Cars driven to new objectives
18 June 2010
The automotive market, as we all know, has taken a severe beating over the past two years. Looking back we may have cause to applaud governments for their ‘car scrappage’ schemes in 2009, which may retrospectively prove to have saved many worthy automotive manufacturers and those in the supply chains that serve them.
The year 2010 has brought a change in fortunes for the automotive electronics industry and the reasons for this, beyond the recovery in general, become clear when you talk, (as I did), to someone like Drue Freeman who is Vice President, global automotive sales and marketing at NXP Semiconductors (the old Philips Semiconductor company). NXP decided some years ago to move away from the mass markets of mobile phones and consumer electronics, and instead concentrate on more specialist markets where expertise and experience is as important as the product itself. The automotive market is one of these.
Setting aside fluctuations in the economy and in oil prices, both of which have predictable effects on the number and type of cars that are being bought, the electronics content in a new car historically rises by around four to five percent per annum.
NXP obviously sees not only growth potential, but are also one of the companies driving this growth – providing the technological platform for development. One example is FlexRay, the in-vehicle networking technology. NXP have been involved with this technology since its inception and after three years, up to August 2009, reached the landmark of shipping one million Flexray Physical Layer Transceivers. Last week it announced that it had reached the two million milestone, less than a year later, indicating the rapid take-up of this technology. Chris Webber, Vice President at Strategy Analytics Global Automotive Practice, recently explained the trend: “High-speed CAN network capabilities are being exceeded by the requirements of high end vehicle designs. As a result, FlexRay will be increasingly used by vehicle OEMs to deliver superior bandwidth and robustness needed for high specification models featuring the latest advances in powertrain, chassis, safety, comfort and infotainment. NXPs latest achievement confirms this migration has indeed begun.”
Two million transceivers doesn’t, incidentally, equate to two million cars. There are typically 8–10 nodes per car, rising to nearer 30 for top-end models. The connectivity that this provides is a useful tool in the development for automotive electronics. Drue Freeman described the four main drivers as connectivity, safety, comfort and sustainability, adding: “All of these are inter-related. Sometimes they are complementary whereas sometimes there needs to be a trade-off. A good example of the former is where the telematics provides the connectivity, which is also used as a safety feature when an automatic safety alert is issued if, for example, the air-bag is deployed. This alert could include GPS information, engine status etc. This facility, called eCall [by the European Commission], is more common in the US but the EU estimates that it could save around 16,000 lives a year.”
A system that works in a similar manner (electronically speaking) is road-pricing equipment. While this is not something that would make most motorists want to pay more for their cars for, it is a likely route that governments may force automotive manufacturers to go down. As Freeman commented: "There is one compelling argument for road-pricing - you can influence people’s driving habits.” He quoted a trial in the Netherlands which proved over time that by making roads more expensive to travel on at the busiest times of the day, a smoothing effect emerged that reduced congestion.
Freeman also described some more obvious example areas in which his company was helping automotive manufacturers fulfill their environmental obligations:
• Electric Power Steering - Saving fuel consumption and CO2 emissions by 10g/km
• Eco Telematics (Eco-Routing, Eco-Powertrain, Intelligent Traffic Management) - Intelligent Traffic Management saves fuel consumption and CO2 emissions by up to 16%.
• Body networks - potential energy saving of up to 70W
• Dual-clutch transmission - saving fuel consumption and CO2 emissions up to 10%
• Stop-start systems – saving fuel consumption and CO2 emissions up to 4-10%
All of the above is equally relevant to electric or hybrid cars – whatever the fuel source there will always be a drive towards energy efficiency so that they become cheaper to run, have longer range and lower carbon footprint. So for all that the automotive industry still has a fair amount of recovering to do in this recovery, the role of electronics and the pace of development remain undiminished.
I wonder if the next big push in this sector will come when as many mechanical systems as possible have been switched to electronics and the majority of the ‘value add’ has been added – what then? The answer must be in reducing cost, something felt keenly by car retailers who have spent much of the last two years offering discount after discount in a bid to shift their stock. But, as Freeman said above, everything in a car is inter-dependent, so would cutting costs involve corners being cut? Safety being put at risk?
No way. If ever an industry was aware of ‘safety first’ it is the automotive industry. But it will inevitably be that as the technology becomes more commonplace then customers will become unwilling to pay a premium for it. What will be the industry driver then?
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