Industry
Manufacturing
Future-Ready Manufacturing: Partnering in your journey to a sustainable manufacturing enterprise
Highlights
- Automotive industry is dealing with two industry defining technology transition concurrently - electrification and software-defined vehicles.
- SDV brings exclusive benefits towards EV transition, ranging from vehicle weight reduction to power management to data-driven performance optimization in real-time
- Industry players need to define a unified strategy combining the power of these two revolutionary technologies
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Technology trends
With significant investment already committed, electric vehicle (EV) industry is battling with volatile market demands while grappling with multiple technology transitions at the same time.
The short-term charging infrastructure challenges and battery capacity constraints impacting the electric vehicle (EV) industry has led to volatile market demands. While the outlook remains optimistic, incumbent automakers are recalibrating their EV roadmaps by balancing investment and return.
Almost concurrently, the automakers are grappling with redefining their business with Software-defined Vehicle (SDV), another revolutionary industry defining technology.
TCS' Future of EV Study found that, despite the pressure of battery technology advancements, the majority of EV manufacturers' efforts are in areas such as vehicle cost reduction, lightweighting, and efficiency. Software defined mobility emerges as a unifying paradigm in this case, bringing with it enormous potential to aid transition to EVs.
SDV brings enormous potential to aid transition to EV. The SDV architecture has several advantages that directly benefit EVs, such as improved battery life and range, energy management, cost savings, and streamlined production. Many of the born-EV automakers like Tesla, Rivian are demonstrating the power of combining these two.
Lightweighting
SDVs can help reduce the weight of an EV through consolidation of electronic components and by optimising system architecture.
The aim for any OEM is to optimise the weight of the vehicle – this directly improves the efficiency, handling, performance and reduce cost of manufacturing and operation. Reducing weight is particularly important when it comes to EVs as their energy storage systems (batteries) are significantly heavier than their ICE counterparts (fuel tanks). This extra weight impacts the range of an EV, and requires more energy for propulsion. As a result any weight reduction that can be achieved in EVs has a greater impact compared to an ICE vehicle – hence a crucial focus for EV manufacturers. A study concluded that a 10% weight reduction in EVs improved electric range by 13.7%, whereas in an ICE vehicle, fuel efficiency was improved by 6–8% for each 10% reduction in weight.
Electric Control Units (ECUs) are embedded systems in vehicles that manage specific functions such as braking, infotainment and seat controls. A key component in the modern vehicle, ECUs are everywhere – a vehicle with advanced features can have over 100, each dedicated to a single task. This distributed approach leads to additional complexities when it comes to wiring, integrating across systems and needing additional hardware as more functionality is added to the vehicle.
Automotive E/E architecture is evolving from distributed to zonal, from hardware defined to software defined. Cross-domain functional consolidation at physical zones enables reduced harness complexities leading to roughly 30% reduction in wire length and weight.
An example of this can be seen in Rivian’s second generation R1S and R1T vehicles, whereby they have consolidated the number of ECUs from 17 to 7 – Infotainment, autonomy, vehicle access, drive units and battery management system (BMS) have their own ECUs, and the rest is controlled by 3 zones referred to as West, East and South. ECU consolidation has helped Rivian to reduce 1.6 miles of wiring (including wiring complexity) and weight by 20kg, decreasing material costs by 20% and carbon footprint by 15%.
Power management
Zonal architecture offers efficient power management - the systems are logically and physically grouped into zones, enabling power distribution to be also combined by zone.
Modern electric vehicles have numerous sensors, control units, safety systems, ADAS and infotainment systems, and several traction motors – Many of these systems have extremely high-power consumption. Supplying and managing power to these systems have consequences which need to be carefully managed. For instance, in addition to requiring a large power source, the systems must dissipate the heat generated when dealing with high energy.
The Zonal Control Unit provides regulated power to the zone's control units, sensors, and actuators. Additionally, smart power distribution and management based on insights acquired from several systems is made possible by cross-domain zonal management of data and signals. For example, the zonal control unit of continental manages the zone's smart power distribution, which includes electronic fusing, diagnosis, and recovery.
The use of 48V systems is also fuelled by zonal architecture. In addition to providing electricity to today's power-hungry systems, it also helps to lower the weight and cost of the harnesses.
AI-powered intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a critical role in delivering best performance in an SDV powered EV.
AI can optimise real-time vehicle performance through analysing data from internal and external factors such as sensors, driving conditions, and user inputs (longitudinal and lateral control of the vehicle) to make instantaneous adjustments. This is key for EVs due to their complex systems for battery management, power delivery and energy management.
AI is used for dynamic performance optimisation by monitoring the vehicle in real-time is for adjusting the power consumption based on driving conditions or user behaviour. For example, improving EV battery pack performance and lifespan might be achievable by disabling the HVAC compressor during acceleration to reduce discharge current. This is important for EVs as the range can be heavily influenced by temperature, terrain and driving style and AI can mitigate these effects by dynamically adjusting power distribution and thermal management.
AI can be utilized for intelligent energy management, such as optimizing the charging and discharging of EV batteries. It can enable smart charging by considering factors like the desired state of charge, departure time, grid load, and energy prices to create a customized charging schedule for the EV.
AI can also be used to enhance EV route optimisation and regenerative braking. To maximise energy recovery, regenerative braking can be adjusted for situations, such as on highways versus urban traffic. Furthermore, based on the route, navigation data can be used to forecast energy requirements, which can then be adjusted to maximise range and conserve energy.
Unified tech power
Transition towards sustainable mobility is inevitable.
Software-defined vehicle architecture facilitates this transition in a holistic manner without compromising objectives pertaining to customers, businesses, or the environment.
The automakers are prioritising their SDV roadmaps based on their operating segments, customer demands, competitive pressure, and investment capacity.
The EV business will also benefit from the many additional advantages that SDV offers beyond those covered in this paper. For instance, SDV will enable faster product launches and feature rollouts, improved vehicle lifetime maintenance, personalised services, and an increased revenue stream for digital services.
The automakers need to define a unified strategy and roadmap keeping both EV and SDV in conjunction. There may be a significant legacy for the incumbents to overcome, but now is time to rewrite the script as this is the new reality of the automotive industry.
References
W. J. Joost, “Reducing Vehicle Weight and Improving U.S. Energy Efficiency Using Integrated Computational Materials Engineering,” The Journal of The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (JOM) 64, pp. 1032-1038.
R. Dixon, “Be ready for the coming shift in automotive computing power,” S&P Global Mobility, April 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/be-ready-for-the-coming-shift-in-automotive-computing-power.html. [Accessed December 2024].
Rivian, “Rivian Introduces Second Generation R1S, R1T,” June 2024. [Online]. Available: https://rivian.com/en-GB/newsroom/article/rivian-introduces-second-generation-r1s-r1t. [Accessed December 2024].
K. Shaw, “How Rivian reduced electrical wiring by 1.6 miles and 44 pounds,” August 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.popsci.com/technology/rivian-zonal-electrical-architecture/. [Accessed December 2024].
Continental, “New ECU Platform for Server-Zone Vehicle Architectures,” [Online]. Available: https://www.continental-automotive.com/en/solutions/server-zone-architecture/zone-control-units.html. [Accessed December 2024].
