Technology Commercialization Assessment

Project: Future light duty vehicle regulations in Europe and the United States will require dramatic reductions in fuel consumption/CO2 emissions. The EU was planning on an emissions limit of 95 grams of CO2 per km (roughly 57 mpg for gasoline-powered vehicles) and the Obama Administration had recently proposed a 62-mpg standard for the US in 2025. These regulations would certainly lead to the adoption of efficiency-improving technologies. The question was which ones? Corning was researching several technologies that could be candidates for installation on cars sold after 2020. Publicly-known examples include lithium-air batteries for electric vehicles, thermoelectric generators for waste-heat recovery, and ultracapacitors for high-power Mild-HEV energy storage. Would these technologies be the right ones to help automakers meet future CO2 regulations? The SGE Immersion team examined: (a) what future automakers would be willing to pay for the last marginal gram eliminated from future cars (in dollars per gCO2) and (b) which technologies might be worthy of future investment, and why.