Let’s review the last 10 or 20 years of automotive data. Prior to that, automotive data was composed of a variety of vacuums, hydraulic pressures and mechanical positions. It worked, but it just wasn’t enough to get the performance and emission controls that were being called for.
Then came a plethora of assorted electronic control modules. I can remember little black boxes that were referred to as “Seatbelt Control Module” or “Window Control Module” mounted next to not so little black boxes called “ECM” or “PCM” or “TCM.” Of course, none of them were actually black. Each box had its own sensors and output circuits. Different modules were connected to different diagnostic connectors in different ways. Outputs generally needed a large transistor inside the box to drive the current necessary to make it do what it needed to do.
As electronics got smaller and faster and we began to get a better understanding of analog to digital conversion, digital sensing and all other things digital, along came the Data Bus. Lots and lots of data buses. Some vehicles had (and still have) 4 or 6 different buses with gateways and conversions to each other. Modules began to do much more and needed more information. Much more of the vehicles inner workings were being controlled by electronics that were talking to each other. Data moved fast enough for even the most intimate functions of running an engine or transmission, stopping the car, deploying airbags, maintaining traction, etc were directly computer controlled.
Presently there are still plenty of data buses. Interbus communication has improved dramatically. A screaming fast 400 Mbps 1394a bus hooked to the DLC can get data to the scanner from everything, including the GM Low Speed bus and the CAN bus using the PCM (or any other major module) as its gateway. Having the radio or the windows get vehicle speed is a simple software trick now.
What We Can Expect
We are starting to see media buses in vehicles that stream audio and video without a strain. 1394b buses are getting into the Gigabit range. Automotive computing has finally joined the ranks of electronics that follow Moore’s Law. In 1970, Gordon Moore, a cofounder of Intel, said that the number of transistors that can fit in a given space on a chip will double every 18 months. Correlations of Moore’s Law have the same increases in memory, switching speed, processing speed, and lower power consumption. This means that everything goes twice as fast, at double the frequency, can do twice as much, can remember twice as much, and takes half the power, every year and a half. Moore’s law is still true today, and as far as anyone can tell will remain true well into the future.
Fiber is coming soon. Lightweight, immune to EMI, RFI and other forms of interference, and unbelievable data rates make it very desirable to the automotive designer. There are some down sides. If you think the transition from pressure gauges to multimeters was tough on car techs, you ain’t seen nothin yet!
Repair of fiber is a skill all by itself. Even the big Telco and data companies have trouble keeping manned up with good fiber cutters. The fiber harness is a big consideration as well. Fiber does not bend well. On the upside, fiber and fiber connections fail a LOT less than wire and wire connectors do. Any future increase in the speed of fiber will be evolutionary, not revolutionary. Sort of like the speed changes in telephone modems some years back.
Automotive versions of NFC (Near Field Communications), Bluetooth, wireless USB and other short range wireless connections are being worked on. Interference on this medium is a major concern, but as the frequency bands up into the terahertz range begin to open up this will become less and less of a concern. Current wireless data runs at 2.4 or 5 Gigahertz. Faster switching transistors and other advances in RF technologies will have wireless ramping up into the 30 and 60 TERAhertz ranges making for revolutionary data speed gains. As wireless approaches 100 terahertz it will begin to beat out fiber for data speed.
Connecting a vehicle to the internet is already old hat today, but those connections are going to get a LOT faster and there are going to be a lot more stuff going over it. Telematics are going to be all over the place. Your OEM will tell you when it is time for an oil change, and will advertise the local dealers current special while they load the route to the dealer on your GPS and bill your VISA card for the oil change while back at the shop a bay is cleared for your arrival and an oil change robo tech is standing by.
Privacy advocates are having a field day with this type of scenario. How about a speed cop getting a reading directly from your VSS! The little widget that Flo uses to get you a better rate on your insurance will be in real time. In the event of an accident video from collision avoidance cameras as well as all vehicular data will be available to investigators either onsite or while on their way. Roadside assistance and medical assistance will be automatic and immediate.
Another big change for the future is a vehicle sensing the world around itself. We already have vehicles that park for you and warn of leaving your traffic lane or proximity to other vehicles and objects. They can apply brakes or even steer the car to avoid a collision. Wait till they can drive themselves to the market and back. Big advances are being made in sensing the state of the driver of a vehicle too. Soon an impaired driver will not be able to get the car moving, and a driver that is texting will cause the car to slow down or will sound an alarm, or even better will turn off the texting function of the phone. Further down the road the car will just take over the driving duties from the human behind the wheel.
All of these future applications will need gobs and gobs of data and processing power, as well as the assistance of centralized information. Vehicular data will be served by a unified ethernet bus using TCP/IP over short range terahertz wireless and fiber running at terabit speeds. Outside world data will run over 5G and 6G connections at hundreds of gigabits. Eventually reaching the terabit range. Applications none of us have ever dreamed of will be commonplace and we will all wonder how those people back then were able to get from place to place at all!
In the immortal words of Dennis Hopper in the movie Flashback “the next 10 years are gonna make the last ten years look like nothin.” Expand that concept out to 20 or 30 years and you start to get the idea.
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