If you're above a certain age, you may sometimes experience that sudden realisation that we're living in the future. For those of us who grew up pre-millennium, to be surrounded by videophones, robotic servants that vacuum the house and trains that magically drive themselves seems like something out of our childhood science-fiction books. Heck, we're in the year of Back to the Future II; Marty McFly is due to arrive in October. Lexus has just announced that it's made a hoverboard. What a time to be alive.
We’re not all the way there – plenty of what we envisaged as kids has not yet happened. But much of it will. The future will be a very interesting place indeed.
But if you’re a driving enthusiast, it’s also a scary one. In recent years, almost all of the major car manufacturers have focused on improving their technologies and boosting efficiency and safety levels so that even the most cack-handed of drivers will have more of a struggle to throw their machine off the road.
As automatic transmissions, parking and even driving become increasingly commonplace, how worried should we, the petrolheads, be about what the automotive landscape will look like in the future?
A good place to answer that question is at the headquarters of Bosch, just outside Stuttgart, Germany. The company name might conjure up images of drills, dishwashers, spark plugs and wiper blades, but Bosch is one of the most important automotive companies out there, supplying components, parts and technologies to a huge number of car manufacturers. From electronic stability control and anti-lock brakes to fuel injectors and the plethora of sensors dotted around modern cars, Bosch has been instrumental in developing tech that pervades today’s machines.
So if anybody is equipped to paint a picture of our automotive future, it’s Bosch. First things first, though – is technology taking away our enjoyment? Not at all, says Stephan Stass, the company’s chief of driver-assistance systems. He believes the technology Bosch is developing, in collaboration with the world’s manufacturers, will give people options – options to switch on autopilot, save fuel and get more information about the transport infrastructure, but always with the option of turning it off and simply going for a drive.
“We thought it was a good idea to ask the enthusiasts, and we’ve made quite a lot of research internationally to find out what our consumers think of all this,” he says. “People are saying they want to have the function and they’re willing to pay for it.”
The function he’s referring to is automation – the ability of a car to drive itself. Automation is one of three key pillars of development that Bosch sees as crucial in today’s automotive world, alongside connectivity – that is, getting cars, components and devices to talk to each other – and electrification.
Ah, yes, electrification. When Honda’s Insight and Toyota’s Prius dropped, using electric motors to support rather underwhelming petrol engines in the name of emission reduction, dyed-in-the-wool petrolheads rolled their eyes. But look now at the likes of the McLaren P1, Ferrari LaFerrari and Porsche 918 Spyder, which lead the charge of performance hybrids. Look at Tesla, which is going great guns with its full-electric cars that offer scintillating performance. Manufacturers have realised that electric power means lowdown torque, which means acceleration of the kind few could have imagined in the past. So increased electrification isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Which is just as well, because the trend is only going to continue, according to Bosch. By the company’s estimates, 15 per cent of the total cars sold worldwide in 2025 will have some sort of hybridisation, or be full-electric models. Bosch is working at full pelt to improve battery technology, with aims to double output and halve the physical size of a typical unit by 2020. By this time, estimates suggest there will be three million public charging points for electric cars around the world, meaning increased incentives for owners of electric cars and plug-in hybrids.
This doesn’t necessarily sound the death knell for the combustion engine, though. Petrol engines and especially diesel units still have plenty of potential for increased efficiency, according to Rolf Bulander, the chairman of Bosch’s mobility-solutions division. Even as scientists beaver away to improve alternative fuel technology such as hydrogen fuel cells, “traditional” engines will be streamlined by way of higher pressure direct-injection systems, cleaner combustion and optimised gas-recirculation systems. The basic premise of squirt-spark-bang remains, but it’s getting seriously clever. When combined with the improving electric technology, we’ll see serious efficiency, which can then be used either for reduced pollution or improved performance. Or both.
