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MAHLE acquires Italian thermostat specialist

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MAHLE acquires Italian thermostat specialistStuttgart/Germany, September 4, 2018 – In August, the MAHLE Group acquired all the shares in the former joint venture Behr Thermot-tronik Italia S.p.A. (BTTI), which has been renamed MAHLE Behr Grugliasco S.p.A. with immediate effect. The former shareholders, MAHLE Behr Kornwestheim GmbH and Valtri S.p.A., jointly agreed to this step in order to pursue the long-term, future-oriented focus and successful ongoing development of BTTI.
Press release [PDF; 31 KB]Press release (Italian version) [PDF; 45 KB] Complete acquisition of Behr Thermot-tronik Italia (BTTI)Thermal management products of great strategic importance for MAHLETapping additional potential in the Italian marketAt its headquarters in Grugliasco near Turin in northern Italy, the company develops and produces a broad range of thermostat products for use in all vehicle classes. The employment contracts of the currently around 120 employees are expected to remain unchanged, and no physical relocations are planned. “We are delighted that the employees of BTTI will now belong fully to MAHLE. Their skills and experience will secure the successful development of MAHLE Behr Grugliasco and therefore also of MAHLE,” says Bernd Eckl, Member of the Management Board and responsible for the Thermal Management business unit at MAHLE.
BTTI’s products are already an important component of MAHLE’s portfolio, as complex thermal management tasks within the vehicle can only be realized by intelligently controlling the energy flows that arise. Control systems such as map controlled thermostats ensure precise temperature regulation tuned to meet demand and thus promote more efficient operation, reduced consumption, less wear, and lower emissions.
“Aside from the technological aspect, MAHLE also benefits from the BTTI team’s excellent reputation, extensive expertise, and outstanding customer relationships in the Italian market. This applies both to the original equipment and the spare parts businesses,” says Arnd Franz, Member of the Management Board and responsible for Automotive Sales and Application Engineering as well as for the Aftermarket business unit at MAHLE.
As a result of the acquisition, the Italian thermostat specialist will now benefit fully from the systems competence and global network of the MAHLE supplier group.
“For us, it was important to offer employees long-term, futureoriented prospects. We believe that MAHLE’s acquisition offers the best opportunity for BTTI to continue developing successfully,” says Franco Triberti, representative of the former shareholder family.
In turn, MAHLE is expanding its strategically significant thermal management product portfolio. Efficient thermal management is becoming increasingly important, irrespective of the powertrain configuration. In internal combustion drives, the cooling system plays an important part in making vehicles even more efficient. For electric vehicles, the economical use of hot and cold flows is the basis for performance, cruising range, and service life. Integrated, efficient, and intelligent thermal management is therefore a prerequisite for e-mobility.
Behr Thermot-tronik Italia was created in 1997 from Behr Thomson Italia. Since it was founded, the joint venture has worked closely with Behr Thermot-tronik’s other entities. These have already been fully integrated in the MAHLE Group for some time as part of MAHLE’s majority acquisition of Behr in 2013.
About MAHLEMAHLE is a leading international development partner and supplier to the automotive industry as well as a pioneer for the mobility of the future. The MAHLE Group is committed to making transportation more efficient, more environmentally friendly, and more comfortable by continuously optimizing the combustion engine, driving forward the use of alternative fuels, and laying the foundation for the worldwide introduction of e-mobility. The group’s product portfolio addresses all the crucial issues relating to the powertrain and air conditioning technology—both for drives with combustion engines and for e-mobility. MAHLE products are fitted in at least every second vehicle worldwide. Components and systems from MAHLE are also used off the road—in stationary applications, for mobile machinery, rail transport, as well as marine applications.
In 2017, the group generated sales of approximately EUR 12.8 billion with about 78,000 employees and is represented in more than 30 countries with 170 production locations. At 16 major research and development centers in Germany, Great Britain, Luxembourg, Spain, Slovenia, the USA, Brazil, Japan, China, and India, around 6,100 development engineers and technicians are working on innovative solutions for the mobility of the future.
For further information, contact: MAHLE GmbH
Margarete Dinger
Corporate Communications/Public Relations
Pragstraße 26–46
70376 Stuttgart/Germany
Phone: +49 711 501-12369
Fax: +49 711 501-13700
margarete.dinger@mahle.com

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Tesla is a ‘hope stock’ that is ‘just not real,’ fund manager says

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3:58 AM ET Tue, 28 Aug 2018 | 03:42

Tesla is a “hope stock” with little chance of success in the car-manufacturing industry, a fund manager told CNBC on Tuesday.

“Are we living in the real world?” Tesla is just another one of those hope stocks,” Peter Toogood, chief investment officer at The Embark Group, said on CNBC's “Squawk Box Europe.”

Tesla's share price took a nosedive Monday after the company's Chief Executive Elon Musk abruptly halted plans to take the firm private.

Musk had shocked investors on August 7 by announcing his aim to remove Tesla from the stock market at $420 per share. The firm's shares have shed almost 16 percent off their value since.

Days after that initial announcement, Musk said that Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund had approached him “multiple times” about taking the firm off the public market, lifting hopes that Tesla could raise some much-needed cash to help its drive toward profitability. Such hopes of a Saudi deal have waned since Musk's U-turn on taking Tesla private.

Joshua Lott | Getty Images
Elon Musk

Despite Toogood's bearish thoughts on Tesla's auto manufacturing abilities, the analyst said there was “hope” for the firm in its self-driving technology.

