The current economic crisis is cutting the automotive sector to the quick. Public authorities worldwide are now faced with requests for providing loans and accepting guarantees and even for putting large automotive companies under state control. Assessing the long-term benefits of such help and wei- ing the needs of different sectors against each other poses a major challenge for the national policies. Given the upcoming change of customer preferences and state regulations towards safety, sustainability and comfort of a car, the automotive industry is particularly called to prove its ability to make nec- sary innovations available in order to accelerate its pace to come out of the crisis. Consequently the Green Car is assuming a prominent role in the current debate. Various power train concepts are currently under discussion for the Green Car including extremely optimised internal combustion engines, hybrid drives and battery-electric traction. Electrical cars are the most appealing option because they are free of local emissions and provide the opportunity to use primary energy from sources other than crude oil for transport. Well to wheel analysis show that their green-house gas emissions can be rated negligibly small if electricity from renewable sources like wind and solar is used.
The upcoming change of costumers’ preferences and state regulations towards safety, sustainability and comfort of a car is calling the automotive industry to make the necessary innovations available in order to accelerate its pace on the way out of the economic crisis. Smart miniaturized systems and ICT based solutions are considered the key enablers of future mobility technologies like novel power train concepts including electrical traction, cooperative safety systems, advanced driver assistance systems as well as car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure communication.
The International Forum on Advanced Microsystems for Automotive Applications (AMAA) has been an exclusive showroom of R&D activities in this domain for more than a decade. In 2009 its topic is "Smart Systems for Safety, Sustainability, and Comfort". The papers published in this book were selected from more than 40 submissions. Highlights include contributions on the scope of two European projects related to the Green Car, EE-VERT aiming at the development of energy-efficient vehicles for road transport, and E3Car doing research on nanoelectronics as a key enabler of electrical vehicles. Furthermore, several authors are reporting first results of the INTERSAFE-2 project that is dealing with cooperative intersection safety. Likewise prominent topics are a detector for left-behind occupants, novel driver assistance systems and several other highly integrated components for various applications in the automobile.
Additional information is available on www.amaa.de
