The race for the car of the future

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We asked this question for the FCA (Fiat Chrysler Automobiles) who invited us to meet their Innovation Center, in Betim. The visit began with a conversation with Matthew Silveira, coordinator of future insights, the department responsible for some of the group's innovation projects.

The future of cities

How to think about the car in a future where the ownership of a car will be increasingly questioned due to environmental issues, changes in consumer behavior and lack of parking spaces? Is an electric car the solution? Autonomous car? Shared car? For Matthew, none of the alternatives is correct.

"Self-driving car congestion remains congestion” he says. "To devise strategies for the car of the future, it is necessary to understand what the cities of the future will be like and the mobility challenges they present.". Cities of the Future is precisely the name of the first project of the future insights. Started in 2014, it is an open and collaborative project that had the participation of USP Cities, from Cesar, a software center in Pernambuco and more than 250 mobility specialists.

"Shared, autonomous and electric cars are technological innovations that do not solve the problems of cities. Subway, train, larger streets, all of this is necessary, but the solution is not in the infrastructure. Trying to solve the problem of urban mobility by investing in infrastructure and how to try to solve obesity by buying wider pants”, says the coordinator.

For Silveira, the problem of mobility is a matter of urban density: “Our urban system is very similar to the American one, with sprawling cities. Our cities have little urban density. It is necessary to densify them, which does not mean losing quality of life. London has almost three times the urban density of Belo Horizonte and has a great quality of life. The important thing is that the collective has priority over the individual. Instead of large gated communities, build public parks and swimming pools. It is also necessary to distribute employment and leisure opportunities. Mobility problems need to be solved first by arranging the movement of people and then investing in infrastructure".

The car as a platform

Matthew calls his department “one man army”. He doesn't have employees, but he can request human resources from inside or outside the company according to the project's need. One of the features of future insights, is the focus on innovation from the user's point of view, not the technology. "Several innovations in Fiat's history were not technological, but only a new way of meeting consumer demand. The first ethanol car was a response to the oil crisis of the 70s, for example".

For him, the most important thing for the future of the industry is to think of the car not as a vehicle, but as a digital business platform. "PFor me, it is part of a line up that starts with the wearable, goes through the smartphone, notebook and arrives in the car. It makes perfect sense to complement our product with digital content. And that doesn't necessarily mean developing new accessories, we can digitally explore the ones that already exist. The reverse camera can take selfies, timelapses. We are proposing to think of the car as a mobile device. Some say that when your car and home are connected, with voice recognition powered personal assistants, you won't need your cell phone anymore.".

Electric car vs Combustion car

With more than 100 years of existence, the technology of the combustion engine is already considered a pre-candidate for a museum piece by several specialists, but not for the FCA. Silveira believes that there is a lot of fascination with electric vehicle experiences abroad, but that they don't make sense in Brazil.

According to the coordinator, “The electric car is not the future. It makes sense in Europe, where there are nuclear plants producing energy around the clock, but not in Brazil, where every now and then we still need to resort to thermoelectric plants. In environmental terms, if we consider the entire life cycle of the product – from the production of ore for batteries to its disposal – it ends up being less sustainable than an ethanol engine.".

A FCA should increase its bet on the ethanol engine. The company promises for the short term an engine that will eliminate the performance gap between ethanol and gasoline.

This does not mean that the company does not research the use of electric energy in its vehicles. O Sunflower Project is a prototype born in Betim that uses photovoltaic film technology from a Swiss-mining company, sunew.

It has a sunroof that captures the sunlight and uses the energy to power the electrical consumption of accessories such as the air conditioning, the multimedia center, the electric windows and any other electrical system in the car. There are already 30 prototypes of the project under test, but there is still no forecast of when it will become a commercial product.

autonomous car

In the same way that it researches electric cars, FCA also has autonomous car projects. It is the vehicle supplier for the Waymo, the autonomous car project of the Google. In the next few years, 62 Chrysler minivans will roll along American roads with no one behind the wheel.

The Google is considered by the FCA as an evolutionary step towards the autonomous car. The group also has ongoing projects with BMW Group, Intel, Mobileye e Aptiv.

