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The coming weeks and months threaten to become difficult not only for the car manufacturers but even more so for their suppliers including the electronic system vendors. Not that they had been overly spoiled by success — the competition has already been tough in the past years, and the rules have been set by the OEMs.
Now the sudden drop in automotive demand will cause a domino effect all along the value chain, with certain delays. But since the first domino already has fallen, it is foreseeable when it will hit the suppliers and their suppliers. And, according to the usual market oracles, it is to be feared that we are in for a steep, deep downturn.
But, as philosophers say, in every crisis lies a chance. In the case of the European automotive industry, the chance might lie in building simpler, more energy efficient cars while maintaining the same level of safety and comfort as we are used to. In a recent conversation about energy efficiency, a physicist told me that the only — and he meant the really only — way to sustainably improve the fuel efficiency is to reduce weight.
Translated this requirement into the electronic designer's scope of options I think it means that more functions need to be implemented in software instead of hardware. Software is light and energy efficient. It can be changed much faster and much more easily than steel, aluminum and plastic structures. And it can control some parameters decisive for fuel consumption.
But this won't be enough. After the smoke of the crisis will be gone, much will have changed. Some cassandras predict that the cars we will be able to buy are more like a Tata nano than like a Mercedes S-Class. In any case, for a sustainable individual mobility, the European automotive industry will have to re-think ways to tame the fuel consumption beast. Critics say that in other countries the development for alternative drives has made far more progress than here. This crisis is the chance to change the direction.
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