Autonomous Driving (AD) with level-4/level-5 capabilities is one of the major trends that has been already pursued for several years within the automotive industry. Of main interest are passenger cars and commercial vehicles. Although they differ in some requirements, they all have one thing in common, which is their need for fail-operational behavior. To realize L4 or L5 driving capabilities including fail-operational features, three key requirements must be met.

• Safety is realized by fail-operational functions bringing the vehicle to a safe position even in case of a single failure, which can be achieved by torque redundancy. To realize this, fault-redundant drivetrain components and HV-/LV- supply redundancy are crucial. Besides, sensors for advanced driver assistance systems combined with fast algorithms for decision-making are crucial for AD in general.
• Reliability is especially important for commercial vehicles operating 24/7 and tremendously increases the requirements for a longer operational lifetime of components (e.g. power electronics) and to reduce downtimes (e.g. predictive maintenance). Thus, aging simulations during development and early failure detection are mandatory. For AD cameras, advanced cleaning systems can be necessary as well.
• Comfort functions like automated conductive or inductive charging as well as phone-as-a-key authentication (already available) must be employed to enable driverless operation for applications like robo-taxis.

Vitesco Technologies has a broad product portfolio that enables fail-operational autonomous driving, which includes powertrain, powernet and E/E architecture solutions for redundancy. Besides, advanced sensor cleaning systems or phone-as-a-key authentication is part of the portfolio as well. Finally, Vitesco Technologies is already cooperating with companies to provide predictive maintenance for fleet managers.