Crossing the RUBICON to a Sustainable Future

This presentation was made at the NAFEMS Americas Conference "Simulation in the Automotive Industry: Creating the Next Generation Vehicle" held on the 16-18 March 2021.

The automotive engineering community is now confronting the largest technology transformation since its inception. The demand to manufacture cleaner, safer, and smarter vehicles, along with providing an overall enhanced driving and ride experience, has never been higher. As a result, engineering teams must discover, evaluate, and successfully implement leading-edge technology and methods to produce reliable, effective results.

Hence, the challenges for automotive engineers are enormous and require a significant increase in the upfront use of numerical simulation capabilities, methods, and processes such that they’re able to efficiently design, manufacture and deliver these innovative technologies to market in greater speeds than ever before.

Resource Abstract

This presentation will talk about RUBICON, a project where Hexagon is studying radical options for future urban mobility. Naturally, EVs are considered, but making transport sustainable is not just about changing the energy source. As vehicles become connected and autonomous, a scenario is investigated where Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is provided by an urban taxi fleet. Cost and CO2 per passenger mile are introduced as key optimization targets, not just for vehicle operation but also accounting for manufacturing, averaged across the lifetime of the vehicle. By operating the autonomous taxi at high levels of utilization, vast mileages accumulate, and the project proposes the design of an ultra-durable powertrain, targeting circa 1m miles of operation. The life cycle costs per mile are thus massively reduced. Further, the design of an innovative, Hexagon-patented permanent magnet electric motor that avoids rare earth metals is presented and is shown to perform far better than conventional solutions on other sustainability measures such as ozone depletion and ionizing radiation. Thus, we see Hexagon committing heavily to sustainability, not only as a supplier of software packages, but as a leader on the sustainability agenda, driving change and being fully cognizant of the challenges and opportunities of next generation vehicles.