Its newest joint venture with Pricol for instrumentation and body electronics completes Johnson Controls’ automotive portfolio in India, after earlier JVs with Tata AutoComp Systems for seats and the Galla family of Amara Raja for batteries.
As carmakers worldwide fall over themselves to develop infotainment features that deliver the “always-on” experience today’s iPhone generation demands, the issue of driver distraction has never been more critical. The proliferation of multimedia, navigation, and smartphone apps in the cockpit is throwing up serious challenges to occupant and traffic safety.
Attempts have been made all over the world to “legislate away” the dangerous use of mobile phone text messaging while driving — to little effect. In fact, what this has resulted in is even higher-risk driving behaviour as motorists simply hide their handhelds lower in the cockpit and consequently take their eyes off the road more frequently and for longer intervals.
In India, the danger is far more acute, for reasons that are all too obvious. Safety, for one thing, is low-priority — for governments, OEMs, and motorists themselves. And the chaotic traffic situations so common in city motoring are enough to drive one to distraction, pardon the pun, even without the riveting attraction that smartphones and tablet computers hold for a growingly app-happy car-buying crowd.
“People, once they are connected, don’t want to be disconnected just because they are driving. And that’s what’s causing the distraction,” says Jeff DeBest, vice-president and head of Johnson Controls’ interior electronics division. The Tier-1 supplier, he reveals, is in advanced research into a “multimodal” human-machine interface (HMI) that “gives the consumer what he wants, but in a safe way”.
The placement of the driver interfaces in the vehicle, he points out, is a crucial determinant of the safety of interior electronic applications. No less critical is the way the information is structured, by means of layers of menus. And JCI, possibly the only global supplier of every single part you can imagine in a car’s interior, is “very excited” about the convergence of information, entertainment, and “standalone” connectivity in the centre stack.
However, the fact that not just interior functions, but indeed the chassis dynamics of the vehicle as well, can now be controlled from the user’s mobile device via a pre-programmed “profile” means the smartphone is increasingly becoming the centre of attention for the driver. In recognition of this trend, DeBest reveals, JCI is working on gesture-recognition technology, which allows the user to “sweep” information from smartphone to centre stack and back, and seeking to combine this with its industry-leading full-featured head-up display technology.
In India, a country that’s “very advanced as far as smartphone usage goes”, DeBest is absolutely upbeat about the potential for “cost-efficient” technologies that connect smartphone to car, technologies it plans to introduce through its brand-new joint venture with Pricol.
For global platforms Johnson Controls Pricol (JCP) will provide global solutions from JCI, but systems for domestic carmakers will be developed “interactively” between the OEMs’ design centres and the JCP development centre in Coimbatore. “We will marry the advantage of frugal engineering in India with the advanced engineering that JCI will bring in. And this, we hope, will be a win-win for this joint venture,” DeBest tells this correspondent.
The more immediate business, though, is for electronic instrument clusters. It is in this area that both partners see ample scope for JCI’s display technologies, ranging from modular gauges through vacuum fluorescent displays to TFT LCDs. And encouraged by customer acceptance of its “head medium” display technology in Peugeot’s 3008 compact crossover and 5008 compact MPV, DeBest is pretty certain of good prospects for this lower-cost alternative to head-up displays in India.
The two-wheeler segment, which is rapidly shifting from electromechanical to electronic meter technology, is another vast market opportunity. Not only in India, but in China as well, and beyond that the rest of the world. Indeed, with JCP, Johnson Controls is entering the two-wheeler segment for the first time ever, and the joint venture has been designated JCI’s global centre of expertise for instrument clusters for two- and three-wheelers.
Products from JCP will be jointly engineered “to suit Indian specs, and especially Indian pricing”, according to Pricol chairman Vijay Mohan. And since electronic instrumentation is principally software-driven, JCI sees “great opportunity” to leverage the software development capabilities of JCP engineers for its global network, and plans to elevate the JCP engineering centre into a full-fledged global tech centre, possibly within this year itself.
A key consideration in the “marriage”, as Mohan describes the partnership, is that his company can source parts for all its products from JCI’s suppliers worldwide, and thus enjoy the leverage on pricing that its partner’s global scale affords. Moreover, the rest of Pricol’s instrument business also benefits from exposure to JCI technologies.
Intriguingly, this could even be the foundation for the joint venture – and, more significantly, JCI itelf – to get into the business with commercial vehicles. “Tata Motors is definitely going to be interested in having the same JCP technologies in its trucks as we propose for its cars. These products Pricol could supply independently, but if our partnership with JCI succeeds we’ll certainly try to bring our other businesses into it,” Mohan acknowledges.
While JCI does not supply for commercial vehicles anywhere, the “flexible concepts” and “platform-type designs” it is now developing do make this a very likely prospect, DeBest concedes. “We view ourselves in our vision as being the leader in driver interaction, so whether you’re driving a truck ultimately or riding a motorcycle, we are going to be involved with that interaction,” he concludes.
INTERVIEW WITH JEFF DEBEST, GROUP VP AND GM OF GLOBAL ELECTRONICS, JOHNSON CONTROLS AUTOMOTIVE EXPERIENCE
In the market for driver information systems, what differentiators can Johnson Controls Pricol boast?
We can offer from base-level displays up to fully reconfigurable TFTs — the whole spectrum of display and instrumentation technology that you can tune to your requirements. You can have very basic instrumentation all the way up to a highline variety. We’ve taken a modular approach to it, allowing you to cover the whole breadth of a particular vehicle platform from the very low-end to full-featured head-up displays like the ones we do today with PSA. The modular approach gives you flexibility — by modularising the gauges you can have a different aesthetic for different models, using the same basic gauge.
What prospects do you really see for head-up displays? This technology is still rather niche, isn’t it?
In the past these displays were very cost-prohibitive, but now there are very cost-effective solutions. And we have been a leader in this new wave of designs. We’ve seen a clear trend towards head-up displays. Because what do you always teach kids, whether they are playing football or playing in a band? You always teach them to keep their head up, right? So why should it be any different for a driver? If you keep your head up, and you don’t need that optical correction that needs to take place by looking down and around to get the data you need, that’s a definite benefit.
With JCI’s head-up technology, are you really putting all that’s on the cluster up there?
We can put turn-by-turn navigation in there as well. When you talk about body control, the ability to move these signals all around the vehicle is a definite strength. Today you have graphics drivers in each one of your displays. At some point, with the power of the embedded electronics, you could have one graphics driver feeding to all of these displays. So it’s a more cost-efficient solution, and the ability to move the signal from navigation up to the head-up display is a part of it. When you have body control capability along with the interactive capabilities around head-up displays and instrument clusters, like we do, it’s a pretty powerful combination.
How cost-effective can it get?
The old head-up displays you only saw on very, very highline or performance vehicles, but with the cost of displays going down, and some of these solutions around how you put it off an acrylic screen, you have a lot more cost flexibility than you had in the past.
We do both, we reflect it off the windscreen itself, and off shields inside the windscreen.
This would definitely not be a priority for OEMs in India. If anything, they would look to put high-end systems elsewhere in a vehicle before they think of a head-up…
I’ve been very pleasantly surprised at the market acceptance of the head-up displays that we produce today. It’s been better than we could wish for. So the consumer does react positively to it when they have it.
Do you have it in China as yet?
Not yet, but the Chinese automakers are very interested in it as well. Everybody has something going on with head-up. They may not have it in production yet, but there is no OEM that does not have something going with head-up displays, as far as researching it goes.
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