[EV Vision Original] If the concept of environmental protection has been integrated into the spiritual blood of Northern Europe, then the synonym of safety has also been integrated into Volvo’s brand gene.
Throughout the development of Volvo, you will find that in some historical nodes, there are security considerations. In 1944, the first one-piece cage body was invented, and in 1959, the three-point seat belt was invented. In that era when fuel vehicles dominated the world, Volvo created a new definition of safety.
Swedish engineer Nils Bohlin invented the V-type three-point seat belt in 1959.
So, when electrification has taken over the throne of fuel vehicles and is ready to unify the world, is Volvo ready for safety?
Yes, it did.
I remember once, Volvo put forward the vision of "zero casualties", which was successfully realized in 2020. Although this is a chapter that can’t be surpassed in the era of fuel vehicles, in the face of the advent of electrification today, Volvo has also begun its own evolution and learning, especially intelligence and networking, and integrated its corresponding technologies into the whole vehicle to meet the new needs of users for automobiles. And the assisted driving has become an important foundation of this development.
In our knowledge, some car companies are still promoting their own L2-assisted driving system. However, as early as 2012, Volvo launched a mass-produced Pilot Assist pilot system with L2 autopilot function, which means that Volvo has once again advanced its deployment in this field and once again led the technological pace of industry development.
So, how will Volvo "lead" in the future?
With regard to autonomous driving, Volvo’s advanced technology route can be said to be very unique. It does not follow the L1-L5 classification method commonly used in the industry, but adopts three stages: "Drive Pilot" (the driver is dominant), "Cruise Pilot" (advanced assisted driving under system monitoring) and "Ride Pilot" (without driver monitoring). This is nothing more than the support of our own technical strength, so we have such courage.
For future models, Volvo will be equipped with a central computing platform composed of NVIDIA DRIVE Orin chips in terms of hardware. The data shows that the computing power of a single Orion-X chip can reach 254TOPS, which means that it can calculate 254 trillion times per second, which is 3.5 times that of Tesla HW3.0. At the same time, Volvo is also cooperating with Luminar, the top technology company in Silicon Valley. All Volvo cars will be equipped with 300-line +1550nm Iris second-generation vehicle-class lidar.
As a lidar manufacturer from the United States, the lidar produced by Luminar uses a laser source of 1550nm. At present, there are two kinds of lidar wavelengths on the market: 905nm and 1550 nm. Among them, the laser radar with wavelength of 905nm uses silicon-based photodetector as the emission source, which has the advantages of low cost and mature technology. However, it also has the disadvantage that the 905nm laser source is harmful to human eyes. Although it belongs to the invisible light source, under a certain energy, the laser of this wavelength will burn the retina when it irradiates human eyes, so when it is used as a laser radar emitter, the power should be reduced, so its ability to resist weather interference is weak and its penetration into rain and fog is insufficient.
The 1550 nm laser radar uses InGaAs near infrared detector as the emission source, and its laser is far away from the visible spectrum absorbed by human eyes. Compared with the 905 nm laser, the 1550 nm laser with the same power is 40 times safer for human eyes, so it has higher safety. Therefore, it can run at full power and has high penetration for extreme weather environment.
The data shows that Luminar lidar has a maximum detection range of 600m, and can detect about 10% low reflectivity targets within a distance of 250m, such as black cars at night and tires with the lowest reflectivity on the road, which is of great help to improve driving safety. And the radar itself also supports OTA upgrade, which can constantly update iterations.
In addition, it can also achieve a viewing angle of 120 horizontally and 26 vertically without rotating the radar, and can obtain high-resolution data at any position in the vertical direction in real time by dynamically changing the scanning mode.
In addition, Volvo’s future models will be equipped with a multi-sensor fusion sensing scheme consisting of 5 millimeter-wave radars, 8 cameras and 16 ultrasonic sensors, which improves the fault tolerance rate of the autonomous driving algorithm and greatly improves the safety factor.
In terms of software architecture, Volvo is one of the few automobile manufacturers with complete capability of independent research and development of ADAS. Except perception, everything from perception fusion, decision-making to control is self-developed. At the same time, Zenseact, a Volvo autopilot software development company, can provide a full stack of autopilot software. In addition to reaching a global strategic cooperation with the autopilot giant Waymo, it also cooperated with companies such as UBER to jointly accelerate the development of safe and stable autopilot algorithm logic.
