Vehicle styling, speed and looks took the back seat while capabilities driven by GPS, sensors and data were up front at this week’s Los Angeles Auto Show’s Connected Car Expo. Privacy and security, distractibility and safety, and human interfaces were all hot issues. The terms connected car and autonomous cars were being used interchangeably, as a continuum of an evolving set of capabilities. The least-asked question: If we build an autonomous vehicle, will it sell or become an expensive niche product? And how will the market respond to mechanical failures or accidents, even if the vehicles are proved to be overall safer and more reliable?
Not Happy with Navigation. With little to individually distinguish car models, auto makers are looking to infotainment to uniquely brand their vehicles. Yet drivers identify navigation and multimedia among the “lower quality” features of their vehicles. While consumers report that the quality of almost all other features of their vehicles are improving, they indicate that the quality of their navigation and multimedia are declining. “The problem is overly complex systems,” reports Renne Stephens of J.D. Power. “Usability is now considered by consumers as a factor of quality.”
Car makers are under enormous pressure to add functionality demanded by consumers, and make the whole experience simpler. Many of the features embraced by automakers have not attracted the interest of drivers. Stephens reports that valued features include surround view camera with rear vision, wireless charging station, near field communication and smartphone field integration. What they don’t value are eye tracking, tactile touch screens, hand gesture control and laser headlights.
Hacking. Discussions on security were enlivened with the inclusion of hacker Chris Valasek. You may remember that last year Valasek and his partner, Charlie Miller, hacked into the steering and brakes of a Prius and Ford Escape, solely by attaching a laptop to the vehicles. Members of an Israeli intelligence unit reported that they had remotely hacked into a vehicle wirelessly via an aftermarket insurance dongle (in this case, Zubie) that was plugged into the vehicle’s OBDII port. Dongles might make people safer drivers, but could they lead to an unwanted adventure?
Valasek and Miller created a list of the most hackable vehicles with the Jeep Cherokee, Cadillac Escalade and Toyota Prius as the most vulnerable. The Dodge Viper, Audi A8 and Honda Accord top the most secure list. Malicious attacks could range from enabling a microphone to eavesdrop to the catastrophic, such as controlling steering or brakes.
Valasek assured conference goers that hacking vehicles isn’t easy. No matter how many layers of protection are created, no vehicle that communicates with the outside world will be hack-proof. Last month, automakers announced that they are forming a consortium that will be dedicated to deterring “black hat hackers” and will create a venue for the auto industry to share information about hacking attempts.
Dreams and Nightmares. The best-case scenario for the automotive OEMs is a connected vehicle industry in which they control the ecosystem and derive high revenues, as well as driverless cars starting to become common around 2024. In reality, the OEMS may encounter lagging consumer acceptance, perhaps shattered by catastrophic accidents, reliability issues or privacy troubles. Regulation might cause insurmountable constraints. The driverless car could become a niche product and a costly failure.
In another possible scenario, the connected autonomous vehicle becomes a success, but the tech and digital companies win the market with parallels similar to how the PCs took the industry from IBM. The OEMs become a pipeline with little value and the tech companies take home the bacon. If the market fails, the VCs will stop investing and some of these tech companies may fold. The Tesla offers an example of how this scenario might unfold.
Privacy. Automakers are making a commitment to privacy in the vehicle far beyond that made by companies like Apple or Google, which are vying for a piece of connected vehicles. Nineteen automakers just signed a set of principles delivered to the Federal Trade Commission. “Google may want to become an automaker, but we don’t want to become Google,” said Mitch Bainwol of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. The OEMs provide assurance that they will not share information from vehicles that is streamed back to automakers or that is downloaded from the vehicle’s computers. They pledge information won’t be handed over to authorities without a court order, sold to insurance or other companies or used to bombard them with ads for Starbucks, gas stations or other businesses they drive past, without their permission.
“You just don’t want your car spying on you,” said Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “That’s the practical consequence of a lot of the new technologies that are being built into cars.” The automakers signing on to the principles are: Aston Martin, BMW, Chrysler, Ferrari, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Maserati, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Porsche, Subaru, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo.
Uptake. About half of us like to drive and the other half just want to get there, reports futurist Peter Schwartz. Younger populations are increasingly in the transport camp, as illustrated by the popularity of Uber, Lyft and Zip Cars. How to win the whole market is to “automate the boring parts of driving,” says Håkan Samuelsson of Volvo.”
J.D. Powers reports that consumers perceive the autonomous vehicle as a driver completely detached from the driving experience. This isn’t too close to the reality that is within reach; the driver will need to be engaged and ready to assume control when called upon. But the dream of catching a few winks on the way to work is a good one. Will this vision be led by Detroit or Silicon Valley? We should find out soon.
