YouSaid · the spoken record

Jim Rowan

lines on the record: 76
first: 2023-11-14
most recent: 2023-11-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Bold choice to make that early on in the transition race, and so that allowed us then to fully focus on Bev and electrical propulsion. So then we used to buy in their electric motors. We used to buy in our inverters. We brought that in-house. That became a core part of our DNA. And now we're doing a deal with Northvault in terms of batteries. So we'll have our own battery factory soon. So we really understand batteries and all of the nuances around battery manufacturing development. And then we write our own BMS or battery management software. So you pull that together now into a single propulsion capability, batteries, motors, inverters and battery software. Then you've got, I think, a building block that you're going to need if you're going to win this game in the future or at least be a big player.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's the super question because we were pretty early on, and I need to hand that to my predecessor for having the vision to do that. This was before I joined the company. A year or so before I joined the company, the decision and the strategic decision was made, we don't think that we can invest and keep going investments in internal combustion and really be serious about investing in EV to the extent that it needs to be invested in. So we took all of our ice assets, all of our internal combustion assets in our factories, and we moved them into a new company together with Geely. You know, that company is called Orobay. And then that became an external part to the company, which would then be self-funded. We still had access to that technology because we knew we would need internal combustion engines for a while yet, but we didn't want to have to invest in that. And that was a very strategic and very clever choice.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not so much to the people, but certainly the way in which we work has become much more about, okay, this is what we need to get done long term. Let's make sure we've got that in our sights. This is what we need to get done short term. Let's make sure we execute on that this quarter or the next quarter. Let's keep recycling that so it's rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, and make sure we just keep moving the company forward. And that goes back to the clock speed and pace that I mentioned earlier. We only need to get done long term. We don't need to get done short term and we need to get it done faster”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Comes to fruition. So there's a huge amount of strategic thought that goes into the long-term success story, if you will. And then at the same time, you've got a lot of tactical requirements that you need to get on with the day-to-day. Got to keep the trains running on time, you've got to make sure you hit your quarterly numbers, you've got to take cost out, you've got to bring in good talent, you've got to make sure that you keep feeding that talent so they stay with you, so to speak. From a structure perspective, we have then a GMT, which is the group management team. That brings in the subject matter expertise. So within that room, then, you've got people from manufacturer and from supply chain, from procurement, from R&D, from software, from electronics. Everywhere is in that room. And we meet on a regular basis. We talk about the tactics, but we also talk about the strategy. So everybody is singing from the same hymn sheet, so to speak. And we do that with regular precision. And then, you know, we just got on with it.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not that much to be honest, we have an EMT, so we have an executive management team. We try and make sure that that executive management team is really engaged in a long-term strategy for the business. Where do we need to take this business? You know, it's a public company, so of course we need to pay attention to the quarterly numbers. Of course, we need to get tactical stuff done. But we also need to lift our eyes up a little bit and look out two, three, four, five years in the distance. The auto industry is kind of unique in so much as that you're making investments now that need to serve your needs four, five, six years now in the future. You're making investments in technology to build a car manufacturing plant takes a long time. It's a big investment. So you're trying to look at the geopolitics and where you should build those factories to try and eliminate trades and trade tariffs. You're trying to say where should I be building those technologies? Where am I going to sell those cars? And then you're making those decisions three or four years before I ask for...”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you came into Vovo, you looked at the structure of the company itself, I imagine, as the new CEO, most CEOs say, okay, I'm going to listen to everybody, and then they go about making some changes. How have you changed the structure of Vovo?”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But from the point that we share platforms with them, then of course there's a definite cost benefit that we share technology. Of course, there's definite benefits and that as well. But also the brands are very different. We're a premium car manufacturer. We play to that premium audience. We have our, so if you look at, say, Polstar, when they went on the DSPAC, you know, their three words were pure progressive performance. That's the marketplace that they aim for. And we are safe, sustainable. and family-centric or customer-centric. That's our marketplace. That's the customers that we aim to attract. I think there's room within the industry for people to have different customer bases and attack different demographics. And I think we've done that reasonably successfully. I'd say the thing about the Chinese car manufacturers as well have not quite gone to core compute architecture, so that will be the next phase for them as they develop that core compute architecture for that specific market.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Both great cars. And so it's nice to see Poe's, as Thomas said, they're moving to the next phase. And then we have Giley. So Giley, we're a public company, so we trade on the stock exchange in Sweden, the Nasdaq exchange in Sweden. So we're actually a public company in our own right. And then we have high ownership, as you mentioned, by Geely. That's a symbiotic relationship in so much as we share platforms when we share some engineering technology. And they build their cars and we build our cars, predominantly Geely build obviously for the Chinese market predominantly. We build as a global car maker for the global market. So it's a very symbiotic relationship between Polestar, Geeley and Volvo. Each of us have our own markets. Each of us have our own cars and we share technology across the platforms, across all of those different car models, you know, similar to some other big auto companies do across their platforms.