SIEMENS

I can understand why they called me here to this dark and deserted parking garage at the plant in the middle of the night — now that I see the vehicle in front of me in all its glory. Apparently, what I’m looking at is a milestone in the development of electric vehicles; a top car for a top price. At least that’s what the manufacturer says. One way or other, I’ll find out tonight whether that claim is true.

Maurice Lavell is my name. I work for a company called Henry Poiret in New York — an agency that was established around 20 years ago with the mission of optimizing ecological balance sheets. Today, it’s the world market leader for identifying the potential of recycling and material substitution. We offer our customers a very special service. Whether it’s small products such as electric toothbrushes, complete high-speed trains, or — as is the case today, electric cars — we analyze product prototypes down to the last nut and bolt. By doing so, we can, for example, determine if and how manufacturing costs can be reduced. One way of achieving this goal is to use as much recycled material as possible. Another is to employ alternatives that cost less than expensive conventional materials. Whatever the method, the aim is always to ensure that neither product quality nor performance suffer as a result.

Our business was transformed into a goldmine five years ago, when resource scarcity finally hit the market with full force and prices for materials such as copper, lithium, and aluminum went through the roof. But even those things are bargains compared to rare earths. So now, the greater the amount of recycled or alternative materials you use, the greater will be your competitive edge. Manufacturers of all types of things and from all over the world are now queueing up to do business with us, and we can hardly keep up with all the work.

One of our first contracts came from an industrial association that wanted us to develop a procedure for mass production of polyhydroxybutyrate, which is a plastic produced using a purple bacterium known as Paracoccus denitrificans. The bacterium accomplishes this feat by converting surplus carbohydrates into fatty acids and then linking them in long molecular chains. We used our high-powered computers to adjust some parameters in a virtual bioreactor until we were able to increase the stability of the plastic. The result of our work was a material that can be produced in any desired amount. It can even replace metals in certain applications. This success made us famous overnight.

The plastic can be used in a wide range of applications. For example, every new-generation streetcar today has a high percentage of the green polymer built into its structure. The rest of a streetcar mainly consists of materials that are fully recyclable — thanks to the sophisticated recycling methods that have been developed and patented by my team for a large number of substances.

But let’s stick with the streetcar example. We utilized a special assessment method that allowed us to reduce tram operating costs in nearly all major European cities by equipping the streetcars with extremely efficient sandwich-structure batteries. As a result of this development, the trams can travel great distances without the need for an overhead line. They can also operate autonomously until they return to recharge their batteries at night. Naturally, this is done using electricity from renewable sources — and thus without producing CO₂ emissions — which is particularly cheap at night.

It goes without saying that we had to search for alternative materials for the batteries. Not surprisingly, lithium became very much in demand — and therefore costly — after electric vehicles began to dominate the scene. In fact, we received a request from the United Nations a few months ago to find such an alternative. Luckily, we had just put our new quantum computer into operation a few weeks earlier; otherwise it would have been extremely difficult for us to meet this request. In the course of just a few days, the computer’s sophisticated software virtually built and simulated hundreds of thousands of electrodes with different metal combinations until we found a mixture whose properties were closest to those of lithium.

I suspect that this alternative material has probably found its way into the batteries that power the fancy car in front of me. Which brings me back to today’s job.

I’m supposed to check out the E-Ston Boiteaux, which according to E-Captions — its manufacturer — offers the best value for money on the market. Up until now, that has been the unchallenged claim of Wheel-E, which is ECaptions’ main competitor in the vehicle’s price segment. It is therefore not really so surprising that Wheel-E asked me to take a close look at the new car and demonstrate that E-Captions is making a false claim. For this particular job, I’m using specially-developed, foldable e-paper that enables me to analyze the material composition of the vehicle. Wheel-E transferred the electric car’s 3D data onto the paper for me. The company was able to get it thanks to a law stipulating that competitors are allowed to demand such data if there’s reasonable suspicion that someone might be violating the rules of fair competition. Optical sensors and intelligent software compare my field and angle of vision with the virtual data. This enables the display to show a cross-section of the exact spot I am holding the paper against. The material information contained in the vehicle data is then compared in real time with a database at our headquarters and analyzed.

I somehow have the feeling that it won’t take much time to get a result. At first glance, it seems as if E-Captions has done a good job. For example, the right amount of iron was used to reduce the cobalt content in the battery. The wheel hub motor’s synchronous magnet contains a perfectly mixed combination of neodymium, iron, and boron, which significantly reduces costs but still provides enough energy to ensure that the motor’s output isn’t reduced. It also appears that all statically irrelevant materials have been replaced with green polymers, and that all the remaining material has been recycled.

Just between us: Wheel-E will have its work cut out for it in the future. In my opinion, its rival’s electric speedster is ahead of its time. The only thing that could do with some adjusting, however, is the cockpit. More specifically, I think I’m the only one who should be allowed to sit in it.