Serious question, how much does the IIHS tests affect your job?
A lot of the tests I’ve seen are 1-3 mph from making no contact and mitigating the whole incident when it comes to parallel/perpendicular tests for pedestrian systems.
Does anything other than a acceptable or good rating send you back to the drawing board?
Not really back to the drawing board, but more than likely recalibrating the system to improve performance. EU-NCAP
/CN-NCAP are a much bigger deal, at least for vehicles that are sold in the EU/CN market, and poor performance on those can mean pushing for larger changes. But even then, they’re seldom “back to the drawing board” just because at that point it’s usually way too late in production to make significant changes.
In the US, the new FMVSS 127 requirements are a huge fucking deal, and are making huge waves in the industry right now. Because they’re regulatory, meaning if you don’t pass you can’t sell the vehicle in the US, they’ve taken what’s been a generally low priority in the US to basically priority #1, especially given how tough the requirements are.
We are quite literally going to have to rework basically every single vehicle model we sell to meet it, some of them quite significantly, so it’s a much bigger deal than stuff like the IIHS requirements.
Gotcha. I figured AEB was pretty much getting to the point of being standard. Didn’t know it was decreed at this point.
I guess I was thinking more if third party targets were missed if it was possible to recalibrate or if new hardware was needed. In my experience, VW specifically, they used different radar units just about every year. And my Mazda is very different in comparison.
I welcome standard AEB. Maybe people will stop totaling my cars.
It’s definitely possible to recal or replace the hardware, it’s just way easier to recal that replace hardware.
One example I can think of is one project whose calibration and braking performance meant it was just eking out a pass, but because of the transition to copper-free brake pads, was now hitting the target. It wasn’t a huge deal, and we had to recalibrate it to brake a bit earlier.
VW (and Mercedes) is a pretty special case in terms of their industry pull. When I worked at a German Tier 1, it was very much a case of if they say “jump” you asked, “how high?”. They have such a massive output of vehicles, as a supplier, you’ll do anything possible to try and maintain their business. Even being on the team for NA/LATAM customers, we’d be told to sideline what we were working on to support stuff for VW/Mercedes, even though we saw literally no benefit from it as the NA team, and it could seriously hurt some of the projects we were working on. However, the reality was that the business from VW alone was larger than basically every other project we had combined, so it was worth it to piss off our other customers to keep them happy.
I also welcome standard AEB, but I’m not convinced customers are going to like it to be entirely honest. With how the regulation is written, it’s asking a lot from OEMs in terms of performance, and with perfect performance being required to even just sell a vehicle, I fear that we’re going to wind up with ultra-sensitive systems with heaps of false-positive/“phantom braking” reactions, just to ensure they pass the regs. NHTSA in all their infinite wisdom did include some very basic FP testing, but not an acceptable rate of FP per X number of miles. Also, because of the extremely high nighttime requirements, expect headlights to get even more blinding in the coming years…
I never thought about a sudden change in brake compound affecting the AEB system and its calibrations. I’ve always tried to stay OEM or comparable aftermarket pads. For example, I swapped my pads on my GTI for some EBC’s mostly because of brake dust. They performed very well, but I also had sticky tires. I have noticed I was able to find parts much more easily with that car than I have my Mazda. And with how many parts revisions I’ve seen for that one car I’d believe that they demand a lot in parts manufacturing. I guess it comes with the territory when they do something like the global MQB platform where parts are so easily shared.
In 6 years and 150,000 miles I only had one incident of a false positive where the car braked for whatever the system saw as an obstacle. Fortunately, no one was behind me but it was a route I traveled every day and it happened early on (~40,000 miles). My newer Mazda has the whole camera setup etc and definitely triggers if with the adaptive cruise if someone in the lane next to me brakes or slows down so I can see the overly sensitive reactions making people angry.
For the headlights, I don’t think factory cars are much of an issue. Now that matrix style lights are making their way here we should be able to learn a lot from Europe.
Thanks for the insightful reply! It’s cool to see stuff like this.
