One of the problems with big conferences like this is that they have multiple tracks for the tech sessions so you can’t see them all. Monday’s tracks were “The Connected Vehicle”, “Human Machine Interface” and “Powertrain Challenges and Solutions for Sustaining Individual Transportation and Protecting the Environment”. That last track has a title indicative off the 100% buzzword compliance of the entire auto biz. If they spent half as much time in the dyno room as in they do inventing catch-phrases and buzzwords maybe the US auto industry would be in better shape. I suppose I should have spent some time in the first track, about connected vehicles, but I didn’t go to a single session in that track. The title of the first talk was “Connecting Vehicles in the Social Domain, Web 2.0 in the Vehicle” The Continental guy in the morning panel talked about how cars were going to transition from simple electronics to networking, but I am not so sure, after all the rule of networks is that the advantages square as the number of nodes double.  But how many nodes do you want? There are five cars around you that you may need to communicate with, perhaps just the cars doing the talking in a M2M (machine to machine) interface, but when you talk about everybody engaging in a big chat-fest, that just gives me images of drivers surfing the net instead of watching the road, a scary thing for a motorcyclist like me. Another killer app is all the stores sending your car ads, so you will have an electric sideshow barker in front of every single address to distract you even further. Heck, I find I don’t even listen to the radio anymore when I am in my car.

So I blew off all the software and networking-centric tracks and went to a talk about driver distraction given by Thomas Dingus from Virginia Transportation Institute. They put cameras in cars and watched drivers get distracted and then correlated that to accidents. It was another scary talk for a motorcyclist like me. The teen girl with an iPod, a cell phone and playing with the heater— she did manage to stomp the brakes and achieve a 0.91g deceleration, barely avoiding an accident. Then there was the big-rig trucker that was using two cell phones at once, while shifting and driving with his knees. He ran a yellow light but managed not to crash, unlike some of the other footage Tom showed. The highest risk factor, over 8, was when you are reaching for a falling or moving object. Checking the mirrors lessened your chances of an accident, 0.5. He also showed tuning a radio lessened your accident rate—I wondered if it was because your music wasn’t distracting you or because people are so used to the task risk, they purposely pay more attention. Cell phones were a factor of 2 or 3 times more risky for a crash, and Tom pointed out that using a cell phone was not as risky as driving drunk, he did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation about the 7% people using phone in cars and the overall crash rate. Pretty much, the message here is that anything that takes you eyes off the road, other than checking your mirrors, is a risk. But he showed fatigue was even riskier, with factors over 6 being commonplace.

I stayed in the Human-Machine Interface track to check out a talk by Ralph Bruder of Darmstadt Univ. of Technology about safe and pleasurable driving. The take-away here is that if you do safety equipment right it does not distract from the driver it makes driving more fun. He defined the four aspects of human pleasure based on anthropologist Lionel Tiger’s classifications:

• Physio-Pleasure: This is to do with the body - pleasures derived from the senses. In the context of products physio-pleasure would cover, for example, tactile and olfactory properties as well as ergonomic issues.
• Socio-Pleasure: This is the enjoyment derived from relationships with others. Products and services may help to enhance or facilitate particular social situations and may confer social or cultural status on the user.
• Psycho-Pleasure: This type of pleasure refers to people’s cognitive and emotional reactions, including their reactions to the products and services that they use.
• Ideo-Pleasure: This concerns people’s values. It is important that the values embodied in products and services are consistent with the values of those for whom they have been designed.

One interesting aspect of the talk is that when they equipped a vehicle with an automatic avoidance system, 30% of the drives thought that they had turned the wheel to avoid the object when really they had done nothing other than let their arms get dragged around by the servo system.

I then jumped over to Powertrain track for a hard-core presentation by Ash Punater of Delphi about using cylinder pressure feedback to get better combustion. Apparently if you homogenously mix the charge and then really compress it, there is no flame front, the charge just burns everywhere. I pointed out that this used to be called knock and ping and Ash explained that you cannot let it happen at higher loads and that yes, acoustic noise is a problem, as is damaging the cylinder pressure sensor and I suspect the crank journals. Ash is more of a software fellow so he is more concerned with all the algorithms to keep the noise and damage from occurring. If you do let the charge self-combust in diesel mode you get lower temperatures and less NOx as well as more efficiency and fuel mileage.

Staying in the powertrain track I watched Shailesh Kozareker talk about various  hybrid architectures. I loved the analog aspect of the product matrix. He pointed out that there is no one best hybrid architecture, it depends on how you use the car, a lot of city driving or a lot of hiway or if there is hilly terrain. For hills a parallel architecture was preferred for hiway a series-parallel. One problem that is displays is that there is no one hybrid car that is good at all kinds of driving.

I finished out the day staying the powertrain track with Mohamed Alamgir, who presented a paper on the various lithium ion chemistries. He pointed out that the cobalt cathode chemistries used in laptop batteries gives great energy density, but were far more susceptible to fire when shorted. When I asked him about the limited lifetime of lithium ion batteries he pointed out that the capacity loss was not always permanent but he did seem to indicate that if you store the battery at full charge it will lose capacity no matter what the chemistry.

Mohamed Almagir provided this handy chart comparing li-ion cells.