As the connected car develops, consumers will demand vehicles that are even safer, more comfortable and more environmentally-friendly than today, and fully reflect the level of consumer electronics that people expect in other aspects of their lives. This is the vision of the future of mobility of advanced technology expert, Chris Borroni-Bird, who believes consumer desires for the ‘ideal connected car’ now need to be made reality.
Megatrends spoke to Borroni-Bird, Vice President of Strategic Development at Qualcomm, about his vision of the future of mobility, and the steps that need to be taken by the automotive industry to produce that ‘ideal connected car’.
Cars that can see around corners
Borroni-Bird joined Qualcomm from General Motors in 2012, the latest step in a career spent developing technology that helps vehicles communicate with each other and with their surroundings, with the ultimate aim of eliminating collisions, reducing vehicle weight and improving efficiency.
Qualcomm is a semiconductor company, perhaps best known for its work with smartphones and tablet computers, but it has recently made headway into the automotive industry, increasingly the direction for many traditionally non-automotive suppliers such as Apple and Intel. Qualcomm is now producing cellular chips and technology for cars and automotive-specific technologies, including wireless charging and wireless vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication.
Future mobility will be developed around electric vehicles (EVs) that talk to each other and use only wireless technology, believes Borroni-Bird. “Qualcomm is working towards addressing consumer and societal trends with wireless connectivity solutions, along with mobile processing technologies and, of course, wireless charging.”
These increasing consumer and societal demands, says Borroni-Bird, will require vehicles to be ever more locally networked – that is, “have the ability to communicate with each other at near distance for collision avoidance purposes.”
When combined with the increasingly widespread number of sensors for collision avoidance, Qualcomm’s technology will be able to improve this performance, says Borroni-Bird. Cars will be able to perform functions that drivers cannot, such as seeing around corners, or quickly and safely adapting to bad weather conditions.
In late 2013, Qualcomm, alongside Honda, developed a system to prevent vehicle-to-pedestrian collisions, enabling communication between the two. The system involved a pedestrian carrying a smartphone equipped with Qualcomm’s DSRC modules, and an Acura TL, which was also equipped with the device. In this case, both the driver and the pedestrian were alerted that a collision was imminent, even though they were unable to see each other. The interest in such technology is clear: were all cars and pedestrians equipped with similar sensors, incidences of cars colliding with pedestrians stepping out from behind parked cars, for example, might no longer involve serious or fatal injuries, or indeed any collision at all.
An automotive world stored in the clouds
Many OEMs are introducing cellular connectivity into their vehicles to provide consumers with the in-car infotainment they require and desire, and these connections can also prove useful for providing further connectivity for the car, such as driver assistance technologies.
Congestion is a major issue, especially in many cities, having a negative impact on traffic times as well as energy usage. Borroni-Bird sees a role for vehicles linking to the cloud via cellular connection. “We see that it can help in terms of enabling more accurate and more frequent map updates,” he says, “as well as information about problems that are occurring down the road.”
This can range from traffic time predictions to warnings about weather conditions. “It’s not inconceivable that a car in the future encountering patches of ice in a certain location could send that information to the cloud,” he says. “This would alert nearby vehicles of the ice before they actually hit it.”
Despite the possibilities that vehicle connectivity can provide in terms of sharing information between vehicles, Borroni-Bird highlighted the potential for further connectivity between vehicles and infrastructure to make cities smarter in the future. “Connectivity both locally for collision avoidance as well as to the cloud for traffic and road information is going to be increasingly important in the future.”
Hungry cars
With increased connectivity, however, comes increased data, and vehicles will continue to generate and transmit data to the cloud. “There is a lot of work needed on the network side to support these hungry cars which have insatiable appetites for data, and there’s going to be a need for more powerful processing on the vehicle,” says Borroni-Bird.
He continues, “This is one of the things to consider as we think about the next generation of cellular networks. In city centres, where you have tremendous quantities of sensor data to generate, that’s where you may need the greatest capacity in terms of bandwidth.”