Denso Corp. began testing advanced driving support technology on a public road in Aichi Prefecture, Japan, this past June. Denso is testing automated driving scenarios in a single lane and testing automatic lane changes, as well as other driving maneuvers. Denso’s goal is to develop technologies that reduce driver workload and assist in safe driving.
Previously, Denso tested this technology on its test course in Japan. Denso’s goal with public road testing is to identify, analyze, and solve real-life problems that don’t occur on the test course.
Denso is conducting the field tests as part of activities led by the Vehicle Safety Technology Project Team to reduce traffic accidents. The project team is organized by the Aichi prefectural government and involves companies and organizations operating in the prefecture.
Denso has been developing its advanced driving assistance technology to achieve safer and more reliable driving while the driver remains in control of the vehicle. Development and commercialization of this technology will help prevent traffic accidents and contribute to increasing safety of our automotive society.
Denso Corporation, headquartered in Kariya, Aichi prefecture, Japan, is a global automotive supplier of advanced technology, systems and components in the areas of thermal, powertrain control, electronics and information and safety. Its customers include all the world’s major carmakers.
The autonomous, or driverless, vehicle market seems to be a big side topic at connected car conferences. Location technology will continue to play a role in the development of autonomous vehicle markets. However, many view a fully autonomous vehicle to be more than 10 years away — these are usually folks from the auto industry or academia. Others, those who lurk around Silicon Valley, believe that driverless cars will be on the road in half that time…and once again, if Detroit doesn’t move on it, they will.
Just as GPS was once thought of as science fiction — something that naysayers said would not be fully operational for decades — autonomous vehicles are now thought of as an extension of the connected vehicle market. However, technology and legal issues will make the implementation of an autonomous, or driverless car, a tenuous road in the next few years.
One executive from Verizon Telematics, which is a major player in connected car technology, said it is going to take time, perhaps between the years 2025-2030, to grow the autonomous vehicle market.
“You just can’t flip a switch and have autonomous vehicles [on the road]. You have to take baby steps to develop a network, build an infrastructure and condition the marketplace,” said Kevin Link, Verizon Telematics senior vice president. “The collaboration is going to have to be more than one player, including the government. It was a while before desktop computers evolved into laptops.”
While the technology hurdles will be significant for autonomous vehicles, there are features today that will help shape the market, Link said. “Mercedes cars remind people to steer and turn around corners, when to stop at a safe distance and to change lanes,” he said. “These are not taking you from point A to point B autonomously, but real-time connected car features will feed into the autonomous car.”
The evolution of autonomous vehicles will not be derailed at this point, given the intensive research and investment focus from both the private and public sector, said Tim Johnson, NextEnergy director of transportation initiatives. “However, cars that ‘drive themselves’ will not be in mass production in the next five years. Ten years, maybe. Five, no,” he said. “This is not a technology-limited premise. The technologies are rapidly approaching realistic use in limited applications, but the regulatory, liability and infrastructure aspects are far from being fully implemented in the next five years.”
Technology Hurdles Await Early Autonomous Vehicles — More Regulation than Technology?
Some of the technology hurdles center around the speed, capacity and logic of the vehicle and infrastructure systems to manage the significant amount of information required for self-driving vehicles, Johnson said. “If it was possible to wave a magic wand and have all vehicles made simultaneously capable of these communications and logic decisions, it would be much more viable to create a mass, public environment for self-driving cars,” he said. “In reality, there will be an extensive transition period, possibly 15 to 20 years, where capable vehicles will need to deal with incapable vehicles. Once again, this is not so much a technology issue as it is policy, regulation and liability.”
Autonomous Products Already Out There…
Autonomous vehicles will only continue their current momentum as the technology for assisted driving is already well underway with features like self-parking, lane departure warning, predictive collision warning, back-up collision intervention and blind spot prevention, said Scott Frank, Airbiquity vice president of marketing.
An example is the Infiniti Q50, which uses Airbiquity technology for Infiniti InTouch Apps. “What we’re going to see from here is a shift from driver assistance to zero driver involvement — the ultimate expression of autonomous vehicle — where the car does all the driving and there isn’t even a steering wheel or brake pedal,” Frank said. “We won’t see fully autonomous vehicles becoming commonplace in five years’ time due to the massive amount of technology, infrastructure development and integration that needs to happen to ensure the requisite amount of safety.”
