Hallo! We started today with a much later start at 8 am which was a really nice change from our 6:50 role call yesterday. We also got to sleep in longer because we were skipping breakfast to have our Weisswurst breakfast. We traveled to this small little restaurant/shop in the countryside that looked like it was family-owned. We sat among a lot of bikers and enjoyed a traditional German breakfast. I personally didn’t try the sausages but I heard they were pretty good. I did enjoy the fresh pretzels though, I put this sweet mustard on top and that made it even better. We had a beautiful view and it was so calm and peaceful out in the country. I was kind of astonished to see being drinking beer at 9 in the morning but I quickly remembered that we were in Germany lol.
We then headed back to the hotel and departed for my company, Faurecia. We first got an intro to the company and then went through a tour of the manufacturing they do in Augsburg. I enjoyed watching the laser cutting machine that cut every piece with precision every time. After completing the factory tour, we went through a few presentations, including their new acquisition of Hella and the hydrogen technology of the future they are investing in. These two topics were of particular interest to me and my group because these would be essential parts of our presentation. They spoke a lot about how they believe that hydrogen is one of the key players in getting us to be a carbon-neutral world. They emphasized that the acquisition of Hella, another major player in the automobile industry, will also dive further into the world of autonomous driving in the future. They did not bring up anything about electricity, but this made sense with the amount of money they are putting into developing hydrogen.
Today was a short day as we headed home after of the presentations and had no events later on in the day. We had an individual dinner scheduled which I traded for sleep instead, best dinner ever! I did take some time to reflect on what I heard in the presentations and thought about how to incorporate them into our final presentation. We definitely got a ton of good information that will be very helpful later on.
Signing off,
A hydrogen educated Sydney