For better or for worse, artificial intelligence (AI) is the technology of the moment, and the world is still figuring out how it is and isn’t useful. While those uses can be questionable, some are useful. Porsche’s new use of AI could be one of the good ones. The company is trying to get AI to understand how comfortable cars are, in order to help calibrate them before they reach customers.
Porsche
Porsche is a German sports car manufacturer and part of the broader Volkswagen Group since August 2012. Founded in 1931 by Ferdinand Porsche, the brand is most famous for the 911 line of sports cars, which first launched in September 1963. But it was the Porsche 356 that came first, and subsequently, Porsche has expanded its model lineup to include a variety of sports cars, supercars, SUVs, sedans, and even EVs. Porsche has a rich history in motorsport, with 19 outright Le Mans victories to its name, among various other titles.
- Founded
-
1948
- Founder
-
Ferdinand Porsche
- Headquarters
-
Stuttgart, Germany
- Owned By
-
Volkswagen
- Current CEO
-
Oliver Blume
The Problem
According to Porsche, there are some inherent issues when developing the quality and character of a vehicle’s ride. Different people have different ideas about what is comfortable, and different people have different levels of experience and expertise as to how to evaluate ride. As the company highlights, suspension engineers and vehicle project leads have different understandings of how the car should feel, and how to communicate what they’re looking for. As such, something that could help speed up suspension calibration and help keep some consistency regarding how the vehicle should feel would help with vehicle development.
The Potential Solution
To try and fix this, a vehicle dynamics engineer by the name of Emmanuel Bogner has been training an AI system to evaluate different aspects of ride quality. He has worked out how to use sensors on the wheel, driver seat, B-pillar, and shock to record multiple vibrations and accelerative forces. He associated different characteristics with different sets of this data, and trained the AI on it. He has managed to develop the AI far enough that, according to Porsche, it can provide usable evaluations of ride quality after a day of training, and within minutes of receiving new data.
The company will start having other engineers work with the system, too, in order to provide additional reference data. Presumably, the company will be able to record some data from a prototype, and the AI system will be able to give a rough estimate of how close or far the suspension is to the engineers’ and project managers’ desires more quickly than having multiple engineers repeatedly testing the vehicle.
Related
Toyota’s New AI Will Teach You How To Drift
The Japanese automaker built a self-driving GR Supra to demonstrate the development of the tech.
Porsche didn’t say anything about how this could affect employees, but we don’t think this could be a full replacement for suspension engineers. Even with much quantification and standardization of ride quality based on various measurements, ride quality is ultimately subjective. A human still needs to decide whether one setting is better than the other, and that may be a factor that’s not easy to quantify. Plus, while the computer might be able to help put the quality in the ballpark, it will still take engineers to figure out how to reach that point.
#Porsche #Unusual #Cars
