In connected car news this week were: Volvo, GM, Toyota, BMW, AZ, Green Hills, Renesas, Kyocera, SmartCar, Zubie, LDRA, SAP, Cypress Semiconductor and Valeo.
Volvo Investment Fund Launched
Volvo Cars, the premium car maker, has launched a new investment fund aimed at investing in high potential technology start-ups around the globe.
The goal of the Volvo Cars Tech Fund is to invest in strategic technology trends that are transforming the industry, such as artificial intelligence, electrification, autonomous driving and digital mobility services.
The first strategic investment as part of the Tech Fund is a seed round investment into a California-based technology firm developing advanced sensors, underlining Volvo Cars’ growing presence in the technology hub of Silicon Valley.
In the fall of 2017 Volvo Cars also acquired the assets and key personnel of Luxe, a US based premium valet and concierge service. This acquisition provided a major boost to Volvo Cars’ development of digital services.
Maven Expands to Austin
20 Chevrolet Bolt EVs became available for freelance drivers in Austin to earn money on their own schedules. The city’s passion for tech start-ups, combined with its high concentration of college students, makes it the ideal location for Maven Gig. Maven is working with Austin Energy, the Austin Transportation Department, and Rocky Mountain Institute to create infrastructure solutions leading to an all-electric future. Maven will leverage Austin’s Plug-in EVerywhere™ network of EV chargers, including Electric Drive, Austin’s downtown smart mobility showcase complete with a DC Fast Charger and solar kiosk.
AZ Self-Driving Law Goes Driverless
Arizona Governor Ducey updated his 2015 executive order for safety of self-driving vehicle testing allowing the vehicle to be operated without a human backup driver. The vehicle must have minimal risk condition where the vehicle may come to a complete stop.
Companies that operate autonomous vehicles in Arizona must be in compliance with NHTSA voluntary standards.
Green Hills Supports R-Car D3
Green Hills Software’s secure INTEGRITY real-time operating system (RTOS) supports the products/services portfolio for the R-Car D3 automotive system-on-chip (SoC) for graphical instrument clusters from Renesas Electronics. The highly integrated high-performance platform combines the trusted ASIL-certified INTEGRITY RTOS and development tools with the high-performance 64-bit R-Car D3 and its Open GL 3D graphics acceleration from the Power VR® Series 8XE graphics processing unit (GPU) from Imagination Technologies. Carmakers and their Tier 1 suppliers can now create rich and smooth graphics-intensive human machine interfaces (HMI) for automotive infotainment and instrument clusters on the safe and secure INTEGRITY run-time foundation.
The Renesas R-Car D3 includes a 3D graphics core that enables high-performance human-machine interface (HMI) and realizes significantly reduced system development cost equivalent to those of existing 2D cluster systems.
Kyocera Hi Res LCDs for HUDs
Kyocera announced a new line of high-performance, high-resolution liquid-crystal display (LCD) panels specifically designed for automotive Head-Up-Displays (HUDs). These LCDs offer high light transmittance, high resolution, and the industry’s widest operating temperature range for optimal performance in automotive HUD applications.
Kyocera’s new HUD LCDs provide light transmittance up to an ultra-high 8.5%, and typical contrast ratios of up to 1700:1. Their low temperature polysilicon technology delivers pixel density of approximately 300ppi – about twice that of conventional LCDs – and an 85-degree viewing angle* with no color shift, through Kyocera’s Advanced Wide Viewing technology (AWVII). Additionally, Kyocera HUD LCDs offer an operating temperature range of -40ºC to +105ºC, the broadest currently available among automotive displays.
Raymond Marntinez 6th Admin for FMSCSA
U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao today swore in Raymond P. Martinez as the sixth Administrator for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA).
