Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
A new way to drive
Another company flirting with more democratised methods of technological advancement is Mercedes-benz. Our June issue had the full report back of the new A-class launch and one of the highlights Merc is pushing with its new baby is a car- sharing service. This obviously will not be available when the car breaks local cover, but in its European spec it is a seamless, app-driven experience that, confusingly, isn’t folded into the Connect Me experience. You can, however, use the benefits of Connect Me, like porting your personal driver profile and dashboard configuration to the car you’re borrowing.
The current trend is to embrace the millennial ‘ Sharing Economy’ stereotype of people between the ages of 18–35 not wanting to own things and rather use goods and services on demand. Think renting instead of buying. To be fair, the idea is better for the environment than senseless consumerism. But current data points to millennials starting to buy homes, have children and own cars again. The US home- ownership market is recovering after a second quarter 2016 62,9 per cent low. First quarter 2018 numbers are rising steadily to 64,2 per cent.
The reasons behind this upward ownership trajectory are seemingly steeped in out- of- control rental costs, thanks to the Airbnb effect, a 2,9 per cent recovery in the employment rate and a generally improving economy. As it turns out, millennials were only not acquiring assets because they were, well, broke and unemployed. Then, the second part of Merc’s mobility strategy is ready to catch them when they make their inevitable fortunes.
In 2017, the company sent a special S-class to cities around the world to collect road data it could feed into its autonomous- drive system. When the S-class was launched, it was billed as the most advanced car in the world and enhanced DISTRONIC (Merc’s own brand of adaptive cruise control), Active Steering Assist, Active Lane Change Assist and Active Emergency Stop Assist all support that claim. Mercedes-benz did bring the most advanced automated lane- change feature to market with the E-class, and our testing found that particular car’s autonomous systems to be the best in our market when it comes to functionality on poorly marked roads, so the S-class could logically be better.
Mercedes-benz South Africa also conducted a clever marketing stunt of returning the driver from its famous 1990 Chapman’s Peak ad to the scene of the infamous crash, all to show its commitment to its promised superior safety. The video, which you can watch on Youtube, went off without a hitch and demonstrated the many tangible advantages to having these types of systems on board. So successful was this new marketing campaign that it inspired local Marketing Director Selvin Govender to make the bullish claim that the brand could bring a Level 4 autonomous car to market tomorrow if it wanted to.
With the Mercedes-benz system integrating GPS navigation data and this big new set of real-world driving conditions, it is now on par with the likes of Tesla’s Autopilot, except that Tesla uses the connected features of the cars to share the individual vehicle information with the fleet to improve the system’s functionality on a macro level. Of course, this approach has still resulted in bizarre accidents such as Teslas driving into stationary vehicles.
Autonomous cars have a very deep learning problem. We can only feed a finite number of scenarios into these systems, which they can then create algorithms for. The problem is human behaviour can be very impulsive and erratic, and hardware glitches can still sometimes happen. Add unpredictable weather patterns into this equation and it results in just the kind of chaos that binary computing simply cannot create a comprehensive set of rules for.
And there’s little indication that quantum computing will soon arise as the immediate answer, because of the fragility of the quantum state.
Quantum computers begin to outperform traditional supercomputers (quantum supremacy) at the 50 qubit (that’s quantum bits, or quadrillion equations per second) threshold. To achieve so many qubits and quantum gates, the processors need to either be cooled to close to absolute zero – this technique currently yields a mere 17 qubits – or have ions directly exposed to a complex system of lasers, which can be tuned to cool the ions to close to absolute zero.
Both approaches are currently being employed in laboratories – with IBM and Google heading the charge in the latter approach – and are still far from ready for consumer hardware.
The D-wave method uses an entirely different approach and has been the most reliable way to reach 2 000-qubit computing to date, but even that is still decades away from reaching car-dealer networks. That’s still discounting the limited number of perks quantum computers have over binary computing.
At the moment, our most successful solution for accelerating computing hardware is graphics processors, which explains why Nvidia’s Xavier-powered Drive Pegasus intelligent platform is the absolute market leader in semiautonomous vehicles. And there’s little surprise that Mercedes-benz is one of Nvidia’s biggest clients.
Where quantum computing can assist us right now is in the field of traffic optimisation and electric- car charge- point deployment. Artificial Intelligence is best suited to grapple with these sophisticated equations, leaving dealing with driving situations like navigating Marabastad on a busy Saturday morning to humans, who can, for the most part, react a little bit better to the waves of erratic taxi drivers and distracted pedestrians.
The cleverest cars on the road right now
Two years ago, Volkswagen first broke cover on the Tiguan GTE hybrid 4x4 concept. Then, last year, the German company unveiled an urban SUV ID Crozz concept. In 2018, we have the first genuine competitor to Tesla’s excellent Model X and it draws on all the strengths of the VW concepts, but is made by the British brand Jaguar. We’ve become quite accustomed to VW’S incessant teasing of its new ID brand, but never imagined that the first premium EV (electric vehicle) contender to make it would derive from the automotive establishment.
