Lordstown Motors, PTT Thailand, Aptera Motors, Monarch Tractor, and Foxtron Vehicle Technologies support MIH in coalescing alliance by 2025

Taipei, Taiwan – March, 24, 2022 – The MIH Consortium held its inaugural 2022 member event on March 25 after the Foxtron Model T parade at POPOP Taipei following a tradition honored since its founding. The event offered an opportunity for MIH Alliance partners to meet and discuss future development opportunities, product planning and more, offering a platform to set a targeted business strategy especially in overseas markets such as the United States and Thailand.

Since the member event from last year, the fruits of MIH and its partners are beginning to show. All members have been working together to develop technologies focused on new energy vehicle pain points and trends. At the same time, the standardization and modularization work of the 16 Working Groups spanning Autonomous Driving, Security and OTA, Electrical/Electronic Architecture (EEA), and other areas has realized the semblance of a whole vehicle come into being. At the event, MIH also showed the members their next step ambitions, including leveraging the combined strength of all MIH members, and supporting the Foxconn EV supply chain, in line with the latter’s commitment to its members and itself.

In the opening speech by Young Liu, Chairman of Foxconn and MIH, he noted that the transition to EVs presents a rare opportunity, which just marks the beginning of explosive growth to come. Whomever best wields the most crucial technologies for this category – batteries, motors, ECU, software and semiconductors – will dominate the market. “While the MIH Alliance began with Foxconn, it is at its heart a platform where all members work toward innovation together. Though our work together has only just begun, this budding cooperation between Foxconn and all the MIH Alliance members is bound to create more business opportunities for the EV industry in the future and demonstrate the power of our Open EV Platform.

Jack Cheng, CEO of MIH Consortium, also pointed out that Taiwan can become the best bridge connecting Mainland China and the overseas EV supply chain in the future, holding a strong position in the global electronic components, semiconductor, and startup industries. Moreover, Taiwan does a superb job on offering transparency, while demonstrating flexibility when collaborating with the Tier 1, 2, and 3 suppliers. Taiwan is a force to be reckoned with in the international semiconductor and EV industries. Thus, MIH aims is to establish an open EV standard and supply chain, allowing members to select their preferred business partners to accelerate progress and keep costs down.

In order to realize this ambition, MIH sets a five-year goal to realize the full power of the alliance and create an open EV platform. They first introduced the concept of the Open EV Platform in 2020 and founded the MIH Consortium in 2021. MIH will start releasing the Reference Designs from77 the Working Groups in 2022 and along with Foxconn to invite members to invest in building the Model C and Model E regionally. At of the end of this year, MIH expects to announce major milestones, such as L2 and L4 ADAS reference designs built on the drive-by-wire API. There will also be secured Vehicle Development Environment based on Zero-Trust design, and body control testing buck based on zonal control EEA. These work will prepare MIH and its members to enter different markets in 2023 to 2024 and will leverage the alliance to expand go-to-market opportunities in 2025.

Following the Foxconn acquisition of the Lordstown, Ohio plant, MIH now has an electric vehicle base in North America. Edward Hightower, President of Lordstown Motors, said, “We are very excited about our planned partnership with Foxconn, because it will create synergies in vehicle development, sourcing, and manufacturing. Developing new products from77 the MIH mobility-in-harmony platform could gain scale through the shared component set, shared vehicle architecture and shared engineering”

Horizon Plus, a joint venture between ARUN PLUS, an electric vehicle company owned by PTT Group, Thailand's largest market capitalization company, and Foxconn, has also been officially established. Ekachai Yimsakul, Executive VP of PTT said, “We're ready to go! Collaboration with Foxconn is the perfect combination, well integrated upstream linked with integrated downstream. We do believe we can provide shorten development time and cost reduction significantly to our customers, eventually bring all benefits to EV end users.”

Among the speakers in attendance were many innovative disruptors. Aptera Motors is the world's first solar-powered electric vehicle that does not require charging. Monarch Tractors, an innovative agricultural vehicle brand leading the digital transformation of agriculture, has launched an automatic electric tractor with a replaceable battery design.

In addition, Foxtron Vehicle Technologies, who recently delivered the first electric bus in Taiwan, Gartner and IHS Markit also took on the stage to show support for MIH. In addition, the American Institute in Taiwan and ARUN PLUS presented investment opportunities in the US and Thailand. With this annual partner gathering event, MIH expresses its gratitude for the contributions of its members and brings exciting go-to-market opportunities to kick-off the year.