How Manufacturers Are Driving Automotive Innovation

The automotive industry in the future will see and undergo radical changes.

As autonomous cars gain prevalence over the next 25 years, the market will see transition from B-to-C to B-to-B. Individuals will no longer own vehicles and car fleets like Carline, Ola, Uber and ‘Robo-taxi’ will emerge.

Innovation is a constant buzzword in the industry, directly implying the critical competency needed to transform our vehicles into smart machines. That will be a definitive trend incorporating numerous systems such as guidance (GPS), adaptive cruise control, infotainment, and automatic parallel parking, amongst others.

The one thing that will not change, however, is the need for engineering simulation to design cars of the future. Innovation’s indispensable requirement in meeting new government standards that regulate fuel efficiency or emissions and the market demand for new technologies like electric or hybrid cars will need the physical testing of an autonomous vehicle to current standards, and it would need more than 1 bn road-testing miles over 100 years!

Needless to say, the consumers and the auto industry cannot wait that long. Let us take a look at the key focus areas of manufacturers and design engineers for driving automotive innovation.

DRIVING TOWARDS THE FUTURE

At present, we see automotive systems being far more complex than it ever was. No one could have imagined just a decade ago how smarter and autonomous functionalities could be introduced into a vehicle. More and more cameras, radars and other sophisticated electronics are being incorporated with advance sensors and electronics that not only control a vehicle’s speed and position, but also its entertainment and communications technologies.