Audi's electronics spending booms

An auto industry record of more than a teraflop of computing power will be stuffed inside Audi’s next limousine, it has been revealed.

Audi is spending four times as much on developing in-car electronics than it did just five years ago, and the results are expected to culminate inside the new A8, due in 2017.

Audi’s head of Electronics Development, Ricky Hudi, this week admitted that booming demand for electronic systems had seen unprecedented strains on his department.

“It is a significant double-digit percentage of Audi’s total research and development spend today,” he said during a validation drive of the new B9 A4.

“There will be more than a teraflop of computing power in the A8. It will need it, and it’s affordable.”

A large slice of that computing power will be soaked up by the adoption of bendable OLED touch-screens for both the multimedia systems and the ventilation systems, plus the next iteration of Audi's all-digital instrument cluster, the Virtual Cockpit.

“If you just look to the camera in the B9 A4, it’s a 3D camera that does everything from recognising traffic signs to active cruise control with its Mobile Eye. It has 245 gigaflops of computing power. The world’s biggest supercomputers only just had that 15 years ago.

“To give you an example of how it’s moving, when I started in 2009 as the head of the electronics development, I had a budget of X. Now I have a budget four times more.”

Not all of Audi’s electronics R&D spending only translates into infotainment systems, though Hudi’s team has ushered in innovations like the NVidia high-resolution multimedia screen, in-car connectivity, the Virtual Cockpit and the Q7’s specialised tablet for the rear seats.

“There are no longer separate boxes of development inside our company. Everything relates to everything else.

“If you have adaptive cruise control, for example, then you have 27 ECUs affected by that throughout the car. Things like the ECUs governing the brakes, steering, acceleration, radar sensors, camera sensors, the dash display…

“If you want to know why, just tell me one innovation that is not related to electronics. Ninety per cent of innovation in a car is directly or indirectly related to the semi-conductors.

“The progress of all that computing power is accelerating so fast that new systems are possible and thinkable that 10 years ago we never could imagine.

“It’s very important that as a car-maker we have direct access to the developers because if you go to the suppliers later, you get second-hand technology because they want to pay off their original investment and start paying for their next investment.”

Hudi compared Germany's big three premium car-makers to the world’s leading smartphone companies, suggesting the parallels were clear and that technology, and the perception of innovation, played a huge part in solidifying support.

“Look at the smartphones on the table. You look at the iPhone 6, the Samsung Galaxy and the Huawei. They’re the best three smartphones on the market today and they all do more or less the same things, but they take completely different ways to do it.

“And people buy them for their own reasons, even if they’re all doing the same thing.

“The majority of our customers can’t differentiate between the driving feel of the engine, transmission and steering, grip or the special properties of the chassis between Audi and Mercedes-Benz and BMW.

“At the end of the experience you have a confident styling and craftsmanship and then you come to the point where the brand and some other special items decide whether customers go to us or them.”