A modern car comprises a lot more technology compared to five years ago. Modern cars can detect and prevent accidents, communicate, and run on clean fuel. All this is done to keep the roads safe, along with the occupants; however, such technology comes at a cost. Also, the percentage of cars that offer these technologies are few, as the cost keeps such features away from mass-market vehicles. 

To understand more about the automotive industry and the technology used, the way forward for it, and the various hurdles faced by Indian Auto Inc., Express Mobility spoke to Rajesh Kosalram, the Head of Automotive – Capgemini Engineering. 

Connected cars and IoT – Apart from vehicle-related data, can cars warn or transmit health-related data to emergency services? 

Many accidents are caused by sudden changes in the physical conditions of drivers. Stroke, Heart diseases, drowsiness are a few frequent conditions that lead to road accidents. 

The vital signs of humans are body temperature, heart rate, respiration rate and blood pressure, all of which can be measured with optical sensors and used for the monitoring of the driver’s health. Consumer devices, such as fitness wristbands or smartwatches, have already started to spread in the market and use such technologies. The driver monitoring system is used to collect recognizable information about the driver for assessing the capability of the driver to perform the driving task safely. 

The automotive active health monitoring system has biometric feedback sensors which are usually placed nearby the driver’s seat, in the seatbelt, or on the steering wheel and they help to continuously monitor the driver’s health condition. Active Driver health monitoring could help to detect such problems early and the data can be transmitted through a telematics device to the control room. An ambulance can be rushed to the spot. If equipped with autonomous features the car can take over to get into a safe stopping position at the side of the road. 

In-vehicle heartbeat-measuring systems are classified into two types: the wearable type, in which a person wears a wrist watch-type wearable device, and the non-wearable type, in which the driver’s condition is measured at the steering wheel, seat, or other places the driver touches while driving.

Audi AG, unveiled its project to develop a system integrating wearable health technology with cars called Audi Fit Driver. Toyota’s LQ concept car (first introduced in 2019), incorporates a suite of infrared and 3D cameras to track driver’s eye movements, facial expressions, and skeletal positioning from which it gauges body language. It then strives to identify drowsiness or even potentially dangerous emotional states, like anxiety or boredom, which could affect driving. 

Ford’s new auto technology will allow its cars to obtain a complete picture of a driver’s health status through sensors that will be featured on steering wheels, seat belts, steering columns and seats.

Conductive sensors (like those found on exercise machines) will be featured on a car’s steering wheel to measure any changes in the driver’s heart rate. In addition, steering wheels will have infrared sensors that monitor a driver’s facial temperature. In addition, seat belts will feature sensors that will measure and assess the rate of the driver’s breathing.

If someone were to have a seizure while driving, a vehicle featuring the new technology would be able to detect the incident, steer out of harm’s way and park. In such an emergency, the technology would even be able to contact paramedics.

How can ADAS be made more affordable for mass-market cars?

Today’s ADAS (advanced driver-assistance systems) functions such as autonomous braking, collision avoidance, lane change assistance are designed to help avoid accidents altogether.

ADAS features are only offered in high-end vehicles and partially in mid-segment vehicles. Unfortunately, to date, it hasn’t been economically feasible for all cars to have ADAS features. But carmakers and Tier-1 suppliers are striving to make driving-assistance features available in as many cars as possible. This means that more vehicles need to be capable of cost-effectively doing sensing, processing, and acting on real-time data.

Five pillars of ADAS are sensors, processors, software algorithms, mapping solutions, and actuators. The most used ADAS sensors today are lidar, radar, camera and ultrasonic. Making these systems affordable is important as it enables more market penetration and brings the system advantages to consumers more rapidly. The good news is that ADAS has become more widespread across multiple price points and car models.

The following three features are the most prevalent: 

Other common driver-assist features include FCW (forward collision warning); PD (pedestrian detection); BSW (blind-spot warning); and APA (advanced parking assist). 

– Cameras, Radar, and LiDAR: Most ADAS safety features are sensors such as cameras, radar, LiDAR, ultrasonic and infrared systems as well as several actuators. By combining an advanced sensor suite with a central control unit, functions such as adaptive cruise control, traffic-sign recognition, lane-change assist, lane-keeping assist, and traffic-jam support all can be enabled.

Camera systems can use a mono- or stereo-camera setup. The main advantage of a mono camera is that it can be installed at a low cost and the degree of freedom for the installation location is high. These cameras with enhanced features are expected to be widely used as parking sensors due to their increasing penetration in economy cars, especially in emerging economies. 

An important advantage of radar over cameras is that radar is resistant to night-time conditions, or when visibility is bad due to weather. Radar is useful for vehicular applications such as parking assist, lane-change assist, and car safety applications like autonomous braking and collision avoidance. Radar systems have become mainstream in recent years as they have become highly compact and affordable.

Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is a sensing method that detects objects and maps their distances. The technology works by illuminating a target with a laser pulse and measuring the characteristics of the reflected return signal, helping vehicles “see” other objects like cars, pedestrians, and cyclists. A more compact, low-cost model allows automakers to easily embed it into their vehicles

– Greater Processor Capability: More cameras, radar, and LiDAR with higher resolution all translate into stringent requirements for high-performance processing. Processors for ADAS applications need to be able to combine megabytes of visual or other sensor data to produce an interpreted environment for the car. To make ADAS applications affordable in low- and mid-end vehicles, there are quite a few cost-effective low power, high-performance SoC solutions available.  

The mainstream use of ADAS in modern-day cars is being made possible by reducing the size and complexity of individual components, such as sensors, as well as integrating more processing functions into comprehensive IC platforms.

What’s more, in terms of reining in ADAS costs, solutions are accommodating an open software-development methodology, making it possible to reuse the resulting code and preserve efforts made in development and testing.

Finally, a major cost reduction in semiconductors and embedded systems can only be realized with high volume. If Federal regulation mandates incorporation of many of these ADAS features in new vehicles, the economy of scale is round the corner to further push the cost down and thereby help in adaptation for the mass market.

EVs are growing popular, however, not to the extent of making an impactful change. How can carmakers make EVs more affordable?

The major part of EV cost goes towards the battery and its management and the Motors. Countries like India are dependent on importing these parts from countries like China. To make EVs more affordable we need to focus on the following.

– Battery technology: Battery technology has improved significantly in the past decade, with lithium-ion battery prices falling by approximately 85% from 2010 to 2018. The evolution of technology has also helped to increase EV range by about 17% per year over the last ten years.

However, battery technology must improve further towards more affordable EV models with superior range too. This will make electric cars more accessible and attractive to a bigger audience. Battery efficiency to cost ratio is key. This is the main barrier to mass adoption. Battery technology will continue to improve with more energy density per space and less degradation over time. Combining this with faster charging like Ultra-Fast and beyond will benefit the consumers, especially with cost-parity with ICE based cars happening sometime this decade.

In the short-term, significant improvements might be made by cutting down the usage of the expensive metal’s cobalt, lithium, nickel in lithium-ion battery production. Both General Motors and Tesla have recently announced the introduction of lithium-ion batteries based on this principle, proclaiming it will lead to EVs reaching cost parity with fuel cars.

In the long-term though, multiple different technologies offer the promise of even more improvements. For instance, according to John Goodenough, the co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery, solid-state batteries will be the next big thing.

Few Indian companies are betting big on Sodium-Ion batteries, which are believed to offer better performance and can operate at a wider temperature range. They work much more efficiently in cold environments. They are non-flammable and are expected to have more service life than Lithium-Ion batteries. They are estimated to cost half that of today’s batter. However, their weight to energy density is inferior to Lithium-Ion.

Permanent Magnets in the Motor is another area where the cost is high. While India has a huge deposit of monazite ore from which neodymium can be extracted, India does not have a manufacturing capacity to extract neodymium. We import our Permanent Magnets from China. With demand for EVs increasing, maybe India can consider setting up the facility.

– Mass Production & Economy of Scale: With lower demand, EVs are manufactured in smaller numbers which limit the advantages of Mass production resulting in lower Return of Investment on Capax deployed and negotiation potential of parts and systems.

– Incentivising EV adoption across the ecosystem: Government may investigate increasing incentives further under FAME II to manufacturers. This can reduce the end price to the customer and rationalize taxes on finished cars further to reduce the final cost of ownership.

With all the above, the ownership cost should be on par with ICE vehicles in three to five years. With the advent of new battery technology within this decade, it will only be fair to see Electric Vehicles cost far less than today’s ICE base vehicles by the end of this decade.

Speaking of alternate fuels, how soon can we see hydrogen being used?

Most of the hydrogen today is used in industry, including oil refining and the production of ammonia, methanol, and steel. But recent advancements in green hydrogen technology are making it much more appealing for several different industries.

In transportation, hydrogen fuel can act as a direct replacement for gas and diesel. Hydrogen fuel cells hold a lot of promise soon. Fuel cell technology is fast evolving to become techno-commercially feasible for long haul trucks and trains. Three important breakthroughs in fuel cells could potentially accelerate its commercialization.

Unlike electric vehicles, which can take around 30-60 minutes to charge with the fastest charging stations, hydrogen fuel cell cars can be ready to go in minutes. But fuel cells, which convert hydrogen fuel to usable energy for cars, are still expensive. And the hydrogen station infrastructure needed to refuel hydrogen fuel cell cars is still widely underdeveloped. Still, experts think hydrogen can be especially effective when it comes to long-haul trucking, and other sectors such as freight shipping and long-haul air travel, where using heavy batteries would be inefficient. Mercedes’s parent and truck maker Daimler announced a deal with Volvo Trucks to share the costs of developing, producing and selling heavy-duty vehicles powered by fuel-cell technology.

