OEMs Deny Suppliers the Limelight

October 1, 2018

Lindsay Brooke

They were like ships passing in the night — the OEM and its tech partner, one day apart.

First came Toyota, with a Class-8 tractor-trailer powered by its latest 675-hp hydrogen fuel cell. The big rig, its sides emblazoned with a “Creating a Zero-Emissions World” banner, glided quietly to a halt outside the CAR Management Briefing Seminar in northern Michigan last July. Only its 18 tires and air brakes announced its presence.

The nearly silent entry impressed all who had gathered to learn about this clean-running giant. Toyota’s chief engineer on the program, Andrew Lund, gave a brief talk about this ‘Beta’ Project Portal 2.0, the vehiclemaker’s latest step in developing a hydrogen-fueled ZEV solution for trucks operating in the busy, exhaust-choked Port of Long Beach. The advanced testbed, with its pair of Toyota Mirai fuel cell stacks, was the most important news of the conference, in my view.

Then came Ricardo, in a press release distributed the next day.

The legendary British engineering consultancy graciously thanked Toyota for their “successful collaboration” on the project. It also detailed Ricardo’s major role in the fuel-cell truck’s design, testing and development. Ricardo engineers and technicians at the company’s Detroit Tech Campus spent hundreds of man-hours, I’m told, integrating systems, providing packaging solutions and routing the many new electrical subsystems onto the truck’s CAN bus. Ricardo essentially built both the Beta truck and its Alpha predecessor.

If you’re wondering why Toyota didn’t eagerly invite Chris Brockbank, Ricardo’s VP of vehicle engineering, to co-present their joint effort at a high-profile event, you’re not alone. In fact, I’ve been asking OEMs for years why they choose not to include key suppliers at their new product launches. It’s one of the most professionally discourteous, and counter-productive, aspects of the industry’s business model.

And it needs to change, as the industry becomes even more collaborative — by necessity — to survive.

OEMs direct the sourcing and write the checks, so they control the message at launch. And that means little or no acknowledgement of vital supplier technology contributions. Contracts typically muzzle suppliers’ own publicity initiatives. When they’re finally cleared to talk publicly about their work, it’s usually months after launch. The “buzz” surrounding the product is gone. Impact potential is lost. This is absurd.

OEMs do honor their suppliers, of course. There are internal award galas for vendors who exceed their customers’ expectations. Semi-private external events, such as the annual PACE Awards and SPE Automotive Awards, serve a similar role. The speeches gush about collaboration — “and we couldn’t have done this without our supplier partners.” So why not include those invaluable partners who serve as your extended engineering, development, and R&D team, when you roll out the new product?

Automotive Engineering believes in crediting suppliers for their achievements, although we often have to dig deep for the information — such as earlier this year when we broke the news of FCA using Magneti-Marelli’s and Continental’s 48-volt hybrid systems in the 2019 Ram 1500. Researching background for this month’s interview with Dr. Ben Patel, I found a Tenneco press release. It reported that the company’s CVSA2 suspension is available on Mercedes-Benz’s new G-Class — the first SUVs to offer the technology.

Mercedes’ media kit for the G-Class makes no mention of Tenneco. It’s been a very long time since automakers engineered such systems — and delivered them to themselves.