Accelerating the
drive toward a
more-sustainable
automotive industry
BorgWarner shifts gears to electric vehicle propulsion and a clean, energy-efficient future.
HOW COULD
THE SHIFT
FROM ENGINE-BASED
PROPULSION BE SUPERCHARGED?
The Situation
Harry Husted, chief technology officer for BorgWarner, and his Advanced Engineering team spend their days looking at the horizon—a horizon that moves with the evolving automotive industry. In 2021, BorgWarner introduced their accelerated electrification strategy, called Charging Forward. Husted and the company could see where it needed to go. But how would they get there?
“Our vision really centers around mobility and making the automotive industry more sustainable,” says Husted. “And as we’ve looked at what that means to us right now, it means being innovative and leaning into the electrification of the vehicle propulsion in the car.”
Charging Forward was a strategic pivot for BorgWarner that’s intended to expand its portfolio of eProducts while maintaining a combustion portfolio optimized for lower-carbon emissions. The company started making significant investments in electric vehicle (EV) technology. These investments included acquisitions around charging infrastructure, which represented a leap into a new market for BorgWarner.
The 100-year-old company had always been under the hood of vehicles. Charging infrastructure would shift BorgWarner to the cloud. Husted notes, “With cloud-connectedness comes new opportunities,” and the need for stationary DC—essentially fast chargers for EVs—is growing as more EVs hit the market. Currently, there are few players in the automotive industry who can own the end-to-end EV experience, from driver’s seat to charging mechanism. For BorgWarner, this was more than an advancement in technology—it would be an entirely new line of business.
THE SOLVE
DRIVING A SHIFT
FROM UNDER THE
HOOD TO UP IN
THE CLOUD
The Impact
In just 10 weeks, Husted and his team proved out a cloud-native solution that enabled BorgWarner to collect data from software-enabled chargers that can be used to enhance the customer experience and drive value. Through the creation of a technology stack, data model, and infrastructure framework to support a new software-enabled business stream, the initial hypothesis was made real. Growing enthusiasm could be gauged by the steadily increasing number of BorgWarner stakeholders joining virtual demonstrations as work progressed.
Now, Husted’s team has a solid foundation it can build upon alongside BorgWarner’s IT function, led by Chief Information Officer Ryan Talbott. Husted shared, “My [Advanced Engineering] team’s role was to take a business perspective on the type of application we want to offer to the marketplace, and Ryan’s IT team creates the entire world we operate in. Those two things are really the whole.”
Beyond speed, Husted underscores the qualitative benefits BorgWarner has realized by collaborating with Deloitte. “Part of going fast is being confident and making good decisions. And then it’s having some help alongside you as you do the work to implement and make the change,” he says. “In this case, Deloitte did both of those things in the project, which was helpful during a period of transition for us, doing something brand-new to us and creating new capability.”