Typical French foresight and quirkiness at CES.
Renault has announced today, with the cooperation of its technology partners OSVehicle, ARM, Pilot, and Sensoria, that it will be bringing open-sourced projects and open-platform innovations to the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada.
This new approach to things will allow Renault to capitalise on the ever-evolving automotive environment, allowing ambitious developers and innovators a proper platform on which to test their ideas. Renault’s vice president of engineering, Pierrick Cornet, spoke about how this would give the firm an edge. “Being able to work in all new ways, incorporating new technology with new scenarios in mind, ensures we’re constantly exploring new areas of transportation, connected cars, zero emissions, and an easier life for our customers,” Cornet said.
Renault’s open-source vehicle, the first of its kind in the world, is based on the compact Twizy city electric vehicle (EV), and will be made available to everyone from private customers to researchers and start-ups, affording third parties to copy & modify existing software, as well as introduce new software, to create a customisable electric vehicle. All this can be done with assistance from OSVehicles, a firm that provides design & engineering know-how to the equation. Put everything together, and you have a platform that will make it easier to design, build, share, and roll out ‘new’ vehicles than ever before.
Together with ARM, Renault will open up the software and hardware architecture of the open-source Twizy to allow the inclusion and modification of things like autonomous driving tech, advanced cockpit features, and larger connected-car systems. Pilot, another of Renault’s tech partners, is a retail supplier of mobile electronic products and automotive accessories. The cooperation between the two firms has resulted in the world’s first electroluminescent charging cable for EVs, though we can’t really work out why that’s important.
The quirkiest part of this announcement has to be Renault’s partnership with Sensoria, in an attempt to develop data-collecting socks (yes, socks) to improve the performance of racing drivers. Various parameters like speed, acceleration, and braking are monitored via the smart socks (we’re still not kidding), and then conveyed to an app that allows drivers to evaluate their performance on the track.
For more information on Renault, check out our Showroom.
