S02E06: Building the Car of the FutureLouise de Laat (00:00):
A group of 35 students that never worked with each other and never built a car before, and we
still accomplished to develop this car in less than one year.
Kyle Fox (00:26):
This is A Smarter World podcast focusing on breakthrough technologies that make ourconnected world better, safer, and more secure. I'm host Kyle Fox. Each episode we introduce
bright minds in their approach to a more sustainable world. We discuss the opportunities andchallenges they face and how technology can change the world for the better. For today's
episode, I'm joined by Louise de Laat, the Team Manager of TU/ecomotive. This is a student
team, which is based in Eindhoven University that challenges the automotive industry byimplementing cutting edge innovations from within and outside the automotive industry into
proof of concept cars. Each year a team of students is tasked with creating concepts for uniquesustainable car. In 2022, for example, the team created the ZEM, zero emission mobility EV that
actually captures CO2 straight out of the air. It cleans the air as it drives. This year's concept car
will be revealed in just a few weeks and I'm hoping Louise is able to tease a little bit about what
we can expect. Hi Louise, and welcome to the pod.
Louise de Laat (01:30):
Hi, Kyle. Thank you.
Kyle Fox (01:31):
I am so excited to talk to you today and learn more about what you do over in TU/ecomotive.
It's a really cool group, right? It's a group of students that's making a real impact. So can you tell
us a little bit more about what TU/ecomotive does and how you got involved?
Louise de Laat (01:45):
Yeah, maybe it's cool to tell a little bit more about what a student team exactly because fromour journey there are a lot of people that get mixed up with oh, this is just a group of students
that are working from a lecturer of a facility from the university. But no, we are really a selforganized origin that is really working with setting up the team 'til touring with the vehicle that
we made. And so this is a nonprofit organization where technical University of Eindhoven is oneof our sponsors likewise as NXP. Every year a new group of students within TU/ecomotive canwork on the challenge on what is your future concept of sustainability and mobility and[inaudible] was really focusing on CO2 neutrality in general. How can we make a CO2 neutral carfrom head to toe in all the life phases of the vehicle?

(02:40):
And I first got involved by a silly WhatsApp question in one of the student WhatsApp groupwhere I'm in, "Hey, we are really looking to have an account manager in team." And I was like,"Okay." And I already experienced something of accounting in my previous jobs that I had, so
let's do it. And eventually ...
Kyle Fox (03:01):
You said yes.
Louise de Laat (03:43):
Yeah, I said yes and it turned out that I also could be a very nice team lead. So I got chosen as ateam lead of the whole student team and it was a group of 35 students that never worked witheach other and never built a car before, and we still accomplished to develop this car in lessthan one year.
Kyle Fox (03:21):
It's amazing. I really liked what you said. People's first impressions might be oh hey, this is abunch of students getting together. What are they going to be able to accomplish? But I think itsounds like that's the power in what y'all have done is these innovative young ideas that come into be able to build these cars. And as you pointed out, they're not just creating PowerPoint cars,
they're actually building real metal and real wheels that are going on the road.
Louise de Laat (03:43):
Yeah, indeed. I see us as the underdogs that challenge the industries. Right now really would liketo shake up the car manufacturing industry by showcasing what is possible because still we are avery small team, we didn't have many resources such as time and money, but that is not an
excuse to hold you up in your innovations.
Kyle Fox (04:05):
I always root for the underdog myself. So let's unpack a little bit about what you and your teamaccomplished. As I understand you are the team manager for last year's ZEM car, so I want to go
right to it. Tell me more about that. I'm excited. How does a car clean the air?
Louise de Laat (04:19):
So ZEM stands for zero emission mobility and the focus points that we had was for ZEM to be
zero to neutral on all life phases of the vehicle. So from the car manufacturing, the driving, andthe end of life of the vehicle itself. And among those three different phases, we developeddifferent types of technologies. One of them was in the car manufacturing mainly based about
additive manufacturing, so 3D printing the whole chassis of the vehicle, but also the body panelsfrom already recycled granulates. So the material that you use for printing, and because it was
already recycled and we 3D printed the components, you can recycle it in a very closed loop andwithout having waste within the manufacturing and also in end of life.
