Continental to produce lower cost ESC and ACC solutions

With new safety regulations by both the US Federal government and European Union mandating Electronic Stability Control (ESC) as mandatory for all cars starting from 2011, automotive electronics giant like Continental is set to cash in the new development. The ESC market is largely dominated by the twin German giants of Bosch (which patents their ESC solutions under the ESP name) and Continental. Besides USA and the EU, Australia is also mandating ESC as compulsory for all cars including SUVs from 2013. The Aussie government is also considering to extend this requirement to commercial vehicles like utes, which are hugely popular in Australia and is often use for dual-purpose (private and commercial).

With the eventual wider adoption of ESC, Continental revealed that it is working to lower the cost of ESC (expected by observers to be a ten fold reduction) to enable them to be included in "affordable" cars, defined by Continental as cars costing less than 10,000 Euros (USD 14,350). The hardware of Continental's next generation ESC solutions will be one-third smaller and one-third lighter but the company stop short of providing anymore specifics. VW is Continental's single largest OEM customer, so expect the company's direction to hint at future developments of VW. As we have seen earlier, a Polo sedan is in the plans to penetrate developing markets of India, China and ASEAN.

Like many, this author considers ESC to be most important safety feature after seatbelts. Currently, the cheapest car that can be had in Malaysia that comes fitted with ESC as standard is the Kia Forte.


The next item that Continental is seriously looking to reduce cost is adaptive cruise control (ACC), which slows down the car automatically depending on traffic conditions ahead, guided by a milimeter wave radar mounted behind the front grille. ACC is currently a feature under the preserve of luxury cars. And most ACC currently operate using the 77-GHz spectrum. Continental is said to be working on a lower cost solution that works using 24-GHz spectrum. Dynamically, the only difference is that the 24-GHz systems works at speeds up to 150km/h, rather than 200km/h limit that 77-GHz systems can operate at. For regular sized vehicles like a Ford Focus and VW Golf, the system's operating range is acceptable.

This next phase in ACC development is long overdue. The reason for this delay is summed up by Ralf Cramer, Continental's President of chassis and safety division, as "German engineers engineer for German requirements. We will stop that. It's wrong for the rest of the world markets." (LOL!) Cramer was commenting that German engineers tend to design systems to work under the famed German autobahns where the average speed is around 130km/h, with a fair number of stretches that are deregulated and cars regularly travel in excess of 180km/h to 200km/h.