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so let me decode that then a little bit for the decoder audience. So Volvo AB, which includes trucks, construction equipment, penta and so on. And Volvo cars are now two separate companies. So they separated and they both trade separately on the stock exchange under different ticker codes. So that's an entirely separate company. We shared the trademark with Volvo, but other than that, that's really the engagement. Polestar, we own 48% of Polstar, so that's a deep engagement for us. They despacked and so they're now a public company, trade on Nasdaq in the US. I sat on the board of Polestar, so I have access to Thomas and I speak frequently. And an investment that we've made in a company that we've now taken public and they're getting ready for their next big phase of the journey, which is now they're going to have the Polestar 3 and the Polestar 4 that they'll bring into the market in the next six months. Both of those cars I've driven.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So for me, it's pretty simple. I live by the mantra of none of us is smarter than all of us. We have a really good team of people here. We have subject matter expertise. Some decisions make themselves. You don't need to think about them too much. So you don't want to overthink those. But there's certain decisions where you need to bring in the diversity of thought. I mean, you really need to drill in and you need to become a pretty good listener and say, okay, what do you think and why do you think that? Then when you get enough decent content, then you can say, okay, I got it. We're going to go east. We're going to go west. We're going to go up. We're going to go down. But it really comes from that having a core group of people that you trust and who have got subject matter expertise.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But just think about that meeting, right? So let's say people work 40 hours a week and you're saying, hey, guys, we need to be 10% more productive. Everybody can cut out four hours of meetings. Easy. 10% right there. I mean without even thinking about it”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've really made, I think, a lot of headway now on just saying, let's really add value in the limited time. It's not about making people work longer. Absolutely not. It's about making sure that people are adding the best value to the time that they spend within their daily hours at work, if you will.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can change that. You don't need to have every meeting that goes for an hour. So I can set it to 42 minutes. I can say it to 12 minutes. You don't need to have 25 people on copy on every email just because it's kind of the polite thing to do.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Pace, you just run fast, the clock speed is that when you're doing something repetitively, but you're doing it faster repetitively. So there's certain things within our company that we need to do and we just need to keep doing those things faster, whether that cycles in terms of testing software or cycles in terms of developing hardware, that's the clock speed of getting certain things done that we know always need to get done. We just need to get faster and better at doing those things. And then you generally have pace. So for me, Pace is like everything in the company. You know, because you look at Microsoft and it says that...”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Topic, let's make a decision, make sure that's the decision right, and then let's move to execution. So it's really the execution.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On a big transition journey technology wise and also commercially, so direct to customer engagement and everything that goes with that technology wise and electrical propulsion and core compute and everything that goes with that as well. The third one is sustainability. So making sure not just that our cars are sustainable, but we're using sustainable materials in terms of recyclable aluminium and all of our factories and our supply base, that they're complying to our desires to be a more sustainable company. And so those are the three big areas. In terms of culture, I think we already had a fantastic culture in the company. The thing which I think I've added coming from consumer electronics is I've added some pace and I've added a little bit of clock speed to getting things done. That's seven as well right now. So, you know, in terms of the cultural aspects, we have less meetings. We have less emails. We just get more stuff done. We don't need to have endless meetings and endless emails on the same.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Course, they want to use the dealership for upgrades or for servicing fantastic. But we as Volvo need to be part of that conversation. We need to be involved in the conversation. So now rather than have a two-way conversation between the customer and the dealership, we now have a much richer conversation, which is between Volvo, the customer, and the dealership. More and more we do that through the Volvo app. We use technology that's embedded within smartphones that allows our customers to engage directly with the product, directly with Volvo, directly with the dealership, and it makes it seamless. And that's really the big change, I think, that's come into the auto industry.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I joined the industry, I was surprised actually by the lack of connection to the end customer. I mean, just think about that for a second. You sell a product which is 40, 50, 60, $70,000. In often cases, the single biggest purchase that many people make other than their home. And you as an OEM have zero contact with that customer. You don't talk to the customer before the sale. You don't talk to the customer during the sale. You don't talk to the customer after the sale. Everything was done through the dealership network. Now, the dealership network play a huge part in the whole ecosystem and they play a huge part in add tremendous value to our customers. And some customers want to research online and then they want to go take a test drive from the dealership and eventually they'll buy the car. They may buy it online. They may buy it directly from the dealer. I don't care. I mean, as long as they buy Evolvo, I think that's the main objective, right? And then, of course,”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is no tension between it first and foremost that we give, especially if it's in relation to any of the core attributes of the cars as regards safety or performance, then we need to be rock solid that that software is going to work. And that really is the big difference between the auto industry and other mission critical industries like transportation in general, be that aviation or trains or so, you need to make sure that you understand embedded software and that you have enough protection in that and enough fail safe in that that you simply can't cause a problem for the customer that's in any way life-threatening. That's why this is so difficult. That's why we spend so much time, so much energy, so much effort on making sure that the code that we write works seamlessly, especially on those safety circuits.