Brief Portrait of GR/ET and EP/ET
At three production locations — Böblingen near Stuttgart, Ulm, and Palo Alto, California — the Infotainment and Telematics business unit of Daimler Corporate Research and Advanced Development works on all of the aspects of these topics that are relevant to future vehicle models.
Under the leadership of Ralf Guido Herrtwich, 100 employees work in five departments on developing new functions for future telematics systems and on the innovative hardware and software components that are needed to implement them. Because it often takes more than five years for the developed technologies to reach series production, one of the biggest challenges faced by the engineers at the center is to accurately predict forthcoming developments in the information technology and telecommunications sector and to design future telematics systems in such a way that they can share in this progress smoothly via the appropriate interfaces and modular construction.
Telematics systems generally used to be self-contained, but today the integration of devices such as iPods and smart phones is playing an increasing role in the work done at the center. Customers are bringing these devices with them when they get into a vehicle, and they want to use them there safely and comfortably. The Internet and its connection with future telematics functions has also become a stronger focus of the engineers in charge of advanced development, ever since affordable mobile data services with an adequate bandwidth have become available in most countries. Telematics researchers can also imagine vehicle-to-vehicle communication — which, however, will focus less on transferring infotainment content than on increasing safety by warning drivers promptly about dangers on the road ahead.
Under the leadership of Peter Häußermann, 250 employees work at the Electric/Electronic Telematics Center at Daimler's Passenger Car Development business unit. Here, eight departments focus on four product areas, the biggest of which is Telematics. The three other product areas are Instrument Clusters & Displays, Switches & Controls, and Air Conditioning Electronics. A multidisciplinary cross-functional department deals with standardization issues and represents the interests of the business unit in various internal and external committees.
The range of tasks dealt with at the center is correspondingly broad. It includes voice controls, sound systems, DVD changers, and head units. The Daimler engineers bring the necessary hardware and software to series-production readiness, but that's not all. They also create new functions for car interiors, such as digital high-resolution radio, and innovative services, such as emergency call systems. The area of networked telematics systems is becoming increasingly important for them, together with the appropriate software architectures. But whatever project they're dealing with, they always focus on two seemingly simple but ultimately crucial questions: "What will the customer of tomorrow want?" and "Can he or she control the right functions simply and easily?"
