Just finished attending an intelligent event for the Ford Mach E, and this car will start delivery in the second half of this year. Today’s topics mainly revolve around intelligent functionalities, and we summarized some of the key information below.
EE Architecture
Mach E’s electronic and electrical architecture is named FNV, and it supports FOTA at the hardware level, which is also capable of resuming downloads. The central gateway has a storage of 16G and a memory of 1G. Moreover, Mach E supports A/B backup upgrades, which means that upgrades can be downloaded and installed in the background, and the car can be quickly upgraded (around 2 minutes) after a restart.
According to the engineers on-site, almost all of the controllers are upgradable, and the Ethernet bandwidth inside FNV reaches a level of one hundred megabits.
Advanced Driver Assistance System
Mach E’s advanced driver assistance system is named Co-Pilot 360, which officially describes it as an L2+ advanced driver assistance system.
Hardware:
It has six cameras, five millimeter-wave radars, and twelve ultrasonic radars. Additionally, the driver assistance system is powered by the EyE Q4 chipset.
Highlighted features:
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BlueCruise: In areas with ADAS maps, mainly highways, and possibly expanding to ring roads, expressways and other areas in the future, it supports hands-free driving (due to regulatory reasons, the official does not want to promote this feature), and this feature will have DMS driver attention monitoring. This sounds similar to the high-speed hands-free driving of CT6 that we have experienced before.
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AEB: If the full-force brake is unable to avoid a collision, and there is no car present in either of the lanes, and there is space for escape, the vehicle will assist the driver in steering to the free lane. Ford calls this feature Emergency Avoidance Steering Assistant.
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In the near future, it may upgrade to a high-speed navigation-assisted driving feature. The driver assistance system hardware is fully capable, but compared to Tesla and new players, there is still a gap in the landing progress. The specific online time has not been announced, but during this event, Ford stated that it will be highly reliable and completed when released.
Infotainment SystemThe car chip of Mach E is Qualcomm Snapdragon 820A, and the car machine on Mach E is Ford Sync+. The domestic car machine has conducted in-depth cooperation with Baidu, mainly including maps, voice, and ETCP parking, etc. In terms of voice interaction, Sync+ can support natural language, and some functions do not require clear execution instructions. For example, when the user says “I am hot,” the car can turn on the air conditioner. Also, the recognition of the main and co-pilot areas is supported, and voice interruption is supported.
C-VTX
Mach E will be Ford’s first commercial vehicle with C-V2X capabilities, including common C-V2X features such as traffic light prompt and Green Wave guidance (through traffic lights). It will be launched in cities such as Beijing, Guangzhou, Cangzhou, Changsha, and Wuxi at the end of 2021, with a good coverage rate.
Summary
Mach E is a heavyweight model of Ford that adopts a new pure electric platform and electronic and electrical architecture. In this conference, we can have a better understanding of the configuration and progress of the vehicle’s intelligence.
Overall, Mach E is a product that is more in line with the concept of intelligent electric vehicles for today’s consumers. Compared with the new forces and Tesla, Ford is still at a disadvantage in terms of starting late. However, it is considered advanced among traditional car companies. Ford also mentioned that most of the sensors and controllers on this vehicle are upgradable, and I think it may be possible to look forward to the possibility of hardware upgrades in the future.
Finally, the intelligent part of Mach E is what we talked about today. The most anticipated or attractive part of this car may be its sportiness and driving. We will talk more about it when we have hands-on experience with the real car.
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.