E-Mobility Engineering 015 l EMotive Scarab off-road truck dossier l In Conversation: Giulio Ornella l Hall effect and magnetic sensors focus l Challenge of batteries for heavy-duty EVs l Alpha Motor Corporation digest l Automated charging insight l HVAC systems focus

Dana Incorporated’s global VP of light vehicle electri ication explains how he merges the company’s engineers’ skills into e ective units. Rory Jackson reports Teams builder O ver the past 5 years, US auto parts maker Dana Incorporated has undergone a dramatic transformation since it entered the e-mobility market. Its acquisition and integration of companies such as TM4 and Pi Innovo, combined with internal development of skills critical to electric powertrain engineering, have resulted in it accumulating a portfolio of OEM customers. Moulding different teams with a myriad of scientific disciplines and cultures into a cohesive entity might seem a daunting task, but that is what Giulio Ornella has achieved since he joined Dana in 2012 as he has risen through the company to become vice- president of global engineering for light vehicle electrification in June 2021. Pulling together unfamiliar sets of hardware and jumping between engineering disciplines to achieve project targets was something he had become accustomed to by the time he moved to the US. He recounts that in his early childhood, in northern Italy, he was fascinated with computers (still a new consumer technology in the 1980s), and began programming at the age of 9 on his first PC. “I went on to study Computer Science and Electronics at the University of Padova, so it might seem odd that I’ve been far more deeply involved with automotive engineering for over 15 years now,” he says. “But the truth is I’ve always loved discovering new technologies, and watching how they evolve and shape the products of different industries. “So, by the end of my degree I’d already done a lot of training and consulting work, and I decided to move into automotive engineering simply because I felt I’d become a little too comfortable in computer sciences and wanted new challenges. Now though, in e-mobility, I’m incredibly lucky because I still get to stay on top of software developments and leverage them across r&d for new EV powertrain technologies, from design and simulation to analytics and management of test data.” His desire to try new things and tackle new engineering projects guided him through several of Italy’s top scientific educational establishments, and he has played possibly the biggest role in enabling Dana to grow and advance from its position as a newcomer in the EV space to becoming a world leader in electric powertrain manufacturing. While at university he wrote a thesis on automatic image recognition, which prompted one of his professors to recommend him to Carraro, one of Italy’s leading automotive and off-road Over his career, Ornella has spearheaded r&d into high-performance sportscar powertrains for various OEMs (Images courtesy of Dana Incorporated) 16 Autumn 2022 | E-Mobility Engineering