The innovation of automobile electrification and intelligence is unstoppable. How can testing technology keep pace with the times?

But with great power comes great responsibility. This responsibility is placed squarely on the shoulders of automotive test departments, who must develop test capabilities to ensure the quality, reliability and safety of these systems. Anjelica Warren, automotive product marketing manager at NI, has unique insights into the challenges facing automotive testing and how test tools must continue to evolve to keep up with the pace of innovation.

Every year, traffic accidents kill more than 1.25 million people and injure millions more worldwide. As cars move toward autonomous driving, drivers gain greater safety through advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Efforts to reduce traffic fatalities and improve mobility have a huge potential impact, but unfortunately, autonomous vehicles being tested on the road today are increasing the accident rate. To ensure that these cars are safer than human drivers, more rigorous testing is necessary to provide trustworthy and traceable results to verify that multiple subsystems and software algorithms are functioning properly.

Self-driving cars will generate unprecedented amounts of data (the systems must simulate 140 million kilometers to prove they are as safe as human drivers), but collecting the data is not the main challenge. The importance of these safety systems requires extreme attention to detail and the ability to analyze the data to find out exactly why something failed during testing.

Poor data management at any step in the testing process can lead to product development problems or incorrect conclusions. To quickly obtain the information they need, maintain traceability, and make data-based decisions, engineers must be able to search, process, and generate reports on the terabytes of data generated by vehicle testing.

More than one-fifth of global greenhouse gases are emitted by vehicles. Growing concerns about climate change require automakers to comply with stricter fuel efficiency regulations to reduce CO2 emissions. In addition, governments around the world have announced requirements to sell only a certain number of internal combustion engine vehicles after a certain date, or even ban the sale of internal combustion engine vehicles. For example, Germany and the United Kingdom have set deadlines to ban the sale of new gasoline and diesel vehicles before 2030 and 2040, respectively.

Figure 1. Automakers are racing to design smarter powertrain systems to comply with stringent fuel efficiency regulations.

Hybrid and all-electric vehicles are at the forefront of redesigning smart powertrain systems. The electrification of automotive powertrains provides more power, lower emissions, and a more comfortable driver experience, but high-power electronics and faster control rates make these components very difficult to verify. Hybrid electric vehicles, in particular, integrate two different powertrain technologies, greatly increasing the complexity of testing. For example, the battery pack must be characterized under various conditions because the charge and discharge characteristics depend heavily on temperature, and the battery pack must operate safely within the designed specifications without affecting other subsystems.

To meet increasingly tight time-to-market requirements driven by industry competition and government regulations, as well as to cope with increasing test complexity, automotive manufacturers must adopt flexible test systems with high mixed I/O, higher frequency and resolution, and higher voltage and current to test mechanical and power electronic components.

The growth of electric vehicles has also shaken up the automotive supply chain. OEM purchasing managers are looking for suppliers who can provide more electric vehicle parts. LG is a new player in the automotive supply chain, providing more than 50% of the parts for the Chevrolet Volt, including batteries, nearly the entire powertrain, and connectivity and infotainment modules.

While mechanical components remain important, they can quickly become commoditized, and traditional Tier 1 suppliers are innovating to stay differentiated. As they adopt new technologies to develop specialized products, test departments are also trying to keep the same people operating the same equipment to meet new test requirements. Test managers can improve efficiency by complementing existing test configurations with application-specific tools that can be dynamically reconfigured to enable more users to obtain important information about a specific test.

Cars have long ceased to be a means of transportation to get from point A to point B. The evolution of how private cars are purchased and used is similar to the development of smartphones. While practical factors such as fuel efficiency, performance and price are still important considerations, infotainment, driver assistance and connectivity (i.e. the software and experience of the car) are increasingly influencing consumers' purchasing decisions.

Automakers are leveraging innovations from other industries to gain a competitive advantage and meet growing customer demand for new features. Active safety systems are leveraging technologies from the aerospace/defense industry, such as radar, cameras, and lidar, combined with sensor fusion methods to give cars a more complete understanding of their surroundings. The line between automotive and consumer electronics is blurring as engineers add feature-rich infotainment systems that include audio, video, RF and wireless, and in-vehicle communications.

Figure 2. Modern vehicles combine technologies from other industries, such as aerospace, energy, and mobile devices, greatly increasing testing complexity.

These technologies are constantly evolving, further adding complexity to the automotive development process. For example, there are currently two competing standards for V2X – 802.11p aka DSRC and LTE V2X. To remain competitive, automakers must be ready to integrate both standards together, which means validation tests must be able to be easily modified to the latest standard without significant cost or rework of the system.

Furthermore, multiple competing standards are not the only problem. Governments are trying to determine the best way to govern autonomous vehicles, and many regulations are still being developed. As new technologies and standards continue to emerge, open test platforms with interoperability, extensive I/O, and synchronization are essential to meet future validation test needs in order to avoid falling behind the rapid pace of innovation.

These trends are creating new challenges at every stage of the automotive development process, including the supply chain. Similar themes emerge again and again, but in different ways. Newly designed and rapidly evolving components and systems are increasing system complexity. At the same time, changing regulations require more and more testing with accurate and traceable results. The increasing pace of innovation often leaves organizations unprepared for timely adjustments to budgets and test methods; forcing test departments to find ways to do more with less.

Test managers are faced with multiple challenges, not only needing to build increasingly complex hybrid measurement test systems within ever-shrinking timelines, but also needing to manage the explosive growth of acquired data. And these challenges are not limited to the automotive industry, but also permeate adjacent industries such as heavy equipment, aerospace, industrial equipment, and academic research.

To overcome these challenges, engineers need application-specific tools to optimize test workflows, and they also need scalability to adapt to different needs. For example, NI's software-defined open platform allows engineers to choose their favorite tools and make full use of their expertise to flexibly meet changing needs.

FlexLogger™ software, NI’s newest configuration-based data logging tool, helps more engineers and technicians build accurate, flexible test systems to validate new and rapidly evolving technologies — all without programming.

Figure 3. FlexLogger helps automotive test departments quickly capture accurate and well-documented data, providing critical information without programming.

Self-driving cars have become a hot topic, but even seemingly simple components such as headlights or car seats have become increasingly complex mechatronic systems that combine ECUs, sensors, actuators, and communications to the rest of the car. To meet the quality and reliability required to ensure safety, engineers must understand the interdependencies between electrical and mechanical components and industrial I/O and communication mechanisms in these systems.

As the volume of testing increases, the amount of recorded data is also growing rapidly. Without an effective data management strategy, it becomes increasingly challenging to find specific test results. Inadequate documentation is the main reason for repeated testing, and only 5% of the collected data is actually analyzed.

Building on NI's expertise in data management, FlexLogger helps improve traceability by automatically capturing fully documented data and provides descriptive metadata about test configurations, including sensor and hardware acquisition settings. Test departments can use NI client and server-side data management software to further optimize data access and consolidate data across the test organization to find, analyze, and report large amounts of data.

Innovation in the automotive industry shows no signs of slowing down. NI has been a trusted partner to OEMs and suppliers around the world, providing flexible and future-proof test systems with the widest range of I/O, system-level synchronization, and a large partner ecosystem. FlexLogger is part of an interoperable workflow designed to serve the entire product design cycle to help automotive test departments reduce costs, shorten deployment time, and maximize test coverage.

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