SANTA CLARA, Calif. — An engineer from Jaguar Land Rover sketched out the guts of its latest cars and gave a sneak peek at plans for future ones in a keynote at the Printed Electronics USA show here.
The company’s Discovery Vision concept is a self-learning car that acts in some ways like a smartphone on wheels. Onboard computers map out routes, check traffic, scan the owner’s calendar for meetings, and informs him when to leave and what route to take. If the car thinks it will arrive late, it sends a message to the meeting organizer.
Inside, the car responds to a driver’s gestures. A wave of the hand opens doors, turns on the radio and headlights, and changes the level of tint on windows.
The car not only sports a heads-up display on the dashboard, but it also uses lasers to project guidelines on the way ahead when terrain is challenging. Drivers can use a tablet to pilot the car remotely on particularly rugged terrain.
“It’s not an easy roadmap,” quipped Ashutosh Tomar, a principal engineer at JLR Research, the division that works on technologies and feature five years out.
The company’s Jaguar XE already sports a heads-up display and acts as a WiFi hot spot for passengers. It also responds to voice commands and synchs with both iOS and Android phones.
Tomar expressed some skepticism about applications for printed electronics in cars. However, he did mention that some models use sensors woven into seats for energy harvesting.
100 computers and a ton of wires
The typical Jaguar Land Rover car now sports more than 70 electronic control units (above), essentially embedded computers. The company’s premium cars pack more than 100. They require about 5.5 million lines of code running over multiple RTOSes.
“It challenges the level of complexity in aerospace,” Tomar said.
To connect all those subsystems, the cars use 50 kilograms of wiring (below) — enough to stretch six kilometers and cost €3,000 ($3,700). The wiring harnass weighs about as much as an adult passenger, he said.
— Rick Merritt, Silicon Valley Bureau Chief