INDIANAPOLIS — Indiana’s auto-parts industry, wobbly from a bruising recession, may find salvation in an unlikely suitor: Chinese consumers clamoring for a taste of capitalism and U.S.-style mobility.
That’s the prediction oft-repeated at a historic summit of Chinese auto executives and Indiana auto-parts makers who gathered in a hotel ballroom in the state’s capital, two days before the iconic Indy 500 car race.
Among those in the audience were top officials with Delphi Automotive Systems and Remy International, two Indiana companies spending millions of federal stimulus dollars on clean-car technology to drive sales in the U.S. and in China.
What those executives envision is an increase in Indiana jobs devoted to designing the pieces and parts for hybrid and electric cars. While those vehicles have been slow to take off in the U.S., they have been championed by China as means to reduce its carbon emissions and rising oil imports.
“It’s not a matter of if, but when,” said Delphi’s Jeff Owens of the mass-production of hybrid and electric cars.
But how soon those jobs could materialize is uncertain. Electric-car battery maker EnerDel announced on Thursday a joint venture with China’s biggest auto-parts maker that could add 1,500 jobs to EnerDel’s Greenfield plant.
Owens, president of Delphi’s electronic and safety division, and Kevin Quinn, head of Remy’s electric motor technologies unit, were more cautious in their forecasts of what business relationships with China would mean.
“It should mean more employment in Indiana,” said Quinn. “Our intent is to send products made here to China.”
Owens said the agreements struck at the summit on Friday, in which Indiana and Chinese companies vowed to share technology, may someday lead to a Chinese car manufacturer opening a plant in Indiana, not unlike the Japanese-owned Toyota and Honda plants that opened here last decade.
“It took years of this kind of dialogue before those companies located their plants here in Indiana,” Owens said. “When the Chinese decide to make those kinds of investments in the U.S., we want them to think of Indiana first.”
The U.S. is investing private and public dollars into hybrid and electric-car technology, with the aim of reducing carbon emissions here. But auto analysts at the summit predicted slow growth for those vehicles in the U.S. They cited such factors as the high cost of electric cars now on the market and the “range anxiety” of Americans who fear their car’s electric battery will go flat before they reach their destination.
Auto analyst Mark Fitzgerald told summit attendees that hybrid and electric cars will account for 4 percent, at most, of all cars produced in the U.S. within 5 years. China vows that 30 percent of the cars manufactured there will be hybrid or electric in 5 years.
But Chinese auto and government officials at the summit conceded they can’t reach that goal without the standards and manufacturing know-how that Indiana’s fast-growing clean-car technology companies offer.
Citing both nations’ struggles to control carbon emissions, China’s assistant minister of commerce, Wang Chao, told the summit audience: “It’s only through cooperation, that either of us will achieve sustainable development.”