NextEnergy’s Johnson said that cars that drive themselves are already in use in restricted access sites, such as military bases, restricted commercial and university locations, national lab campuses and more. “These are the first real-world applications of both the vehicle and infrastructure technologies to test the practical limits of semi-autonomous driver-still-behind-the-wheel cars,” he said. “Much like the FAA use of limited test sites for the development of regulatory aspects of drone flight, these sites are providing the information and insight to move the potential of cars that drive themselves closer to everyday use.”
Will Public Transit Be the First Proving Ground?
Most companies have different opinions when asked whether the public transit area will be the first major market, and serve as the catalyst, for autonomous vehicle growth. “Although we don’t know for sure, it could be that automated public transit programs, will operate in controlled environments with known routes [meaning low speed operation with pedestrians/bicycles operating on the same thoroughfare, but the automated transit system does not have rails or guide ways — the route planning is easily changeable with no impact to the transportation infrastructure],” said Roger Berg, Denso North American Research and Development office vice president.
Denso believes the autonomous vehicle market will encourage additional functionality within the premium car model lines, but gradually these advanced driver assist systems will become more and more common and eventually spread through even the economy car segment, Berg said. “First systems deploy warnings or simple lateral and longitudinal vehicle control. But then functionality for what most people refer to as ‘driverless cars’ or ‘automated driving’ would only be usable under fairly benign driving and traffic conditions, such as some level of automated highway driving,” he said.
Public transit as an “early adopter” business model is viewed to be less probable in the near term as many of the technical challenges facing autonomous operation require significant research and development and capital investment, said Chris Hennessy, IAV Automotive vice president, engineering. “Most of this capital is centered on markets where the return on the investment can be substantial. At the moment, the most likely scenario for a reasonable ROI is in the premium-brand automotive market, where consumers are willing to pay a premium for new technology,” he said. “This market and the technology growth that will occur from this early-adopter market will provide a foundation for cost-effective proliferation of this technology to other markets, where either the operational boundary conditions are narrower or the available capital is lower, which is typically where public transit would fall. Exceptions to this condition could be analogous to the light-rail market, where the interaction to the general public can be controlled and managed with isolated tracks or lanes of travel, but this would require significant planning and capital investment in infrastructure.”
Airbiquity believes that public transit will not be a first adopter. “No, the first adopters will be private parties in urban areas providing a value proposition to people struggling with congested cities, long commutes, and high parking costs. You’re going to see small and innovative companies offering car services with autonomous vehicles operating on city grids at lower speeds,” Frank said. “They will source the autonomous vehicles from non-traditional automotive makers that move faster than traditional automotive makers. Local government will also be involved, since they own the majority of the infrastructure and need to ensure safety standards are established and met.”
In other location news:
Telit Wireless Solutions has debuted the Jupiter SL871-S, designed for easy migration between a full-GNSS solution for top-ranked applications and a simple GPS-only solution for less demanding applications. The Jupiter SL871-S is designed to track and navigate GPS and QZSS constellations while ensuring pin-to-pin and protocol compatibility with its multi-constellation companion module, the SL871.
The module comes in a 9.7 x 10.1 millimeter LCC package with an ARM7 baseband processor, embedded ROM memory, and integrated LNA. It delivers geolocation data using NMEA protocol through a standard UART port. It supports ephemeris file injection (A-GPS) as well as Satellite Based Augmentation System (SBAS) for increased position accuracy.
In addition, its extremely low power consumption in all conditions is suited to applications requiring long battery life.
SL871-S has been designed to ensure hardware and software compatibility with SL871, allowing customers to design once and take advantage of the xL871 common form factor. Benefits include:
The SL871-S can replace the SL871, allowing customers to design once and interchangeably mount the appropriate solution depending on the required features.
“The new SL871-S module designed to be easily swapped with other xL871 modules for enhanced simplicity and scalability,” said Taneli Tuurnala, CEO of Telit GNSS Solutions. “It is an ideal example of how buying a module from Telit enables our customers to avert the need to keep track of the latest chipset technology on their own. We keep them on top of the best available technology, pre-packaged in a module that is easy to replace as needed, without having to redesign their entire application to stay up to date.”
The new NEO-M8L Automotive Dead Reckoning (ADR) module by u-blox has integrated motion, direction and elevation sensors. The module integrates gyro and accelerometer with u‑blox’ GNSS platform u-blox M8 to achieve high indoor/outdoor positioning performance for road vehicle and high-accuracy navigation applications.
In addition to accessing the integrated module’s gyro and accelerometer data, accident reconstruction systems can provide the location of an accident to facilitate insurance claims even if a collision occurs in a tunnel or park house. High-end navigation devices are able to guide drivers through tunnels of several kilometers because of the accuracy of u-blox’ ADR system. Stolen vehicles can be located instantly due to continuous monitoring of sensor data and storage of location in non-volatile memory.
