The state of the automotive and transportation industries from the perspective of electrical and electronics engineers designing the new products to reach customers is undergoing a once in a generation change. Four or five years ago it was evident from the mountain of investment moving from R&D into new product design that cars, trucks, buses, agricultural and off-road vehicles were undergoing a period of rapid innovation.
Electrification and autonomous features in vehicles are two of the mega-trends you have to have lived without access to media of any sort to have missed hearing about over the last few years. The market is changing influenced by factors like government regulation and although the USA stands out in the extent to which there is a lack of encouragement through regulation and incentives to OEM’s compared to elsewhere. Nevertheless the American market is shifting. Overseas automakers, bus manufacturers etc. influence through their competition with home-based USA companies’ electric and hybridization strategies as they sell successfully into the market. USA companies of all size and segments like Waymo, GM, Tesla Local-Motors and Lucid and their tier one partners have a bright future ahead of them because they innovate and are exploiting the market shift.
At the latest IESF event, just over a week from now at the end of November in Munich – the agenda and the subjects covered keynote speakers reflect the priority interest that is being given to the subjects of architectural advanced design for the new technologies, connecting the car and driver to the external world and autonomy and electrification in transport.
https://www.mentor.com/events/iesf/automotive-conference
Get there if you can. It is very much worth your time.
Change your head gear as well as your mind-set
Many lay people are skeptical that autonomous vehicle technologies matter in their lives, or for a majority of transportation uses. Mistrust of machine over personal judgment, mistrust of coverage or quality of the “decision making” of machines and misunderstanding of where artificial intelligence and “drive by software” is working in the real world are the symptoms of that skepticism. An attitude of 100% autonomous operation is not yet here so cars shouldn’t be expected to be trusted for any autonomous features they may contain is quite obviously a logical mistake and a practical mistake too. The truth is that significant breakthroughs in autonomous driving are already a reality, solidly accepted in the market and liked by consumers. Emergency breaking systems outperform and are safer than reliance on the driver. Lane departure detection, parking assistance, proximity detection are also examples. Does your car have a camera at the rear for assistance when you are reversing? Mine does and it is a ten year old car. Do you have to command the car to activate the camera, or does it just come on automatically when you engage reverse gear? No, of course you don’t have to press a button or throw a switch there is autonomy in the way the machine assists you. It seems to me a foolish notion I could refuse to look at the screen as well as looking over my shoulder and using the mirrors, or perhaps I could disbelieve the guide lines on the fish-eye lens image because the perspective is not the same as vision with my own eyes and I’m a good driver. Driving assisted by autonomous features will be safer – perhaps not 100% with no exceptions per 100 billion miles – but certainly safer than without these features.
The trends in the industry, consumer choice, regulations from governments will percolate into the challenges of transforming functional requirements into systems and the systems designs into physically routed implementations of electrical interconnect into the car, truck, bus or tractor. Capital will handle the validation of successfully delivered functionality in the electrical designs. Verifying change is safely applied (even when late in the design cycle) consistent with preserving all optional content and doing this at target cost and weight is imperative. The more software automation the electrical and electronics engineers can use to surmount these challenges the better.
In this endeavor too there remain some skeptics – some engineers believe generating or synthesizing wires from design inputs is a flawed idea. A fear there may be a mistake 1 in 100,000 operations unless validated using the same spreadsheet checks used prior to automation. Not enough trust in Capital’s built-in-automated design rule checks has been a real worry for some. It takes time to address that because engineers feel they must have derived design data which is correct by construction under all circumstances. Trust is earned not assumed but once there is almost invisible. I need to remind myself of that because to me mistrust of the Capital tool is analogous to having a backup camera screen in your car and not trusting it. Change in engineering processes is not a point in time, it is a process for early adopters, followers and laggards. All are welcome.
Change to a new lanyard for your new employee badge – lanyards for laggards as well as early joiners.
Change in the transition from Mentor a Siemens business, to working in the Siemens PLM organization presents challenges of similar types. I advocate change to customers, and as I mentioned in my last blog post the team I work in is getting plenty of recent experience in change in our working practices. I wish to issue a correction to what I wrote in the last blog. The promotional pens have indeed changed as well.
However what hasn’t changed is Capital is preferred as the tool suite for electrical platform design by electric and autonomous transportation new entrants to the market and is being adopted by these companies around the world. Capital has a whole-vehicle perspective, and a workflow capable of reaching cross-domain not just within electrical engineering whilst enriching the data flow between OEM’s and their design partners.
The promotional pens have indeed changed after a few years