MAGNA on the Future of Autonomous Vehicles

Bodo Seifert, Director of Advanced Engineering at Magna discusses the key highlights from 2016 in the autonomous industry, predicts what is to come in the next 2-5 years. What are some key highlights in the autonomous industry from 2016?

“There were a couple of really good and there were a couple of really bad things.

The good things first; so there were a couple of start-up companies that were gobbled up by the OEMs. I mean there was the California company that went for a three digit billion dollar amount to General Motors.

And then Outie is forming their own auto company for autonomous driving. So there is a lot of positive movement in the industry. I think right now this is on top of the cycle.

So I think all of this is positive. This is going to help the consumer. But then we also had the tragic first death of a person that was driving in an autonomous vehicle, and that really raised a lot of questions on how we engineer these vehicles as well as we make sure functional safety is properly addressed and so it didn’t really help to raise the consumer’s confidence in autonomous vehicles.”

What are your predicitions for the next 2-5 years?

“So some of the technologies that might migrate into the field, so I mean machine learning is definitely one of the things that seems to be the high point. So then different sense of technologies that might come in, I mean maybe we will see more lighter systems coming into the vehicle.

We’ll also see advances in how we fuse sets of data and make sure we can basically play the strengths of the census and downplay the weakness by getting a more holistic image out of these vehicles.

And then the third thing is going to be the cloud connection, I mean be it- hopefully that we see how it acts, take off, but also how to interface with the cloud and then get information and data out of the cloud.”

How do you think the industry will progress; both regionally and globally?

“Globally I think there’s going to be a couple of challenges. So in developing countries, India for example, I mean if you go off on an interstate and an interstate looks very much different than an interstate in Europe or in the U.S. would look like. There might be pedestrians and I don’t even want to talk about city driving in India.

I mean even the regular western European will have trouble handling that and so try to imagine a machine having to function in this environment.

But then the other thing is also legislation globally. So we have to figure out how things will progress in Europe, how things will progress here in the U.S. and the we’ll see where that takes us.”

What do you believe is the importance of attending Autonomous Vehicles?

“Now this is an industry where even the OEMs struggle with the topic and the OEMs have hundreds of engineers.

I mean they’ve got billions of dollars worth of budget and so if it comes to them, they are not absolutely sure about the technology,

I think Sergio from FCA has indicated that he thinks that collaboration will have to take place amongst the OEMs. But then if you go to the Tier 1s, it’s even worse. I mean then the engineering staff is smaller.

So without going to a convention like this one, where you can talk with your peers and exchange information, I think it’s going to be extremely difficult to really form an opinion, ground yourself and then see if you’re either a mainstream or if you’re going in the total opposite direction.

And, you know what you want, I mean if you don’t want to be mainstream, it might be good to go in the opposite direction but if you don’t know that, you can’t make a conscience decision.”