“Devices for usage-based insurance, stolen vehicle recovery, road pricing, fleet management, emergency services, and vehicle navigation depend on reliable, uninterrupted positioning including tunnels, park houses and stacked highways,” said Thomas Nigg, vice president of product strategy at u-blox. “The NEO-M8L is the ideal solution for all road vehicle based applications, able to calculate a position in all circumstances based on its own internal sensors, regardless of satellite visibility and end-device orientation.”
The NEO-M8L module will be demonstrated at the u-blox stand at electronica 2014 in Munich, November 11-14, Hall A4 Stand 219.
The compact module is 12.2 x 16.0 x 2.5 mm, requires minimum host integration resulting in no risk, is low cost, and provides fast time-to-market design, u-blox said. With uncritical orientation of the installed module, odometer function and autonomous data logging, it is an all-in-one solution for all road vehicle applications requiring reliable and uninterrupted position in challenging environments such as urban canyons, tunnels and underground parking.
The NEO-M8L embeds u-blox’ 3D Automotive Dead Reckoning (3D ADR) chip technology. Using the vehicle’s speed information and the module’s onboard sensors enables accurate positioning in three dimensions, even when satellite signals are completely lost and the end-device installation is not horizontal, u-blox said. An odometer function, based on the ADR technology, also provides accurate and continuous distance traveled.
The module is able to track all visible GNSS satellites including GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, QZSS and all SBAS (European’s Galileo will be supported in a future firmware version). Concurrent reception of two GNSS systems is supported. The NEO-M8L module can output a position up to 20 times per second.
The module uses u‑blox’ M8 GNSS chip and is available in Professional Product grade. This grade includes qualification according to the ISO16750 standard “Road vehicles — Environmental conditions and testing for electrical and electronic equipment” and manufacturing in ISO/TS 16949 automotive-certified factories.
Samples and evaluation kits will be available in December 2014.
The Land Transport Authority (LTA) of Singapore is seeking to develop Singapore’s next-generation electronic road-pricing system, based on GNSS technology, reports AsiaOne News.
LTA has shortlisted three consortia to participate in a tender to develop the system: NCS Pte Ltd & MHI Engine System Asia Pte Ltd, ST Electronics (Info-Comm Systems) Pte Ltd, and Watchdata Technologies Pte Ltd & Beijing Watchdata System Co Ltd.
The contract to design and develop the system is expected to be awarded in the second half of 2015. The system is to be implemented in 2020.
Following an 18-month system evaluation test that concluded in December 2012, LTA said that it has found that it is technologically feasible to develop a GNSS-based road-pricing system in Singapore. The system will overcome the constraints of physical gantries, which are costly, difficult to maintain, and take up land space.
The GNSS-based system will implement distance-based pricing along certain congested roads, where motorists will be charged proportionate to the distance traveled. An interactive and intelligent on-board unit in motorists’ vehicles will support additional services such as real-time traffic information and electronic payment for parking fees.
LTA is considering new policies for off-peak travelers.
Telit Wireless Solutions, a global provider of high-quality machine-to-machine (M2M) modules and services, today debuted the Jupiter SL869-V2S GPS module, designed for easy migration between a full-GNSS solution for top-ranked applications and a simple GPS-only solution for less demanding applications.
The Jupiter SL869 V2S supports GPS as well as QZSS constellations and is ROM based. Geo-location data is delivered using NMEA protocol through a standard UART port. It supports ephemeris file injection (A-GPS) as well as Satellite Based Augmentation System (SBAS) for increased position accuracy. Its onboard software engine is able to locally predict ephemeris three days in advance starting from ephemeris data broadcast by GNSS satellites, received by the module and stored in the host flash memory.
Key benefits include:
The SL869 V2S can replace the JN3, SL869 or SL869 V2 — allowing customers to design once and interchangeably mount the appropriate solution depending on the required features. The xL869 is Telit’s GNSS unified form-factor family, which allows customers to select among different GNSS technologies and feature sets. Modules in this family are offered in a 16 x 12.2 mm, 24-pad, LCC package.
“The new SL869 V2S module is designed to be easily swapped with other xL869 modules for enhanced simplicity and scalability,” said Taneli Tuurnala, CEO of Telit GNSS Solutions. “It is an ideal example of how buying a module from Telit enables our customers to avert the need to keep track of the latest chipset technology on their own. We keep them on top of the best available technology, pre-packaged in a module that is easy to replace as needed, without having to redesign their entire application to stay up to date.”