In an era when the very essence of what a car interior is – how it feels, looks and operates – is rapidly changing, it can be tricky to visualise what we will be sitting in by 2030. But Faurecia has a clear vision of tomorrow’s cockpit. Faurecia’s four main product divisions encompass a wide range of components, systems and modules ranging from exhausts, instrumentation, door panels and other interior equipment and complete seats and components. The company is increasingly focused on growth areas such as smart and connected on-board systems including assisted and autonomous driving – which it collectively refers to as Cockpit of the Future. To learn more, we caught up with Dr Alexander van Laack, Director, Cockpit of the Future – North America at Faurecia.
Could you tell us more about your Cockpit of the Future?
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The Cockpit of the Future was introduced by Faurecia because we see there is a big shift in the automotive industry to focus more on the end consumer, their needs and expectations. If you look at how organisations in the automotive space are usually organised, mainly in silos, the Cockpit of the Future bridges those silos that, of course, also still exist in our company, because we have business groups, namely: seating, interiors, electronics and clean mobility. Cockpit of the Future bridges those cockpit interior relevant business groups to make sure that we actually build and create something that gives the best use experience for the consumer, and therefore also capitalising on the synergies of the different business groups.
We understand that Faurecia’s Immersive Sound Experience is one element of your Cockpit of the Future. In what ways is Faurecia advancing the personal listening experience?
The Immersive Sound Experience, and also specifically what you mentioned is the audio bubble experience. We believe that individual bubbles inside the cockpit are important, especially if you think about new mobility content. Today, most people drive alone in their cars. In the future, we have to think about new mobility concepts, e.g. shared mobility. So how do we make sure that people still feel comfortable and they actually want to do that, they want to be in an enclosed space with other people? A way to do that is creating personalized bubbles, for example, through audio. In this case we demonstrated at the most recent CES how we can create a different audio bubble for passenger and drivers inside the car, by using speakers that are integrated around the seat or inside the seat, and we use specific signal processing also to give you a very high-end sound experience.
Now, because you are driving on the road and you will have road noise, you will have all sorts of noises that come either from the engine, road or wind. This is where our active noise control comes in, ANC, which allows us to reduce the amount of disturbing noise that comes from the outside world, and therefore even make you more relaxed in the end inside your own seats.
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By GlobalDataThat would work well for an ICE yet does ANC perform just as well in an electric car where it’s even quieter?
For the ICE, it works well because we have a booming noise of the engine in the end, which is easier to cancel out, it’s very low frequencies. You say that the electric car is quieter, that’s true, but at the same time you have other noises that you hear more because the engine noise is missing, like wind noise. This is one of the key things, this is something which is not ready for production yet, but it’s something we are working on, to actually filter out and reduce higher frequencies as well. The set-up that we have shown at CES this year used what we call a ‘local ANC’, basically giving the driver and passengers a different active noise control through the headrest. And because of the way the system is set up we are able to control the higher frequencies, frequencies you would not usually cancel out or control with a standard ANC system.
Are you developing these active noise control technologies in-house or in cooperation with others?
Over the past years, Faurecia has actually acquired several companies. We started with a company called Parrot Automotive in France, and then recently finalised the purchase of Clarion Electronics which is now, out of four companies we created a new business group, Faurecia Clarion Electronics, therefore we have now the competence in-house. We also bought a Swedish company called Creo Dynamics which is leading in the area of active noise control and which now of course is one important pillar of our electronics.
Presumably using eyes, voice and hand gestures, it is possible to eliminate buttons from an infotainment system. What is your vision of this touch-free user experience?
There are many things you can do, the question is: do you want to do it? We are tactile beings, we like to touch things. We have shown, and I think the automotive space has reduced buttons over the last ten years already significantly, and there is still more room for improvement. What’s important is that whatever we use is intuitive. I don’t believe that we will have a completely button-free interface. There will be some buttons just because, for example, most people they don’t want to get rid of their volume knob, it’s much nicer to turn down the volume on a knob than to even push a button or to say, ‘Alexa, please turn down the volume,’ ten times. So, I think there are some natural commands you will still do through interaction through buttons, but many other things, like navigation, are already completely through voice, you will just tell your car right now, whether you use Siri or Alexa or whatever car system you use in your car, most likely through the voice where you want to go.
Gesture is one interesting bit because gesture recognition is something that is very cultural. People gesticulate differently in different cultures, and you will probably not want to control everything with gestures, but there are certain functions that you still want. Just as an example, if you get a phone call and you want to reject your phone call it would be much easier, either you say you don’t want to take the call, but probably even more intuitive would be to do a simple gesture, like a hand holding up to reject the call or just wave it away, because it’s easier than finding a button on the steering wheel and pushing it.
Is your consumer research providing any clear indication that different age groups want different things from buttons versus touchscreens?
