E-Mobility Engineering 016 l Aurora Powertrains eSled dossier l In Conversation: Thomas de Lange l Automated manufacturing focus l Torque sensing insight l Battery Show Europe 2022 report l Sodium batteries insight l User interfaces focus

“And of course, the voice assistant system must also adapt to the particular driving situation in its dialogue with the user. To do that, the information from driver and vehicle monitoring must be made available to the system.” He adds that it is also important that the dialogues become more intelligent and that the voice assistant interacts proactively. For example, user: “Guide me to [address]”; system: “Your range is not sufficient. I will plan a coffee break at a charging station on your route”. Intelligent systems can be even more proactive than that, for example by monitoring physiological cues from the driver, such as frequent blinking that can indicate drowsiness and responding by recommending a break. HMI philosophies The introduction of all these ways and means of interacting with an HMI makes vehicle ergonomics a much more complex subject than ever, the HMI development platform provider argues, going far beyond how easy it is to reach the controls. The technology has reached a point where vehicle OEMs and HMI developers have to consider different philosophies, such as those based on hierarchies of control methods and those characterised by very high levels of redundancy, and even mixtures of the two. A hierarchical control philosophy might have the driver activate the climate control, for example, with a voice command and then set the temperature with a physical button or knob. Alternatively, the driver might activate it with the push of a button and then use a voice command to set the temperature. That, however, would not work well for people with some types of disability, so making the vehicle accessible to them would probably involve providing multiple ways of using every function in the HMI, the expert points out. “If I were unable to speak, for example, I might need buttons to control everything I want to use, but if I were missing limbs I might need speech recognition to execute everything the car can do, and there would then be a huge amount of redundancy,” he says. “It is not clear yet what the standard in cars will be, but it can’t remain like this where everybody does Early EV HMI research In 2011, a team of researchers from Swedish industry and academia conducted a simulator-based study of two UI designs for an electric car – a conventional one that closely resembled that of a petrol-engined car, the other more innovative and based on feedback from drivers who had used the irst. In both cases the interfaces consisted only of the instrument cluster. Each showed basic information, while the second included the option to expand some of the display items with the aim of improving drivers’ understanding of EV systems. The traditional HMI presented three dials, the largest being the speedometer. This was semicircular, with a needle and a rectangular strip at the bottom showing the drive selector position, along with digital displays of temperature and odometer data. To the left of the speedometer was a circular distance-to-empty gauge with a needle and a small silhouette of a car with a double-ended arrow underneath it, both in green, to indicate that the car was ready to drive. To the right of the speedometer was the so-called ecometer, a circular gauge containing three pointer needles with their pivot points arranged in a triangle. The needle at the triangle’s apex was labelled ‘Ecometer’ and pointed to a green sector lanked by red sectors left and right to indicate how much charge was being taken from or put into the battery. Labelled ‘A’ for auxiliary, in reference to non-propulsion loads on the battery, the needle on the left pointed to tapering green segments that narrowed to indicate that the use of onboard equipment was making the drive less ‘green’. Finally, the needle on the right pointed to SoC markings for the battery, supplemented by two laptop- style battery icons, the irst indicating the charge level and the second lighting up yellow when the SoC reached 15%. The team found that some drivers had problems understanding the EV- speci ic information content for EVs in both interfaces. One problem with the traditional interface was that it led participants to expect the vehicle to behave as though it had an IC engine, while the innovative one could induce feelings of insecurity. More basically, they attributed some of the problems to participants’ lack of knowledge and useful mental concepts of electricity and batteries. Although the Swedish study is now more than 10 years old, it would not be surprising to ind that the same core problems are still encountered. Continental and Pioneer are cooperating on ‘holistic’ HMI for future cars including ,=s integrating multiple items from diɈerent sources into centralised infotainment implementations (Courtesy of Continental) Autumn 2022 | E-Mobility Engineering 71 Focus | User interfaces