Automated Driving – Continues to Pull in the Headlines!

Two major headline items in the automotive industry these past few days are the restructuring that is happening at Ford and the company announcing record quarterly results. Besides this everything else has been about autonomous driving. Here is a recap of a few

Delphi acquisition of nuTonomy – this is the startup that emerged from MIT and the first to deploy/test an autonomous taxi system in Singapore. With trials expected to start in Boston soon, Delphi’s acquisition of this autonomous driving software stack company is interesting. Besides reasons pertaining to any form of financial restructuring and realignment of investments/assets [Delphi recently divested its powertrain and other mature business into a $4.5 billion separate entity to focus its core brand on electronics and autonomous driving] the strategic intent here is for Delphi to integrate the nuTonomy software into its sensors and electronics portfolio to offer a fully integrated solution. Just search for jobs at Delphi on LinkedIn and almost all of it is for its autonomous driving business J

Growing importance of driver monitoring systems – Finally with the debut of the 2018 Cadillac CT6, GM has unveiled that the supplier of the steering wheel mounted driver monitoring system is Seeing Machines, an Australian company that started in the mining sector. FOVIO the system developed by Seeing Machines uses a steering wheel mounted camera to monitor the driver. This technology is crucial for OEMs looking into L2/L3 systems and that is almost 2/3rd of the market. Companies like Mitsubishi Electric have also announced the availability of a wide angle camera based driver monitoring system that can monitor both the driver and the passenger for drowsiness and other attention related features/gestures. Besides these players there are bigger names such as Continental, Denso in the fray that utilize inward IR cameras in some cases to analyze the driver readiness.  OEMs like Ford have been vocal about skipping L3 due to the handover situations but it is unclear if any level of automation would still require some form of DMS system just for redundancy purposes.

An interesting new redundant L3 system from Hitachi – dubbed One Fail Operational technology, the idea is to create a back-up that increases the duration of autonomous driving by a few sec to allow the driver to take control in case any damage occurs to the autonomous driving central controller [or a bunch of separate ECU’s].

The other interesting article that warrants a read despite offering nothing new is the importance of testing autonomous vehicles in different weather conditions [think snow, black ice, sleet, rain, fog, and glare from the sun] - http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/mobility/2017/10/25/robotic-car-developers-testing-snow-ice/106979218/. The short of the story is that Detroit is now becoming a very interesting location for testing autonomous cars and the latest to join the party is Waymo that will be testing its Pacifica fleet in Detroit this winter.

The importance of HD maps - The performance of Cadillac Supercruise system in many ways will lay the ground for HD maps utilized in L3/L4 systems. Based on initial tests and reviews looks like the Ushr maps in the Supercruise system are pretty accurate in lane positioning. In poor weather extremely localized maps with high accuracy and inputs like V2V and V2I become crucial. But with the new administration almost killing the V2V mandate, the door is now widely open for OEMs to come up with technology agnostic solution for V2V and V2I. In the US Ford, AT&T, Qualcomm and Nokia have begun testing cellular based V2X trials in San Diego. HERE is also rapidly increasing its customer base for the digital transportation infrastructure [DTI], long name for cellular V2X service.

Finally as we start looking into the near future here are some disruptions that await this rapidly transforming industry

--> The continuing explosion of startups and the options they provide to OEMs. Ford for example after investing in Civil Maps and after acquiring AI Company ARGO is now partnering with DeepMap in the bay area to research a different type of HD map.

--> Tier 1 suppliers strengthening their competency beyond hardware – Joining Harman and Delphi, Continental is the latest to join the acquisition spree. Continental this week acquired Israeli cybersecurity company Argus. Again much like Harman and RedBend and Towersec, this acquisition now provides Continental with some level of integrated security and OTA capabilities. Each major Tier 1 - Delphi, Continental, Harman and Bosch can now offer some level of end to end solution capabilities either in the connected car or connected car and autonomous driving space.

--> A different is emerging approach to electrical and electronic architecture building for the next generation compute hungry cars. Some call this a centralized architecture splitting hardware and software; others call this the integrated domain controller concept. Audi did the zFAS for automated driving and is pushing this concept to the infotainment/cluster side and most other premium OEMs are looking at this. Along with newly announced concepts like adaptive AUTOSAR, there is new thinking using older concepts like high speed Ethernet that is emerging in the automotive space largely due to the automated driving pressure.