Change in the automotive landscape is accelerating with a greater focus on sustainability. Vehicle propulsion is shifting from fossil-fuel-burning internal combustion engines to more electrified options to combat global warming and reduce air pollution. Vehicle control is moving to greater autonomy to get the human error out of the equation for greater safety but also more convenience and mobility equity.

With so much change occurring, the industry’s OEMs and suppliers need all the help they can get in organizing and planning for the future to ensure that the sustainable mobility transition goes as smoothly as possible. SAE International is looking to help ease the transition to a more sustainable transportation future by helping to bring the industry together in key areas.

Spearheading the effort is Chief Growth Officer, Frank Menchaca, who gave Futurride exclusive insight into key SAE initiatives. Since joining the organization, he has championed bringing more of a focus on customers’ needs in determining its future direction.

Menchaca believes that sustainable transportation will play a major role in limiting the ill effects of climate change: “We feel that it’s important for [SAE] to play a role in helping to address that scientific challenge.”

 

Office of energy

At the beginning of 2021, Menchaca began a major SAE initiative with the Office of Sustainable Energy Transportation, with a series of working groups created to help better coordinate the industry’s shift to more sustainable energy consumption. SAE hopes to capitalize on its history in helping engineers develop electric vehicles, with well over a hundred standards in that area on the ground-vehicle side. One of those is the well-known Recommended Practice SAE J1772 for plug-in vehicle charging couplers.

“We started hearing about a year ago that there needs to be more coordination between the vehicle and the world around the vehicle—the vehicle to infrastructure,” said Menchaca. “SAE can fill a role here because of our convening capability and foster collaboration and dialogue between segments that don’t really talk to each other. If you think about the current state of EV development, it’s a bit of a patchwork quilt when it comes to the infrastructure; everybody’s got a piece of it, but no one is really helping to coordinate the larger picture.”

The need for better coordination was driven home to Menchaca as he was sitting in on a committee meeting with the California Energy Commission when members asked SAE about developing a standard for bi-directional battery use.

“Suddenly we realized that we’ve got to be talking to energy companies, which are not typically going to be present in an SAE technical committee,” he said. “So that’s when we understood we’ve got to broaden the network. We have to move upstream a little bit from standardization to start to work out some of these larger relationships.”

So, the charter of the new office on energy was to make these connections. What followed was a coordinated effort to get customer input, talking with about 50 thought-leaders from OEMs, suppliers, energy companies, labs, and government.

“We didn’t limit it to the automotive side,” he said. “Batteries are batteries, whether they’re coming from cars or airplanes. There are many of the same issues.”

One of the working groups’ first tasks is to identify the most important use cases that can be tested via a pilot. Candidates include smart charging, bi-directional battery use, battery second life/recycling, payment and routing, and new business models such as battery-as-a-service.

Outputs could be best practices or white papers that can be handed off to the SAE standard-committee operations led by Jack Pokrzywa, Director, Global Ground Vehicle Standards, and David Alexander, Director, Aerospace Standards.

The effort has also opened up a dialog with ChargePoint and EVgo on coordination around the big challenges of making passenger-car charging faster and more convenient. Menchaca believes SAE might also be able to better convene the industry around the growing trend of battery-as-a-service business models championed by OEMs like Nio.

 

Building on automation experience

The thinking behind the Office of Sustainable Energy Transportation was previewed by SAE’s formation of the Office of Automation, which is looking at how the organization can better serve the industry as autonomous vehicle technology advances. One direct result of that effort was the creation of the Automated Vehicle Safety Consortium (AVSC) under the SAE Industry Technologies Consortia (ITC).

The AVSC is a group of OEMs and technology developers working on automated driving systems. The specific focus is on Level 4 ADS DVs (automated driving system, dedicated vehicles). Current members are Aurora, Daimler, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Lyft, Motional, and Toyota.

“The consortium is developing best practices to foster public trust and confidence in automated driving systems and also accelerate open industry standards in those areas,” said Edward Straub, Executive Director of the AVSC. “And they’re also committed to implementing the best practices.”

The best practices are handed off to technical committees that can work a little bit faster on standardization.

“You cut out all of the fuzzy front-end stuff and you’re able to standardize much more quickly,” said Menchaca.

For example, the AVSC did a series of best practices around vehicle operator qualifications to a committee now writing a standard. It is also tackling vehicle-to-pedestrian communication.

“Each automaker should not do that in a different way,” added Menchaca.

In its most recent best practice, the AVSC published guidance for passenger-initiated emergency trip interruptions, specifically how passengers will initiate an emergency stop or call while driving in fleet-managed SAE Level 4 or 5 ADS DVs. The best practice strongly advocates that all fleet-managed ADS-DVs be equipped with a PES function, a PEC function, or both.

“Much like an emergency stop button or a call button in an elevator, the general public understands that, while they don’t control the elevator car, they have the ability to stop and ask for help during an emergency situation,” added Straub. “Riding in an AV should be no different, and this best practice provides guidance industry should consider.

 

More than best practices and standards

While many of the new SAE sustainable-mobility initiatives have resulted in best practices and subsequent standards initiatives, those aren’t the sole options to serve industry needs. Solutions have come from other areas of SAE’s product and service portfolio.

“I look at the problems we’re trying to solve,” said Menchaca. “Standards are one tool in the tool bag, but there are others.”

One of those is a relatively new product line called EDGE Research Reports—being developed by Monica Nogueira, Director of Content Acquisition & Development, Automotive & Aerospace—that looks specifically at unsettled issues related to emerging technology.

“The idea is to focus on things that are not standardized yet,” said Menchaca.

A recent EDGE Research Report authored by Sven Beiker, Founder and Managing Director at Silicon Valley Mobility, LLC, focuses on visual communication between automated vehicles and other road users. This communication will be critical to signal the intentions of vehicles driven by software rather than human pilots; simple lights, indicators, and displays will need to be standardized for uniformity to help with the mass adoption of AVs.

Another recent sustainability-related initiative brought together SAE’s increasing focus on training and the important challenge of cybersecurity. In June, SAE and the TÜV SÜD Mobility Division announced a collaborative new cybersecurity training certification program.

The training curriculum consists of two certification levels and promotes awareness and adoption of three significant industry standards including the ISO/SAE 21434 Standard: Road Vehicles – Cybersecurity Engineering—a continuation of the SAE J3061 Standard: Cybersecurity Guidebook for Cyber-Physical Vehicle Systems.

The idea behind the training program is to equip product developers with a common language, an understanding of cybersecurity threats and protections, and the laws and regulations that impact the industry. The partners believe that it represents a major contribution towards enhancing vehicle and component security and ensuring the success of type approval applications for series-produced vehicles.