The average car has a few miles’ worth of cables and wires. They handle everything from controlling your anti-lock braking system to telling you how much fuel is left in the tank. Cables and wires are efficient and reliable. They’re also heavy and expensive, which is why Ethernet will be the next in-car connectivity standard.
Bringing Ethernet to cars will do more than reduce the complexity and cost of wiring your ride. It will be instrumental in helping automakers boost the fuel efficiency by reducing weight — something of particular importance to automakers trying to hit federal fuel economy standards of 54.5 MPG by 2025.
“We’re promoting Ethernet as the backbone of the car,” says Kevin Brown, VP and general manager of the Phy Group for Broadcom, which develops connectivity solutions for both automotive and consumer electronics companies.
Hyundai is working with Broadcom to develop an Ethernet system for its next generation of vehicles, but it will be several years before the technology appears in showrooms.
The problem, and they’re always a problem when your talking about big changes in the auto industry, lies in creating a standard to make it work. That’s a hot topic at the Society of Automotive Engineer Convergence conference in Detroit this week, where car companies, suppliers and the automotive brain trust are discussing connectivity in the next generation of vehicles.
They’re all getting an earful from the OPEN (One-Pair Ether-Net) Alliance, which aims to “address industry requirements for improving in-vehicle safety, comfort, and infotainment.”
What OPEN wants to do is create the standard for connecting the various sub-systems in a vehicle with a single, unshielded twisted pair cable similar to the Ethernet line in your home. This auto-specific application is about one-fourth the diameter of the cable running into a cable modem, allowing it to be routed through the vehicle in a smaller area.
Broadcom contends that the adoption of in-car Ethernet can reduce connectivity costs by up to 80 percent, while reducing wiring weight by around 30 percent – shaving up to 100 pounds from your car.
“We’re building more connectivity without increasing weight,” Brown said.
However, maximizing the weight savings will rely upon integrating the various systems found in a modern car.
Your car is loaded with black boxes. There is an engine control unit. A chassis control box. A body control unit. An infotainment module. The list goes on. And on. Integrating them into a single cohesive control unit is key to reducing the weight and complexity of a car’s control system. To that end, automakers are developing one box to rule them all. Think of this lone computer as the heart and the Ethernet as the veins.
As cool as all this sounds, the idea has been around for decades. BMW introduced its “multiplex” technology in its flagship 8-Series coupe in the late 1980s. The revolutionary (for the time) connectivity solution allowed the automaker to send multiple signals through a single wire, reducing complexity and lowering weight.
Another iteration of this came in the form of “Flexray” technology on the current generation BMW X5 SUV. Flexray grouped the adaptive drive functions — specifically the electronically controlled suspension, front and rear anti-roll bars, and active steering — into a singular, instantly adjustable system that could make changes to all the suspension and drive components on the fly.
“We needed a system to manage all those functions quickly,” BMW technology spokesman, Dave Buchko, said, “so they could adapt while you’re driving.”
However, the initial application of vehicle Ethernet will be limited to non-critical systems, like back-up and surround-view cameras. Later, it’s easy to envision when Ethernet will connect the navigation system to the transmission controller, allowing automakers to change gear ratios based on the road terrain, maximizing fuel economy in the process. And BMW has already announced plans to do just that.
So what’s old is new again, but this time, automakers have the ability to stream anywhere from 100 Mbps to 1Gbps of information through the car, while keeping both costs and consumption in check.
Via Autopia