Weekly Meeting - September 25: The Auto Future / Wild to Wilder

Speaker: David E. Cole co-founded AutoHarvest, an on-line meeting place for innovators of all types with an interest in advanced manufacturing intellectual property, in 2012 and serves as Chairman of its Board. He is Chairman Emeritus of the Center for Automotive Research, which he spun off from the University of Michigan in 2003 as an independent non-profit organization; prior to that, it was housed in the University’s Transportation Research Institute  as the Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation. In February 1986, he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Automotive Engineers. He is the 2000 recipient of the Horace H. Rackham Medal, the highest award given by the Engineering Society of Detroit, which had elected him as a fellow in 1990. He has been a fellow of the Society of Mechanical Engineers since 2009 and was elected to the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2014. He holds B.S.M.E., M.S.M.E., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan and is an Emeritus Professor in its Department of Mechanical Engineering.

The hallmark of the automotive industry today is its struggle to manage the transition to autonomous vehicles, as well as electrified vehicle platforms, which both require immense capital investment and significant realignment of production capacity without tangible immediate returns. Our speaker will provide us with a contemporary picture of this amazingly dynamic and important industry.

The innovations which are reshaping it are facilitated by incubators such as AutoHarvest.

AutoHarvest provides a neutral and global on-line meeting place for innovators of all types with an interest in advanced manufacturing. Its interest group consists of over 300 prominent R&D and manufacturing organizations from industry, government and academia. Its platform allows users of all types to showcase capabilities, technologies, and needs system-wide. It also enables them to then privately connect with fellow inventors and commercializers to explore technology and business development opportunities of mutual interest.