Serious question, how much does the IIHS tests affect your job?
A lot of the tests I’ve seen are 1-3 mph from making no contact and mitigating the whole incident when it comes to parallel/perpendicular tests for pedestrian systems.
Does anything other than a acceptable or good rating send you back to the drawing board?
Not really back to the drawing board, but more than likely recalibrating the system to improve performance. EU-NCAP /CN-NCAP are a much bigger deal, at least for vehicles that are sold in the EU/CN market, and poor performance on those can mean pushing for larger changes. But even then, they’re seldom “back to the drawing board” just because at that point it’s usually way too late in production to make significant changes.
In the US, the new FMVSS 127 requirements are a huge fucking deal, and are making huge waves in the industry right now. Because they’re regulatory, meaning if you don’t pass you can’t sell the vehicle in the US, they’ve taken what’s been a generally low priority in the US to basically priority #1, especially given how tough the requirements are.
We are quite literally going to have to rework basically every single vehicle model we sell to meet it, some of them quite significantly, so it’s a much bigger deal than stuff like the IIHS requirements.
Gotcha. I figured AEB was pretty much getting to the point of being standard. Didn’t know it was decreed at this point.
I guess I was thinking more if third party targets were missed if it was possible to recalibrate or if new hardware was needed. In my experience, VW specifically, they used different radar units just about every year. And my Mazda is very different in comparison.
I welcome standard AEB. Maybe people will stop totaling my cars.
It’s definitely possible to recal or replace the hardware, it’s just way easier to recal that replace hardware.
One example I can think of is one project whose calibration and braking performance meant it was just eking out a pass, but because of the transition to copper-free brake pads, was now hitting the target. It wasn’t a huge deal, and we had to recalibrate it to brake a bit earlier.
VW (and Mercedes) is a pretty special case in terms of their industry pull. When I worked at a German Tier 1, it was very much a case of if they say “jump” you asked, “how high?”. They have such a massive output of vehicles, as a supplier, you’ll do anything possible to try and maintain their business. Even being on the team for NA/LATAM customers, we’d be told to sideline what we were working on to support stuff for VW/Mercedes, even though we saw literally no benefit from it as the NA team, and it could seriously hurt some of the projects we were working on. However, the reality was that the business from VW alone was larger than basically every other project we had combined, so it was worth it to piss off our other customers to keep them happy.
I also welcome standard AEB, but I’m not convinced customers are going to like it to be entirely honest. With how the regulation is written, it’s asking a lot from OEMs in terms of performance, and with perfect performance being required to even just sell a vehicle, I fear that we’re going to wind up with ultra-sensitive systems with heaps of false-positive/“phantom braking” reactions, just to ensure they pass the regs. NHTSA in all their infinite wisdom did include some very basic FP testing, but not an acceptable rate of FP per X number of miles. Also, because of the extremely high nighttime requirements, expect headlights to get even more blinding in the coming years…
I never thought about a sudden change in brake compound affecting the AEB system and its calibrations. I’ve always tried to stay OEM or comparable aftermarket pads. For example, I swapped my pads on my GTI for some EBC’s mostly because of brake dust. They performed very well, but I also had sticky tires. I have noticed I was able to find parts much more easily with that car than I have my Mazda. And with how many parts revisions I’ve seen for that one car I’d believe that they demand a lot in parts manufacturing. I guess it comes with the territory when they do something like the global MQB platform where parts are so easily shared.
In 6 years and 150,000 miles I only had one incident of a false positive where the car braked for whatever the system saw as an obstacle. Fortunately, no one was behind me but it was a route I traveled every day and it happened early on (~40,000 miles). My newer Mazda has the whole camera setup etc and definitely triggers if with the adaptive cruise if someone in the lane next to me brakes or slows down so I can see the overly sensitive reactions making people angry.
For the headlights, I don’t think factory cars are much of an issue. Now that matrix style lights are making their way here we should be able to learn a lot from Europe.
Thanks for the insightful reply! It’s cool to see stuff like this.