In addition to intelligent driving, passive safety is still Volvo’s core DNA.
When the vehicle ushers in the electrification transformation, the structural safety of the vehicle itself is a little more than that of the traditional fuel vehicle. The first thing to bear the brunt of this is battery safety.
According to previous reports, Volvo Cars announced in June that it would cooperate with Northvolt to develop and produce sustainable battery products. The battery product will be produced with 100% renewable energy, and its energy density is expected to exceed 1000 Wh/L.. So, with such a high energy density battery, how should Volvo prevent it?
In view of the safety of high energy density batteries, Volvo has adopted six technical supports, namely, low heat conduction source blocking technology, barrier-free heat removal technology, intelligent cooling technology, millisecond fast power off technology, positive pressure blocking technology and automatic early warning technology, and their main duties are to block the thermal runaway of batteries to ensure the life safety of people in the car.
Not only that, Volvo will test each battery provided by the supplier separately instead of sampling to ensure reliability. According to the test, the battery pack carried on the whole vehicle can be soaked in more than 1m water depth for many hours and still be intact.
Previously, Volvo had put a Volvo XC40 pure electric version directly into a large glass pool with a water depth of 1.7m. After soaking for 4 minutes, the Volvo XC40 pure electric version can still be driven out smoothly, and the battery-controlled motors are in normal working condition. And after 12 hours of continuous immersion, Volvo XC40 pure electric battery pack still has no water, no leakage and no thermal runaway. It can be seen that Volvo’s battery protection level far exceeds the IP67 standard, so there is no doubt about Volvo’s battery safety.
In addition to waterproof, Volvo has also achieved all-round design and optimization in terms of battery collision safety. Generally speaking, when a pure electric vehicle collides, the battery will be extruded and deformed due to external force, which will eventually lead to rupture and short circuit, and lead to severe fire.
Volvo, on the other hand, has developed fire prevention and temperature control technology for battery packs, so that enough evacuation time can be reserved for drivers and passengers. Not only that, because the power battery occupies most of the chassis area, it puts forward new requirements for structure and energy absorption design.
Volvo has done a good job in protecting the battery pack structure from the structural design of the battery pack. In the collision test in Europe, the battery pack can remain intact and not deformed after the side collision, so as to ensure that the battery cells and circuits are protected from being squeezed and damaged in the vehicle accident, greatly reducing the accident risk and improving the safety of the vehicle.
Perhaps it has been brought to the extreme in terms of safety, but is Volvo’s label limited to this? The answer is: no.
Nowadays, the advanced level of intelligent cockpit has become the best test to show the real strength of a car company in intelligent technology. For future products, Volvo will be equipped with a self-developed integrated in-vehicle system-"Volvo S.OS", and its operating systems include Android Automotive OS, QNX, AUTOSAR and Linux.
This system can realize faster and more flexible function development and upgrade. Just like our smart phones, functions and applications, including service experience, can be upgraded remotely online through OTA.
In addition, at this year’s CES show, Volvo announced its cooperation with Qualcomm. In the future, Volvo pure electric SUV will use Qualcomm Snapdragon digital cockpit platform as the high computing power center, which can meet the higher requirements in image, audio and artificial intelligence, and has the advantage of ultra-low power consumption. Thanks to the new computing platform, the running speed of Volvo Car’s next-generation in-vehicle infotainment system will be increased by 2 times and the image generation speed will be increased by 10 times.
Finally, Volvo recently announced a cooperation with Epic Games, a game company, to apply Unreal Engine, a game development engine of Epic, to the brand-new all-electric flagship model of the next-generation Volvo car, so as to provide a more realistic visual effect for the digital cockpit through photo-level visualization technology and meet the new breakthrough of drivers and passengers in senses.
Write it at the end
As a car company that has developed for 95 years, the word safety is deeply rooted in Volvo’s brand gene, which is more important to consumers than fuel consumption and performance. With the advent of electrification, Volvo continues to lead the safety benchmark in the electrical age through its own vision and foresight, and as consumers, we continue to give Volvo such confidence and continue the concept of "zero casualties" to the end. We will wait and see.