Category: Cars

Freescale’s High Resolution 77Ghz Radar System

Posted by – June 27, 2011

This is the 77Ghz chipset demonstrating Freescale’s for Automotive Radar Millimeter-Wave Technology, this is a demo of a radar for cars to see through the dark, through rain, through any weather. Find more information at http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/overview.jsp?code=AUTRMWT

Freescale Xtrinsic radar chipsets are the most advanced SiGe technology on the market, consisting of a transmitter and a multi-channel receiver with an integrated phase-locked loop (PLL). Freescale’s 77 GHz technology allows a device to switch between long- and short-range functionality simply by issuing a serial peripheral interface (SPI) command. This enables the same radar module to be used for multiple safety systems, such as adaptive cruise control, headway alert, collision warning and mitigation. Long-range radar, used for adaptive cruise control and lane departure warnings, has long and narrow coverage directly in front and back of the car. Short-range radar, ideal for blind spot detection, pre-crash and stop-and-go applications, monitors the car’s immediate surroundings with a wide spatial view that covers shorter distances.

Qorivva MPC5645S-based in-car interactive dashboard demonstrations from Freescale and Visteon

Posted by – June 21, 2011

Drives two displays in parallel with gauges. Very low memory footprint thanks to fragmented frame buffer.

Renault launches electric cars for real

Posted by – May 27, 2011
Category: Cars, Other

Yup, all new cars can now be electric, and we can setup the renewable energy to power them and the battery switch stations and charge stations at all parking spots as fast as those new cars can get onto the market.

China does Electric Cars using Better Place battery swapping

Posted by – May 3, 2011
Category: Cars, Other

All new cars to be sold in China are to be electric, running on 100% clean renewable energy. All that is needed is political will. China seems to have that political will. They figured they’ve got enough pollution in their rapidly growing cities, they figured they’d like to be energy independent, they figured they need to make all their cars electric now.

Switchable electric batteries are the only solution for the full scale implementation of electric cars for the mass market today. Project http://betterplace.com is implementing a worldwide standard for battery swapping, charging connectors and re-charge infrastructure.

Better Place, China Southern Grid Sign Strategic Agreement Centered on Battery Switch Model

April 27, 2011

Guangzhou Municipal Government Signs Agreement to Aid New Partnership

TEL AVIV (April 27, 2011) – At a signing ceremony today in Israel with officials from Guangzhou, Better Place announced a strategic agreement with China Southern Power Grid Co. (CSG), the world’s eighth largest utility according to the Fortune Global 500. The agreement, which focuses on joint electric car and infrastructure projects in CSG’s service areas, will further advance electric cars with switchable batteries in China. The agreement calls for the companies to open a battery switch station and joint education center in Guangzhou before the end of the year, while working to formalize a joint-venture partnership.

Source: http://betterplace.com

This is relevant on ARMdevices.net because electric cars can have more ARM Processors in them than any other types of cars. An average electric car may have 47 ARM processors in it. Also, those need better wirelessly internet connected interactive in-car navigation systems (probably Android based) than any other car. As those need to make it easy for the driver to find re-charge stations, to find and order a battery swap, to monitor and manage battery capacity and more.

Freescale Powered MyFord Touch

Posted by – January 7, 2011

Freescale is powering the Ford Sync system called MyFord Touch, there is an i.MX51 processor in there and Windows CE based user interfaces and features providing in-car system for the Ford cars. This type of ARM Powered solution for the car, voice activated, is becoming a large part of what allows car makers to differentiate their cars in the market.

Renault Twizy electric car presented by Matthieu Tenenbaum at LeWeb 2010

Posted by – December 13, 2010

This compact french-design electric car is to be released about a year from now, it has a range enough for use in cities, and the size is in between scooter and small car, easy to park, it’s actually a two-seater. It can even be configured to be driven without a drivers licence. This is an interview with Matthieu Tenenbaum who is Renault’s deputy program director for all of Renault’s electric vehicles including the Twizy.

Shai Agassi at LeWeb 2010

Posted by – December 12, 2010

Project Better Place wants to eliminate oil within a few years, in partnership with Renault and other car makers, they are about to mass produce electric cars, Better Place is building out the infrastructure to switch batteries and to charge. You can watch the full Q&A video here. You can also watch Shai Agassi’s recent interview on the Charlie Rose show and on Morning Joe.

Test Driving a Renault Fluence Gen2 electric car in Paris!

Posted by – December 11, 2010

This is an impressive “full sized” electric car by Renault, soon to be released to hundreds of thousands of consumers in Denmark and Israel, it may be one of the first electric cars to be mass produced! I am a big fan of project Better Place, and I am really looking forward to mass adoption of electric cars all over the world. The driver in this video is Stephan Ehrhardt, race car pilot instructor consultant at Europa-First and car specialist.

QNX car info cluster software solutions

Posted by – November 17, 2010

Here demonstrated in a nice Corvette, you can do a bunch of interactive things with these new ARM Cortex-A8 Freescale i.MX51 powered digital information clusters and infotainment systems that are coming in different configurations to more and more cars soon.

Freescale automotive concept car

Posted by – June 24, 2010

Freescale is one of the leaders in putting processors and technology into cars. Freescale has put as much technology as they can on this concept car to showcase what we might see in the future out of the automotive industry.

Freescale Automotive: 3 levels of instrument cluster solutions

Posted by – June 24, 2010

Freescale shows what they think future car dashboards will look like. They will be fully LCD based with for example a wide 12.3″ Sharp LCD screen running Linux features on the Freescale i.MX51.

Self-driven slot cars powered by Freescale

Posted by – June 22, 2010

You know the slot cars, you have two little electric cars on a track and two players have a button to decide how much voltage to send over to the car. Freescale has collaborated with universities in Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania to use Freescale sensors and software algorithms to create an automatic self-driven car that is faster than most human drivers. As it learns the track on its first lap, it then speeds away at full speed, knowing exacly how much speed to use in each turn. You can watch this other official video showing the self-driven slot cars at Self-driven slot cars at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv5_g5dVsaw