Connected Car News: Wallbox, Hitachi Lightning Electric, Epic Games, Marvell, Hyundai, BIStel, NXP & Elektrobit

In connected car news are Wallbox, Hitachi Lightning Electric, Epic Games, Marvell, Hyundai, BIStel, NXP and Elektrobit.

1/2 Price Super 65kW Power Charger

Wallbox, the leading energy management company that manufactures smart charging solutions for electric vehicles (EV), is disrupting the public charging industry with Supernova, its first fast public charger with 65kW power at half the total investment of similar chargers.

Supernova is the first public charger developed by Wallbox and introduces unprecedented levels of efficiency and operational stability into this market segment. Supernova offers an optimized internal design to make it light and easy to install by integrating multiple elements of Wallbox’s award-winning bidirectional charger Quasar. The product doesn’t compromise on aesthetics, with a modern, ergonomic layout that is synonymous with the Wallbox brand and its signature hallmarks of innovation and design.

Wallbox’s entry in the public charging segment complements its existing products and services offering for residential and semi-public charging that are currently available in over 40 countries globally.

Hitachi”s New APB HD

Hitachi Automotive Systems, Ltd. is introducing a new heavy-duty automated parking brake (APB HD) especially designed for pickup trucks, vans, SUVs and light commercial vehicles.

Developed by the company’s Brake Business Unit in Europe, the new brake system already has gone into production in North America and Europe. Several Hitachi Automotive Systems customers will introduce the new brake system on new vehicles in September in Europe and October in North America. The brake system will go into production in the Asia-Pacific region in 2021.

Automated parking brakes account for more than 25 percent of the global market for parking brakes and their popularity continues to grow. With its acquisition last year of Chassis Brakes International, Hitachi Automotive Systems is now the third largest supplier of automated parking brakes worldwide based on the company’s analysis of the market.

Lightning Electric for Fluid Trucks

– Lightning Systems, a provider of complete electrification solutions for urban commercial fleets, announces that Fluid Truck, a national truck rental platform, will incorporate 600 Lightning Electric vehicles onto their platform, with availability starting in Q4 2020.

Fluid Truck, a technology-based truck rental platform, empowers businesses to easily rent and pick up vehicles from nearby locations 24/7, 365 days a year. Users in major cities across the United States can access vehicles through both the Fluid Truck website and mobile application.

Epic Games HMI and Games for GMC CHummer EV

Epic Games today announced a new HMI initiative to enable the creation of automotive infotainment and digital cockpit experiences. Additionally, General Motors’ soon-to-be-revealed GMC HUMMER EV will be the first vehicle to use Unreal Engine in its digital cockpit, with more details to come at the car’s October 20th unveiling. New Unreal Engine alliances with HMI technology leaders including BlackBerry QNX, Mapbox, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., Siili Auto and Vectorform are making it easier for automotive companies to work more efficiently when building in-vehicle experiences.

Marvelll Ethernet PHY

Marvell introduced the industry’s first automotive gigabit Ethernet PHY solution with integrated media access control security (MACsec) technology for secure point to point communication. With nearly a billion connected cars projected to be on the road by 2030, the integration of security becomes an important factor in tomorrow’s vehicles. MACsec technology fortifies in-vehicle networking by securing data exchange on a hop-by-hop basis and prevents Layer 2 security threats such as intrusion, man-in-the-middle, and replay attacks. Marvell’s new Open Alliance TC10 compliant, dual speed 100/1000 BASE-T1 88Q222xM Ethernet PHY enables energy efficient, secure in-vehicle networks and assists in achieving functional safety compliance at the system level.

Automotive networks rely heavily on partial networking in which some segments are hibernated and woken up on demand. Marvell’s new gigabit PHY supports the Open Alliance TC10 for sleep mode and wake-up, tailored for automotive use cases. TC10 control signals are sent over the data line and minimize the need for special cables for remote control of the PHY states. Rapid electrification of vehicles has resulted in reduced power budget for each component. As the industry’s lowest power gigabit Ethernet PHY and with support of TC10, Marvell’s 88Q222xM aids tier1s and OEMs to design energy efficient in-vehicle network architectures.

