An IoT Story - Gentherm

Early February I had the privilege of chatting with the Senior Vice President and CTO of Gentherm Matt Fisch and learn more about Gentherm and its role in the automotive industry and where in his view the company was headed. If you think this is not an IoT Story, then hold your thought because it is a different kind of an IoT Story.

What is Gentherm known for?

Gentherm is a global market leader and developer of innovative thermal management technologies.

Gentherm is considered the expert in thermophysiology, which when oversimplified is understanding of how our body behaves and adjusts with temperature.

They are in the business of understanding heating and cooling and how to best do it and create value in various applications. In the automotive space they have found their place in providing heating and cooling solutions in the seats, heating solutions in the steering wheel and heating and cooling solutions for battery packs in Electric Vehicles (EV’s) among many others.

Why are Gentherm’s solutions important today?

With the strong move towards EV, Gentherm’s role in the automotive or EV space has become almost central to the industry for simply one reason, Gentherm’s solutions have a direct and an outsized impact to the performance of the vehicle.

How? - The HVAC system in a vehicle is the largest user of energy outside of the energy needed to drive the vehicle. Gentherm’s solutions around heating or cooling in seats helps optimize energy consumption for the HVAC system. Their temperature-controlled coverings for battery packs improve the charge and discharge efficiencies of the battery by either cooling or heating the batteries prior to the charge or discharge cycle for optimal performance.

These innovative products help reduce total vehicular energy consumption thereby reducing range anxiety for customers which is currently the largest customer experience issue for EV manufacturers.

How is Gentherm redefining itself?

Gentherm does not view itself as just a heating and cooling solution provider for various automotive needs.

Gentherm is redefining itself as being in the business of keeping passengers comfortable in their vehicular space. And that statement has a very broad and far-reaching impacts.

?For example, Gentherm believes it is possible to understand the emotional and physiological state of the driver and passenger to interpret their heating and cooling preferences and adjust to it, thereby avoiding the need for them to take their eyes and mind off the road to adjust dials on the controller. To do this, Gentherm is researching how it would monitor the temperature profile of the driver and watch for various biomarkers. This is requiring the company to adopt new tools, such as AI and cloud computing.

How is Gentherm an IoT company?

Gentherm is not an IoT company but when the IoT product is the entire vehicle, all critical inputs going into the IoT product that directly influence customer experience become an IoT player. This is where Gentherm and its future vision comes into play and its aspirations to be digital solutions provider focused on the end user become clear.

In Matt’s own words, Gentherm’s goal is to close the loop on keeping the passenger comfortable. This requires creation of intelligence that leads to prediction of human thermoregulation behavior.

This includes occupant biomarker detection as well as various other environment information collected from the vehicle or from the cloud (time of day, direction of the sun, outside weather, personal preferences). This leads to prediction of occupant comfort and helping to avoid potential driver distractions. ?

In another example, Gentherm’s footprint in steering wheel heating has led to the evolution of heating mats to become hands on detection sensors which provides information on when and how a driver is holding the steering wheel. As autonomous driving increases in importance there is a growing need to add even more intelligence into these sensors. Their investment in Forciot (provider of stretchable electronics for pressure sensor) gives an indication of how they see themselves moving in this direction.

Gentherm is part of the critical data flow within the vehicle that when fed to the brain of the vehicle can make intelligent decisions. And to do all this, Gentherm is positioned strongly because of their presence in the steering wheel, seating systems and the thermal devices it provides for batteries along with the cables and harnesses that it builds to connect all of these to the main controls of the vehicle. In some ways, it not only has control over critical parts but also a portion of the nervous system of the vehicle.

From IoT perspective, is Gentherm going to be just a data feed then?

This is where the perspective of cloud vs edge computing and their own core strength on being the best in the industry for Thermophysiology comes into play. According to Matt, Cloud vs Edge in many cases is purely a mathematical equation. What is most efficient in the cloud vs what is most efficient in the edge to give you the best results should lead you to the right decision. But in the EV or vehicle space this becomes more of customer experience and safety issue. Just because you lost connectivity to the cloud a driver of the vehicle will not be OK with losing intelligent controls or comfort capabilities of the car.

Gentherm sees the potential to become an Edge computing entity where most of the data collected from various sources would be analyzed locally with AI to deliver the results necessary for the comfort of the driver and passenger of the vehicle.

Gentherm sees that these digital extensions to its solutions are obvious to unlock the value to EV manufacturers and the drivers of vehicles and make it progress towards its goal.

While providing so many critical parts and harnesses, is there a standard that Automotive Industry follows?

As per Matt, although the industry is one of the most mature ones, there is really no standard approach towards connecting various parts of the vehicle. Each manufacturer does it just a little bit differently, which is a challenge. Integration of their solutions into each car brand is unique which makes ease of integration with suppliers a key topic. Gentherm for its part tries to push forward with a certain level of abstraction on its solutions that make it convenient to connect to various vehicle brands.

How does Gentherm see it executing on its goals and vision?

Matt has been clear that to move fast and deliver value, Gentherm augments its internal technology initiatives with strong external partnerships. Gentherm knows its strengths and will rely on partnering as well as investing on strong players in Sensors, AI, Cloud computing and Digital Applications space to build the necessary solutions and services that Gentherm will be able to provide to its automotive manufacturers. Some of its recent venture investments are a clear indication of their resolve. In addition to that, he is pushing hard on fueling the innovation culture within the company by engaging all individuals across the company to collaborate and be a part of it.