Transportation – Personalized Cars

Whether it's clothes, furniture or mobile phones—these days everything has to have a sense of unique identity. Automakers and parts suppliers feel the same way, and are investing in technologies that will give cars plenty of personality.

Nowadays, VW offers 13 different body shapes and more than 90 engine types in Germany alone. In fact, when you take all the different options and colors into account, there are more than ten million variations of the European Golf.

However, individuality is by no means limited to appearance; it also includes many things you don't see, like the electronics and software. When combined, these two aspects make the variety of models truly immense. But in many respects, that's only the beginning of the story. Tomorrow's vehicles will have an individual "character," so to speak. They will, for instance, recognize theirAddresses and questions on "Pictures of the Future" owners, be able to adapt, listen and understand, and will also have personalized displays, as well as transmission control systems that are capable of learning.

The initial stages of this process can already be marveled at on the roads: For three years now, DaimlerChrysler S-Class vehicles have been able to identify their drivers at a distance of about 1.5 m on the basis of wireless keys or smart cards, and then unlock the doors.

Furthermore, the engines can be started by simply pushing a button. In the future, these PASE (Passive Start and Entry) keyless access control systems from Siemens VDO will also be installed in VW, BMW and Renault models. Other manufacturers intend to follow suit after 2002. Whereas PASE uses radio frequencies in the kilohertz and megahertz band, the next generation of systems, due on the market in 2005, will be based on radar waves in the gigahertz band, which allow identification over a range of up to ten meters.

Tomorrow's cars will then use radar to determine in which "zone" the driver is currently located. In particular, the system will distinguish between detection, authentication, access and interior zones. "When the driver enters the detection zone, the car will address the ID transmitter—in other words, the wireless key or smart card," says Wolfgang Piesch, who is responsible for system development of access control systems at Siemens VDO. As soon as the driver reaches the authentication zone, the ID transmitter will answer: "It's me!"

"Since the driver will have already been identified in the authentication zone, the doors will unlock as soon as he or she enters the access zone—so there will no longer be a need for an elaborate and costly proximity sensor in the door handle," Piesch explains. "This division into four zones also makes possible new applications, such as secure, automatic locking of the car when the driver walks away."

The "personal car" of the future will also have Internet access. In conjunction with the navigation system, the driver will, for example, be able to display a list of all Italian restaurants within a radius of five kilometers and have the car guide him or her to one. But what's the use of the best information if the driver can't take it in at a glance? What's needed, therefore, are clear indicators and displays. Siemens VDO already manufactures approximately ten million of these annually—from fuel gauges to battery charge indicators and complete instrument clusters.

"Our instrument cluster in the new BMW 7 Series, which was launched in the fall of 2001, is a unique product worldwide," says Dr. Helmut Angermäller, head of the Technology unit at Siemens VDO's BMW Customer Group Division. "In particular, it combines analog and digital displays in an ideal way." Parameters such as speed and revolutions per minute are still displayed with dials and pointers in the familiar and well-established manner.

But navigation indicators, readings concerning the distance to the vehicle in front, warnings, and on-board computer functions are presented to the driver through a high-resolution display. "The on-board computer displays information relevant to the driver—like warnings concerning the distance to the next vehicle—only when the situation calls for it," Angermäller explains. "What's new here is that the driver can select information and have it shown on the display by pressing two buttons integrated into the turn signal lever. For example, he or she can have either the fuel tank level or the distance to empty displayed, as desired. With this development, we've taken a first step toward a personalized display. The instrumentation of the new BMW 7 Series can thus be referred to as the first generation of reconfigurable displays." Although this first generation shows a monochrome image—in orange in the BMW 7 Series—digital instrument clusters of the future will provide multi-colored images.

But creative freedom won't be limitless. "On the one hand, automakers will continue to cultivate their corporate identity and allow only a restricted range of designs and colors appropriate to the car and to the outfitting of the passenger compartment," says Brohm. "On the other hand, display design will still have to take ergonomic aspects and legal provisions into account." Like today's displays, those of the future will not only have to be economical, but also easy to read at all times. In particular, they will have to be suitable for use in cars; in other words, they will have to be able to endure - 40 °C just as well as + 85 °C.

