6 PART | I ITS technology enablers
is, VDA/SAE Level 3+. This involves fail-operational behavior and the highest
levels of safety (ASIL D).
It is a common understanding that reliability improvement and advanced
solutions for environmental perception (prerequisites for autonomous driving)
can only be achieved by sensor diversity combined with data fusion approaches,
due to the physical limitations of single sensor principles.
In the automotive domain (according to all major OEMs), robust and reli-
able automated driving will only be achievable by combining and fusing data of
three different sensor systems: LiDAR, Radar, camera, exploiting their specific
strengths as depicted in Tables 1.3 and 1.4.
McKinsey predicts an overall share of 78% for processors (37%), optical
(28%), and RADAR sensors (13%) in 2025 (Table 1.5) among automotive semi-
conductors, reflecting the main electronic components of highly automated ve-
hicles as announced by OEMs.
This is evidenced not only in market reports but also in the technology road-
maps of major OEMs. Strategy Analytics has analyzed the sensor demand for
environmental acquisition and indicates high annual growth rates for RADAR,
LIDAR, and 2D camera sensors for the coming years.
However, currently available solutions for highly automated driving have
not reached readiness levels suitable for the automotive industry. Although sys-
tem deployment costs for these demonstration vehicles are very high, this is
acceptable and normal for novel low-TRL technologies. However, the inability
to achieve fail-operational levels is a significant roadblock to their adoption.
TABLE 1.2 Levels of automated driving defined by VDA J3016 and key
performance figures for autonomous driving (Level 3+ requires advanced
fail-operational dependability and ASIL D safety level).
Automa-
tion level
Functional
description
Driver
interaction
Perception
redundancy Dependability
Safety
level
Level 0 No
automation
High None Fail-silent QM
Level 1 Driver
assistance
Medium–
High
Complemen-
tary
Fail-silent ASIL
A or B
Level 2 Partial
automation
Medium Combining Fail-safe ASIL B
Level 3 Conditional
automation
Moderate Partially
overlap
Fail-safe ASIL C
Level 4 High
automation
Seldom Largely
overlap
Fail-operational
(single error)
ASIL C
or D
Level 5 Full
automation
None Fully overlap Fail-operational
(single error)
ASIL D