(05:06):And during the driving phase, yes, indeed we developed a technology that has the superpower
to clean the air of CO2 while driving. That was very controversial. People thought this ... Like theother way around, right? It has the ability because on the front behind the grill we developed
the technology that is the CO2 capture, a filter while wind is driving towards the front of ZEM, it
will go through a gap and within that gap, the filters behind it and then the air, what flows tothat filter gets cleaned from CO2 and gas from CO2 will stick in that filter, and then clean air will
come behind the filter. And when the filter is saturated, we can clean the filter while charging
ZEM because ZEM is also an electric vehicle. While cleaning, the CO2 gets extracted from a filter,so the filter is empty again and can be reused, but the CO2 that you capture from the filter canalso be reused. And that is a whole new world because CO2 right now in gas forms can berecycled or reused for making carbon materials for feeding the plants.
Kyle Fox (06:20):
You put a ram scoop behind each wheel to pull the air in and now you're filtering it. It almost
feels like an oil change for a gasoline powered vehicle, but in this case you're changing out thefilters with real carbon in it.
Louise de Laat (06:27):
Yeah, indeed. So you also get a blink on your [inaudible] port, note the cars need to review it.
Now you get a blink in our ZEM vehicle with you need to empty the CO2 filter to regenerate theCO2 that you captured.
Kyle Fox (06:40):
There's lot to talk about how to make things carbon neutral, reduce the carbon in the overall
manufacturing cycle, and y'all certainly have gone very far on that, 3D printed materials. I also
noted that the leather in the car itself is vegan, made from pineapples.
Louise de Laat (06:54):
Yeah, indeed. Pineapple waste.
Kyle Fox (06:56):

In essence, you're growing your own leather, right? It's amazing to think about it in terms of it's
not enough to have the materials be manufactured, you've actually got to do something thathas a net positive, or I should say negative benefit, on how much carbon is in the air itself. So
the device itself, in this case a car, has to participate after it's been manufactured in pullingcarbon away.
Louise de Laat (07:15):
Yeah, you have thresholds throughout all the life phase because we calculated our footprint of
the vehicle itself from all those different life phases, also stimulated the behaviors of thevehicle. What you see is that you have an offset already in car manufacturing and we tried tolower that as much as possible with new technologies such as the additive manufacturing, which
we're already reusing recyclable materials and then still, we saw that the offset is still too high,so we need to come up with a technology that can restore that offset. So ZEM is a bidirectional
vehicle so it can give energy but also capture energy, or the grids by that. But then still we saw
okay, we need to do something with capturing CO2 out of the air.
(08:02):
It was a very crazy idea. We made it into reality. There's still a very concept based technology atthe end of life, we saw the keys to reusability like reuse a lot of components. We also reuse awhole infotainment system off of partners. It can still be sexy to have secondhand materials inyour fancy looking car because it is still like huh, do you have a secondhand entertainment
system? Yeah, it can still be sexy. The car nowadays could be more sexier with a lot of recyclable
and reusable materials than everything new, new, new.
Kyle Fox (08:35):
Well, you make it a brag point instead of something you want to hide. Check out what this car
can do.
Louise de Laat (08:38):
Yes.
Kyle Fox (08:38):
I totally get it. It's getting me excited about it. I'm sure we could spend another hour on how you
might unpack this technology into all different types of things that move, trains, planes,
automobiles. But what really came to my head is that the more you drive, the better it is for theenvironment, which is counterintuitive in the gasoline powered vehicle mindset. Amazing.
(08:58):

We've talked about your team and we talked a little bit about the reuse of infotainment, thatsort of thing, and I saw that you are working pretty closely with different sponsors. Obviously,
this is going to be very collaborative to bring these concepts to life and one of those sponsors is
NXP. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you're doing with NXP? How's thatcollaboration going?
Louise de Laat (09:16):
So NXP is already our long-lasting sponsor because they worked with us in the early stages when
we started as a student team and they already know all the generations that we had. And
because they know already us, they like to challenge us also, so that's something that I really like
about the attitude that we have together with NXP because we really would like to set up thebar high and higher again to keep the innovation as high as possible. To get more in detail, we
work a lot with the microcontrollers of NXP such as the LPC11C24, which is the beating heart ofeach vehicle with the embedded sulfur and canned communication. Also with the electronics
that we have from other partners such as [inaudible] with the side view mirror. We also see that
had an NXP microcontroller in it.
(10:12):
So we really could integrate all those functions together, but it really started already in the earlyphase of our concepts, so NXP is one of the first sponsor where we really like to [inaudible]
because they know already us a lot, they already know our mistakes that we made in the bus,
and they really can help us also with hands on tackling challenges, et cetera. So we also workwith the [inaudible] board on the small prototyping and already testing the electronics in a very
early stage of [inaudible] car development, but still because we have just that small time spentof developing the full vehicle, NXP like to work also with us on that high level. So yeah, that isreally nice.
