Is Steel the Real Deal for Autonomous Vehicles & Ride Sharing? WorldAutoSteel & Ricardo's Steel E-Motive Concept

Steel sometimes gets a bad name. High CO2 emissions, high replacement costs, and the long lifespan of steel products has it classified as one of the 'hard to abate' sectors, along with cement and petrochemicals. But there is a place for steel on the road to net zero.

The Steel E-Motive concept vehicle, the culmination of a three-year research program led by WorldAutoSteel and in partnership with global engineering firm Ricardo, demonstrates the strength and durability of steel.

Fully autonomous and built for ride sharing, Steel E-Motive is a new class of vehicle, “autonomy coupled with a completely different type of vehicle, a vehicle designed for moving people,” George Coates, Technical Director for WorldAutoSteel, tells Auto Futures.

“The collaboration between the WorldAutoSteel consortium is amazing. When you get those people in a room, and then alongside Ricardo, the car design experts, it's just phenomenal what we can achieve… It's exciting. And being in autonomy as well; it’s just being kind of 10 years ahead,” Neil McGregor, Chief Engineer for Ricardo, tells Auto Futures.

Research conducted by WorldAutoSteel found certain trends in transportation: urbanisation was leading to an increase in ride sharing and less people owning cars.

Not only is Steel E-Motive appealing because of its ridesharing capabilities, but it’s fully autonomous, which addresses other issues that arise with more traditional taxi companies.

“The thought is that the cost of the driver for the mobility service provider is their biggest cost component and if you can remove that, then that makes that business case maybe more appealing, but it also creates… some real freedoms of engineering, like in design for the vehicle, but it also can create some real challenges,” explains Coates.

To ensure that this project would be as environmentally friendly as possible, Ricardo conducted lifecycle analysis and examined the impact of producing these vehicles.

“We looked at optimising the design of the vehicle, so minimising weight, using steels that are kind of decarbonised in production, so using advanced steel production, tools and methods,” says McGregor.

When a human drives a car, there’s throttle acceleration, braking and scrubbing at traffic lights, etc. But the autonomous nature of the vehicle allows for better speed control, and that conserves energy on its own.

“If you take Steel E-Motive, and apply all the factors, the grid decarbonisation, increased lifetime, increased occupancy rate, drive cycle smoothing, we get about 86% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions for 2035. So that's a really good step towards the 2050 net zero,” explains McGregor.

Pushing Boundaries

Everything about Steel E-Motive’s design is unique. The vehicle has wide door access and an open body structure, and that’s because there’s no traditional B-Pillar. Instead, it’s incorporated into the scissor doors. There are hydroformed high string tubes that interlock when the doors closed; this gives some needed strength for intrusion resistance.

“With it being autonomous, we take away all the driver controls, steering wheel, pedals, everything all that. The only interface you have is on your phone, saying I want to go from here to here, and everything else is done by computers and the autonomous system,” explains McGregor.

The battery is unconventional in that it’s not a battery case or box. Steel E-Motive uses what’s called a battery carrier frame, which is integrated in the body structure.

“That gets mounted to the crossmembers and the floor of the vehicle… and then we put a double wall at bottom plate and there's some safety advantages, some mass advantages, and cost advantages. We've shared that with some OEMs, and they've gone ‘wow that's really cool,’” says Coates.

Vehicles can be adapted to operate autonomously, but what makes Steel E-Motive different is that it was designed and engineered ground up to be autonomous.

Safety-First

Steel E-Motive’s top speed is 130km/h, so high speed crash safety was crucial. The concept vehicle has an inward facing seating configuration. This, along with its open concept structure, created certain engineering challenges because in a high-speed crash situation, the occupants are more vulnerable.

“You have to develop a safety structure, an impact structure, that offers exactly the same if not better protection than a conventional passenger car where they're forward facing,” says McGregor. “It was difficult, and we wouldn't have been able to achieve it, I don't think, without using the properties of advanced high strength steels.”

Steel E-Motive is the first autonomous concept vehicle with full potential to meet the global crash requirements, which only further demonstrates the strength of steel. This concept can be applied to other vehicles.

Conventional autonomous vehicles tend to focus on what kinds of defensive manoeuvres the vehicle could perform in the case of a high-speed crash. However, what WorldAutoSteel and Ricardo discovered is that there was lack of a passive safety structure in autonomous vehicles.

“Nobody perhaps had yet engineered a vehicle to those same high speed crash standards for autonomy,” explains Coates. “Ricardo did that, based on their understanding of crash events and the need to protect these people in new novel seating configurations.”

Fast-To-Market

The two concept vehicles include SEM1, a four-passenger urban transport, and SEM2, a six-passenger extra-urban commuter. WorldAutoSteel’s manufacturing target is high volume at 200,000 to 250,000 units per year.

“We wanted to make sure that we could utilize existing manufacturing infrastructure. So, you could go in today to the OEMs plants and you could build this vehicle without all new capital investment. So, it has to be able to use their types of processes, their types of stamping equipment,” explains Coates.

The planned timeframe for actual deployment is 2030 to 2035.

“The roads aren't ready yet for them, government regulations and insurance aren't ready yet for it yet, but we think all that stuff will be settled by then and certainly the technology will be quite capable,” says Coates.

In working on this project, WorldAutoSteel and Ricardo have also been solving crash and stiffness challenges, and these can be applied to other vehicles.

“This has been, in my solid 27 years of engineering consultancy… the best project I've done; the most exciting, the most challenging… It's not very often as an engineer, you get a clean sheet of paper, and someone says design an autonomous car. It's like gold,” concludes McGregor.