EV pivot: Mobility center plans charging hub near Detroit

Aug 10, 2023

Reuben Sarkar, CEO of American Center for Mobility in Ypsilanti, Mich., speaks Wednesday at the Center for Automotive Research’s Management Briefing Seminars.

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — The American Center for Mobility is working toward building out an electric vehicle charging hub at Willow Run, 44 miles west of Detroit, as it aims to further diversify from strictly autonomous vehicle testing.

The project at the vehicle test track would consist of installing up to 24 DC fast chargers of different makes and models and require an investment of between $4 million and $6 million, said Reuben Sarkar, president and CEO of the center.

Sarkar said he is pursuing federal grant money and commitments from charging manufacturers and automakers to scale the project, which could break ground as soon as the fall.

The charging hub seeks to provide automakers and charging manufacturers solutions to the issue of interoperability between different vehicles and charging systems. Michigan has relatively few varieties of chargers in operation and no single location where various types can be tested, Sarkar said.

Washington, D.C., has been the closest place for such testing, he said. At one point, the trip from Detroit to Washington served a dual purpose for automakers looking to also validate batteries, but it is not an efficient way to zero in on the interaction of car and charger.

"There is no place in Michigan you can go to have 30 different chargers of different makes and models, so where do you go?" Sarkar told Crain's Detroit Business on Wednesday after a presentation at the Center for Automotive Research's Management Briefing Seminars in Traverse City, Mich. Crain's is an affiliate of Automotive News.

The answer, Sarkar would hope, is the American Center for Mobility. The EV testbed is its latest attempt to provide more offerings than just testing of autonomous vehicles. The incoming hydrogen hub is another example.

AVs may be the future, but it remains a mystery how far out that future might be. As automaker spending on AVs took a backseat amid the EV boom, Sarkar sought to reposition the center to solve industry problems in the present.

"This is a starting point to deal with a tangible industry problem," he said. "My goal is that we would continue to invest in that EV testbed."

EV charging is one challenge of a broader infrastructure puzzle related to the deployment and adoption of EVs. It is such a vexing issue that it compelled General Motors and Ford Motor Co. to partner with Tesla — the industry juggernaut and perceived enemy of legacy automakers — on universal usage of charging stations.

Willow Run's EV charging hub would initially allow automakers and charging manufacturers to study the "handshake" between the car and charger, Sarkar said. They would be able to study how different battery platforms interact with different chargers and troubleshoot charging inefficiencies. The goal would eventually be to collect anonymized data so companies could see how they compare to the industry.

The cost to install a fast charger can be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, making it too expensive for automakers to want to do in-house, Sarkar said.

"If you're an auto, you're not going to invest in all that yourself," he said. "Hardware gets obsolete, you have to keep buying new things, and so it posed a good opportunity for the same thing we do — shared testing environment."

The center is applying for a matching grant from the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation with a value between $2 million and $3 million. Sarkar said he is also in talks with charger manufacturers to potentially provide equipment on consignment.

The EV testbed would hopefully lure more companies to the track and provide a stable revenue stream for a business that is infamously cyclical.

"It gives a meaningful offering in electrification," he said. "We've been focused on pivoting the business form connected and autonomous only, which is still very important, and we're taking very purposeful steps to unlocking bottlenecks and growing."

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