Hyundai Invests in Envisics

Hyundai Mobis announced on the 7th that it has made a significant investment in Envisics, a UK based global leader in Augmented Reality Head-Up Display (AR HUD). AR HUD is a next generation safety convenience feature that matches driving information with the road ahead in real-time and projects it onto the windshield.

Hyundai Mobis has been making aggressive investments in autonomous driving and electrification over the last 3 years despite the unclear global business conditions, such as COVID-19. This demonstrates the company’s focus on actively discovering and developing next generation components in infotainment, and in autonomous driving with Velodyne and Motional, and is complemented by the establishment of 3 new electrification plants in Korea.

BIStel & NXP

BISTel, the world leader in engineering equipment systems and AI applications for semiconductor smart manufacturing, announced  a global, enterprise-wide collaboration with NXP Semiconductors, a world leader in semiconductor solutions spanning automotive, IoT and industrial sectors. Under this new multi-year, multi-fab collaboration, BISTel will deploy its award-winning manufacturing AI solutions, including Dynamic Fault Detection (DFD), chamber matching, eDatalzyer and the GrandView® predictive analytics in all front-end NXP fabs in the United States and Europe.

Angstrom Group is excited to announce that on September 18, 2020, Vantec, LLC a division of Angstrom Group acquired Vantec, Inc. and will operate out of Vantec, Inc.’s former Iowa & Nebraska facilities effective September 21st business day. As an Angstrom Group company, Vantec LLC will join the Angstrom Group family of companies servicing the Global Automotive & Industrial Markets and continue to provide a stable and expanding platform for its customers.

For more than 20 years, BISTel’s broad range of continuous improvement software applications have helped manufacturers improve the performance of their equipment and production processes, resulting in increased engineering productivity, reductions in system downtime, and an improvement in yield. This new agreement includes DFD fault detection, and eDatalyzer®, an innovative suite of machine learning based root cause analysis applications that quickly pinpoint and solve yield issues. It also includes BISTel’s new AI powered GrandView APM, an asset performance management system that monitors the health of critical assets, detects anomalies and offers predictive analytics that identifies production problems before they occur. It even provides a remaining useful life (RUL) prediction of equipment.

Elektrobit & Unity Collaborate

Elektrobit (EB), a visionary global supplier of embedded and connected software products for the automotive industry, and Unity, the world’s leading platform for creating and operating interactive, real-time 3D (RT3D) content, announced a collaboration to streamline the process to design and develop automotive human-machine interfaces (HMIs), extending together the power of real-time rendering to create next-generation, future-proof user experiences.

This collaboration harnesses the power of Unity’s real-time 3D rendering platform, and EB GUIDE, Elektrobit’s unique and comprehensive HMI development toolchain that powers more than 50 million vehicles on the road today. By combining their expertise, EB and Unity are enabling their customers to jump-start next-gen real-time 3D automotive HMIs by accelerating time to market and providing a reliable foundation throughout the entire development journey.

As we accelerate into the era of highly automated vehicles, Unity is leading the way in powering the in-car HMI experiences. Through our collaboration with Elektrobit, Unity’s real-time 3D technology will further drive efficiencies in-car development cycles, allowing consumers to interact with their vehicles like never before. “We’re excited to work with Unity to make it easier and faster to develop immersive, interactive experiences across the entire development lifecycle from design to implementation,” said Bruno Grasset, Head of Product Management, User Experience, at Elektrobit. “Car makers and Tier 1 suppliers will benefit greatly from the unique combination of experience and expertise from EB in automotive HMI development, and from Unity in immersive real-time 3D HMIs. This in turn will enable smartphone-like, automotive-grade user interfaces in vehicles.”