Kyle Fox (10:54):
So been along for the entire journey. I realize I talked so much about the carbon capture, theZEM vehicle, but you kind of hit nail on the head, you've done seven of these. So in addition towhat you did last year, which we've unpacked, you've created some very unique sustainablecars over the years and I'm assuming they each have their own revolutionary concept. This is
why we're building it and why you should care. So let's spend a little bit of time on that. Can you
highlight a couple more in this lineage of cars you've built that you're particularly proud of andthe problems they're solving?
Louise de Laat (11:25):
Yeah, in the first three years for student team, we competed in the Shell Eco Marathon, so ourvehicles were developed to be as light and efficient as possible, efficiently in terms of the energy
use while driving in the vehicle and also with the weight distribution of the vehicle itself. But wesaw that competition also had a lot of restrictions that hold us up in our innovations that wewant to develop. We really would like to step out of the box by really making very sustainable
vehicles, such as one of the first vehicles was Noah. Noah was a fully circular vehicle, which wasmade out a sandwich panel at Chelsea, and the sandwich panel was flux, it was a bio fiber with ahoneycomb structure of a sugar. So sugar and then the POA size, and then that was the
structural component of the vehicle itself and it was freely circular. Then we had Luca, and theychanged the honeycomb structure with PET, PET bottles. So Luca was really focusing on how can
we make cars out of waste.
Kyle Fox (12:29):
You just described the materials that you would make out of waste, like literally take somethingthat we've discarded and turn it into something we care about.
Louise de Laat (12:37):
Yeah, indeed. And that was also our challenge because what are you going to make after a Luca
concept and vehicle? Because Luca itself was a very cute yellow vehicle and already had that
great attention, international but also national, with all the publications that they had. And thenyeah, we started after COVID with a new team and then still, what are we going to do? And we
saw that now currently in Europe, but also internationally there are a lot of problems in terms of
the emissions that we have and how can we reduce those. And we saw that the car
manufacturers right now are very focused on the driving phase of the vehicle, make that green
as possible, but they lose track of the manufacturing and the end of life because what are wegoing to do with all those batteries? Do we think about the recyclability and the reusability
aspect of it and those kind of things. Also, the friction with pollution of the car tires because
electric fuels.
Kyle Fox (13:40):
Oh, yeah.
Louise de Laat (13:41):
Get heavier. That was also a little bit the trigger of making ZEM like showcasing what is possible
in reaching suture neutrality.
Kyle Fox (13:47):
That makes sense because the world has an e-waste problem with just lithium ion batteries
coming from the phones that we've been building and ...

Louise de Laat (13:53):
Yeah.
Kyle Fox (13:54):
We're just going to make that just a little bit more challenging by putting in much larger battery
stacks into all these cars and what do you do with it? Interesting.
(14:03):
So your teams have built seven cars, right? With an eighth on the way, and as you've been
describing this, I'm just thinking about how incredible that pace of innovation is. What's themost challenging part here? It would seem that there's a bit of a time element involved withhow long the students themselves can implement a project. They've got their academic careers
to deal with and they may be graduating, that sort of thing. Or is it simply coming up with new
ideas each year? What's the biggest challenge here for you?
Louise de Laat (14:28):
I think we know how to build cars, so that is something that we've already proven and we canalso learn from the past years that we created vehicles within TU/ecomotive. But I think what
you've already recognized is that having those new innovative concepts over and over again,that is something where the new team is also struggling with, but we still see that when thepressure is very high to come up with a very innovative concept, you still can accomplish
something great and that is something that we for sure already proved in our ZEM vehicle and I
strongly believe that the next team is also going to do that with their new vehicle.
Kyle Fox (15:06):
Clearly, and so I've realized this is top secret, and of course, we'd love to have a scoop on this,but this next concept, car number eight that's under works, my understanding is it will be
revealed in July of 2023, so just right around the corner. Any chance you can give us a little hintof what it'll be? Even just a slight touch of what it might be? Or is it completely top secret andwe just need to wait?
Louise de Laat (15:28):
Yeah, this is a combination of both. I really would like to give the team the full pleasure of
revealing the full concept, and maybe in another podcast next year. They're also going to tour inEurope together with NXP. They're going to travel along the roads to showcase their vehicle inEurope. I don't want to spoil too much, but they are really going to step up a little bit more on
our reusability and recyclability.

