Car Lingo EP01 | Suppliers, Electromechanical Systems & Brakes

[00:07] Geese, where we explain terminology used in our videos and other industry anecdotes in plain English and easy-to-understand examples. So, let's talk about today's topics. We're going to cover suppliers and supply chain,

[00:21] what electromechanical systems are, and discuss modern brake systems. discuss modern brake systems. >> [music] term, suppliers. It's a word you hear thrown around in our videos all the time

[00:36] in positive and negative lights. And suppliers are not just exclusive to the automotive industry. Well, let me put it in a way you can understand. Imagine you cookies. You lay out your ingredients, your butter, your salt, your eggs, your

[00:51] chocolate chips. Do you churn your own butter? Not likely. Are you out there laying your own eggs? No. You're going to a grocery store and you're picking a specific brand to put all that together. So,

[01:03] those would be your suppliers. Now, what would happen if you ran out of eggs or the store no longer had that brand's eggs? Well, you'd pick a different brand. That would be a different supplier to make your masterpiece. And

[01:16] the car industry is no different. In fact, let's take a brand like Honda, Toyota, Ford, or Chevy. When they manufacture a car, depending on the vehicle, they could have over 500 suppliers.

[01:28] Not parts that those brands are making themselves. So, think about it. Tires tier-one suppliers. Brake ABS units could be Bosch or Mando

[01:40] You could have steering wheels, different steering wheel manufacturers, seats, fabrics, audio systems, speakers, you name it. All those are a different supplier. And the magic of making a car come together is integrating all those

[01:54] components together. And that's why making cars and manufacturing them, making sure they're constantly going down the assembly line, is so challenging. Just because you put a different seat from a supplier here, a

[02:06] different brake system, a different tire system, different engine calibration, are not made by the manufacturers or that brand, they come from a supplier. suppliers in check and making sure the car works. And not only works, but works

[02:21] well. And that's one of the reasons why we constantly talk about suppliers and engineering integration to make sure that all of these teams are working together to make that car consistent every single time. Not only just that

[02:33] every single time. Not only just that car, all their vehicles in their lineup. almost every single video. That's because every modern car has a variation

[02:47] of it. Imagine you want to take a bicycle ride. You sit on your seat and you start pedaling. That force that you're pushing through the pedals goes through a gear, through a chain, and just spins the tire to keep

[02:59] you going. If you want to go faster, what do you do? You pedal harder. Pretty basic. Now, let's say you wanted to add an electric motor to your bike, turn it a battery, some layer of software inside the

[03:12] Now, that electric motor is assisting you in pedaling. You can pedal more, you electric motor propel you with essentially doing nothing. This is turning your bike into a giant electromechanical system. Same goes

[03:27] Cars [music] used to be very rudimentary. You wanted to stop, you used your foot force to push hydraulic fluid to calipers or brakes to get the Then, there was brake boosters, electronic brake boosters. Now, you have

[03:41] drive-by-wire. So, you have an advanced set of systems, electronics, and talk to each other. One of the main reasons for this invention of this technology, a lot of it was driven by safety systems, anti-lock brakes,

[03:55] stability control, traction control, and of course all the other supplemental safety systems like airbags and all the sensors required to make that work. So, it's no longer just a question of why can't we just have bicycle-like

[04:10] simplicity in cars? Well, with all these systems having to talk to each other and software-controlled, they've all needed to become electromechanical systems to make sure that everything's working properly.

[04:29] with suppliers and electromechanical systems, and nothing applies here more than this. There's different brake suppliers for different brands. Even some brands might may use the exact same [music] brake system, but the difference

[04:42] is how they do the software integration or how they do the programming of these systems. So, you might have the same brake system in two cars, but they might feel completely different, and that's depending on how the engineer does it.

[04:55] recipe and you gave it to five different people, again, to make those cookies, five different people might have five different tasting cookies just based on [music] the way that they made them, how they mix the dough. All those variables

[05:09] can come into play and affect the outcome. The same thing goes for cars. So, let's talk about the different brake systems. [music] The old-school ones with your foot and it required so much brake force to push the pedal down to

[05:22] calipers to squeeze [music] the discs or drums to stop the car. It's very similar bicycle. You grab the handle, you grab your brake, pulls a cable, grabs those two rubber pads on the wheel, and it stops the

[05:36] because the problem with that is it required a lot of leg force that modern people in in modern societies it's not so safe for people anymore. So, things have moved on quite a bit from there. We have vacuum assisted brake boosters,