City transport – autonomous and efficient
According to Borroni-Bird, autonomous vehicles have the potential to ultimately change the business plan for shared mobility services, if the vehicles can ‘self-balance’ themselves at the end of each day and be brought back to the starting point ready for the beginning of the next day. “I think it would improve the finance on the business side of a shared mobility service,” he explains. “At the moment, car share companies have to send people out to drive the vehicles back at the end of the day to where they may be needed at the beginning of the next day. They’re experimenting with new business models, such as incentives for people to take strides against the flow, so to speak, for a subsidised rate. If the vehicles could drive autonomously, that would be very attractive.”
And on the subject of shared mobility, EVs may also be a solution, “because just as these shared vehicles make sense in city centres, now that’s also where you need clean vehicles to tackle pollution concerns.”
Although people may still own a car for occasional long distance trips, Borroni-Bird believes a shared EV may be attractive for daily use during the week. “And if it can go and park itself because it’s autonomous, then it certainly would play into the need for wireless EV charging, because if the vehicle’s parking itself you don’t want someone to be responsible for plugging it in.” Look at Qualcomm’s offerings, and it’s clear that autonomous vehicles and wirelessly charged EVs form a central role in the company’s vision of the smart city of the future.
Indeed, Borroni-Bird’s long-term vision for shared vehicles includes semi-dynamic charging, something he believes would make sense in places like for taxi ranks and at intersections, where cars spend a significant periods of time. “Wireless charging should be something that people don’t have to think about, he explains. “It’s just part of the long-term vision, beyond benefits in the home and static charging in public parking spaces.”
From high-end to mainstream
Technology currently being introduced in high-end vehicles will be mainstream technology in ten years’ time, due in part to the declining cost of said technology, as well as rising demand. This is not a new phenomenon, but the trickle-down of technology is increasing. “You’ll see more vehicles that have mild hybridisation and more vehicles that have capability of collision-avoidance technologies,” he says, “like forward collision warning, lane detection and so forth.”
The changing face of automotive design
Through implementing technologies such as Ethernet into their cars, OEMs have been significantly reducing not only connectivity costs but also the very weight of cabling in their vehicles. However, most vehicles currently carry over 3kg of mass in terms of passive safety content, such as energy absorbing foam and airbags, seatbelts and the crash structure itself.
By changing the face of technology, and enabling vehicle autonomy, Borroni-Bird believes there is potential for a complete redesign of the car as we know it. “It’ll need a structure, obviously, for ride and handling purposes, but you wouldn’t need as significant a mass of structure if you don’t have to worry about crashing,” he says. “Today, you have a choice between steel, aluminium and carbon fibre, but if you didn’t have to worry about crashes, then it may open up the space to new materials that might be less expensive, or lighter, or more recyclable, or offer some other benefit. And that in turn opens up opportunities for changing the shape of the vehicle. You might be able to enter through the front of the vehicle instead of the side, as you would no longer be worried about frontal impact.”
Despite there being much that could be done to change the design of the vehicle, Borroni-Bird concedes that it is a long way from happening. Nonetheless, he maintains that it could occur sooner in a segregated community like a campus. “In terms of the mixed environment that we assume is the dominant model, it will probably be decades before you get to a point where the penetration of autonomous vehicles is such that you can begin to think about that seriously.”
The automotive world in 2025
So, how does Borroni-Bird see the automotive world in 2025? He grins. “That’s only a couple of models away from where we are now, given the cycle times, and if you look back ten years at what cars were like in 2004 versus today, you wouldn’t find a tremendous difference.”
Nonetheless, in the next ten years, Borroni-Bird sees efficiency being one of the main game-changers. “You may see a greater fraction of vehicles having some kind of a mild hybrid, maybe 42V or 48V systems to promote start-stop capability. You’ll see more plug-in hybrids and more pure battery electric vehicles, but unless there’s a breakthrough in battery technology or a real change in the price of fuel, or some extreme regulatory action that we don’t know about just yet, I think the vehicles will in many senses be not that different from today. They’ll be capable of a certain level of autonomous driving, such as the limited speed, highway assist operations that are likely to be introduced.”
The road to the future
As the industry moves into an exciting new phase of product development, designing the car of tomorrow to meet new technological innovations is currently one of the main challenges facing OEMs and suppliers. Despite constant innovation inside the vehicle, the slow automotive development cycle is still a drawback for consumer desires. Regardless of the changes that will occur inside and outside of the car within the next ten years, it is clear that considerable work still needs to be done before Borroni-Bird’s connected vehicle vision becomes reality.
