®
A CONVERSATION WITH
Ralf Lenninger, head of innovation and strategy for Continental
WildDucks Q&A
Warner: We’ve been hearing a lot about
self-driving vehicles, lately. How close are
we to this becoming reality?
Lenninger: We’re very close. The
technology is already on the market to
help the driver to cruise effortlessly along
the highways and to avoid accidents.
Many high-end cars already have built-in
ESC, or electronic stability control, plus
adaptive cruise control and lane departure
warnings. And, more recently, there’s
been the introduction of city safety system
technology, an autonomous emergency
braking system, for inner-city driving.
So, the technology that informs drivers of
what’s happening around them, and which
makes necessary adjustments, already exists.
If you merge these technologies together,
you get the first step in automated driving.
When we make that leap, the car will
be able to obtain and process even more
information to keep the driver informed on
the road conditions ahead. In this scenario
the car will know the street ahead and make
the necessary adjustments.
Continental’s
Ralf Lenninger in
Babbenhausen,
Germany
Harnessing big data,
the cloud and Watson
to build the car of the future.
Even with the popularity of crowd-sourced traffic apps, motorists know precious little about the drive home.
A lack of vital information about roadway and weather conditions is more than an annoyance. It’s killing
us. The World Health Organization says 1.24 million people die every year in traffic accidents. International
automotive supplier Continental has plans to reduce that number to zero. It starts with the introduction of
the semi-automated vehicle, which will be in mass production starting next year. Connected car technology,
being jointly developed by Continental and IBM, will harness cloud, data analytics and eventually Watson to
enable vehicles to see around corners or even miles down the road and to drive themselves. An early rollout
of the platform has achieved impressive fuel savings in trucks, says Ralf Lenninger, head of innovation and
strategy for Continental’s Interior division. And that’s not the only benefit. “We think there will be a point in
time where accidents belong to a museum,” he confidently adds. – Bernhard Warner
The road map we’ve outlined is this:
In 2016, we will start seeing mass
production for semi-automated driving
solutions. By 2020, we will be ready for
highly automated driving scenarios and
fully automated by 2025. One of the main
tasks for highly and fully automated driving
will lie in using the cloud as an information
carrier for the vehicle. Because automated
vehicles will need to know what lies behind
the next corner – is the road free, or is
there a construction site?, for example.
We will achieve this with our eHorizon,
a technology we are realizing together
with IBM.
A self-driving car may sound like a
science fiction gimmick, but you’re
dead serious about its implications
to improve, and even save, lives.
That’s right. At Continental, we talk about
Vision Zero, which is a future of zero traffic
fatalities and zero accidents. Cleary we think
there will be a point in time where accidents
belong to a museum. You have to keep in
mind that 90% of the accidents are rootcaused by the wrong behavior of human
beings. The motorist is careless, distracted,
tired. If we can eliminate these moments
PHOTOGRAPH BY CARL DE TORRES
we can save a lot of lives. It’s not just a nice
feature. Society demands it. The end goal
is a safer car, a cleaner car, and a car you
will enjoy sitting in. We think that with the
technology available we can get it done.
During your recent keynote presentation at
CeBit you spoke of environmental benefits
as well. The cars that are equipped with
eHorizon, how green will they be?
We first introduced eHorizon in trucks, for
the Swedish truck manufacturer Scania, in
2012. This was an early version. It wasn’t
even a fully connected technology. And still,
the fuel savings were four percent, which is
huge! Here’s how it works. The truck talks
to the map. The truck asks, ‘What’s going
on? What kind of hills do we have in front?
What do you ask me to do?’ The driver sees
absolutely nothing, and still the fuel saving
was four percent. That’s with just one truck
manufacturer. We have more than six or
seven other programs where mass production
will be starting next year, and the year after.
The wave is coming because of the desire to
reduce CO2 emissions—and, because it’s a lot
of money. We’re talking big savings.
For the next stage of eHorizon, you’ve
teamed with a number of networking,
mapping and IT specialists, including IBM.
Can you explain their role?
That’s right. Our core competency is in
designing and developing automotive
technologies. We supply at least 95% of the
world’s automakers with tires and automotive components, like very sophisticated
braking systems, and systems for powertrain,
range management and transmission control. For us, IT is not our core competence.
Keep in mind, the connected car is part of
the Internet of Everything movement. You
will think of your car as a smartphone on
wheels. And the benefits are huge.
Connected cars will help drivers avoid
accidents. It will minimize traffic. It will
reduce C02 emissions. And, it will keep
us connected with the world around us –
allowing us to check email, Twitter and
download favorite podcasts on the go.
We need this alliance to pull it off. We
are working with leading companies in
connectivity and mapping. IBM provides
the big data analytics and, soon, Watson,
for voice-controlled driving.
How will that work?
It’s a combination of big data, cloud and
connectivity. Even today’s cars throw off
a tremendous amount of data – between
200-300 megabytes of data per second. But
not all of the data are relevant to the driver.
That’s where data analytics come in. With
IBM’s help, the car is able to process the
pertinent data and make accurate predictions
of the road ahead. That’s the first big task of
eHorizon, pulling what’s relevant from this
massive data dump, packing it together into a
secure protocol, and sending it via the cloud
to a massive backend that can make sense of
the traffic situation, the road conditions, the
cars around you, and the weather—all in realtime. For the driver, this real-time road-mapping is key. It will tell the car how to best
manage the route home so as to minimize fuel
consumption and reduce traffic tie-ups. And
the big data and networking capabilities will
be massive. Multiply that data processing by
millions of cars. If millions of cars are sending
so much information you need to have a huge
backend and you need to do very sophisticated big data management and analytic
processes to predict the most efficient way
forward for everyone.
This sounds like a massive networking
challenge. Maybe the biggest ever.
The networking infrastructure being built
for this project is unprecedented. But society
is demanding this of us, and the technology
is already here. Keep in mind that starting
next year 20% of all new cars will have
on-board connectivity. They will come out
of the factory with a SIM card. The payoff is
potentially huge. It will make the roadways
safer and make the air cleaner. Also, remember that the average commuting time is 80
minutes. That’s 80 minutes per day that’s
being robbed from our lives. We think there
should be solutions to give the gift of time
back to the people.
This is one in a series of articles and infographics
brought to you by IBM about innovators who are
combining ambition and technology to change
the world. Wild Ducks is produced by veteran
journalists Jeffrey O’Brien and Bernhard Warner
and designer Carl De Torres.
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