Alan Amici (LinkedIn) is the Vice President and Chief Technical Officer of Transportation Solutions for TE Connectivity. Which basically means that he is responsible for making our cars and vehicles more “high-tech” and connected than ever before.
Alan grew up in Detroit, Michigan, so his love of cars runs deep. He turned that love into a thirty-year career at Chrysler, and now he is doing incredible things with TE Connectivity. Throughout decades in the industry, Alan has seen it all: including the transformation of cars from simple machines that get us from point A to Point B to highly intelligent vehicles that can drive themselves. But he hasn’t just been a passive witness – he’s been instrumental in making those changes a reality. Recently on IT Visionaries, Alan and host Ian Faison discuss everything from how Formula-E Racing informs consumer car technology to the future of autonomous driving and more.
Here are some of the highlights from their conversation.
The advancement of automobile technology and where IoT fits in:
Gone are the days when all your car could do was get you from your house to the corner store. Today, our vehicles have all manner of advanced technology built in – they are connected to the grid. But what does connectivity mean? It means your vehicle can have a connection to the cloud, and you can access cloud services – or a 5G network – from your car for anything. You can be connected to loyalty services as well, which creates a potential for an IoT economy with connected cars. Plus, because of cloud technology, there are over-the-air updates that are now available for connected cars, which saves a trip to the dealership. So, you can enjoy a new and improved feature with less hassle.
“These are technologies that have been available in phones that we’re seeing being utilized in cars,” Alan says.
Speaking of phones –your car can be connected to that, too. You can now get a status update on your smartphone that can diagnostic information. This gives the owner more power and knowledge when it comes to getting a car fixed.
What innovations are happening that will shape the future of electric cars?
Electric cars used to be cute, compact vehicles that could get you places nearby. Now the range on a single charge is up between 200-300 miles, much beyond the daily commute range that electric cars started with. With that problem solved, innovators are looking toward the next big hurdle: time of charging.
“The next big challenge in the industry is how to accomplish quick charging and duplicating a gas station experience.”
Currently, it takes eight to ten hours to get a full charge via A/C charging, which is good, but could certainly be better. There are options to improve the rate of charge, but there are always trade-offs. For example, you can switch to D/C charging, but then you have to deal with the heat in the cable.
But innovation is always happening, and they come from unique places. Alan explains that technology used in Formula-1 and Formula-E racing has been transferred to commercial vehicles. One example is the high-performance materials that allow for improved breaks and wireless technologies in Formula-1 race cars –such as connecting the driver to the outside world – have been incorporated into cars on the road today. Not long ago, Formula-E races were broken up between two cars, because the battery would not last. Now, there is a higher-capacity battery, better power management strategies, and range-extending measures. All of this can be applied to consumer cars. There is more aluminum and carbon fiber in consumer cars because it was first proven to work well in the Formula-E cars.
Autonomous driving and the problems that go with it:
Nothing is more exciting in the world of transportation than autonomous driving, though the industry is still trying to figure it out. Alan explains that the computing power necessary to make autonomous driving uses computing platforms tens of thousands of times more powerful than what is in use today. For autonomous driving, the new computing platforms are measured in something called TOPS —Trillions of operations per second.
“One of the challenges we’re seeing in autonomous cars is in creating high-speed networks that can move a tremendous amount of data around a car very quickly,” Alan says. “The question is: How do you make a self-driving car reliable, repeatable and better than a human driver?”
In order to achieve safety and maintain standard performance, there are many different sensors being used: radar, lidar, weather and traffic information. The challenge remains that platforms need to aggregate all the data from those sensors and use them in real time to make adjustments. There are calculations that suggest autonomous cars will put out four terabytes of data per car per day.
Despite all those challenges, autonomous vehicles are already on the road, even as companies try to optimize the technology. Currently, autonomous vehicles are slow, but that’s because the vehicles are obeying the speed limit while all the other drivers are not. Autonomous vehicles are also not experiencing – and therefore not learning from – all the different scenarios a driver faces every day. That’s where the learning occurs.
What’s to come in the future:
According to Alan, there are big problems that need to be solved before anyone is using an autonomous car with any regularity. But in the meantime, semi-autonomous driving could enter the market. Alan believes there will be a period of time when the car still has a steering wheel and pedals, because at some point, the car may need to pass control back to the driver. For example: in inclement weather, system failures, or various other environmental circumstances, the human driver will need to take over. This requires the driver to be ready for this situation, which means more technology: including driver-facing cameras, biometric readers and more.
“There’s a whole other level of complexity with semi-autonomous driving,” Alan says.
Alan also thinks that 5G is the way forward, regardless of what else happens with autonomous driving technology.
“5G could be a big game-changer for cars in vehicle-to-vehicle communications,” he says.
Alan predicts that each car will have a radio on board with a short range — one kilometer or less. Each car will be able to exchange information with other cars or even pedestrians or others, and it will create an opportunity to provide the driver awareness of and the ability to prepare for upcoming situations or hazards.
Listen to the full episode here.
