14 March/April 2024 | E-Mobility Engineering Honda R&D Europe’s deputy GM talks with Rory Jackson about changing where EVs stand relative to the environment, the grid and the home Recharging communities A drive to understand how complex machines work can spur one towards a life of engineering and research across a diverse field of sciences, as Michael Fischer, deputy GM of Honda R&D Europe, has experienced. Today, he directs a team of predominantly e-mobility engineers at the Honda R&D facility in Offenbach, Germany, but his teenage years were taken up by a love of internal combustion engines, and the sophisticated mechanics by which they transformed chemical energy into shaft horsepower for cars and motorbikes. “Not long before I had to choose a university, and a degree discipline that my career and life path would follow, someone stole my motorbike,” Fischer recounts. “The police found it crashed into a small river, and in a really bad condition; the engine and electrics just didn’t work anymore. But I wanted to keep the bike, so that became my first big engineering project – disassembling the old powertrain, and then specifying and building a new one into the bike.” After half a year or so, the bike was running again, and it had become clear to the young Fischer that mechanical engineering was his calling. He soon enrolled at the Technical University (TU) of Darmstadt, beginning with fundamental mathematics and physics, and soon moving onto applied projects involving thermodynamics, mechanics and other specialist subjects. “A position soon opened at Honda R&D Europe, and because they work from a small but innovative research centre, with a very wide and open remit for developing new technologies, it was exactly what I’d been hoping for,” Fischer recounts. The position in question was as a research engineer for automotive powertrains, including more of the Diesel aftertreatment r&d that had captured Fischer’s interest at TU Darmstadt, but also Honda’s work in battery- and hybrid-electric powertrains, which by 2006 was already well under way. “By then, I had a dream target that I called ‘air in, air out’,” he muses. “I wanted what came out of cars’ tailpipes to have as little harmful emissions as the stuff going in. Literal zero-emission is challenging, but some use the term ‘zeroimpact emissions’, meaning a powertrain that does no harm to the environment.” Honda R&D Europe’s facilities feature extensive smart charging, hydrogen and other infrastructure, all aimed at making EVs more sustainable and useful for consumers (All images courtesy of Honda R&D Europe)
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