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, as I say, the first car comes out, the first core computer architecture comes out in the EX90. We'll start producing that car in the second quarter next year. And that's as we're off to the races. And from there on in, it will just be continuous improvement on that core compute architecture. As the silicon becomes more hyper-computational, we'll be able to write more software code that allows us to get much more benefit and performance from the car. And the car really starts to improve over time because we can do over-the-air updates with that new software. And that's really the profound change as well. It used to be when the car left the production center, that was as good as the car was going to be. And now you're in an era where the car's going to continually improve over time, provided that you have enough computational power in that car and provided you have enough software that updates the performance and that you can do that over the air to make it seamless for the customer.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The choice came when you could go to a system on chip and you had that computational power, you could go to a core compute architecture. And as you mentioned, some companies went there faster than others. And now some of the, let's call them heritage companies are moving in that direction. We are pretty far along the road. The new EX90, which we announced a couple of months ago, that moves us much, much closer to our core compute architecture. And for the first time then, we've had to figure out that whole high computational silicon, the software stack, the connectivity, and bringing all that back into a co-compute architecture. And of course, it's a challenge, but the benefits are absolutely huge if you can get that early mover advantage.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely right. So it used to be that you would buy in these MCUs or ECUs, whatever you wish to call them. And they would be distributed 140, 150 of these small control units dotted around the car. You would buy those from tier one manufacturers. You had no choice what silicon they used. You had no relationship with those silicon manufacturers. You never knew whether it was the TI part or Infinean part or Renaissance part. And to make changes to that silicon, you had to then go through that tier one.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You've got connectivity to the phone and the iOS strand or Android for that matter. And then you've got data. And by data, I don't mean data capture. I mean data analytics, which of course is now going to be augmented by AI and ML and machine learning. And that technological transformation with all those different strands is coming in at the same time. And it means that you don't have a choice. You don't say, oh, I'm just going to really become really good at software or silicon. You got to do all of this at the same time as well as electrical propulsion. And that's what makes it both challenging, hugely interesting, and at the same time profoundly demanding on the industry in general. That's really what made me saddle up, if you like, and get back on the horse to get involved with Evolvo.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the attraction for me, I'm an engineer and the amount of technology that's been poured into the industry simultaneously just makes it for a really appealing place to be right now, just simply as an engineer alone. So because you've got this massive transformation on electrical propulsion from internal combustion, that's one side. And although the industry talks a lot about electrification, it's really the easy part. That's the tip of the iceberg. The much more profound change that's happening in the industry is this move to core compute. And the move to core compute technology brings with it silicon and really being able to understand high computational silicon software. Of course, in all its various strands of software, be that embedded software or mission critical software or the application layer to your iPhone. Then you've got connectivity inside the car. Then you've got 5G externally, you've got cloud architecture.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for sure. Lots of things going on at the same time. On one side, you have this huge transformation in terms of the technical transformation, but at the same time, you have a massive transformation on the commercial side. And then all of that is underpinned by this quest and this desire and the need to move towards a more sustainable future. So you get this almost triple-headed change agent that sits right in front of us. And it's just super interesting.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's interesting is that Jim doesn't buy any of this. You'll hear him say Vovo is not interested in monetizing the experiences inside the car. He just doesn't think that any car maker's infotainment system will be able to actually compete with our smartphones. Instead, he's focused on building recurring revenue outside the car, with things like maintenance and insurance. It's a strikingly different approach to the auto industry, and honestly, it's kind of refreshing. Of course, it's decoder, so we talked about Vovo's admittedly complex structure and how it works with sister company Polstar and its Chinese parent company Gili. And I really wanted to know how he feels about the big picture in EV sales as prices fall and supply begins to outstrip demand. I also post Unvolvo's big decision to use the Tesla charging plug like the rest of the industry, but didn't seem like Jim wanted to talk about that very much. I did my best though. One note before we start, Jim and I had a very confusing exchange about the operating systems inside Volvo vehicles.”
2023-11-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping CarPlay is a mistake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT