Notes from the Chair - Welcome from Adrian Feeney

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Society of Automotive Engineers - Australasia

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Adrian Feeney

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Mohammad Fard Technical Director Sam Lagozzino Membershp & Events Bernie Rolfe FISIT & SAE Liaison Greg Shoemark Gov’t & Industry Liaison James Soo Autonomous/EV Vehicles Richard Taube Board Director Michael Waghorne Finances Gary White Board Director

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Adrian Feeney

Secretary, Chair and CEO Society of Automotive Engineers – Australasia

On Monday, 3 October, I had the honour of opening the 21st biennial Asia Pacific Automotive Engineering Conference (APAC21) with an audience of more than 180 delegates, I hope you were one of them. It proved to be an absolutely amazing conference, on two levels; it was the first face-to-face gathering of such significance since Covid, and it put SAE-A on the map as a credible global player representing the automotive industry in Australia That day was the culmination of a journey that started in 2018 when it was proposed to the SAE-A board that we should host this conference, a conference that would make EV/AV technology its central theme. By any standards this was a large undertaking, and an equally significant risk, but the support was unanimous and so the process began. Little could we have known what lay ahead, a pandemic like nothing we have seen before, right in the middle of the original scheduled date of October 2021. The entire world was thrown into lockdown and no one was allowed to travel within Australia, let alone enter or leave our shores. During that period, we made two decisions from which we never wavered: firstly, that the event would proceed, albeit delayed (by one year as it turned out); and secondly, that it would be a face-to-face conference, and not even a hybrid combination was acceptable. So, three years after the APAC20 conference in Thailand and we had our face-to-face conference, and it was a great success. I wish to take this opportunity to thank some key people for their amazing efforts: • The Technical Committee chair, Professor

Mohammad Fard, whose tireless work almost single handedly managed to bring this conference to reality • To his hard working and creative committee who was always supportive of Professor Fard and offered valuable insights into the running of such an event, always willing to volunteer for any task that was required • To Mohammad’s PhD students who worked tirelessly in the background, making many impossible things possible. • To the SAE-A board, who at all times supported this event and the Technical

Committee, even through those troubled and challenging COVID times • To our event management team, KE Creative and its managing director, Nadia Kentera and her staff • And finally, to the presenters and delegates for showing such faith in our untiring belief that this event must proceed in its original form. The key to our success was the quality and quantity of the program with three panel sessions led by experts in their respective fields. We also had four keynote speakers, with our main drawcard, Remi Bastien formerly from Renault who provided the delegates with some important insights in the future challenges of autonomous vehicles in our society. The rest of the conference consisted of four concurrent sessions of presentations of papers on a variety of topics pertaining to the conference theme, with a total of 69 presenters, from 13 countries, including 40 from Australia. It was certainly a quality packed program which attracted over 180 delegates from 13 countries, of which 130 were from Australia The success of this event has encouraged the board to offer more of these events in the future, perhaps not as big but certainly more often and more targeted to our local requirements, this conference was by any standards a remarkable success So, we now turn our attention to another popular SAE-A event, our annual Formula SAE University program that again returns to a face-to-face event at Winton Raceway from December 8 to December 11. We will have more to say shortly but please save the date and join us either as a spectator or better still a volunteer, you will not be disappointed.