The automotive industry has introduced an unprecedented array of electrical and electronic innovations in recent decades — from passive safety features such as airbags to immersive user-experience and infotainment, as well as active safety features such as automatic emergency braking.
Each new innovation requires its own electronic control unit (ECU) with its own power, its own processing, its own data and its own connectivity. Each feature’s hardware brings its own wiring, introduces complexity, takes up space and adds weight to the vehicle.
This approach barely meets the needs of today’s feature-rich vehicle and certainly won’t scale as the industry moves toward fully autonomous driving, the most complex challenge it has ever contemplated. What’s needed is a new vehicle architecture that simplifies the design, centralizes computing power and optimizes electrical/electronic content, components and functionality.
To address these challenges and prepare for the future, Aptiv developed Smart Vehicle Architecture™. SVA™ embodies a vehicle-level design philosophy with three primary goals. The architecture must:
- Reduce complexity. By simplifying the hardware and software topology within the vehicle, SVA reduces interdependencies between the many different ECUs currently required to enable various functions.
- Unite diverse applications. SVA brings together software from many different domains across the vehicle to unlock new functionality and improve life cycle management.
- Empower OEMs. SVA gives OEMs the ability to fully control the software that defines the user experience of their vehicles and to enhance that functionality over time.
Read our white paper to find out how SVA™ meets these goals and goes beyond what’s possible with today’s vehicle architectures.