[05:50] which use a membrane to amplify your foot force. So, when you hit the brakes, you can push it a little bit, but that brake booster is able to amplify that force to create more pressure to stop the car without you having to push so

[06:02] much with your legs. And those systems are still in place in certain sports cars. The problem with that membrane is it's heavy, it's big, and you can't really move it anywhere else except in

[06:16] space. The other thing is it's a lot harder to control electronically. And this is why we've seen so many brands move over to systems like Bosch's iBoost or systems from Continental or Mando. These systems now remove that large

[06:31] membrane and move to a decoupled brake pedal. A decoupled brake pedal means still a connection into that brake booster, but it's no longer a manual or a hydraulic process. It's using

[06:44] electronic pump, which then amplifies the force or creates extra force of pressure onto the hydraulic fluid and into the brake discs to grab them there. The benefits of having that electronic pump is it reduces the size quite a bit.

[06:58] It reduces the weight, so they can fit more things into the engine bay. more things into the engine bay. So, it's it also allows them that flexibility of safety controls. So, most people have a really hard time

[07:11] push your foot very hard when you want to brake. So, the electronic brake boosters have allowed them to program these systems to take over electronically. When it detects a crash, it may apply more force than you're

[07:23] actually putting in your foot. It may just take over and apply a maximum force so the car will stop and you won't hit someone else. It's also there to assist in cruise control or semi-autonomous driving, where the car can literally

[07:35] take over that brake pressure without you even touching your foot. So, again, electromechanical controls. But, the problem with decoupled brake, and we talk about this in sports cars, is despite it having a physical plunger

[07:47] there's no feedback through the system. It's decoupled from the actual hydraulics. So, despite it having a sensor there, and it's telling what the electric motor should do for creating that hydraulic force, it's not giving

[08:00] you any feedback from the ABS system because again, it's decoupled. It's not pedal. So, they tune it through a set of gives you that smooth feel when you push

[08:12] foot, but it's static. Doesn't matter what temperature it is, it doesn't matter how much you use the brakes or how little you use your brakes, it typically doesn't vibrate from ABS actuation, so it always feels the same

[08:24] with a performance car, you're driving hard, there's no feedback in there. You could literally lose brakes and the pedal would feel the same. Now, the because it's physically connected through there, if the electronic pump

[08:38] fails, you can still push the brake down and it will go in an emergency fashion to create some type of braking force to try to stop the car. The next system is brake by wire, and this is completely different than decoupled. Decoupled

[08:51] still has a set of sensors on there for velocity or force. Brake by wire completely removes that, even that physical connection. It's just controller. When you look at some of the sim pedals,

[09:05] either use a set of springs and a load cell to approximate what you're doing with your foot. But by doing that, it's completely, again, removing any type of feel from the car. It's just detecting how fast you're pushing the pedal, and

[09:18] the software does the rest. It's all up to the engineers how that that pedal is going to react when you push it to control the brake system. But again, going to feel the same no matter what you do to it. Now, they're going to get

[09:31] could be vibration, they can put little electric motors in there, or some type of uh other feedback through the pedals to make it feel like it's physically connected, but that's more in the sim world right now than in the real world

[09:44] of automobiles. What this allows them to do is do completely autonomous driving. It's great for electric cars when packaging is different. It allows them to take that electronic brake booster, that entire module it was before, not

[09:58] put it anywhere in the car. It no longer has to be by the brake pedal in the car. They can move it to the side, anywhere they want for packaging, which means they have space to put other things. And that's a huge reason why a lot of

[10:12] companies are going to be moving to this because as every single car goes to electronic control of everything through their safety setups, their their they can just decouple everything and make it a a digital system. It pretty

[10:25] seeing the move towards that quite a bit. Car Lingo. We're I give you a high-level overview of the importance of suppliers

[10:37] and how it affects the manufacturing of cars. We talked about electromechanical systems and how it's taken over [music] the car industry. It allows engineers to change things, make cars feel different through the software layer. Gives them

[10:50] having [music] to change every single mechanical part of the car and the get all of these systems to talk together. It's really the magic which we'll detail more in future episodes. I also talked about the difference in

[11:04] brake systems from packaging, the shrinkage, the loss of weight, and of course, the electromechanical control of these systems and the importance of how the safety suite is integrated so heavily into the brake pedal. Thanks for

[11:18] watching and we'll see you in future episodes.