Valeo Challenges Students to Make Cars Smarter

PARIS – Winners of Valeo’s global innovation contest for engineering students will be able to use electricity to power their ideas because “every automaker in the world” is working on electrification, from stop/start systems to battery-electric vehicles, says Guillaume Devauchelle, Valeo’s chief innovation officer and director of scientific research.

But if electricity is a common denominator for the cars of 2030, little else is.

The market is moving away from a car for every purpose, says Devauchelle. “They will become specialized. We will have cars for the city and cars for inter-city travel. We see a segmentation of technologies…a destandardization.”

Such a future, he notes, “is not good news for the OEMs” whose business case is based on mass production.

The contest has university students form teams of two to five and develop features that will make cars of 2030 “more intelligent and intuitive” with the potential to revolutionize the automobile industry.

There is no particular limit as to which 20 ideas will be chosen on Valentine’s Day 2014 to be turned into prototypes with a €5,000 ($6,750) budget from Valeo.

“Teams may be multidisciplinary in nature and include a designer, sociologist, philosopher, urban planner, architect, biologist, etc.,” say the contest rules.

The idea of a contest to enlighten the future is nothing new. The U.S. Defense Dept. has used a series of “Grand Challenges” to attract bright people from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and elsewhere to the idea of developing autonomous vehicles. Valeo already does research among young people to get their ideas of what the future might hold.

“Our marketing research shows that the answers are different around the world,” says Patrick Benammar, in charge of training for the automotive supplier’s human-resources department. “In Korea, they think that autonomous vehicles are for tomorrow, not 2030. If you ask in China, it is evident that electric vehicles are for tomorrow. People don’t drive between cities, they take the train.

“In Japan, the society is aging. There is a strong demand for automating vehicles. They are not afraid of giving control to robots. In Europe, people say they are better drivers than robots.”

Powertrain technology already is regional, notes Benammar, with alcohol and flex-fuel a given in Brazil, and diesel holding half the market in Europe. Hydrogen is unlikely to become a powertrain fuel soon, says Devauchelle, because “today, the bottom line on mass is not favorable.” On the other hand, he says, hydrogen powering a fuel cell could be a good way to provide power to truckers in the U.S. who are forbidden from running their diesel engines overnight.

Valeo’s contest is only partly about future technology. It also is part of a strategy to create stronger bonds with young people that will help the company recruit top candidates when they finish their studies. Valeo plans to recruit 1,000 engineers and technical people in the next three years, 400 of them in France. The supplier has 9,000 engineers now.

In earlier days, says Benammar, Valeo competed for good candidates with automakers and other top suppliers such as Robert Bosch. Now, he says, “the competition is aeronautics, transportation, the energy industry, even companies that make flat screens.”

The innovation contest, announced in September to several hundred universities around the world, asks students with ideas for future technology to form their teams and describe their plan by Feb. 14. In April Valeo technical experts will choose 20 projects to develop prototypes and give each a €5,000 budget and a Valeo engineer as a coach.

Three finalists will be chosen next September, and the winner of a €100,000 ($130,000) prize will be announced at the Paris auto show in October.