A SUSTAINABLE APPROACH TO BUILDING THE NEXT GENERATION OF VEHICLES
The automotive industry has introduced an unprecedented array of electrical and electronic innovations in recent decades — from passive safety features such as airbags to immersive user experience and infotainment, as well as active safety features such as automatic emergency braking. Each innovation requires its electronic control unit (ECU) with its power, its processing, its data, and its connectivity. Each feature’s hardware brings its wiring, introduces complexity, takes up space, and adds weight to the vehicle.
This approach barely meets the needs of today’s feature-rich vehicle and certainly won’t scale as the industry moves toward fully autonomous driving, the most complex challenge it has ever contemplated. What’s needed is a new vehicle architecture that simplifies the design, centralizes computing power and optimizes electrical/electronic content, components, and functionality.