“The only bit that has got hope is the autonomous driving,” Toogood said, adding, “(but) the idea to compete on a platform basis with cars; it's losing money every time it sells one.”

The investment manager said that the lack of a network for servicing Tesla cars was also a point of concern. Some international customers, for instance, have bemoaned repair waiting times, as parts need to be shipped from overseas.

“He's losing money every time he sells a car today, and he can't service them,” Toogood said. “Ask Norway, they can't actually get the car serviced because there's no network to service them. It's just not real.”

Norway is considered an electric vehicle-friendly country due to subsidies aimed at improving affordability and an overall target of going all-electric by 2025.

“Tesla continues to be a transformational company, especially on Model 3 production and demand,” Daniel Ives, chief strategy officer and head of technology research at GBH Insights, told CNBC in an email Tuesday.

“However, this last month has been a nightmare for Tesla bulls and the Street continues to put the company in the investor penalty box, given all the uncertainty surrounding the name in the near-term with the going-private fiasco front and center. At this point there are more questions than answers on Tesla.”

Tesla's stock price target was cut by a number of brokers on Monday and Tuesday, including CFRA, Independent Research and Canaccord Genuity.

Musk is the largest investor in Tesla, owning almost a fifth of the company's shares. Market observers have expressed worries over his leadership, citing the executive's presence on Twitter, involvement in public issues and general disdain for the media as causes for concern.

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  Meet Martti, the Finnish Robocar That Uses 5G 30 Aug

Photo: VTT

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VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and mobile giant Nokia have joined forces to determine how 5G networks can transmit information to and from vehicles while on the road. To do this, they are testing the capabilities of 5G network technologies when combined with VTT’s robot car, called Martti.

The research is the combined effort of a consortium of Finnish companies and research institutes, including VTT and Nokia. As part of the 5G-SAFE project, researchers are studying what kind of novel road safety services, such as road condition and real-time incident information, 5G will enable for supporting autonomous driving.

These road safety services will rely on sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) devices to collect data from a robocar’s LiDAR, radar, video systems and roadside infrastructure such as weather stations, traffic cameras, and traffic lights. These devices will communicate over 5G networks to cloud-based services and algorithms for processing information and alerts to other vehicles in the area.

Researchers have been working to bring the data processing closer to the vehicles by the means of edge computing for reduced latencies and improved scalability, according to Tiia Ojanperä, Senior Scientist and Project Manager at VTT. Now they are implementing the solutions into real 5G test networks and vehicular platforms for validation.

“We were running the first pilot in June, where VTT’s robot car ‘Martti’ was connected to a 5G test network available in a vehicle test track in Sodankylä, Finland,” said Ojanperä said in an email interview. “The test network in question was still pre-5G, and waiting for real 5G capabilities that will be deployed once the equipment (i.e. network devices and user terminals) is commercially available.”

In the pilot, VTT’s robot car Martti was used to test the ability to detect obstacles and grooves in the road by the means of collaborative sensing. The demo was based on the transmission of 16-layer LiDAR sensor data on a 12.5 Hz frequency from another test vehicle to VTT’s MEC server located in the 5G-test network. The MEC server hosted an algorithm, which optimized Martti’s route.

The second and most recent test VTT and Nokia jointly conducted in August involved a similar communication of Martti’s sensor data to a server via Nokia’s prototype 5G equipment.

For as long as 5G networks have been on the horizon, observers have speculated about the main applications for these new networks, including certain automotive applications. Recently, experts have questioned whether it’s practical to use 5G for autonomous vehicles when mobile coverage of all the remote and rural roads is so limited.

The 5G-SAFE research project has incorporated this coverage limitation into their strategy in building out the technology.

“In the project, we assume that multiple radio technologies (e.g. 5G, 4G, ITS G5 or even satellite) will eventually be used in implementing the services, as not all the 5G capabilities (low latency, high bandwidth, etc.) will be available everywhere the vehicles travel,” said Ojanperä. “The idea is to select the most appropriate means of communication dynamically among the available ones. Also, the services will need to be adapted to the network capabilities, and in some remote or rural areas, only a subset of the features and information may be available.”

While this strategy may address coverage issues, questions remain about what aspects of driving could be safely handled over a 5G network as opposed to within the car's computers. Ojanperä believes that 5G-enabled distributed cloud services, such as the ones developed in the 5G-SAFE project, and direct vehicle-to-vehicle communication can essentially provide more knowledge to connected and automated vehicles of their surroundings to improve safety.

“One of the biggest benefits [of 5G networks] is edge computing and its enabled distributed crowd-sourcing opportunities,” said Ojanperä. “Edge computing is not access technology dependent, but the broad bandwidth of 5G makes it useful by enabling real-time local dynamic map updates and communicating even raw sensor data between vehicles via intelligent infrastructure.”

Ojanperä concedes that vehicles will still need to function without this additional information if the connection to the services is lost. In those situations, Ojanperä says the vehicles will have to rely on their own sensors with a limited range or implement some fail-safe functionality, like stop operation, when connectivity has been lost.

With the test environments and communication solutions in place, the next step will be to develop more advanced intelligence on top of the collected vehicular data, according to Ojanperä.

Ojanperä added: “It is not a big secret that real-time and reliable data is the oil, which enables machine-learning algorithms to make cars and transport systems evermore intelligent. Connectivity is the key enabling technology for pushing forward the transport automation mega-trend.”

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