i3 - January/February 2020 - 42

Smart Vehicle Architecture:
Making the Future of Mobility Work
By Lee Bauer
Think about all the features you have at your fingertips
in your car. Power windows. Bluetooth capabilities.
Cruise control. Automatic headlights and windshield
wipers. Because these features are easy to operate and
are seamlessly integrated in the vehicle, it's easy to
forget about the vast ecosystem required to make it all
functional.
Typically, new vehicle features have been added in a
modular fashion. From the Model T to the Model 3, we've
been adding features the same way. What's the result of
this process? Many of today's cars include around over
two miles (or over 3km) of wiring with more than 100
ECUs.
And all of these features have put increased demands
on the data and electric systems. Twenty years ago, the
electrical power consumption of an average car was
comparable to a hair dryer. Today, the power required
is comparable to an entire household. In past years, cars
transferred 15,000 pieces of data in a second versus
processing 100,000 pieces of data in 2020. A car's data
speed used to be approximately 150 kilobits per second.
It's now chugging along at gigabytes per second. And
we haven't even come close to what will be required
for the fully autonomous vehicles of the future.

SMART ARCHITECTURE: THE NEED TO REIMAGINE
Aptiv began with an initial principle: Level Four and Level
Five autonomous vehicles will experience an architectural
break; therefore, the design and manufacturing processes
must be reimagined. However, what we didn't realize at
the outset was that many of our customers were already
having architectural issues... in nonautonomous vehicles.
The reason? Manufacturers have completely changed
what a car can do - without really revolutionizing the
way it's made. The modular way in which features have
typically been added to a vehicle has led to an inflexible
and unaffordable manufacturing process. As advanced
driver assist systems evolve from semi-autonomous to
fully autonomous, a similar evolution must happen on the
assembly line.
Thus, Smart Vehicle Architecture was born.

Smart Vehicle Architecture (SVA™) is how we describe
the future of the car. While there are a variety of
ingredients that make up a car's architectural ecosystem
- electric, active safety, automation and connectivity
systems to name a few - we envisioned SVA as a unified
backbone that consists of three critical systems: compute,
network and power. And if you follow the systems and
circuitry from sensor to cloud - that's essentially Smart
Vehicle Architecture.
SVA reimagines the way we architect a car, creating the
foundation for the software-defined vehicle of the future,
while also enabling the flexibility that our customers
value. We create customized architectural solutions that
speak to the unique parameters of the problem. What's
important is that we're making the best decisions around
architecture to exceed expectations when it comes to
flexibility and safety.

INSPIRATION FOR INNOVATION
When ideating and improving upon SVA, we find
inspiration everywhere - and sometimes we don't have to
look much further than our own pockets. Smartphones
can update their own software over the air and have the
capability of downloading apps that can add functionality
and flexibility. Traditionally, cars are manufactured and
sold as a monolith composed of embedded software and
hardware, making it difficult to improve upon individual
features. SVA solves for this problem by allowing
for different lifecycles of the hardware and software
components by treating them as individual systems.
By separating them in this manner, we are now able to
develop the vehicle's hardware while at the same time
creating a flexible software framework with tailor-made
computing, data and power distribution networks to
support it.
This means that drivers will be able to add more
functionality and more content to the vehicle without
having to upgrade costly hardware. In the future, you will
be able to download updates to your software without
taking it into the shop - just like a smartphone.
i3 - January/February 2020

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