Anyverse Training for Autonomous Driving
Next Limit, the Simulation Technologies company, developer of cutting edge 3D software solutions for engineering, architecture, videogames and media entertainment announced the creation of a new initiative – Anyverse . Anyverse is focused on providing breakthrough improvements in the productivity of training efforts for autonomous systems. The solution was previewed for attendees at AV18 – Autonomous Vehicles – Silicon Valley this week in Santa Clara, California.
In order to train autonomous driving systems, developers are faced with the creation of innumerable scenarios dealing with variations in lighting, weather conditions, infrastructure and vehicle materials, and the condition of signage and signals. In addition, the variety of sensors and sensor configurations introduces even more complexity to the training challenge. Early innovators are leveraging simulation systems, game development platforms, and new open source solutions to begin to tackle this problem, but lack an approach to efficiently deal with these variations.
The company is introducing Anyverse Access, a partnering program to allow select early adopters to gain access to early releases of the solution and to collaborate with the Anyverse engineering team on insuring their needs are met.
Smartcar Connected Car Platform Raises Money Opens API
Smartcar announced it has raised a $10 million Series A financing led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). This follows a $2 million round of seed financing from a16z, bringing the company’s total financing raised to-date to $12 million. Forest Baskett from NEA and William Krause from a16z will join Smartcar’s board of directors.
Smartcar’s connected car platform lets developers read vehicle data and send commands using HTTP requests to any vehicles in a single engineering effort. By taking advantage of embedded telematics hardware already present in vehicles, developers can use Smartcar’s suite of SDKs and comprehensive API docs to get started easily and build apps to communicate with vehicles.
Zubie Partners with Xirgo
Zubie has partnered with Xirgo Technologies to bring together Zubie’s market leading, connected car platform with Xirgo’s expertise in hardware customization for the transportation industry.
All of the benefits of the Zubie connected car platform will now be accessible via Xirgo devices.
- Location Management: Live location tracking, curfew scheduling, detailed trip history, geofence alerts, point-of-interest reporting, and dispatch.
- Driver Behavior Analysis: Alerts and reports for safety infractions and fuel efficiency.
- Vehicle Health Management: Check engine light diagnosis, battery level monitoring, preventative maintenance reminders.
- Trip Tracking: Map and trip time, mileage, top speed, hard brakes, hard accelerations, speed, idle time and fuel cost.
- Trip Tagging: Categorization of trips for business expenses and tax deductions.
- Roadside Assistance: On-demand tow truck network for quick assistance.
- Fuel Finder: Location of the cheapest gas near you.
- Integrations: Key integrations with Fleetio, Expensify, IFTTT and other partners.
This combination expands the range of solutions that Zubie can deliver: tracking for fleets of all sizes, heavy duty truck tracking, and asset tracking.
Aptiva Joins Coalition for Future Mobility
The Coalition for Future Mobility, a diverse group supporting federal leadership in bringing automated vehicle technology to the marketplace, announced today the addition of four new members. The coalition has now expanded to 31 members, recently welcoming Aptiv, CTIA, What3Words and the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America to its advocacy effort.
LDRA suports J3061
LDRA has announced support within the LDRA tool suite for SAE International’s Surface Vehicle Recommended Practice J3061.
The tool suite now provides an ISO 26262–compliant cybersecurity development process for critical automotive applications that must be secure to ensure safety, including ADAS, autonomous vehicles, infotainment, steering and braking, adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning systems, and more.
SAE J3061 provides an engineering process framework that integrates with other development processes for the comprehensive and systematic design of cybersecurity into vehicle systems. With the LDRA tool suite, developers can now map security goals to particular software assets and cross-reference those to appropriate safety goals and requirements.
The LDRA tool suite supports the following J3061 processes and requirements related to ISO 26262, among others, for automotive applications:
- SAE J3061 section 8.6.2: Methods for verification of the architectural design accomplished through control flow and data flow analysis.
- SAE J3061 section 8.6.5: Software unit design to ensure the objective of specifying software units in accordance with software architectural design.
