E-mobility – opportunities and challenges of integrated corner solutions 2021-01-0984

E-mobility is a game changer for the automotive domain. It promises significant reduction in terms of complexity and in terms of local emissions. With falling prices and recent technological advances, the second generation of electric vehicles (EVs) that is now in production makes electromobility an affordable and viable option for more and more transport mission (people, freight). Current e-vehicle platforms still present architectural similarities with respect to combustion engine vehicle (e.g., centralized motor). Target of the European project EVC1000 is to introduce corner solutions with in-wheel motors supported by electrified chassis components (brake-by-wire, active suspension) and advanced control strategies for full potential exploitation. Especially, it is expected that this solution will provide more architectural freedom toward “design-forpurpose” vehicles built for dedicated usage models [2], further providing higher performances. Target of this paper will be (a) to introduce the EVC1000 project [1] and results achieved so far; (b) with the example of two vehicle platforms (AUDI E-tron and JAC iEV7) to discuss platform migration opportunities and challenges related to corner solutions, and (c) to present preliminary results (simulation based) with respect to expected performance increase. This paper is organized as follow: Section 2 is providing an overview of the demonstrator and introduces the main challenges. In Section 3, the four main technology bricks (physical model-based control, multicore computing platform, the open development platform and the plant model) are discussed. Section 4 is presenting evaluation of the proposed technology, while Section 5 is presenting some conclusions.