The I-pace’s styling and size slots somewhere between the F- and E-pace in the same way its Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) stablemate, Range Rover’s Velar, squeezes in between Sport and Evoque. This is distinctively a Jaguar, but the designers have happily leaned into the newly available internal dimensions that come from not having an internal combustion engine to configure things around. The front axle, for instance, is a lot further forward than on an F-pace. At 4,7 m long and 2,1 m wide, the twoton crossover is almost in a class of its own, lacking the third row seating of its perceived main competitor.
What is worrying, however, is that the 90 kwh battery ( good for around 480 km of driving) will take about 10 hours to charge to 80 per cent from a standard wall charger. A P90 D Model X, on the other hand, will do the same in 9,5 hours, but nets you only 431 km on a full battery. This is just life with electronic gadgets; battery technology is holding us back. Jaguar is happy to report that the I-pace will go from 0 to full in about 90 minutes at a DC fast charging point, which would leave you just enough time to catch a game at the pub.
What we don’t like, though, is the use of mere adaptive cruise control as the ADAS system on the higher-spec models. The I-pace finally adds Apple Carplay and Android Auto to the JLR line-up, and should at least benefit from the range-topping Evoque’s selfdriving capabilities. What it does share with its diminutive cousin is off-road prowess. Adaptive air suspension can raise the body to clear most obstacles and the ridiculous 696 Nm of torque can claw the two independent electric motors up most gradients (remember, 100 per cent of that torque is available from the moment you breathe on the throttle, and is then multiplied by the independent motors; no drive shaft connecting the two axles also makes for better torque vectoring). In theory, the I-pace should be virtually unstoppable on the rough stuff.
What is painfully obvious is that Jaguar is a traditional carmaker in
every sense. There are no car-sharing applications and little mention of connected features. In a world where Tesla can fundamentally alter a car via an over-the-air (OTA) update – the company scraped six full metres off the Model 3's stopping distance after a poor review – not trumpeting aftersales improvements is criminal.
To be fair, the company did announce that the status of compatible charging stations will be updated in real time to the car's navigation system.
Volvo is preparing for a new software update that will allow for automated dynamic route planning on the XC90 T8 plug-in hybrid. The car will then be able to analyse the route ahead and also optimise electricity use for high efficiency. This comes about a year after a major update that unshackled the Pilot Assist autonomous mode to operate at up to 130 km/ h. Even Ford got in on the OTA fun when it added Android Auto and Apple Carplay to all Sync 3- equipped cars in 2017.
Smartphones have by now made us accustomed to our tools evolving over time and our vehicles are becoming more task oriented than ever. There is room for a touch of fun, though. While the Renault-nissan alliance is sitting on a mountain of smart mobility-oriented intellectual property (IP), South Africa is yet to see big strides from these two companies. There are light touches of ADAS and infotainment enhancements dotted around the product line-ups, but innovation has largely come in mechanical form.
Spend any amount of time in the topspec Nissan Qashqai (1,5 dci TEC) and you'll find that the TEC nomenclature is quite generous. The car, for instance, will warn you about an imminent front collision, but under no circumstances would it intervene when we put it to the test. That's not to say that the car is an absolute luddite, because blindspot monitoring and well- considered Bluetooth are still worth something in the car world.
Your wallet, however, will love you for choosing that frugal Renault diesel engine. We tried our level best to run it down in a reasonable manner, but the Qashqai's fuel economy stayed fixed at 5,3 l/100 km.
The diesel is dead
We’ll mourn it for years to come, but with manufacturers like Volvo pulling out after initially pledging to deliver oil-burning hybrids into our market, we can surely kiss our efficient diesel engines goodbye. But in its place, we get all the thermal- efficiency lessons engineers have learnt while trying to reduce emissions while at the same time increasing performance and fuel efficiency on ever-shrinking engines.
Mazda is now leading the field of gasoline compression ignition with its SKYACTIV-X design. The ZoomZoom riff on homogenous charge compression ignition (HCCI) puts the air/fuel mix under compression to the point of ignition from the heat generated as particles are squashed together, much like a typical diesel engine. Obviously, traditional HCCI requires tight temperature control because too low will result in failed starts and too high runs the risk of timing problems and, ultimately, engine knock. Mazda solved these problems with a spark plug to assist with cold starts and, when the engine is under high load, to help regulate the timing.
Where HCCI truly shines is in low-to-medium engine loads when operation is perfect and the power mill can achieve optimal thermal efficiency. The company is claiming a fuel efficiency improvement of 20 to 30 per cent over the current crop of engines, using lower compression ratios by leaving the intake valve open during the compression stroke and then spark igniting a smaller volume of air/fuel mix – this results in a higher expansion ratio and marginal fuel savings.
Current theories around the engine will typically involve the presence of a supercharger to force-induce when the engine is under high load and, crucially, using spark ignition. This is the best explanation for Mazda’s description of spark- plug- controlled compression ignition (SPCCI), where the spark plug and resulting flame increase the pressure in the cylinder and raise the temperature, forcing a compression ignition with all the unignited fuel. Mazda has slated 2019 as the release date for the first SKYACTIV X-powered cars.