Kyle Fox (15:53):
I will not be the one responsible for revealing the hard work of a bunch of students too early. So
I will be watching for the announcement with bated breath. You hit on something that I wasgoing to ask you. I was going to ask you, does the team ever hit the road with these prototypes?
But it sounds like you were saying touring Europe. It's not like you're just sticking this in ashowroom and having people come to you, you're putting these wheels out there. Can people
outside of Eindhoven or even the Netherlands, can they witness this firsthand? How does that
work?
Louise de Laat (16:17):
Yeah, so we have our test tracks at the university ourselves where we build and develop ourown vehicles. You can also test there freely because our cars are not road legal approved andthat is because of the new technologies that we developed ourselves and tested also in thatearly stage in our vehicles. So we couldn't get the road legalness within the time spent of ourconcept. We tour a lot with our vehicles to events, also on test circuits. We did that in the
United States with ZEM, for example, at the TMC track, so that was really cool.
Kyle Fox (16:50):
Thank you so much for all the details here and what you're doing. It's incredible what your teamhas accomplished. You've got an interesting view of what's possible and what's not in theautomotive industry and it's not theoretically, you're actually building stuff. I would consider
you an expert to be able to answer this question. When you look at the current state of theautomotive industry, where do you see the biggest potential to make an impact? And I'll ask thehard question, is the automotive industry doing enough to create a more sustainable future?
Louise de Laat (17:18):
I think they have to because otherwise we are not going to buy their cars anymore. I'm
personally from the next generation and I strongly believe that we really need to challenge theindustry in terms of our consumer behaviors. No, I'm not going to buy a gasoline truck anymore
because it looks cool and it has a lousy noise. No, I'm now going to invest in cleaner vehicles,
and that is a little bit my point of view and I hope that there also more people are thinking thatway. But in terms of regulation as well, we see a lot of things happening right now in terms ofthe calculating your footprint and emissions that you make with your vehicle throughout the life
phase of the car itself.
(17:59):I think people need to prove right now that they really hit those CO2 neutrality targets and thatthey are working towards it. I see already a bit that people are working a lot in terms of
reusability and recyclability, bring it back again to see if you can recycle and reuse components.
What I'm seeing right now is that there's a big trend coming up of predictive maintenance, soyou can predict those batteries of that type of vehicle are on a certain type of level that we canrecycle it back, or newest additional vehicles or we are going to look for a new use case for thattype of battery.
Kyle Fox (18:40):
There's a very clear signal that it has changed and it's not necessarily coming from government
regulations or the corporations saying, "This is what we want to do." It's the people themselvesthat are asking the questions and saying, "I'm not going to put up with this. I'm going to makeemployment decisions. I'm going to make product decisions. I'm going to make lifestyledecisions that are based on ...," what you being the person creating the product or service orwhatever is doing for sustainability. And that movement gives me a lot of hope as this next
generation takes over the reins.
Louise de Laat (19:10):
Same. Because if we really need to wait on the industry itself and all those regulation of
government level international, nationally, I think it will take us too long. All the steps that weare making right now as a consumer, I think it has a big impact for our future. So I'm totallyagreeing with you, Kyle, and that also gives me some hope.
Kyle Fox (19:32):
That's a lot of hope. And so before we close, the question we always ask our guest is I'd like tohear from you, how do you envision what this greener world looks like 50 years from now?
Louise de Laat (19:44):
Yeah, I hope to see more technologies that can capture CO2 or other types of emissions out of
the air while using a type of service or project. I hope to see also a lot of recyclability andreusability, and the trends that were already indicated, Kyle, that people are stepping up more
now within our own beliefs and our own values. I hope that we can do that more closely witheach other, so more interconnections among countries from Europe to America, et cetera, andthat we can make some big steps throughout sustainability together because you cannot do italone, and that's something where I really hope for the future.
Kyle Fox (20:22):
Well, your passion on this is coming in loud and clear, and as I said, it gives me hope because
you are not just saying the words, you're doing something about it. And I think of this as aninterconnected web of influence and people that are inspired. Your students think what they'regoing to do when they hit the working world and what their friends do and their coworkers, andit just spreads, and that gives me a lot of hope. So you've done something wonderful here andit's an honor to have a chance to talk with you about it and understand a little more about what
your team has accomplished, and I am waiting with bated breath to see what car number eightis going to do. So maybe we'll have you back on the show in the near future to talk about that.
That will be amazing. Thank you for being here with us, for taking our listeners through yourjourney, and giving us some hope for the future.
Louise de Laat (21:21):
Yes, great.
Kyle Fox (21:21):
We'll see you on the next one.