7 Of The Most Exciting Developments In Car Tech

Let’s stick with Audi, and lighting to start with.

Back in 2013 Audi showed off its Matrix OLED lighting concept. OLED units are wafer thin needing barely any cooling. They’re completely flat, can be dimmed and don’t require any reflectors or light guides.

They’re the future of car lighting without a doubt, and Audi showed this off in a highly dynamic way with their ‘the swarm’ video. Here they positioned OLED’s in a three dimensional way to mimic a swarm of bees or birds. The effect is just gorgeous, and could one day show up on the rear of a German supercar.

For the time being OLED’s are currently being used on the TTRS as a toe dip for the technology. 

And by this we don’t mean the type of communication you give other drivers when they cut you up.

V2V is being tested by a number of manufacturers as a way to avoid accidents. The system uses wireless signals to send data between cars in real time. It will transmit things like speed, location and direction.

Once the other cars are aware of each other, they can keep a safe distance from one another, slow down or work out the best way to avoid a collision.

In 2010 a report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the US concluded that V2V could potentially reduce target vehicle crashes by 79%. 

The next step from car to car comms. is vehicle to infrastructure. It would work in tandem with V2V to create a real time virtual map of what’s happening on the road.

Cars would transmit and receive data from road signs and traffic lights. If there’s congestion the lights could change and manage themselves to alleviate the backlog of cars. Currently lights are set on timers, these can be changed depending on the time of day, but they are mostly program and forget with no intelligence or awareness built in.

It could also warn drivers of hazards like standing water, or an accident up ahead.

Milton Keynes is going to be the first place in the UK to couple traffic lights with cameras and artificial intelligence, in a semi passive vehicle to infrastructure setup.

No doubt you’ve read or heard about augmented reality, with Microsoft and their HoloLens being a big bet in the home and gaming environment. But in cars?

BMW are currently working on a system that can pick out objects in front of the car and highlight them on the windscreen. The system would show the distance of the car in front and warn of upcoming dangers, as well as overlaying what junction you need to take on the motorway.

Toyota are also in on the AR bandwagon. Their focus is on passengers though, a touchscreen window would allow you to pick out objects in the distance and zoom in. With data being overlaid onto the glass.

I know, they’ve been around since the 1970’s with patents being filed as early as 1951. But what about under the car?

Merc have previously tested an airbag that deploys from the front bumper before a crash.

It works with the marques ‘pre-safe’ systems sensing emergency braking coupled with object detection. If the car deems a crash is inevitable a braking bag is deployed in milliseconds from beneath the front bumper.

It increases braking force on dry roads from 1g to 2g, stops the vehicle dipping down under hard braking and helps keep passengers from sliding under their seatbelts. 

Battery tech is currently awful. A cutting edge 60 kWh battery pack weighs in at 450 KG yet it only provides the same amount of power as 1.8 gallons of petrol. That’s how inefficient they are in terms of weight and size.

Silicon Anode Batteries plan to change that. Silicon can absorb far more electrons than the current lithium versions, over 11 times the power per gram in fact.

If you could get 11 times the range from the same 450KG battery that would equate to a 2,000 mile range. That’s the tipping point when internal combustion cars are resigned to the history books.

Staying on the nitty gritty of how cars work, the 48v electrical system will pave the way for the future.

The current 12v system used on cars just doesn’t have the throughput needed these days. Introducing a 48v setup would increase the useable power by five. Allowing alternators, oil pumps, air con etc to run on the electrical system, rather than being belt driven by the engine. For a start that should improve fuel economy by at least 10%.

Manufacturers would also be able to incorporate ‘mild hybrid’ systems into almost every car. This could harness wasted power from regenerative braking, which could then be used as an electric power boost under acceleration.

Performance boosting wouldn’t stop there either. With 48 volts electric motors can be used in turbos and superchargers, these would spin up the turbo before its needed negating the lag felt in a lot of forced induction cars.

Once again, Audi are at the forefront of this, with the all new SQ7 TDI being the first production car to use such a tech.