When you do consumer research you basically take a snapshot of a period of time, and we did that, and we did that over several years. What you see is that people are, because of their consumer behaviour, using touch screens, using phones in their personal lives they are more and more okay with using touch screens inside the vehicle also. Of course, you still have people that have personal preferences for buttons over touch screens, but in general we see that people, if they see a screen they will touch it, and if the screen doesn’t have a touch functionality then this is rather dissatisfaction than satisfaction. Therefore, what we see is that more and more people in the future will feel easier to use touch screens inside the car than they were ten years ago before let’s say the iPhone and smartphones emerged.
You mentioned gesture control. Do you think we could see more gesture control in a mass-produced car, or is this technology limited to high-end niche applications?
If you look at the BMW 7 Series, when they introduced a gesture, they made it a mandatory feature, you had to take it basically, and then they had three gestures and three functions that you can control. The question is: will people pay money for it? The difficulty with the gesture as we know it from a few years ago, we had to use very complex time-of-flight cameras and 3D capable cameras, but what is possible today with image processing and video analytics basically is that we can use cameras that might be inside the car already for other reasons, e.g. driver monitoring to actually recognise a certain level of gesture. In that case, you actually do not have much of an overhead that you pay for this camera because it will be inside the car anyway for other purposes. This is something we have shown, in a way where we can use software upgradability to make more use of hardware, and we believe that this is a way how the consumer in the future will interact more multi-modal by actually choosing the modality that he wants to use. If you want to use gesture for some functions, why shouldn’t you be able to do so? I personally don’t believe that you will control your whole car with gestures, I still believe gesture will be just a support function and you will most likely have your voice interaction as one of the main interaction functions inside the car, and then afterwards the touch functionalities for certain, buttons that will still exist.
So in order to keep the costs down, are you referring to 2D cameras that could be used with gesture control instead of 3D, and then perhaps broaden them to greater fitment?
Yes, exactly.
What opportunities do virtual personal assistants open up for Faurecia?
Virtual personal assistants are something that is a good example of what comes from the consumer world into the car. There are different versions out there; some are using Google, some are using Alexa. Faurecia is not playing the game of recreating a virtual personal assistant. What we are doing is actually making sure that a virtual personal assistant is able to work together with the car that you have or that you want to buy in the future, meaning when you have a car, ideally you want to talk to your VPA that you are used to and control as many functions inside the car through voice as you can. That is very important, because if you have to learn basically to talk to a new person inside the car, then it kind of diminishes the user experience. Let’s take Alexa as an example. If you are used to talking to Alexa at home, ‘Alexa, turn off my lights, Alexa turn up the music,’ and then you go into the car, you want to probably use Alexa as well. What we did is we actually showed how this can be incorporated inside the automotive space. We did that of course together with our newly acquired businesses, Parrott and Clarion and demonstrated how a handover can be done between the vehicle system and even a virtual personal assistant that is dedicated to a vehicle and an outside virtual personal assistant.
What do you see happening with in-car displays?
I was at the Shanghai Auto Show this year and it was quite interesting to see how cars are already looking like in China, Byton was a good example with larger displays. There’s a clear trend that we can see already that displays are growing, and display amount can also grow. However, I believe that the integration part of the displays is important, so having curved displays, having displays with shaped surfaces that might have corners cut or rounded edges and so on, that will actually create a more homely design and something that is just more attractive to the consumer inside the car. The displays, look at the screens you have at home, we started 20 years ago you had a flat screen 32-inch, now probably everybody buys something that’s 55-inch or taller, so yes we want larger displays because we also want to have more content on the display. I believe that the integration of that is one of the key things to differentiate.
Before we get to autonomous vehicles, what’s your vision of rear seat entertainment?
I see a lot of things happening in the rear. The reason for that is because today, as I mentioned before, you probably buy your car because you drive the car. When you talk about new mobility, when you talk about ride-sharing or ride-hailing, the guy who is paying for the ride is sitting in the rear usually. You already have it in very exclusive cars today in China that the guy who buys the car is also sitting in the rear because he has a driver. So, I think the rear seat, entertainment, infotainment and comfort will be very important.
Occupant comfort and individualisation are increasingly expected by motorists across all car segments today. We understand that Faurecia is working with Mahle on this. How do you see climate control requirements changing in the autonomous car?
For autonomous vehicles, the climate will change if the vehicle is used for more people or if it becomes an autonomous shuttle, because then we’re talking about bubbles again, and then the individualised climate is very important. The other point that is important is not just the autonomous but also electric vehicles, because EVs have a limited power supply. Whereas today heat is just using the energy coming from the engine that we have anyway, but for a car that’s electrically powered we do not have that, so we have to be very careful which parts we heat or cool because energy is very expensive. That’s why it made sense to look at the interior and how we can create a personalised bubble for a driver or a passenger. That is why we work together with Mahle to create a concept and products that are addressing those issues. So you can be the driver in the car and you will be cooled down while maybe the passenger next to you will be heated up because he wants that at the time, and the rear seats are not getting anything because they’re empty at the moment. This way you can create a better energy balance than you would have when you just pump heat or cool air inside the entire cabin.
