Dread,
I think I’m beginning to understand Torvec’s idea of ‘production ready’, if from nothing else but your words ‘nothing customised’.
I take it that the school bus project could be carried out from the current design using parts and materials more or less standard. Fine. Of course this would be hugely expensive per transmission as there would still be many parts which are not standard, but as a demonstrator of the technology, this would obviously be a feather in Torvec’s cap.
Mass production proper does of course mean that every last little detail and part are customised to a new design after many thousands of hours testing, analysing, changing and repeating the process, usually several times. This is just a fact of life in the automotive business and there really is no way round it.
That Torvec are going for the stock swap option for their IP seems eminently sensible to me.
Historically, most transmission innovations have been brought forward in-house, if for no other reason than the horrendous cost of taking an idea from prototype to production is so prohibitive that it is beyond the pockets of all but those with a large R&D department with a profitable business in the background to finance it.
Antonov comes to mind as a business built on a simple but brilliant idea to improve efficiency using more or less standard parts, but even there, as a stand alone company they have had to dilute so much to keep going, it makes you wonder how much the original investors will see back.
Knowing how much it can cost to develop, I do wonder at what price the stand alone IP would attract. Frankly, I was amassed to read the detail given with the possible Shanghai Automotive deal as surely these are cards held close to the chest until the deal is done, usually not even then, but there we are.
Personally, I would have thought a deal involving a modest payment for access to the IP and then royalties on production would seem a logical course to take, but what do I know?
By the way, on traction fluid, I do know that it is neither sticky nor a lubricant. Shell have formulated a large molecule which is fluid under normal conditions and which locks up under pressure to form a near solid, reverting to a fluid on the release of pressure. This is just a fact of life which Nissan drivers with a Jatco transmission don’t even think about.
HeBe
