Case of restructuring or engine for success? The German auto industry presents a mixed picture. While the transformation to e-mobility gets going after a stumble start, it looks rather poor with highly automated driving. Audi, BMW and Mercedes have put their respective projects to the test and replaced the management staff: too time-consuming, too expensive, and further developed assistance systems still do it for a while. The tech industry, on the other hand, is taking off on all continents: At the digital summit in May, Chancellor Angela Merkel explicitly warned the automotive industry against becoming an “extended workbench” for IT companies. So can the Germans only build pretty car bodies, while central electronic components and software know-how come from abroad?
You can get that impression by talking to the executives of chip manufacturers. Until a few years ago, companies like Mobileye and Nvidia were still sub-sub-suppliers for system specialists like Bosch, Continental and ZF, but now they set the pace for innovation: “What we do today is not what we will do in 2025 “, said Amnon Shashua, head of Mobileye, at the beginning of the year:” Until then, we want to democratize autonomous driving and make this experience possible for many people. but wherever they want, “says Shashua.
Are the automakers becoming an extended workbench for IT companies?
Autonomous driving for private vehicles at a surcharge of around 5000 euros? Frank Petznick also believes in such a breakthrough: “We are firmly convinced that automated driving on level 4 will be available on a larger scale from 2025. The basic prerequisite for this is costs below 5000 euros, which can even be significantly undercut with highly integrated lidar sensors can “, says the head of the driver assistance division at Continental. Affordable robotics would make the entire existing fleet of vehicles look old in one fell swoop.
Amnon Shashua explains how this should work: Intel, the parent company of Mobileye, will not only produce semiconductors, but also highly integrated radar and lidar systems in series by 2025. The next-generation sensors on small silicon chips are to be linked so closely with miniaturized high-performance computers that costs will drop dramatically. The computing power is constantly increasing, a thumbnail the size of a chip works faster today than entire data centers used to be. With this enormous computer power, different types of sensors can each create their own images of the world. The resulting environment models are particularly reliable because the camera, radar and lidar control each other.
Anyone who speaks to Intel’s rival Nvidia is presented with a similar master plan: The chip giants finance their development projects worth billions from the bubbling income of consumer electronics – just like Apple and Google do. Nvidia will deliver its electronics platform for autonomous driving to Daimler from 2024 – for all model series from the Stuttgart-based company. The high-performance computers from California are already fueling the MBUX infotainment system: a fully networked toy with a giant screen that brings the digital world into the car in high resolution. Anyone who can enjoy smooth widescreen cinema on the go does not want to bother with the slow traffic in big cities. The tech companies are speculating on this multi-billion dollar business.
This is what automakers call software-based vehicle architectures. But they take a long time to get their tin boxes ready for this fully digital future. The three big German suppliers, however, smell the morning breeze. While the business with components for internal combustion engines is declining, assisted and automated driving systems have been growing in double digits for years. “The market is growing. It will more than double in the next three years,” said the new Continental boss Nikolai Setzer.
“We are striving to be the global leader when it comes to technology for automated driving,” Setzer announced at the 2021 Annual General Meeting. What seems somewhat brave: It does seem sensible to make “Autonomous Mobility” a separate business area for Continental from 2022 onwards. Compared with the “additional investments of up to 250 million euros” (Setzer), the tech companies from the USA and China play in a different league.
The rapid progress increases the safety level of all new cars
Nevertheless, it will not work without the system suppliers. They have the necessary know-how (and in the case of Bosch and Continental 20,000 software developers each) to combine artificial intelligence and new electronic functions with safe driving behavior. And they are already the market leader in distance cruise control, emergency braking and lane keeping systems. Such assistants will be mandatory for new cars in Europe from next year. And the active safety systems will in future be used even more as a basis for the EuroNCAP crash test as an evaluation standard. According to the motto: Avoid accidents instead of reducing the consequences.
Driver assistants will soon become standard and in the next expansion stage they will also be able to drive automatically: whether anticipatory lane changes on the motorway, autonomous traffic jam driving or a motorway chauffeur up to a speed of 130 km / h: cameras maintain a 360-degree overview of the traffic situation , while highly accurate crowdsourcing maps not only show the car exactly where it is to the centimeter, but also what awaits it on the route ahead. The good old radar sensor is also making a career, the Pling-Pling of which made sea and aviation much safer in the last century. The light-independent bundles of rays can now also make out vehicles at a distance of more than 300 meters. Even small, weakly reflective objects, such as bricks, are reliably detected at a distance of 160 meters with several measuring points.
This precise foresight is a key requirement for automated driving: even at higher speeds, the vehicle gains a lead time of several seconds to be able to react to obstacles. Radar systems remain many times cheaper than lidar sensors, which, like lightning or headlights, “illuminate” the world on their own wavelength and measure without distortion.
So sensors are getting better quickly, while the computer power for artificial intelligence is getting cheaper and cheaper. All tech companies therefore expect fully autonomous cars to go into series production by 2025 at the latest. The Bundestag has just created the legal requirements for this. And the German automakers will hurry to go into series production with the built-in chauffeur. Because in the growth market of China, new competitors like Nio want to take off with highly automated driving functions as early as next year – equipped with the latest computer electronics from Nvidia.