Rivian과 VW Group, 새로운 구역 아키텍처에 대한 겨울 테스트 완료

RV Tech, a joint venture between Volkswagen Group and Rivian, has completed a successful winter test program, it said this morning. The partnership was created in 2024 when VW Group announced it would invest $5.8 billion in the American electric vehicle maker to gain access to Rivian’s expertise in vehicle software and electronic architecture. VW Group initially paid Rivian $1 billion in cash, with further payments over time: the completion of the winter testing milestone should unlock a further $1 billion payment. VW’s decision to turn to Rivian followed a tortuous history of its own internal software development. It created a new division in 2019 just to develop software for cars, then immediately bit off more than it could chew by trying to simultaneously develop three different vehicle operating systems. Things went the opposite of smoothly, with software-related delays to the two new platforms used by cars like the VW ID.4 and Porsche Macan that led to chairman Herbert Diess’ firing and the third platform delayed until late in this decade. Rivian, meanwhile, had no such problems developing its own vehicle electronic architecture and software, starting from a clean sheet unencumbered by generations of legacy cruft. As a startup automaker, Rivian needs money, and since Volkswagen needs better tech, the joint venture makes a lot of sense. To the Arctic Circle Automakers love testing cars in the Arctic Circle. It’s about as cold an environment as anyone’s going to drive a car, so if you can make your systems reliable in those extreme temperatures, they should be just fine in milder winters. And there are plenty of frozen lakes, with vast flat expanses of ice thick enough to drive cars across with no worries. So you can test chassis tuning and traction and stability control work at the same time. I imagine it as the difference between the nerve endings in all my fingers, and muscles in my arms needing their own wires back to my brain VS all those bits in my arm tie into a cluster at my elbow, and that 1 pathway handles information flow for everything in the arm below the elbow. from this page:https://www.molex.com/en-us/blog/zo...re-modular-automotive-infrastructure-face-off "Zonal architecture is a decentralization of electric controllers to several modular zones, or hardware gateways, located at points throughout the vehicle. Devices of various functions attach to the closest gateway, rather than with its domain grouping. Zonal architecture reimagines the entire approach to vehicle electronics by assigning each cluster of electrical features to a dedicated zonal controller. This strategic placement of controllers significantly shortens wiring lengths, simplifies power and signal transmission and frees up more space, setting the stage for vehicles that are data centers on wheels."