At the IAA Passenger Cars 2001 trade show in Frankfurt, Siemens VDO presented an initial, fully original prototype—a large 10-inch display with rear-wall projection in the middle of the cockpit—within the context of a cockpit study called "Pure Vision 2.0." "These days we're spending an enormous amount of money on development in order to adapt displays to vehicle models and also comply with requirements such as optimizing the angle of view and illumination," Brohm says. "In 15 to 20 years, we might well be seeing the first displays made of flexible, organic light-emitting diodes (see article Presenting Multimedia: Maxi Displays and Mini Projectors). It may be possible to imprint these directly onto the cockpit surface. Regardless of the direction from which vehicle occupants look at such displays, they will always see a sharp, luminous color image full of contrast."

There is another new characteristic of the "personal car" that customers will not have to wait quite so long for: As early as 2003, cars from one European automaker will be presenting important information in the place where it can be registered by the driver in the quickest and most comfortable manner—right in the windshield. This "head-up" display (HUD) gives the driver the impression that a 170 × 85 mm² color image is floating over the engine hood about 2 m away.

The goal of data presentation with HUDs is to avoid overloading the driver with innumerable bits of information and instead present the most important display contents—such as speed and navigation or warning messages—in a simple and concise way. "Our head-up display increases safety considerably, since drivers no longer have to take their eyes off the road in order to read the speedometer, for example," says Dr. Heinz-Bernhard Abel, head of Advanced Design at Siemens VDO. Drivers can register the same information a half a second to a second faster with the HUD than they can with a conventional instrument cluster.

A car with character should naturally also include an electronic scout that guides the driver safely through unknown territory. Says Meier-Arendt: "In the future, there will be a need for personalized navigation systems. For example, older people will probably prefer to get directions a few seconds earlier than younger people." But the personal guides of the future will have one thing in common—the ability to listen and to speak. Meier-Arendt is convinced that "from an ergonomic point of view, a navigation system has to operate acoustically for the most part." However, the voice recognition and synthesis of navigation systems is still in its infancy. "At the moment," says Dr. Hans-Wilhelm Rähl, who is responsible for the integration of speech modules into vehicle environments at Siemens VDO, "navigation systems recognize about 200 words that have to be pronounced in the form of short commands. But the next generation, which will come to market in two years, will be able to handle a thousand words." However, it won't be until 2010 that cars will be able to understand and interpret sentences formulated colloquially. "In a few years, all the infotainment functions available in cars, including Internet applications, will be voice-controlled," says Rähl. "In four years, for example, drivers will be able to have e-mails read out loud by the car and will be able to dictate an answer that will then go out as an e-mail with an audio attachment. The car won't need its own e-mail address for that. Instead, a UMTS cell phone will establish a connection between the outside world and the car" (see articles on communications).

To make sure the stepped automatic transmission hits the right gear, Siemens VDO offers SAT (Siemens Adaptive Transmission Control)—a system that has been used successfully in passenger cars since 1998. "SAT is based on fuzzy logic, a system that imitates human thought processes," explains Dr. Oliver Nelles, Siemens VDO SAT group manager. "Using sensor signals, it can record not only the gradient of the road and the load being carried by the car, but also, in part, the driving style, including whether the driver tends to step on the gas pedal slowly or quickly and how hard he or she brakes." Depending on the driving situation, the car then adapts and automatically shifts a gear up or down.

But since there are as many different shifting strategies as there are drivers, not everyone likes what SAT does. In upscale cars with SAT, drivers can therefore switch to the manual mode and decide for themselves when to shift gears. Although SAT is capable of learning, there are limits. If the driver encounters exactly the same situation, the system responds exactly as it did the time before, even if the driver didn't like the previous response.

But a modified form of SAT called IntelligenTip, which was developed by Siemens VDO and Siemens Corporate Technology, is more intelligent. "IntelligenTip is adaptive and brings the shifting strategy into line with the driver's personal driving style," says project manager Friedrich Graf from Siemens VDO. If a certain situation recurs three to five times and the driver always shifts up one gear by hitting the plus button on the steering wheel, IntelligenTip knows what must be done the next time and automatically selects the higher gear. Says Graf, "The driver can therefore enjoy both the comfort of an adaptive automatic transmission and the freedom to personalize the system—but with the difference, with respect to manual transmissions, that IntelligenTip takes over the work of shifting."

It will also be possible for cars to recognize drivers on the basis of individual keys, fingerprints or smart cards, for example, and immediately have the personal shifting strategy ready. In fact, IntelligenTip has already passed initial field tests aimed at evaluating such a feature.

All in all, individuality and intelligence will no longer be the exclusive domain of the driver, but will instead increasingly be a characteristic of the car as well.

Ulrike Zechbauer