WildDucks Q&A

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

Harnessing big data,the cloud and Watson to build the car of the future.

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.

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 root-caused by the wrong behavior of human beings. The motorist is careless, distracted, tired. If we can eliminate these moments

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 automo-tive components, like very sophisticated braking systems, and systems for powertrain, range management and transmission con-trol. 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 real-time. For the driver, this real-time road-map-ping 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 sophis-ticated 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, remem-ber 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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Continental’s Ralf Lenninger in

Babbenhausen, Germany

PHOTOGRAPH BY CARL DE TORRES

A CONVERSATION WITH Ralf Lenninger, head of innovation and strategy for Continental

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