We Went to a Mega-Supplier’s Tech Day and Saw 5 Cool Ideas Coming to Your Next Car

Each fall, global mega-supplier Valeo invites automaker customers to its Troy, Michigan, tech center to show off the latest innovations concocted by its three major divisions: Power, Light, and Brain. Lately, it's been kind enough to carve out a morning for the press to see all but a few top-secret goodies. Here are the five concepts we found most interesting.

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New Fireproof Battery Coolant

You may have heard it’s dangerous to fill an EV’s cooling system with an ethylene glycol mixture formulated for a combustion car. That’s because if it leaks, it can become conductive, causing battery short-circuits and fire. Specially formulated low-conductivity coolants are specified, but great pains are still taken to keep such coolants away from the batteries. Now Valeo has teamed up with TotalEnergies to develop a coolant so safe that batteries (or electric motor stators) can be immersed in it.

Obviously, if the coolant can contact the batteries directly on the top, the bottom, and possibly even on the sides, it can cool more effectively while preventing thermal runaway. Temperature control is an enabler for faster DC charging. TotalEnergies is tight-lipped about the formula, but we’re told it’s organic, fully recyclable, and rather viscous—though not quite enough so to lubricate a spinning rotor.

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Immersion cooling eliminates the need for the secondary cooling circuits many EVs use, thus reducing cost. But it also requires more of this denser fluid, which increases overall mass slightly. As we approach volume production (firm timing is not yet announced), Valeo and TotalEnergies are targeting a 10-year service life, but it’s possible a lifetime fill could prove viable.

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Software-Defined … Windshield Wipers?

Relax, nobody’s going to ask you to subscribe to rain visibility. But the AquaBlade “wet wiper” concept Valeo introduced in 2012 can be taught some new tricks. The latest and greatest version includes nozzle holes on both sides of the rubber wiper blade, with the system able to choose whether to spray the leading or trailing edge. Two new software-upgradable programs are now available for this system: Clean4U Defrost and Clean4U Debug.

The former can be activated on cold mornings prior to driving off, e.g., during cold starts. It sprays the leading edge as the motor slowly advances up the windshield in maybe 10-degree increments. Combined with a defrost program heating the windshield, it can greatly reduce the time and effort required to achieve safe visibility.

The debugging program again requires the car to be parked—typically while stopping for gas or a recharge. This time, the spray is dispersed from the trailing edge of an incrementally advancing wiper, allowing a debugging “summer mix” of fluid to break down the bug enzymes for a cleaner subsequent wipe.

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The defrosting system is already in production with Mercedes-Benz, and either system can be added to any car with the latest AquaBlade technology via an over-the-air update. Both ideas help preserve visibility for advanced driver-assist system (ADAS) sensors.

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Maximizing SDV Potential by Planning Ahead

Valeo showed off a few different electrical architecture concepts designed to ensure maximum forward compatibility in the software-defined vehicle future, which involved planning for hardware and computing upgrades. One simply provided space and a port onto the ethernet communications bus for connecting an additional centralized or zonal computing module, either to enable new features or to cope with features that may demand additional brain power over time. A demo showed a single module nearing 100 percent of its capability, before engaging a second module, whereupon the system’s middleware balanced the load between them. Then, a failure of one module was simulated, and the middleware triaged the mission-critical features, sending them to the good module and shutting all others down to ensure a “fail operational” condition.

Two other concepts involved ways to click additional or more powerful modules in like adding cards to a computer motherboard. In addition to futureproofing new cars, this could allow a full-line manufacturer to utilize the same basic architecture for entry-level and full-feature models, just by scaling up replaceable compute modules.

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Solid-State “Auto Focus” Camera

If you’ve driven old and new cars with reverse cameras, you know image resolution has come a long way. But delivering ever higher pixel counts while keeping the camera tiny, light, and cheap is a challenge. As such cameras age through thermal cycling and constant vibration, these high pixel-density image sensors are particularly prone to drifting out of perfect alignment with the lens. Valeo’s seventh-generation ADAS camera employs a new solid-state “auto-focus” function that uses a micro-electronic mechanical system (MEMS) similar to the ones some lidar units use to aim tiny mirrors. The full “stroke” of such a system is 50 microns (0.00197 inch). That’s sufficient to correct for age-related drift, and it’s infinitely simpler, cheaper, and more accurate than trying to move the lens.

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5G-V2X Protects the Vulnerable

I wrote a Technologue Column on vehicle-to-vehicle/infrastructure communications back in February 2006. Nineteen years later we’re still awaiting widespread use and riffing on the idea. Valeo’s latest spin, co-developed with Verizon, aims to protect vulnerable road users (VRUs), like bikers, pedestrians, children playing near roadways. First the VRU is detected and its location is transmitted via 5G-V2X communications. That sensing can happen by a car’s sensor suite or an intersection’s smart camera, or by direct communication from the VRU. The latter involves a smartphone, smart watch, or wearable device employing Verizon’s Hyper Precise Location (HPL) services. This leverages Real-Time Kinetics (RTK) to narrow the meter-precise location provided by the global-positioning satellites (GPS) down to centimeter accuracy by comparing the device’s location against a national network of reference stations. However the VRU’s position is determined, its transmitted location lights a warning on the dashboard and/or can trigger braking or other avoidance technology.

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Valeo also showed off a new flat smart antenna system that, in addition to eliminating the shark-fin promises future non-terrestrial network (NTN, direct device-to-satellite) communications for the next generation internet-of-things devices and cell phones.

Watch this space and our annual Best Tech Awards to follow the roll-out of these and other cool automotive technologies.