Automakers sometimes install hardware before it's legal, useful, or even fully baked—but it’s a necessary step in future-proofing new cars.
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| © Audi |
By Eric Adams, The Drive
In a darkened cave somewhere north of San Francisco, Audi engineers
quietly showed off technology currently outlawed in the United States.
The forbidden fruit? Headlights. High-tech marvels of optical
engineering that can project precision light patterns onto the road
ahead, illuminating the terrain cleanly and uniformly while deftly
avoiding shining bright beams into the eyes of oncoming drivers. During a
demonstration using a handheld light in front of the car—conducted at a
winery (hence, the cave) during the launch of the newly redesigned Audi A7—the Audi’s beam dipped and pivoted while masking the individual who was acting as a simulated vehicle.
The technology—dubbed "HD Matrix-design Headlights with Audi Laser Light"—uses
an LED matrix to executes the dance described above, with a laser
spotlight coming on to double the range as needed. The Matrix HD system
can be purchased for certain U.S. vehicles—namely the new A6,
A7, A8, and Q8—but not used to its full dynamic capability, for the
simple reason that regulators haven’t approved it. (There’s still a
benefit to buying them, namely, the quality of the light and its ability
to adjust its aim with your steering.) The law presently requires
separate light sources for the low and high beam, but Audi’s idealized
system would be able to integrate them into a single light source,
enabling the dynamic shift between low and high beams on the fly. If and
when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration does approve the tech,
owners who’ve purchased the light can have the feature activated with a
simple software patch. If that doesn’t happen...well, those owners will
never know the thrill of the lights they paid for.
The fact that a
carmaker allows features to exist, untapped, in its vehicles is nothing
new. In fact, it’s almost becoming fashionable. Tesla, for instance, has been installing hardware systems
that enable a variety of features long before the systems are either
ready for prime time or even legal, activating them via over-the-air
software updates when the time is right. These include everything from a dashcam feature (using the car’s existing forward-facing camera) to track driving modesto increasingly advanced Autopilot capabilities.
Other
capabilities are more mundane, but reflect regional variations in
thinking. Brake lights, for instance, can be set in Europe to pulse
rapidly during emergency braking, but that feature is disabled in the
U.S., where it’s illegal.
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| © Audi |
According to auto industry analyst Jeremy Carlson with IHS Markit,
much of this has to do with the simple fact that cars are manufactured
for a variety of global markets. “The homologation and approvals process
introduces complexities into the automotive manufacturing, especially
when you’re designing a vehicle at a global scale,” Carlson said. As a
result, cars tend to be hard-wired for things they may or may not be
able to do based on their geographic location.
“Every single
market has its own regulator requirements, and it’s becoming much more
apparent that the technology is moving quite quickly while regulators in
certain areas are not,” Carlson said.
But there are other reasons
cars are being infused with capabilities that aren’t usable. Carlson
notes that Tesla’s strategy hasn’t been just to install the hardware and
wait for features to be legal, but for the company to take the time
necessary to fully bake the features before activating them. The company
installs the hardware and then hones the software, even using data
drawn from vehicles on the road to help bolster the R&D process,
thus allowing both new cars and existing ones to adopt the features when
they’re ready.
Having the hardware present and ready also helps
move the ball forward for both individual manufacturers and the industry
as a whole—and by extension, of course, the consumer. “It’s helpful
that we have an industry that’s leading regulation, in a way,” Carlson
said. “It’s one thing to say that this is what we’d like to do—having
fully autonomous driving by 2025, say—and we need regulators to help us,
and another to say this is what’s presently available in production
vehicles and here’s what could be available. It’s a different
question, and it’s more tangible for regulators when they can see and
experience possible new features.”
But even though it's de rigeur
to preload capabilities into cars right now with the hope or
expectation they’ll be deployable within a reasonable amount of time,
these systems are still expensive, and it’s not always a foregone
conclusion that they will become usable. “There’s always a risk
there that you’re asking someone to pay for an option without certainty
that you’ll be able to turn it on in the future,” Carlson said.
Though
there have been signs of hope from NHTSA regarding permitting
alternative headlight strategies that will allow Audi’s Matrix system to
fully shine, nothing has been inked yet, nor has any timeline been
declared. In-depth semi-autonomous capability is an equally iffy
proposition, even though basic capabilities are fully legal. Audi’s new A8—its flagship sedan—comes loaded to the gills with sensors and processors,
including the first laser-powered lidar system in a production vehicle
and a powerful Nvidia processor, that could enable advanced
semi-autonomous capability—but it may not be able to fully tap that
hardware before the next generation of the vehicle comes around. Sure,
the price for this gear is invisibly baked into the price of the car,
but buyers are still paying for it at the end of the day.
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| © Audi |
But the bottom line, too, is that this hardware has to be integrated
into the vehicle and driving experience at some point, and the process
for reaching full capability rolls out gradually. In another example,
carmakers have begun to switch from 24 GHz radar systems to 77 GHz
units; this enables higher-resolution scanning for objects in the
vehicles’ vicinity, allowing for classification and tracking with higher
confidence. Onboard systems aren't really able to use that power yet,
but upgrading the hardware allows carmakers to add features in the
future without having to introduce new hardware.
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| © Audi |
Similarly, systems like Audi’s onboard supercomputer and the 48-volt
electrical systems that are starting to appear in high-end luxury
cars—which help power a slew of advanced features, even if they’re not
always tapped—effectively future-proof the cars against the often
years-long development process for any given model.
As for whether
we’re overpaying for our technology because of this, Carlson doesn’t
think so. “In general—and using the A8’s computer as an example—it does
tend to feel like the systems are matched well enough to the
capabilities of the vehicle,” Carlson said. “Automakers aren’t going to
invest in significant extra technology that nobody will benefit from.”
Indeed,
the systems may be expensive, but they’re still being used. They could
just be used for a lot more as the years—and the rules—roll along.
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