Innovation In Automotive Industry: Major Trends
Innovation in Automotive Industry: Major Trends
For a long time now, the automotive industry has been seriously investing in innovation and proliferation of the latest technologies. The market’s usage of new technologies from driverless vehicle technology to 3D printing vehicle parts not only advances innovation in the industry but also encourages furious competition among major automotive industries.
This is great news to the consumer section because this head-to-head competition makes new technologies more affordable, more eco-friendly, and makes users’ lives much easier than ever before.
Without further ado, let us delve into the major trends in innovation the automotive industry has come up with in the recent years and where the market is headed in the near future.
Autonomous Automotives
Driverless cars and trucks are already being tested out in the market. Tesla, a forerunner in autonomous cars in the U.S, recently made history by eccentrically launching a car into space.
Although Tesla cars are not completely autonomous yet, their autopilot feature, introduced in 2015, is nothing less than impressive. Tesla also released Enhanced Autopilot in 2017, which adds new capabilities. Tesla cars, typically, are equipped with eight cameras to offer a 360-degree vision. Twelve ultrasonic sensors ensure that the car can recognize and avoid obstructions. Drivers can also instruct the car to enter or exit garages without having to be behind the wheel.
2019 appears to be a major disruptive year for autonomous vehicles. Other major U.S. automotive companies are also competing strongly with Tesla.
Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, manufactures vehicles equipped with software and sensors designed to detect pedestrians, cyclists, road works, other vehicles, and more. Uber recently announced, “In 2019, we’ve committed to buy 24,000 Volvo SUVs that we’re going to equip with our autonomous driving technology and start to roll out on the Uber app.”
By 2019, General Motors plans to mass-produce self-driving cars, which do not have steering wheels or pedals. The car will be the fourth generation of its driverless, all-electric Chevy Bolts, which are currently being tested on public roads in San Francisco and Phoenix.
The U.K. government seems keen to be not left behind in the autonomous automotive technology. It has declared that the driverless technology market will see a GDP of £50 billion by 2035.
Electric Vehicles
Typically, a battery pack in an electric car stores electric energy to power its motor. Electric cars can be charged either in their owners’ garages or at charging stations. With growing awareness of the public in ecofriendly transportation, sales of electric vehicles are gaining momentum in the US, whereas in some European countries such as Norway and Denmark, electric cars have already become the norm.
According to the Global EV Outlook ’17 report by the International Energy Agency, the global electric car stock surpassed 2 million vehicles, with more than 750,000 electric cars sold worldwide, with Norway in the lead.
The near future is set to become even more environment friendly in the automotive world. The world is slowly making a move to electric vehicles. Europe is decidedly ahead of the US in supporting and proliferating the usage of electric vehicles. The U.K.’s Office for Low Emission Vehicles provides over £900 million for the development, manufacture and use of ultra-low emission vehicles in Britain. In order to encourage consumption of electric vehicles, the Norway government exempts value-added tax and traffic insurance tax for electric cars.
The U.S. is not far behind Europe in the competition, though. Ford did its bit to partake in the electrification of its vehicles by planning to invest $11 billion by 2022. In January, BP Ventures invested $5 million in FreeWire Technologies, a U.S. mobile electric vehicle charging company, to deliver rapid charging at retail sites.
China is also set to make a long-term, long-standing change to its automotives. Geely’s Volvo, for instance, has announced to go full electric or, at least, hybrid by 2019. Shenzen, China’s hub for major technology companies, is set to have the world’s first all-electric bus fleet.
Connected Automotives
The U.S. leads in the connected automotive technology. Nuance, a U.S AI company offers automotive virtual assistants, connected to major automotive OEMs like BMW, Audi and others.
One press release on Nuance’s partnership with BMW describes this connected car technology as “hybrid voice and natural language technologies derived from deep neural networks.” According to the press release, this NLP technology is essentially a conversational AI that is powered by Nuance’s hybrid embedded-cloud voice recognition, natural language understanding (NLU), and text-to-speech solutions. This connected car technology enables drivers to access apps and services through voice commands, such as navigation, music, message dictation, calendar, weather, social media. For example, it is possible to command the AI to send a text message right from the car, like “Text Roger I will be 15 minutes late to today’s meeting,” or “Get me directions to Armando’s Pizza in Cambridge.” This technology supports 29 languages, including English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and more.
One of the major considerations of this connected vehicle technology is the interoperability between different AI systems. There are two hard problems to solve in this scenario: identifying the right software to delegate commands to and communicating to the system in the language it understands. Nuance builds semantic automotive APIs that interact/interoperate with other software. These semantic APIs have a list of available services/software that can be registered with Nuance to help them understand the actions and languages of the registered software for interoperability.
3D Printing for Automotive Parts
The 3D printing technology is over two decades old. It is now seeing a booming growth across all kinds of verticals from healthcare to automotives.
Ford, for example, has been 3D printing prototypes for a long time to decrease design time. Local Motors, a U.S. motor vehicle manufacturing company focused on low-volume manufacturing of open-source motor vehicle designs, 3D printed fully working car parts way back in 2014, and named the 3D-printed car model, Strati. The company now reportedly houses three such 3D-printed car models and an autonomous electric-powered shuttle named Olli.
Honda released a 3D-printed, electric car of the Micro-Commuter in October at CEATEC 2016 in Japan. A single-seater with about a 50-mile driving range, the body and majority of the panels on the Micro-Commuter are 3D printed.
Automotive 3D printing is definitely contributing to the economy. A SmarTech Publishing report says that revenue in the 3D printing automotive market will hit $600 million by the end of 2018. It estimates $2.3 billion in revenue by 2021.
In Conclusion,
The recent years have seen a decidedly disruptive growth in innovation in the automotive industry. A 2017 Statista report claims that in 2017 alone, the global automotive industry spent an estimated amount of about $98.2 billion for research & development. This amount is only going to exponentially increase in the coming years.
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Written and edited by Radhika Madhavan at High Peak Software.