All these shots, each one to one side, reflect the current situation in the auto industry. No one knows where this self-driving car story will end up. There are numerous safety, legislation, cost and performance variables to be evaluated. And the electronic architecture of today's cars was invented in the 80s. It's likely the same Precambrian explosion that happened at the beginning of personal computing (who remembers Synclair? Commodore?) or mobile computing (Simbyan? Palm Pilot ?) Until we get to the IBM and Apple of smart cars, it will be a while. Suddenly, it can be the Apple .

Industry 4.0

It's one thing to read and write about such a Industry 4.0: automated, connected factories, daughters of the fourth industrial revolution, the IoT (Internet of Things) revolution. Another thing is to see it working.

the factory of FCA in Betim is 41 years old, but has the face of millenial. In its engine unit, gigantic robotic hands slide on rails over the heads of its human workers, carrying components from one side to the other. Each piece has a databolt, a screw with a label RFID which allows the system to track each component within the production process. "From the original factory, only the columns and the roof remain.”, says the employee who accompanied us on the visit.

In all, there are 15 employees and 1100 robots working in harmony (no robot strikes so far). Some even on the same production line. “Cobots”, as robots that interact with human workers are called, have special characteristics.

They are used for repetitive tasks such as applying glue, tightening screws or selecting components for assembly. Any undue contact with a human causes the robot to stop, preventing accidents. Automation allowed the factory's production to jump from 100 engines to 400 engines a year.

Inside the forty-year-old factory, we find a laboratory called Manufacturing 2020. That's where the best toys are. In a dark room, another virtual factory is projected on the wall. You put on some weird 3D glasses full of temples with polka dots on the ends and hold a kind of bulky Wiimote to manipulate parts of virtual cars, open hoods and look under the chassis.

Outside the room, a VR headset HTC Vive is used to train employees. Further on, a team develops a mobile game to teach security concepts where the best in the rankings win prizes.

The lab uses VR to accelerate processes, in the best startup style Silicon Valley (fail fast, fail often, fail better or fail fast, fail often, fail better). Thanks to it, product development could be accelerated with the creation of Proofs of Concept (POCs) are virtual. FCA states that the investment of R$ 1 million in the Virtual Reality Room was paid for in eight months operating.

mecha-workers

Factory 4.0 did not eliminate human employees, on the contrary, it greatly improved their working conditions. They walk around with smartwatches that allow them to validate operations performed, are assisted by robots in the most dangerous or tedious tasks and use exoskeletons to avoid repetitive strain injuries.

One of these exoskeletons is nothing more than a mechanical chair that allows the worker to sit down to better reach an area inside the car being built. There are currently 14 exoskeletons in use at the factory, divided into three categories (lumbar spine, shoulders and lower limbs)

The most expensive video game in the world

Thinking of Gran Turismo? The SIMCenter from FCA is the ultimate simulation video game. Costing as little as R$18 million, it brings a Jeep Renegade sawn in half on top of a platform supported by giant pistons. At the front, a giant 230-degree screen projects a 3D scenario that can be the streets of a city (eerily similar to San Andreas from GTA) or a race track. Small displays in the rearview mirrors simulate the rear view for even more realism.

you enter the cockpit and foot on the board, feeling each curve and brake as if you were in a real car. Instead of using the gearbox, it changes gears with a button on the steering wheel. I ended up being guided by the sound of the engine, reproduced digitally, but very faithful to the gear changes in a real car. I tried to give a hobby horse, but it was not possible. But they say a journalist managed to roll over on the runway.

Second Rudinixon BitencourtAnalyst of Vehicle Dynamics by the FCA, this is the only simulator of its kind in the southern hemisphere and is identical to a model used by the NASA. The objective of the simulator is to analyze the characteristics of each vehicle component (dampers, springs, tires, steering, brakes) and generate technical specifications for the construction of physical parts.

No SIMCenter, it is possible to evaluate, for example, different suspension geometries in real time, in a fully controlled environment, without having to go to a test track. O SIMCenter is installed on PUC Minas and it gave me a huge desire to take the entrance exam for this institution. The simulator can be used by courses in architecture, engineering, medicine, psychology, among others.

the future of the car

With a few hundred years of existence, the automobile may not have its days numbered, but surely in two or three decades it will transform into something quite different from what we know today. Whether we're going to have highly customized vehicles or identical models remains to be seen, but which you unlock with your smartwatch, travel to a point and discard to the next passenger. The only certainty is that the search for innovation is the only way to remain relevant in this future.

And you, readers? What do you think of the future of cars? Who wins this race? Comment below.

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