Manufacturing

Commentary:

Technology for safer cars

30 April 2008

Safety-related electronics is the fastest growth area in the automotive industry. Advanced technology using sensors, semiconductors and software will help us prevent, instead of just mitigate the effects of accidents, says Ian Riches of Strategy Analytics. 

You may not have noticed it, but your car is no longer really just a car. It is actually now a network of high-performance computing devices that sits upon four wheels.

The use of electronics and software within the vehicle has been growing significantly, and shows no signs of slowing down yet. In 1996, Strategy Analytics calculated the total market for automotive electronic systems in the main vehicle producing markets to be around $51 billion. By 2006, this had risen to $133 billion, and it is forecast to carry on growing to over $200 billion globally by 2012.

Within this overall expanding market, it is safety-related electronics that are seeing the fastest growth. This is in part due to the efforts of legislators: tyre pressure monitoring equipment is now mandatory on US-sold vehicles and the EU has an ambitious target to halve road deaths by 2010. But this growth is also a result of a highly competitive and dynamic market, which is seeing the emergence of advanced, semi-autonomous safety systems on mainstream vehicles.

An example is the new Audi A4 model, which was launched at the October 2007 Frankfurt Motor Show. This offers a wide range of advanced safety systems as optional features, including:
Adaptive front lighting. This uses sensors on the steering column to detect when you are turning and automatically aims the headlamps in the optimal direction.
Lane departure warning. This uses a camera sensor to detect road markings. If the system detects that the driver is inadvertently deviating from their chosen lane, it will warn him/her.
Blind spot monitoring. Two radar sensors, one in each rear quarter of the vehicle monitor the blind spot that exists between the coverage of the rear view mirror and the wing mirrors. If a vehicle is located, a small warning light is illuminated in the wing mirror housing.

Strategy Analytics expects that the penetration rate for sophisticated features such as these will reach around 10% by 2014 – with much higher penetration amongst vehicles from luxury marques. One of the major challenges in bringing these systems to market is getting the right balance between ensuring that no dangerous events are missed and making sure that the driver is not annoyed by a system that constantly ‘cries wolf ’. Ultimately, it is the software that determines this balance, and Strategy Analytics perceives the development of robust algorithms for these advanced safety systems as being the key critical success factor.

Technology is also being applied to the way in which we interact with our vehicles. Over the past few decades the dashboard in front of us has evolved from offering relatively simple information about the vehicle’s speed, fuel level and so on to become a highly complex infotainment centre. The design of the human-machine interface (HMI) for new vehicles is now critical to ensuring their safe operation, and also a highly important part of customer acceptance. We want to be able to jump into a vehicle and drive it, not wade through 300 pages of instruction manual.

The challenge for the HMI has become even greater over recent years. Not only do we have a more complex vehicle, we are now bringing multiple, sophisticated devices such as mobile phones, MP3 players and portable navigation systems into the vehicle.

Manufacturers are responding by developing flexible interface systems that allow us to interact with these devices in a logical, safe and intuitive way. One such is the Ford Sync system, which was developed together with Microsoft. Currently only available on US Ford products, this is a fully-integrated, voice activated in-car communication and entertainment system that allows drivers to interact with a variety of iPods, portable media players and Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones.

A further part of the safety roadmap is the continued evolution of vehicle networking. Most safety systems rely upon the high-speed, reliable communication of data from one system to another. The design and implementation of these multiplexed bus networks is now a key part of vehicle design. Companies such as Mentor Graphics are providing sophisticated design tools that help in the cost and performance optimisation of vehicle networks, and are thus helping to enable further improvements in vehicle safety.

Change has been rapid, and we have all quickly grown used to expecting safety features such as multiple airbags and antilock brakes on our vehicles. The next wave of safety technologies offers the opportunity of preventing accidents, rather than just mitigating their effects. Technology, across sensors, semiconductors and software is helping to drive this trend, and the future rate of change is likely to be at least as fast as that which we have already enjoyed.

Ian Riches is director, global automotive practice at Strategy Analytics. This article first appeared in Prime Spring 2008.