In the studio of Siemens, the digital car architecture displayed on the wall is compared with the traditional automotive electronic architecture, which reflects the concept of simplifying from complex to simple.
On the monitor screen, a car sped by. Suddenly, its two front wheels turned left and right -- the body curved and drifted to the side of the road. There was no driver in the car for such a difficult operation -- it turned out that this was a simulation test of a car's digital operating system at the Siemens research center in Munich. In the future, this system will abandon the traditional mechanical power device and use digital instruction to control the car's forward, backward, acceleration and braking. Dr Kornell klein, a software engineer at Siemens, told the financial times that the advent of computers had sent typewriters into the cold. The advent of digital operating systems is expected to revolutionize the automotive industry.
Cars are a product of the mechanical age, says Mr Klein, and new features are being added as electronics develop. The result is a maze of dozens and hundreds of cables, electronic controls and winding sensors that open the hood of the engine or body panels. Every time a new car is developed, engineers have to add a lot of new cables to the maze and update the original electronics.
How to solve the above problem? In 2012, Siemens led Stuttgart university's institute of aeronautical systems and other eight institutions to form a research and development team to design the car architecture "from a new beginning". In this architecture, steering, acceleration and braking systems will no longer be controlled by mechanical rods, cables and shafts, but by a car's "brain", which controls the motor. When a car needs to turn, sensors installed under the steering wheel measure the pressure, and the brain receives a "report" and sends instructions directly to the electronics that control the wheels. The car operating system will be able to install new applications, like a phone or computer.
Experts at the Siemens institute for central research and development say German carmakers are working on research and development. But the current automotive electronic and electrical architecture has been developed gradually over the past 30 years, and most carmakers are trying to follow this evolutionary path. This gradual development architecture is not suited to the needs of the age of the Internet of things, such as autonomous driving. Siemens is "revolutionary", of the research because of its structure made from scratch again thinking about cars, digital solutions covers all of the components (engine, braking, steering) and functions (close to the fully automatic driving, at the same time to the corresponding safety standards).
In the test shop, a car was mounted on a platform one meter high. Each wheel is hooped by an electric motor. Start the motor and the wheels speed up. In the next room, the car's "driving" scene is simulated on a large screen in real time. Engineers use computers to analyze and test various driving conditions. The electric sports car has no mechanical drive at all and USES hub-drive technology to integrate power, transmission and braking devices into the wheels. In addition, there is no need for a power outlet when the battery pack is charged. When parked above the charging board on the garage floor, it can use inductive coupling to charge wirelessly.
Germany and China automotive industry technology association jian-dong wei said to our reporter, Siemens led the project really belong to reverse the car type design pattern, its advantage is obvious: to speed up the upgrading, personalized, easy to implement with "connected". However, the system still needs more reliability and security tests, and market acceptance remains to be seen. In the future, in the era of the Internet of things, the patent layout competition around the automobile will be more intense.
It is reported that the first batch of cars with digital operating system will be launched in Germany in 2016 and mass production will begin in 2018. Dr. Klein predicted that the first areas where digital cars could be used could be special-purpose vehicles, such as driverless transport vehicles in logistics centers. In the future, digital cars will be able to connect with other cars and other facilities on the road in the Internet of things and realize unmanned driving.