Enhancing car safety through accurate and real time side-slip angle assessment

ended

When we drive, our safety is protected by a set of technologies that silently watch over the car’s behaviour, intervening to minimise the risk of accidents. The Electronic Stability Control (ESC) is by far the most impactful safety technology in cars, having reduced by around 40% the number of fatal accidents caused by the vehicle’s loss of control. Although effective, any ESC on the market suffer from one significant flaw: it cannot directly measure the sideslip angle, which is the key indicator of skidding, namely the situation when the car deviates from the driver’s intended direction. The result is that present ESC can detect up to 80% of skidding events, thus still leaving room for improvements that can save lives. To address this issue and catch a huge market opportunity, Modelway has developed a machine learning technology able to accurately estimate the vehicle’s sideslip angle in real time. And without adding any new sensor to the car. The key to obtain this result is the proprietary and patented Direct Virtual Sensor technology, which can be embedded in standard ESC units to further improve the vehicle’s capacity to detect a skidding event. The DVS technology has been prototyped and extensive tests have been carried out with car manufacturers and their Tier-1 suppliers, showing that the performances are already in line with the expectations of a highly regulated industry as automotive. Now the development roadmap focuses on understanding the feasibility of the integration of the DVS technology in commercial ESC units (Phase 1), to enable a co-development effort with global ESC manufacturers (e.g. Bosch, Magneti Marelli) leading to a pre-commercial validation test-bed (Phase 2). In terms of business potential, with around 100 million cars sold each year globally and around 50 in Europe and the US where the use of ESC is mandatory since 2014, we target more than 4 million DSV installed in cars by 2025, leading to more than 28 M€ of revenues.