eRod – our future

For me, the eRod is the ultimate driving machine. I had already reported about it. (11.04.22 / 18.04.22) Laurence Nève, who takes care of the administration and marketing in the eRod team, invited eRod customers to go for a ride together in the Engadine last weekend. We spent the night at the Hotel Krüzli - the owner Curdin Brugger is an eRod owner himself. In the end, we rode nine eRods over several passes: Oberalp, Gotthard, Tremola, up to a dam and over several slow lanes. With the eRod you are much more aware of your surroundings than with any other vehicle. Changes in temperature, different scents like a flower meadow or rubber when the driver in front accelerates or breaks a bit too hard, a bit of dust as long as we've been driving over the country lanes, softly whispering wind or even a hurricane when we accelerate to the max for a moment - an eRod ride is a feast for all the senses. It is extremely helpful to stay in the here and now. No emails, text messages or other distractions, the ride is enough. In the evening after each ride, I was tired but happy. I hadn't experienced so much in a long time. Riding the eRod is the ultimate experience and snapshot of nature. It takes full concentration. I am only concerned with the road, wind, weather and nature.
The eRod is reduced to the absolute essentials: Chassis, suspension, brakes, batteries, drivetrain with motor, gearbox and charger. That is all. But these few components have been selected and tuned in the best possible way. The handling of the eRod is truly impressive.

But the eRod is also the opportunity for our future. Our biggest eRod customer is Siemens PLM. This division develops software for the automotive industry. It is used to design cars and optimise them in terms of weight, stiffness, crash behaviour, aerodynamics, flow and much more. In 2018, Laurence Nève had met Jan Debille from Siemens at the Brussels Motor Show. Jan was looking for a vehicle that they could use as a technology carrier for their products. The eRod lent itself to this and so Jan Debille and his brother Kurt Debille, who also works at Siemens, soon attended an eRod building seminar. There they built the first Siemens eRod.
At their request, we also provided them with all available CAD data. The whole Siemens team invested many 1000 hours to simulate everything possible with the eRod. Today they use our vehicle as a training project to train the users of the software with it. This spring, Fabien Caroselli and I were invited to the Siemens stand at the Hanover Industrial Fair. We could hardly believe our eyes: our eRod was the centrepiece of the entire Siemens exhibition. They simulated the drive, showed a whole automated production line and even parts of it in real life. With a virtual reality, the exhibited eRod could be shown in section and so every detail could be seen exactly. The aerodynamics were also simulated and through special glasses, the wind pressure and the turbulence could be precisely observed. We saw in detail how exactly our Speedster windscreen took the wind pressure from the driver and passenger.
Many sensors are fitted to the vehicle. Their total value is over 1 million EUR. So every detail can be measured while driving.
So all the engineers who are being trained on the Siemens NX software are practising designing cars using our eRod.
A new idea was born at the fair: While the engineers are designing, they could already be shown how much so-called grey energy is used in the construction of the vehicles. In this way, several variants can be calculated for each design and this energy or the ‘circularity’ of the design can be optimised accordingly.
If Siemens now implements this idea as quickly as possible, corresponding software version will perhaps be available in one or two years. If the designers and engineers are then trained accordingly, this will have an effect in another 5 to 10 years on the new vehicles appearing on the market. I am already making a mental note to take a close look at the cars of the future.

I learned from this:

• A ride in the eRod is a joy.
• Every product is designed first. If we can influence the design software, it will affect the products.
• We influence the future. That really works.