软件定义车辆的观察趋势

October Interview with Dr. Nadim Maluf Automotive OEMs and consumers today are increasingly looking for featuresdefined by software, such as driver assistance, infotainment, and intelligentconnectivity. We recently sat down with Dr. Nadim Maluf, cofounder and CEOat Qnovo, a major software supplier to electric vehicle OEMs, to get an insid-er’s perspective on trends to watch in the software-defined vehicle. ABOUT DR. NADIM MALUF Dr. Nadim Maluf is thecofounder and CEO ofQnovo, an award-winningdeveloper of predictivebattery managementsoftware that enablesbatteries to safely chargefaster with extendedlongevity. These softwaresolutions provide OEMswith real-time andpredictive diagnostics tomaximize performanceand prevent explosionsand fires for any type oflithium-ion battery. Prior tolaunching Qnovo, Dr. Malufwas entrepreneur-in-residence at U.S. VenturePartners and executivevice president atLumaSense Technologies. Q: Nadim, can you tell us about your background?. Dr. Nadim Maluf:I’m an engineer, an entrepreneur, and a physicist. I earned myPh.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford University, and I taught electrical en-gineering as a consulting professor at Stanford. I realized early on that aca-demia was not my calling in life and moved on to pursue a career in industryand entrepreneurship. My first claim to fame came in the mid-to-late nineties with something calleda TPMS. That’s a tire pressure monitoring system. It is the little dashboard dis-play in your car that tells you what your tire pressure is. That was my introduc-tion to the automobile industry. It also gave me a good understanding of thehesitancy of the car industry to adopt new technologies. In 2010 we launchedQnovo, since we knew that batteries were going to be the future. At first, Qnovo offered solutions for the smartphone space. In 2015, we com-pletely reorganized the company and focused exclusively on software. We neverlooked back. The best thing about software is that you can apply it, or define it, toaddress evolving needs for almost any industry. That gave us the energy and theconfidence to expand from smartphones into electric vehicles (EVs). Q: What does your software offer battery makers who supply theEV manufacturers? A:Qnovo’s SpectralX©Battery Management Software offers three benefits.One is the performance, improving the EV driving experience. Fast charging iswhere we shine, reducing EV charging times to nearly 20 minutes. The second is predictive safety, which takes battery health and degradationinto consideration, quickly identifying defects in batteries. This protects driv-ers from lithium-ion battery malfunctions that may spark fires in electric cars,bikes, and scooters, and it saves on costly recalls for the OEMs. The third is optimizing less expensive Chinese batteries and making them per-form as well as Korean and Japanese batteries. This saves electric car compa-nies 20 to 30 percent in production costs. Q: Can you actually improve the range of the battery? A:Yes, this is something Qnovo does quite well. It’s a matter of efficiency. We can increase it by about 10 to 20 percent.This is because batteries are not fully utilized when they come from the manufacturer. For example, the Tesla ModelS has a battery capacity of 100 kilowatt-hours, but you’re really only accessing 90 kilowatt-hours, or less. Our softwarecan increase that so that instead of accessing 85 or 90 kilowatt-hours, you can access 98 or 99 kilowatt-hours. That access in kilowatt-hours equates to up to 10 percent greater EV range. Alternatively, you can reduce the size ofthe battery and save through reduced size and weight, which is substantial. A battery costs approximately $100 perkilowatt-hour. So a 100 kilowatt-hours EV battery is $10,000, which is huge. Ten percent savings equates to $1,000.That’s a large sum for most OEMs and often the difference between making money and losing money. Q: Does it matter at all whether your underlying platform is a real-time performer like an RTOS? A:Absolutely. We’re collecting data from the battery continuously. We measure the voltage and current from each andevery cell all the time. We need that data to reconstruct through our models the chemical processes taking place insidethe cell. The performance of the operating system software helps minimize the latency of the data collection. Q: Outside electric vehicles, do you see your technology running anywhere else? A:We’re seeing EVs across all sectors of mobility, from two-wheelers all the way up to commercial vehicles. We’regetting input from agricultural tractors and vehicles. They want to electrify. The mining industry tells us, “We can’tmine for lithium using diesel mining equipment.” We’re also seeing aggressive traction in energy storage. Capital is flowing into the national charging infrastructurefor EVs. In order to support a mid-adoption scenario of 33 million EVs on the road by 2030, the nation will needmillions of charging stations. Q: As a