Yazaki rethinks wiring for autonomous age

SUSONO, Japan -- These days, a typical luxury car is veined front to rear with miles of electrical cables. Even a compact car can have more than a mile of wire snaking through it. With the advent of connected cars, advanced safety systems and autonomous driving, demand for wiring is set to explode.

It must be a boom market for wire harness makers, right?

Yet Japanese supplier Yazaki Corp., the world's biggest maker of wire harness systems, faces a Catch-22. Yes, the coming era of increasingly electrified vehicles should spur demand for its No. 1 product. But there simply isn't room to pack in all of the extra wiring that vehicles are expected to need. So the company has to find a way to reduce the number of wires in a vehicle and their weight.

If it doesn't, someone else might -- and take away the business.

Noboru Osada, Yazaki's global director for r&d, is at the forefront of trying to use less wiring without undermining his company's top revenue stream. His efforts underscore the challenges facing all automakers as everything from windows to transmissions to trunk doors depends on electric wiring for power and communication.

"It's a big opportunity," Osada told Automotive News at the company's technical center here southwest of Tokyo, in the foothills of Mount Fuji. "But we are trying to reduce the number of wire harnesses. Otherwise, you cannot implement the wire harnesses into the car because there's no space."

Global demand for automotive wire harnesses is expected to climb 10 percent by 2020, Osada said. The bundles of metal cables carry power and transmit signals. They also generate about 90 percent of Yazaki's global sales.

Aiming to slash weight and bulk, Yazaki is turning to aluminum, rather than copper, cables. The supplier is also looking at multiplexing -- having one cable carry more than one signal at a time. Both solutions are necessary, but threaten to cut into revenue because wire harness prices are typically determined by how much metal they contain.

"For the future, we have to reduce the use of wire, but we also have to continue our business," Osada said.

Ironically for a company that has specialized in wire since 1929, Yazaki is even researching wireless networks inside the car that can allow different components of the vehicle to communicate without being tied down by cabling.

"We are investing a lot into r&d for developing secure and reliable wireless systems," Osada said. "We have to be ready with new technology."

Yazaki is privately owned, with President Shinji Yazaki representing the owners and founding family. In the company's fiscal year that ended June 20, Yazaki booked global revenue of ¥1.66 trillion ($13.5 billion), up 6.8 percent. About 64 percent of that came from outside Japan. In the previous fiscal year, sales to automakers totaled an estimated $15.2 billion, putting the Tokyo company at No. 14 on Automotive News' list of the Top 100 global automotive suppliers, as ranked by revenue. The seeming year-to-year drop in the dollar value reflected changes in currency rates.

Yazaki sells wire harnesses to all Japanese automakers and most overseas carmakers. Yazaki also makes meter clusters, cabin lamps and charging connectors for plug-in vehicles. Its nonautomotive businesses include air conditioning and solar power equipment, plus health care and recycling operations.

A large premium sedan can be packed with up to 12,000 feet of cable weighing as much as 110 pounds. A small mass-market car typically has half as many cables.

The wires transmit power and signals to electronic control units, actuators and other onboard electronics.

Producing harnesses is low-tech and labor-intensive. Factories employ thousands of workers to gather and bundle the wires, shaping each harness to the design of the nameplate it will go into. A late design change by an automaker can render inventory en route to an auto plant worthless.

Anticipating an era of advanced safety systems and self-driving cars dependent on sensors, complex microprocessors and actuators, Yazaki is trying to position itself as more than a wire maker.

It wants to be a supplier of so-called electrical/electronic distribution and display systems, which are a kind of combined nervous and circulatory system for a vehicle, managing the onboard flow of energy and communications.

In hybrid and electric vehicles, cables transmit high-voltage power from the battery to the electric propulsion motor. Other wires might carry electricity to dozens of electronic control units running such components as the engine, transmission or air conditioning. Yet more wires transmit orders from one electronic control unit to another, instructing it what to do next.

"How to optimize that," Osada said, "is the big mission."

Going wireless as a substitute for communication cables is one way to save space and weight. But it is much more difficult to transmit power wirelessly from the vehicle's battery to other components; wires are still optimal.

In either case, wireless communications among onboard systems still face reliability and cost concerns. The technology won't be ready before 2030, Osada predicted.

But Yazaki is streamlining in other ways.

Switching from copper to aluminum helps save weight and trims costs. On the other hand, aluminum doesn't conduct power as well and typically needs thicker wire to do so. Aluminum is also less flexible than copper.

Breakthroughs have come through devising different aluminum alloys that have the best qualities of both metals, Osada said.

Yazaki is also exploring fiber optics in such components as camera sensor networks to improve networking speed.

Eking more performance out of existing cables is also on tap. That could come through multiplexing or through powerline communication, in which a single wire transmits power as well as communications. Both approaches have cost and technical concerns, though.

The biggest advances likely will come through new ways to manage the power distribution, Osada said. Layout and architecture are critical, and that is where Yazaki plans to use its decades of engineering experience.

"If you look only at the wire, there is little value to the end customer. Cheaper is better," Osada said. "But if you look at the system as a whole, there is a lot of value."