Predictive Cruise Control

How sophisticated is cruise control really? How does it adapt to elevation changes? If you're cruising on the interstate and about to go up a long grade, is cruise control really going to do a more efficient job than a good human driver would? It's going to do a good job of keeping the vehicle close to the speed you set it at. But it might use much more fuel to do so than a person who can anticipate the hill and carry that momentum up the hill.

The issue is that cruise control systems only react to conditions that it is already experiencing. Adaptive cruise control is beginning to make inroads on anticipating emergency conditions and taking preventive action. That's for safety. Let's talk about energy efficiency.

Thinking along the lines of moving from cars that are driven to cars that are driverless, let's say you're driving your daily commute. It's the same route day in and day out, and there are some hills both ways. Now let's say this route is over an interstate and you're running predictive cruise control (call it PCC) in the peak efficiency speed range. As you come up to the hill the system speeds the car up by a couple of miles per hour in order to build momentum and help push you up the grade. But as it nears the peak it backs off a hair because on the other side you're going to exceed your set speed anyway as you start going downhill. This way it takes less energy to move the car over that hill.

This is repeated for every grade you encounter on the portion of the drive where you use PCC. It will end up saving a lot of fuel. Not only is that important from an environmental perspective, it's also going to be more important in electric vehicles while battery storage capacity is still far behind gasoline and diesel. There just won't be nearly as much energy on board, and PCC can stretch the car's range a little bit more.

Now, how does the system know how to predict a grade, where it begins to rise and where it peaks? GPS is one possibility. If the car's navigation system knew where it was headed and what the grades were, it could map where to adjust speeds. It could also "learn" routes it regularly travels on and build up a knowledge base. Then there's always DSRC. If it gets implemented and provides local road data to passing vehicles, topographical data could be included.

Vehicles with these capabilities are already being tested, and they're going to be important technologies as we move forward.

The Future of Automotive Transportation

This is my opening post of what will become a repository for various ideas, thoughts, and concepts pertaining to the future of automotive transportation. I have a collection of notes scribbled on Post-It notes and scraps of paper. They’re not doing anyone any good in their current state, not even me (too disorganized for my tastes).

We live in an interesting and fast changing era. Much will change and nothing is certain. But it’s safe to assume people will still conceive, design, develop, regulate, manufacture, transport, sell, service, and recycle the vehicles of the future. By examining current trends we can begin to see what may be in store down the road.

Essentially there are only three fundamental issues with the automotive industry today. Environmental, safety, and economic. The first two are regulated in the United States by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) as well as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The economic issue centers around dependency on foreign sources of petroleum. Many of those sources are hostile to the US and therefore represent a threat to both national and economic security.

Beyond the economic and national security issue, it has become apparent to many that the use of petroleum is not sustainable. We can’t go on consuming it at the rate that we have been. As if that wasn’t bad enough, due to the growth in demand from developing (China, India, et al) and industrialized (US) nations it’s becoming less sustainable even faster. Depending on who you ask there’s a strong possibility the world is going to run out of usable oil within 50 to 100 years.

Not only that, drilling for oil, transporting, refining, and burning it is not doing anything good for the environment. It doesn’t matter if you believe it’s a contributing factor to global warming. The fact is that every pound of fuel burned results in more pounds of carbon dioxide (as well as other substances) being released into the atmosphere . In a way it’s like smoking. You may not get lung cancer from it, but isn’t the act of burning something and inhaling it unnatural? There are going to be side effects.

Finally, from a safety standpoint roughly 40,000 people die each year on American highways from vehicle-related accidents, and millions are injured (about 3.3 million in 2006 according to the Centers for Disease Control).

All these factors combined clearly indicate that the automotive industry will undergo massive changes. I’m here to talk about the problems, provoke discussion, and hopefully help find solutions to these issues that we face.