So, the car of the future will probably have electrical components in its power train. But what about the way it drives? Look at some of the technology in the higher-end cars of today and you’ll get a good idea of the way things are going. Modern vehicles are crammed full of cameras, lasers, radar units and other sensors, which allow them to build up a virtual picture of the surrounding environment. Already, cars can tell if you’re inadvertently swerving out of your lane and correct you, or identify a slower car ahead and automatically slow to match its speed. Cars can park themselves using sensors around the car, or spot if a pedestrian is about to leap out in front of you and automatically brake.
These technologies will evolve, to the point where the car can drive itself. There’ll be a process whereby you type in your destination, hand over control to the car and you’re free to catch up on social media, read a book or play with your kids.
Right now, several manufacturers are testing self-driving cars, and even Silicon Valley is getting involved – most notably Google. The main barrier to implementing full automation is legislation. Most countries’ traffic laws are derived from an agreement established by the United Nations, which dictates that, ultimately, the buck stops with the person behind the wheel. To allow full automation, the responsibility has to be handed to the computer inside the car, which brings up various legal questions. In the event of an accident, who’s at fault? The driver? The manufacturer of the car? All these questions need to be addressed, and they are. Stass hopes that by the end of the year, a framework will be agreed upon, which will pave the way for a more automated future. We should see a system that allows cars to operate unmanned on freeways within the next decade.
Once again, Stass stresses the automatic option will be just that – an option. His vision is that electrification will retain exhilarating performance, and automation will mean after a hard day of blasting along country roads, you can set the car to auto for the boring slog back home again.
“We see a strong willingness to have this function in the car, as long as you can switch it off whenever you like,” he says.
The car of the future, then, will be very clever – efficient and self-aware. But Bosch is looking beyond just individual vehicles. Indeed, its mobility-solutions division has been renamed – the old name, automotive, no longer cuts it, because the department is now looking at the wider picture.
Sometimes a car is not the answer; in a big city, for example, it’s often a much better idea to hop on a train or a bike. The key to understanding the best form of mobility is to understand the infrastructure on which mobility relies, and this forms a vital part of Bosch’s work. The secret, it believes, is connectivity, ensuring that as much as possible everything talks to everything else.
Connectivity is becoming an increasingly common part of everyday life, from your smart LED house lights to your watch. Your phone “talks” to your car; your computer “talks” to your printer and TV; the sticker in your car “talks” to overhead gantries as it passes underneath and takes money from your account. Increasing connectivity between your car, other cars and the environment will improve mobility for all.
Imagine a world where each car, already well aware of its surroundings, feeds that information to the cloud. With that myriad information, a picture is built of the landscape – where there are traffic delays, adverse weather conditions and so on. Imagine your car knowing, just around the corner, there’s been an accident or a fog bank; it can automatically slow down before the problem is in sight. Imagine parking spaces with micromechanical sensors in them that know if they’re occupied and feed that information to a central database; as your car automatically drives towards its destination, it has a real-time feed of where it can park.
Such systems are already in play to an extent. Satellite-navigation systems use real-time traffic information to reroute drivers away from snarl-ups or closed roads, and Bosch has a smartphone app that allows drivers to report changes in speed limits to the cloud. That information is then sent to other users.
Bosch envisages this growing exponentially, creating multilayered maps of the transport infrastructure with massive amounts of information that can help optimise travel, allowing you to get where you want to go in the best possible way.
Ultimately, that’s the aim of the game – making travel as simple as possible, whether it’s the daily commute or a long journey. Bosch is working hard to make these visions reality in the near-to-mid future. It’ll be down to the individual manufacturers to put their own spin on these technologies, and ensure they still make cars that satisfy the demands of the public; whether that be comfort and luxury or performance and excitement. But be honest – who really enjoys the boring part of driving? Surely even the most ardent petrolhead could do without those deathly dull motorway slogs or the slow-moving traffic at rush hour. Wouldn’t it be nice, in those situations, to let the car take over? Even if it isn’t a flying, time-travelling DeLorean?
motoring@thenational.ae
