Consumer demands for health and safety will drive automaker priorities post-COVID-19, Nikolai Ardey, executive director of Volkswagen Group Innovation said Tuesday.
In a fireside chat with Automotive News publisher Jason Stein for the virtual EcoMotion conference, Ardey discussed unique demands coming from customers as a result of the pandemic. He called one of these demands “cocooning,” a growing interest in individually owned vehicles that provide a safer mode of transportation given health and hygiene concerns.
“We have observed, at first, a renaissance of individual mobility,” Ardey said. “All the safety and security features we have in mind or in preparation are accelerated now in development. The whole topic of health care will get a more intensive meaning now.”
These customer demands might influence in-vehicle technology development, Ardey said, such as health-monitoring and biometric technologies.
Ardey also talked about the culture of startups, which he says seem to be struggling amid COVID-19.
“Some of them are in really, heavy trouble. They need help,” Ardey said. “In general, this is something which we’d like to improve — to have more open access to them and give them more easy access to us.”
Ardey also acknowledged the importance of these startups for traditional automakers around the globe.
VW’s Konnect innovation hub in Tel Aviv, for instance, is one part of the automaker’s effort to tap into the talents of the global startup scene.
“There’s huge economic pressure which also hits us, limits our resources in order to invest into venture capital,” Ardey said. But nevertheless, “They have a culture of innovation, of development, of R&D, of making decisions, which is far from how we are doing things. With a lot of committees, to have to pass a lot of decision-makers, it’s rather complicated to take positions in a company of a size like VW.
“It’s amazing to see how these startups, how agile they are, how fast they are and how engaged they are. They put so much emphasis and effort into their stuff — they’re really burning for it. This is something which, hopefully, infects us,” Ardey said.
As far as industry lessons learned from the crisis, Ardey said taking advantage of available technology and listening to consumer demands are critical.
“I think we would learn to better utilize the digital stuff, so we learn how to handle it and get used to it. This will definitely enrich our working culture now. Of course, this is something I would like to have had earlier, before the crisis, already in place,” Ardey said.
“In terms of innovation, I don’t see a big difference there, except the topics which we are focusing on now, with the health care topics and hygienic topics and issues. The ‘cocooning’ demands of our customers are new for us, so they wouldn’t have been there if not for the crisis.”
