SAE Convergence

Communications, congestion may drive unconventional partnerships The growing number of vehicles, coupled with the trend to connected cars, is likely to force automakers to forge partnerships that go beyond normal auto-industry boundaries. These links will have to include regulators, universities, and companies from consumer markets and other commercial fields. Read full story

High-speed networking for driver assistance over MOST MOST150, the latest generation of MOST, enables Internet protocol data communication, providing the automotive-ready Ethernet channel according to IEEE 802.3 with freely configurable bandwidth from 0 to nearly 150 Mbit/s. Read full story

Hansen and OEMs discuss electronics trends and challenges at SAE Convergence The dean of automotive electronics observers and six global OEM experts will discuss the impact of Apple and Google; cloud computing; speech recognition; open-sourced software; infotainment system pricing; software virtualization, and much more during the "Carmakers Speak" panel on October 17, at the 2012 SAE Convergence conference. Read full story

A different riff on your basic two-seat electric car Markus Lienkamp, Chair of Automotive Engineering at the Technical University of Munich, says that "electromobility" is impeded at the moment by range anxiety, prohibitive costs, and inconvenient charging. That’s why Lienkamp is leading the Visio.M project, a German government-supported R&D effort to produce a low-cost, high-utility electric car that might attract the interest of the middle European mass market. Read full story

Fully automated driving nears reality Autonomous vehicles may be here sooner than anyone thought, according to a new report by KPMG and the Center for Automotive Research, but ABI Research Vice President and Practice Director Dominique Bonte believes that synergies among three connectivity categories will need to be established. Read full story

JumpStart-ing your engineering career Currently working on the Chevrolet Corvette and Camaro, Jeremy Kearney is an Interior Design Release Engineer at General Motors Co. He also mentors GM's JumpStart Employee Resource Group and has been instrumental in organizing the Future Leader Program at SAE Convergence 2012. Read full story

Cars converse in largest-ever on-road ITS test project The U.S. government, via several of its transportation-related agencies, is sponsoring the project, which it claims is the largest-ever road test of connected-vehicle crash-avoidance technologies. Read full story

Hella banking on stop-start surge The company says it has developed a new generation of electronic system solutions to help vehicle manufacturers address increasingly rigorous fuel-economy and greenhouse-gas requirements. Read full story

Synopsys enhances virtual prototyping tool for embedded software development The new release of Virtualizer improves modeling productivity through a new model authoring feature and IP specification import function. Read full story