just left with how quickly will customers adopt that? You know, how quickly will they adopt them and will they will they like them? And, you know, every conference I go to, there's that debate, you know, by 2030, what percentage of the vehicles will be electrified?
And everyone has their their argument. I see numbers as low as 20 and as high as 67%. I think depending again, on how that legislation is going to is going to go it's going to be going to be mandated just from the customer perspective, though, what's really fascinating is I think as people drive these vehicles and realize what they can do, I think they're going to really like them. So people may have been very skeptical about an electric pickup truck. Don't go drive a lightning go drive it.
You know, go get a new GM, go drive a Hummer, go drive the new Silverado pickup truck. These things are really amazing. The new Silverado, it's now going to have amazing range as well. And that's that big barrier Okay. What is that range anxiety going to be? Well, I think there's a whole lot of customers out there that have that vehicle's got 400 miles worth of range as plenty. I mean, that's plenty for what they want to do. If you're let's say you're a my neighbor, I love a guy.
My neighbor is a plumber and he's got a fleet of about five plumbing trucks. Those trucks don't go 400 miles in a day. They leave his shop, they go do some work and they come back. They could easily be battery electric trucks and then he would have no maintenance on the engine. You know, the brakes will last longer, all that, all that kind of thing.
So I think as people really start to realize what they're capable of and the prices come come down, I think that that adoption will will really take off. Electric motors are just awesome for these trucks because we can generate any torque you want. Essentially, we can generate enormous talks and these vehicles can have tremendous performance.
And again, go get in the lightning, particularly when it's empty and just stomp on that pedal and you just think, I can't believe this is a pickup truck That's that's that's doing this and again, getting range to arrange the to a level that's that's reasonable. I think you'll start to see customers come over the price point still going to be a barrier. You know, these are these are trucks that are knocking on the door of 100 grand when when they're about if not, if not over, you know.
So that's going to have to come down and that's all going to be in the volumes and the batteries, you know, the drive units. I think we can get we can get the cost of the drive units to a reasonable level. But I think the batteries are still going to be that barrier. That's not our swim lane. We're focusing on the drive units, but I think the money's in the battery. Yeah, that's true. We see that too, as we do a lot of that in that space, as you may know. So maybe let's say.
One other thing about that forgot to mention is, you know, when I was in the automatic transmission world that we we always were part of the torque race for diesel pickup trucks. So I developed two or three actually transmissions specifically at Ford for the super duty diesel. And 2004 or five, we launched an engine at Ford that made 560 foot lbs of torque. And the thought was that's that's something you would ever want any more torque than that?
Why would you ever want more than 560 foot lbs of torque? And then every year those diesel engines just kept going higher and higher and higher to the point. Now we're talking 2000 foot pounds on these vehicles. Well, we sure don't see that changing with electrification. You know, customers want what they want, you know, So the OEs that we talk, they want to provide that same capability. And with an electric motor, you can do it. You just size it. They get big and they get heavy.
But the capability to do that is is there. And we see that trend. We see that trend continuing, continue it alone. Yeah, the maybe last question correct for you. What do you see happening in the next five years? What excites you about the technology or working in right now an American Axle And just in general, when we talk about the mobility space? Well, what what are you looking forward to to see over the next five years?
Well, me personally at AAM we're very excited about the business that we've just won you may have right. We just won to be axle program electric beam axle with our partner Stellantis. So that's going to be a very, very important program for us and for our partners and for them. And so that'll keep us very, very busy. And we're pursuing a lot of other work, other other work as well.
So executing those programs and seeing those come to the road is is going to be exciting in the innovation space every day. We're making this integrated design better and better, higher voltage, higher power, faster motor speeds and developing improving its efficiency and building more demonstration vehicles like this truck that we can show customers to get them excited. And what I would hope to see in in five years is we'll kind of get through this. Hey, I need something quick.
I need to get it on the road and start moving into letting Isaac Newton be the guide here. And Isaac Newton says, Let's get the motor speeds up, let's shrink the motors down, let the integrate this stuff all in as the long term solutions. And I hope to see that coming in in a bigger scale over the course of the next the next five years. All right. Very cool. Well, thanks, Craig for your time. Appreciate it. And thanks for tuning in at the Mobility Podcast series here.
Thank you, Craig, very much. Great job. Thank you very much for having me. Thanks for listening. To Reimagine Mobility Podcast. If you like this episode, please subscribe. And tell a friend.