LONGTIME MEMBERS LIKELY RECALL that I’ve written about growing up in the Midwestern manufacturing belt. In my part of Indiana, just about every town had a connection specifically to the automobile industry. It started in the first decades of the 20th century, when companies such as Studebaker, Duesenberg, Marmon, and Stutz competed directly against the mass-market automakers based in Detroit, while smaller companies built components or assembled them into larger systems, such as transmissions. (In my town, a local company rebuilt starter motors.)
The basic geography of the auto industry has remained after more than a century, in spite of the consolidation of smaller manufacturers into the Big Three—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler (now Stellantis)—and fierce competition from international car companies, many of whom built factories on the periphery of the traditional Auto Alley. But there’s a new force that has the potential to remake the car industry: Electric vehicles.
While cars have been partially electric for decades—those starter motors refurbished in Mooresville were battery-powered, for instance—EVs can dispense with a whole supply chain’s worth of parts, while requiring a whole different set, from large battery packs to high-power electric motors and the management systems to keep it all running. For towns and states in the belt that stretches from Michigan to Alabama, the existential question has been, will the auto industry build these new factories and assembly plants in the same region they’ve operated for decades? Or will some new part of the country become the “New Detroit”?
In this issue, Michael Abrams tackles those questions and more. In his terrific article, he talks not only to folks from the big carmakers who are investing in these new plants, but also to economists and other experts who have studied the geography of the automobile industry from a more academic perspective. The resulting article, “Electric Geography,” is bursting with cool facts and insights. (Did you know that the distance between engine factories and final assembly plants has been shrinking over the past decade? Or that the center of Auto Alley coincides with the median point of U.S. population?) I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Elsewhere in the issue, Kayt Sukel looks at how medical professionals are turning to the power of digital engineering—specifically digital twins—to create models of patients that can be employed for both monitoring as well as guiding treatment. But for all the rush to all things virtual, Sukel found experts who urged caution. Just as the map is not the territory, to borrow the line from the engineer and philosopher Alfred Korzybski, so too is the digital twin not the patient.
“When we start talking about digital twins in health,” said Duke University biomedical engineer Cameron Kim, “and how we synthesize all of the potential data points we have, we need to understand that these models, by their very nature, are going to be wrong in some fairly fundamental ways.”
We also have stories on the way design done on a sketchpad differs from those drawn on a tablet or other computer interface, a new material made from interlocking octahedrons, how understanding the properties of extremely cold liquids could help the search for extraterrestrial life, and a walking robot with a stride about the width of a red blood cell.
That’s not all. The Video Production team talks with engineers involved in a Veterans Administration program for improving the science and engineering workforce pipeline, and we profile ASME Member Dee Kivett, CEO and president of NextGen Supply Chain Integrators in South Carolina, who turned a love of cars into an engineering career.
And if you have something you’d like us to know about, please don’t hesitate to write. You can reach us at MEMAG@asme.org; please use the subject line "Letters" (so we can find it amid the junk mail we receive).
—Jeffrey Winters, editor in chief
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