Today, many car manufacturers are introducing interesting software and technologies as components of vehicles.
Industry close watchers believed that the age of the software-defined vehicle is truly here because many Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are now integrating high-definition software into vehicle components.
Here are four new technologies that manufacturers are considering that can change the fixtures of vehicles.
Vehicle motion management
Vehicle motion management will function like airplanes that have several redundant components that could provide ways of maneuvering an aircraft should any primary controls fail. The idea is to combine the functions of stability control, braking, and steering into a single controller.
Though it has not reached production, its ready for bidding. This single computer can reside on any one of today’s control modules or on a domain controller, but the key is that a single software code stack controls all systems holistically.
For example, if the left wheels are on high-grip pavement and the rights are on the ice when the driver stomps the brakes, rather than cutting left-side braking power to match that of the right and avoid veering left, the system can order up some corrective steering to keep the vehicle heading in the driver’s intended direction while maximizing the two-wheel braking power.
Emergency lane-change maneuvers might call for torque vectored acceleration or regenerative braking to keep a vehicle on course. Such a system could also enable more adventurous driving modes, like drifting.
Interior monitoring sensors
Today, it’s vehicles that offer hands-free driving that have driver monitoring cameras, but soon all cars will, possibly be twinned with a 60GHz radar sensor. They will be necessary to comply with a 2025 Euro NCAP requirement for child-left-behind sensing, and perhaps even drunk-driver detection, and new software will extract these and other features from this minimal hardware set which is currently in production.
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Interior monitoring applications
Occupant detection: The radar can sense a heartbeat and respiration rate, and from this information infer the age of the occupant, along with lots of other potential health conditions. This can prevent seatbelt warnings when your hefty briefcase is on the seat along with those warnings to check the back seat if no living being is back there.
Occupant out of position: This could disable passenger-side frontal airbags when someone is riding with feet out the window.
Drunk driver detection: This tech is further out, but Bosch is optimistic that these sensors can reliably detect an impaired driver.
Hands-on the wheel: A fisheye camera typically placed above the inside rear-view mirror can see the driver’s hands, blessedly eliminating cars’ penchant for periodic hectoring us to jiggle the wheel.
Wrong-way driver detection
This low-capital software- and cloud-based approach to detecting and reporting potential wrong-way drivers requires buy-in from manufacturers to simply share real-time GPS data from their fleet of cars, only when they enter geo-fenced areas around highway interchanges. When a vehicle is detected heading in the wrong direction in one of these intersections for 5 seconds, alerts can be sent out to traffic signs, in-car V2X displays, and navigation apps.
It can cover all highway intersections but only a fraction of drivers can currently get the warning, though V2X integration is increasing and in the U.S., the subscription app Sygic supports the warnings. Bosch has conducted a three-year pilot program in Europe that monitored 3.2 billion vehicle interactions, detecting 600 wrong-way drivers, none of which resulted in a crash.
Battery in the cloud
Battery longevity is a big worry for buyers, especially for second-hand vehicles. This can only be owned and operated by the Original Equipment Manufacturer. Benefits include higher confidence in stated residual values of leased vehicles, or possibly residual values pegged to certain states of battery health at the end of the lease and engaging owner/lessees in the process of optimising their battery’s health, by infrequently charging to 100 percent, sparing use of DC fast-charging, etc. Such data could also suggest over-the-air updates that could improve battery life.
