At any given time, global demand for Electric Vehicles (EVs) is increasing. According to Strategy Analytics, 3 million plug-in light electric vehicles will be sold in 2020. In the first quarter of that year, Europe nearly doubled its market share to 26%, making it the leading region for EV sales growth. EV sales are currently at $800 billion and are expected to outpace regular car sales during the next decade.

Not only is EV adoption increasing, but so is electric/electronic (E/E) complexity. Today’s EVs have more than 3,000 wires on average to handle a slew of new features and functions. More than 2.5 kilometers of electrical harnesses with over 750 connectors weighing approximately 60kg. Keeping up with such complexity poses substantial cost, performance, and weight management difficulties for car manufacturers and suppliers.

The Need for Speed, Safety and Cybersecurity

The move toward software-defined vehicles creates opportunities for innovation and market differentiation, and automakers are racing to be the first to introduce technologies that satisfy customers and outperform competition. Software increasingly dominates and determines how a modern car is designed and defined, offering a wide range of scalable and updatable capabilities via over-the-air updates.

And, while time to market for next-generation features and functionality is a major problem in the highly competitive automobile industry, it is not the only one. Other important factors include assuring functional safety and keeping the vehicle’s weight low while maintaining great performance. As vehicles become more network-connected, solid cybersecurity is vital, and interconnected components must perform in unison despite varying voltage requirements and dependencies.

Meeting these objectives necessitates clean-sheet E/E designs, or starting from scratch and inventing new approaches to fulfill expanding integration, safety assurance, simulation, and verification requirements:

• Integration: Key considerations include space reservation and packaging, and the ability to manage changes and releases effectively.
• Safety assurance: Teams must implement requirements traceability while ensuring signal routing, separation as well and redundancy. They must also provide extensive diagnostics, maintenance, and repair support to ensure driver protection.
• Simulation and verification: These practices enable correct-by-construction design. Electrical stimulation is now essential to ensure vehicles operate as intended.

Siemens takes a unique approach to E/E system development by allowing engineers to seamlessly integrate requirements and system models into a full E/E design. This model-based solution provides proper electrical distribution across harness design, manufacturing, and services by encompassing software and network connectivity, integration, verification, and visualization. The digital thread also enables collaboration and full traceability throughout the design lifetime. Teams may safely and efficiently communicate data with people across an organization using Capital Teamwork throughout the E/E design process.

Capital may generate downstream implementation recommendations that connect the E/E design to the digital thread using a platform-level perspective of all electrical, electronic, software, and network components. As a result, teams can investigate multiple implementation options and optimize the E/E architecture accordingly. They can also connect the architecture to the mechanical data for precise outcomes in actual implementation.

Companies of all sizes can benefit from increased profitability and faster time to market by utilizing Capital. With high-quality EVs that meet and even surpass consumers’ expectations, they may broaden their product options, compete more effectively, and improve brand perception.

Capital has helped automakers lower per-vehicle expenditures by $50 and per-vehicle weight by 6.5 KG. They’ve cut electrical design time in half and cycle time from quote to manufacturing by 30%. Furthermore, they have met safety and compliance criteria while cutting service documentation time by 80% and fault diagnosis time by 40%.