- SAE J3061 Section 8.6.6: Code reviews throughout software design and implementation. rs.
- SAE J3061 Section 8.6.7: Software unit testing and SAE J3061 Section 8.6.8: Software integration testing.
- SAE J3061 Section 8.6.9: Verification/validation of software cybersecurity requirements.
5G ZTE with Qualcomm
ZTE Mobile Devices announced they will be working with Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, to drive the commercialization of cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) communications technology. These efforts build upon a broad industry commitment to help drive the commercialization of this technology for enhanced vehicular safety, improved traffic efficiency, and to pave the way for autonomous driving. They demonstrated their new technology at Mobile World Congress.
ZTE is committed to the development and application of C-V2X wireless communication technologies such as C-V2X and 5G in the field of connected cars, focusing the connection service and providing an end-to-end solution. ZTE connected car solutions have been currently commercial in China with leading automotive companies, as well as in Europe and other segments.
Toyota & BMW Invest in May Mobility
May Mobility, the first autonomous vehicle company to replace existing transportation systems with its fleets of self-driving micro-shuttles, announced that BMW i Ventures and Toyota AI Ventures have joined its investor-base, co-leading its seed round. This funding will allow May Mobility to launch new deployments across the country. Other investors include Maven Ventures, SV Angel, Tandem Ventures, Trucks Ventures, and YCombinator.
Cypress Semi Connectivity in 2018 Audi A8
Cypress Semiconductor Corp. announced that e.solutions GmbH, a joint venture of Audi and Elektrobit, has integrated Cypress’ wireless connectivity solution into its design for new in-vehicle communication units, including in the 2018 Audi A8. Drivers and passengers have the ability to connect up to eight devices at once to the Alpine communication unit’s Wi-Fi hotspot leveraging Cypress’ 802.11ac and Bluetooth® combo solution. As the software stack and design and development supplier of the communication unit, e.solutions selected Cypress’ solution to achieve maximum performance. The solution is the industry’s first to implement Real Simultaneous Dual Band (RSDB) technology which enables two unique data streams to run at full throughput simultaneously by integrating two complete Wi-Fi subsystems into a single chip.
The e.solutions communication unit design uses Cypress’ CYW89359 combo solution, which includes an advanced coexistence engine that enables optimal performance for dual-band 2.4- and 5-GHz 802.11ac Wi-Fi and dual-mode Bluetooth/Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) simultaneously for superior multimedia experiences. Its RSDB architecture enables applications such as Apple CarPlay and a Wi-Fi hotspot to operate concurrently without degradation caused by switching back and forth between bands.
Valeo Partners with Lero SFI Research
Researchers from the Lero SFI Research Centre at NUI Galway have signed an autonomous vehicles R&D partnership with Valeo, the major automotive supplier headquartered in Paris, France. Funding for the programme comes from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and Valeo.
The research will focus on helping autonomous vehicles to better navigate in complex, real world conditions using sensor signal processing technology.
A team of up to 30 Lero NUI Galway and Valeo engineers based in Tuam, Ireland, will work on the project. In support of the programme, Lero NUI Galway is hiring ten PhD and two post-doctoral researchers. Valeo, which employs 1,100 people in Tuam, operates the largest R&D team in the West of Ireland with over 400 engineers.
SAP Vehicles Network Payments with HERE Nav
SAP SE added new partners and customers to the SAP® Vehicles Network solution, an open, standards-based services marketplace. New secured and tokenized payment options from Mastercard, navigation capabilities from HERE and on-demand delivery services from Postmates further expand and enrich the portfolio of services SAP Vehicles Network offers. The announcement was made at Mobile World Congress 2018
Powered by SAP Leonardo, SAP Vehicles Network connects vehicles to intelligent, automated services for parking, fueling, food, navigation and payment, transforming driving into the ultimate mobile experience. Through the network, participating members can provide mobility services to drivers and passengers, independent of devices or vehicles. Network members also can offer secure mobility services.
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