With the purpose of transforming road transportation in Europe to zero-emission mobility, POWERDRIVE aims at developing next generation, highly efficient, cost-effective, and compact power electronics solutions that integrate a portfolio of technologies for multi-objective optimisation of electric powertrains of battery electric vehicles. These integrated solutions can be applied to both low and high-performance vehicles, and they will be suitable for diverse types of electric vehicles. The concept of POWERDRIVE is that all the experience and expertise of the project partners in the development of electric drivetrain components will be leveraged and lead into the integration of advanced power electronics solutions for an optimised powertrain. This concept brings additional opportunities to strengthen Europe’s supply chain in electromobility for road transportation and to achieve zero-emission road mobility. POWERDRIVE intends to implement innovative strategies to improve the efficiency and power density as well as to reduce the cost of electric powertrains while keeping performance high and reliable. The technologies developed in POWERDRIVE will accelerate the development and deployment of zero-emission road mobility which will deliver concrete benefits including improved quality of life, economic growth, and new business opportunities for all the EU member states. An optimised EV powertrain will significantly reduce transport emissions and tackle the issues of air quality and noise pollution in urban areas.

Facing to the challenge of future highly automated vehicles, where occupants can freely orient themselves to engage in non-driving activities. This new environment prompts questions about how car occupants will actually sit, what activities they will engage in, and how they will informed through the HMI to keep them in the loop if necessary. AWARE2ALL aims to pave the way towards Highly Automated Vehicles (HAVs) deployment in traffic, by effectively addressing the changes in road safety and changes in the interaction of different road users caused by the emergence of HAV through the development of innovative technologies along with the corresponding assessment tools and methodologies. AWARE2ALL will develop safety and HMI systems that will be interrelated through achieving a holistic understanding of the scene to ensure safe operation of the HAV. AWARE2ALL proposes a common conceptual universal safety framework for considering Human Machine Interaction (HMI). The project will be built on the results of projects funded under H2020 and other R&D programmes addressing the identification of new safety-critical situations and the most likely positions and postures considering the expected HAV applications. The main objective of AWARE2ALL is to address the new safety challenges posed by the introduction of HAVs in mixed road traffic, through the development of inclusive and innovative safety (passive and active) and HMI (interior and exterior) systems that will consider the variety of population and will objectively demonstrate relevant improvements in mixed traffic safety.

Automated driving is expected to increase safety, provide more comfort and create many new business opportunities for mobility services. The market size is expected to grow gradually reaching 50% of the market in 2035. The IoT is about enabling connections between objects or "things"; it’s about connecting anything, anytime, anyplace, using any service over any network. There is little doubt that these vehicles will be part of the IoT revolution. Indeed, connectivity and IoT have the capacity for disruptive impacts on highly and fully automated driving along all value chains towards a global vision of Smart Anything Everywhere. In order to stay competitive, the European automotive industry is investing in connected and automated driving with cars becoming moving “objects” in an IoT ecosystem eventually participating in BigData for Mobility. AUTOPILOT brings IoT into the automotive world to transform connected vehicles into highly and fully automated vehicle. The well-balanced AUTOPILOT consortium represents all relevant areas of the IoT eco-system. IoT open vehicle platform and an IoT architecture will be developed based on the existing and forthcoming standards as well as open source and vendor solutions. Thanks to AUTOPILOT, the IoT eco-system will involve vehicles, road infrastructure and surrounding objects in the IoT, with a particular attention to safety critical aspects of automated driving. AUTOPILOT will develop new services on top of IoT to involve autonomous driving vehicles, like autonomous car sharing, automated parking, or enhanced digital dynamic maps to allow fully autonomous driving. AUTOPILOT IoT enabled autonomous driving cars will be tested, in real conditions, at four permanent large scale pilot sites in Finland, France, Netherlands and Italy, whose test results will allow multi-criteria evaluations (Technical, user, business, legal) of the IoT impact on pushing the level of autonomous driving.

Within this project a new compact and efficient high speed 30-50 kW electrical machine will be integrated with an efficient fully SiC drive and a gearbox within a powertrain traction module. The electrical machine will have a dry rotor direct liquid cooling system integrated with the cooling system for the SiC drive. This traction module can be mechanically coupled with an axle of a low performance electric/hybrid vehicle, or several units could be coupled directly with the wheels for a high performance vehicle or a light-duty vehicle or a bus. Economic feasibility of mass-manufacturing of different electric machine topologies will be studied to choose the best trade-off between performance, manufacturing cost, and efficiency in the selected performance range. Feasibility of direct drive, single stage, and two-stage switchable high speed gearboxes will be studied as well. The resultant powertrain traction module will be an optimal trade-off between efficiency, manufacturability, and cost, utilizing newest technologies in electrical machines, power electronics, and high speed gearboxes. We will demonstrate the scalability of the solution by embedding several powertrain modules on board a test vehicle.