Independent of the race for fuel cells, few enterprises have advanced in replacing fossil fuel in the Internal combustion Engine with hydrogen. Honda, Toyota, Kawasaki and Yamaha have long seen hydrogen as an alternative fuel for their vehicles. They currently have the technology to use hydrogen in internal-combustion engines. Toyota has already entered three races with the hydrogen-fuelled IC Engine car, namely the Fuji Super TEC 24 Hours Race, the Super Taikyu Race in Autopolis, and the Suzuka S-TAI. To take it further, Toyota has also been working with companies and local governments to expand the options for producing, storing, and transporting hydrogen. Hydrogen could also be used to heat our homes and to decarbonize a range of sectors that have proved hard to clean up in the past. This includes the chemical, iron, and steel industries.

Analysts at BofA Securities think that by 2050, clean hydrogen could account for an estimated 22% of our energy needs, up from just 4% of the energy that hydrogen supplies today. It is estimated that generating enough green hydrogen to meet a quarter of our energy needs would take more electricity than the world generates today from all sources combined, and an investment of $11 trillion in production, storage, and transportation infrastructure.

A decade from now, it is believed that hydrogen is going to be an integral part of our life. If we are serious about decarbonization, we just have no choice but to have hydrogen-based energy generation at scale.” 

What is the way forward regarding semiconductor shortages? How can the industry avoid such a situation in the future?

The auto industry makes up less than 9 per cent of chip demand by revenue. That figure is set to increase by about 10 per cent per year by 2025. However, the auto industry— which employs more than 10 million people globally— is something both consumers and politicians are acutely sensitive to, especially in the United States and Europe. 

The origin of this most recent semiconductor shortage began in early 2020 as automotive assembly plants and the supply chain shut down due to COVID-19. While the automotive industry was shutting down, other industry sectors, such as consumer electronics were ramping up due to the stay-at-home orders. The chip manufacturers began shifting their manufacturing capacity to these other industry sectors who were now begging for supply. Much to the surprise of industry analysts, automotive demand came back much quicker than expected. As a result, semiconductor companies were not able to ramp up demand requirements fast enough. 

– Auto Makers take Emergency Measures: Necessity forced automakers to get creative. They ran vehicles down the line, skipping some components, and parking the almost finished vehicles until the missing part and/or features could be added, and the vehicle delivered to the dealers to await chips and components like wireless charging, lumbar support in the passenger seat, automatic start-stop, or extra key fobs to save chips. And going forward, automakers are working to reduce the number of chips needed in each part. 

Many vehicle launches were delayed, including the Nissan Ariya, Rivian R1T and R1S, and the Tesla Cybertruck. Many, including GM, prioritized their electric vehicles, with that automaker making sure its new family of EVs using the Ultium platform remained on schedule, starting with the recent timely launch of the 2022 GMC Hummer EV pickup.

– Current Situation: More semiconductor chips are coming in 2022 and slowly but surely the chip shortage is easing. That does not mean 2022 will necessarily be a blockbuster year for inventory, but the global microchip shortage is expected to continue to improve which should mean less or no downtime for automakers. The hope is that the chipmakers increase capacity and automakers find ways to make cars with fewer chips or use more of the higher-tech wafers that are more plentiful.

– Preventing the future supply chain disruption: Companies are making deals to ensure a continuous supply in the future. In December, BMW said it had secured direct supply contracts with chip maker INOVA Semiconductors and GlobalFoundries, ensuring a long-term supply of chips. Ford and GM also have worked to secure direct contracts with semiconductor suppliers.

Stellantis has a deal with Foxconn Group to design four new families of chips that will meet 80 per cent of the automaker’s chip needs, starting in 2024. 

The above steps will ease the shortage for now, but the fast rollout of electrification, Connectivity, IoT and 5G will only strain the already stressed Semiconductor Supply Chain. If we do not learn any lesson and come up with robust supply chain management, it’s only a matter of time before we find ourselves in another crisis.

Additional capacity that is coming up with the expansion of existing fabrication capacity and newer plants being set up should see the supply restoration for the existing shortage. 

From the individual OEM & Tier1 standpoint, the ability to recover quickly from an unexpected shock is a hallmark of a resilient system. 

However, an individual firm’s ability to pivot quickly in the face of a shock can be limited by collective action problems—including a lack of communication and trust between firms along a supply chain—and a lack of access to the data necessary to support visibility and agility. This is especially critical at times of shortage, to counter the tendency of downstream firms, like manufacturers of finished goods, to overorder or hoard inventory and of upstream firms, like manufacturers of the inputs, to not fulfil orders due to a lack of trust in the demand signal, which results in shortages, delays, price increases, and uncertainty for the workers, families, and small businesses who ultimately depend on these goods.

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