At IAA Mobility 2021 in Munich, automotive mega-supplier ZF showed how it is accelerating its efforts to be a more comprehensive system provider for sustainable mobility, presenting innovations for e-mobility driveline concepts and supercomputers for advanced driver assistance and autonomous vehicles.

Backing the technical display was its Green Power Roadmap to make the company’s activities climate-neutral by 2040—ten years earlier than envisaged in the Paris Climate Agreement. CO2 emissions at ZF locations are to be reduced by 80% by 2030 compared to 2019. The company is taking on responsibility for its supply chain and the use phase of its products, with the goal to reduce Scope 3 emissions by 40% in the same time frame.

The supplier has already backed the plan with action, with 80% of its newly ordered company cars in Germany being electrified. It subsidizes the installation of private charging facilities for company cars. There are plans for charging facilities at every ZF location worldwide by the end of 2021. In Germany, more than 50,000 employees can also lease a bicycle or e-bike through the company.

“And that’s not all,” said ZF CEO Wolf-Henning Scheider. “We are also playing a major role in shaping the generation of energy from renewable sources. Today, 25% of all wind turbines already contain a ZF transmission. These turbines alone can supply up to 100 million households with renewable energy—and another million are added every month.”

 

Modular eDrive Kit premiere

The IAA world premiere of the Modular eDrive Kit marks a significant development effort to bundle the expertise of ZF’s e-mobility team with systems solutions, components, and software control in a flexible platform.

“All new drives bring significant improvements in power density, weight, and efficiency,” said Dr. Otmar Scharrer, Senior Vice President, R&D Electrified Powertrain Technology, ZF.

Optimized transmissions, as well as efficient cooling and lubrication concepts, reduce mechanical losses by up to 70%. The modular system features patented innovations in power electronics.

“Among all the key figures of our Modular eDrive Kit, one is most important to us: the 50th percentile,” said Scheider. “Because we reduce the development times for new e-drives by up to 50%. We achieve this through a common technical base and cross-platform development of the components, through synergy effects, and with a higher degree of maturity from the very beginning.”

The eDrive Kit is engineered to give its customers broad design flexibility, from a focus on performance vs. efficiency for a range of applications, and from compact to premium segment cars. Possible configurations span from 75 to 400 kW and 350 to 540 N·m (258 to 398 lb·ft). The kit comprises three power classes as well as for basic 400-V and premium 800-V SiC (silicon carbide) segments.

Three versions of the kit are about to enter series production. A Low solution below 100 kW and a Mid solution up to 200 kW are both based on ASM or PSM asynchronous and permanent magnet synchronous motors and 400-V inverter technology. A High solution, with an output of over 200 kW and entering series production in the second half of 2022, combines a PSM machine with SiC-based 800-V inverter technology.

For all-wheel-drive vehicles, the eDrive Kit’s efficiency can be increased by ZF’s eConnect module. Designed for “space-neutral” installation, the module leaves the second axle uncoupled when not needed, reducing mechanical drag losses by up to 90%. However, it can reconnect the second drive within milliseconds via a claw coupling without any losses. The company says that its system gives an efficiency increase of well over 2% compared with the best comparable system currently on the market.

Further efficiency potential was demonstrated in the IAA EVnext concept vehicle. For example, the drive and recuperative braking systems are engineered to work more efficiently with an intelligent predictive cruise control system called ACCnext. The coordination takes into account the traffic flow, traffic signals, and topographical conditions. According to its own calculations, the ZF software saves up to 13% in energy thanks to networking with the infrastructure and special control algorithms.

 

Scalable sensing and computing

ZF is also developing “important technologies” in driver assistance and autonomous driving to help make traffic for the future safer, more efficient, and more comfortable. Depending on the application, the market demands different solutions, says Torsten Gollewski, Executive Vice President, Autonomous Mobility Systems, ZF.

“For the time being, intelligent assistance functions—so-called L2 plus systems—have the greatest potential for passenger cars,” said Gollewski. “Fully automated systems for Level 4 and 5 will likely first become established in commercial vehicles and urban passenger transport systems. We have aligned our strategy with this.”

So, on the system and component side of assisted and autonomous drive, the company is developing a broad range of systems and sensors.

“We have every sensor technology in our portfolio,” Gollewski continued. “That includes a full-range radar, FMCW lidar, as well as camera. We also make our systems [with] the capability to hear; that’s the reason why we have acoustic sensors. All these sensor signals have to be calculated in a powerful machine; that’s the ProAI high-performance CPU. Also, we need to connect to the outer world even to other cars or infrastructure; that’s the reason why we have also a connectivity unit in our portfolio, which we call Pro Connect.”

According to ZF, the core of new E/E vehicle architectures being developed by auto OEMs around the world rely on high-performance computers used as central, domain, or zone controllers. For the past few years, the company has been developing its ProAI supercomputer, which was presented in its latest version for the first time in Europe at the Munich event.

“Our ProAI covers an enormous range of possible application fields for virtually every type of vehicle and is suitable for all stages of automated or autonomous driving,” explained Gollewski.

With a 66% increase in computing power, the new ProAI consumes up to 70% less power. It offers flexible computing power from 20 to 1000 TOPS (trillion operations per second).

Its AI (artificial intelligence) capabilities are optimized for deep learning for advanced safety functions. The computer provides GPU-driven 360° fusion of available sensor data from camera, radar, lidar, and audio sensors.

The new generation ProAI is more compact so can be fitted in more locations. Even with available passive, air, and liquid cooling, most models come in the same standard size of 24 x 14 x 5 cm (9.4 x 5.5 x 1.9 in).

A modular design makes the supercomputer flexible for installation in many types of vehicles. It can be equipped with SoC (system-on-chip) variants from different manufacturers depending on customer requirements, and it can be operated with software from ZF or third-party suppliers. Examples of third parties ae Nvidia for systems-on-chips and Cognata on ADAS functionality. Standardized connectors enable the connection of several units together.

ZF recently won the first major orders for the ProAI in both the passenger car and commercial vehicle segments and will produce the central controller in large-scale production from 2024.

 

Putting it all together

In anticipation of the challenge of fully automated systems for Level 4 and 5 in urban passenger transport systems, in 2019 ZF acquired Dutch company 2getthere BV, which has many years of experience with autonomous driving systems.

The 2getthere operation has already transported over 100 million kilometers and 14 million people, with an availability of 99.7%. ZF is also currently in the process of developing autonomous shuttles for the German cities of Mannheim and Friedrichshafen by 2024.

“In Rotterdam, several shuttles have been in operation for many years already, and now we are currently being updated or updating this version to the third generation,” confirmed Gollewski.