On Automotive Electronics

Earlier this year we connected with Dräxlmaier's chief technical officer, Markus Junginger, to get the company's take on where the physical EE architecture - the wiring harness and ECUs - needs to go from here. Major change may be brewing in the quiet and steady world of wiring harnesses. According to Junginger, 80 % of wiring harnesses could be mass produced five, or so, years from now in next-generation vehicles by strictly limiting physical variations and employing the company's novel three-network harness concept. Today the vast majority of wire harness production is highly labor intensive. "My colleagues are going to kill me for saying this but physical variance is bad, asserted the CTO, "[Tesla's] Elon Musk proved that having only two or three major physical variants and doing everything else by software requires a fully equipped car. While some customers might be paying too little for that car, the vast majority of customers are paying enough in excess of the car's cost that the business model flies." …