About Ideas For Automotive Wire Harness: Delivery issues of harnesses have impacted vehicle production, causing a partial standstill for several manufacturers.
This effect demonstrates the importance of the production process of wire harnesses regarding production as a whole.
The article below discusses the various ideas for automotive wire harnesses.
Table of Contents
- Ideas For Automotive Wire Harness in Vehicle Construction
- Ideas For Automotive Wire Harness Development Trends
- Ideas For Automotive Wire Harness to Reduce Weight
- Ideas For Automotive Wire Harness Leaders’ Response to Ongoing Pressures
- Conclusion
Ideas For Automotive Wire Harness in Vehicle Construction
Every car has its wiring system, so a wiring harness is designed specifically for the intended car’s configuration and corresponds to the specific electrical network needed for the equipment.
Manufacturers don’t install any unnecessary electrical lines in the car, resulting in a unique degree of individuality in the car’s electrical system. Therefore, it’s impossible to use an identical harness in several vehicles.
Ideas For Automotive Wire Harness Development Trends
If a vehicle has multiple additional features, it’ll require more wires, which directly increases the weight and length of the harness. This further results in a heavier automobile, making it harder to deploy wires.
For example, artificial intelligence in cars enables computer vision, facial recognition, and other machine-learning algorithms to personalize vehicle settings and user experience by processing and learning from incoming data.
For this to be possible, multiple cameras and additional hardware are connected to the electrical control unit using high-speed data or coax cables.
However, such cables are costly, heavier, and larger than standard automotive wiring.
Also, vehicles are becoming increasingly connected as part of the Internet of Things, making vehicles a seamless hub for communication, productivity, and entertainment.
Since such technologies are connected, it increases the cost, weight, and bundle diameter of the harness.
Some modern cars have almost 40 harnesses, over 3000 wires, and about 700 connectors.
If disassembled and aligned in a straight line the wires would be over 2.5 miles and weigh about 132 pounds.
Also, there could be over 70 specialty cables like USB, coax, and high-speed data cables. Older cars, on the other hand, only had 10 specialty cables.
Caption: Coax Cable
Ideas For Automotive Wire Harness to Reduce Weight
How can manufacturers today reduce the impact of added components and technology on the cost, weight, and packing space needed for wiring harnesses?
Using More Lightweight Constructions
The table below highlights certain measures to decrease the weight of wiring harnesses.
| Measure | Advantage |
| Smaller harness cross-section | Using alloy wires minimizes the size and weight of a harness. Also, alloy wires outperform pure copper wires in bending properties and tensile strength. |
| Thinner wire insulation layer | An ultrathin insulation wire (0.35mm2 ) could reduce the weight because it has a 30% lighter weight, 27% shorter diameter, and 47% smaller size than a thin wire insulation layer. |
| Using lighter-weight materials | Using an aluminum wiring harness instead of copper reduces 48% of the weight and significantly decreases the cost. |
The above possible solutions are only used in very few applications because the market doesn’t fully support such implementations.
Using modular assembly:
The second approach is optimizing module positions and identifying ones that one can combine.
The modular application has a limited distribution board, roof, and door in the wiring space.
An FCB is used in the module and assembly of electronic components or integration of sensor components to make the wiring materials develop in an increasingly functional direction.
The domestic autonomous vehicle factory currently uses traditional fuse boxes and wire harnesses, which aren’t detachable.
A vehicle normally uses 2 to 4 fuse boxes with numerous relays. In the wiring harness assembly, fuse boxes occupy a lot of weight and space.
With the ongoing development of technology, manufacturers use a detachable fuse box fission and more wire in the control unit, relay, and other parts.
E/E Architecture Design Optimization
Lightweight auto wiring harnesses are capable of reducing weight. However, fundamentally, using fewer harnesses pays off more in optimization.
Integrating new E/E architecture designs is the key to reducing the wires used for different functions by simplifying the wiring design.
For instance, Tekla uses E/E architecture designs, leading to a sharp cut in the wire harness length from 3 km to 1.9 km.
Also, it uses technology that upgrades wiring layouts where the harness is almost 100 meters short.
Furthermore, Aptiv announced its SVA enabling multiple ECUs integration in a small domain control unit.
Therefore, the architecture design saves on a number of power supply devices, housings, copper wiring harnesses and microcontrollers while maintaining or improving the car computing power, thus resulting in a 20% reduction in harness weight and size and weight of computing-related hardware.
Applying Wireless Communication to Reduce the Use of the Wiring Harness
Using wireless communication will decrease the application of wiring harnesses.
For example, in 2018, Yakuza obtained a patent involving an extended ECU and the system’s electronic device configured to transmit and receive signals via wireless communication.
Ideas For Automotive Wire Harness Leaders’ Response to Ongoing Pressures
Despite a positive market expectation for harnesses, wiring harness suppliers cope with below-average margins because the business has little potential for automated assembly and a high labor cost.
Cutting Cost
Most products are handmade with low productivity rates since wiring layouts are complex. Therefore, labor costs are a constant strain on scale effect and capacity expansion.
Manufacturers have to rely on advanced equipment to automate a few production links.
With auto wiring harnesses becoming more integrated and production technology advancing, intelligent manufacturing has the chance to break through the entire process.
Pursuing Vertical Integration
Till today, efforts on vertical integration are mainly focused on high-end connectors that are important to OEMs and have higher margins.
Often, OEMs are reluctant to change suppliers and suppliers that don’t integrate have to deal with daunting investments.
Getting OEMs to Pay For Technical Changes
Any changes to the car designs force harness suppliers to follow suit, often in the final stages of the development stages and at short notice.
Therefore, increasing the costs of the supplier erodes their margin further unless they operate rigorous change management systems or convince OEMs to cover the costs.
Raising Efficiency
The average lead time for wire harnesses from design to production release is roughly 23 to 26 weeks.
Variation depends on the amount of changes and progress in the development cycle.
In order to meet deadlines for the following development phase, wire harnesses have to be frozen with minimal time to examine and implement anything learned in the previous development phases.
Often, testing hasn’t even begun before the next freeze cycle comes, leading to huge rework efforts once the build phase begins or sudden change requests are made before the following freeze cycle.
However, both alternatives could reduce the harness quality, resulting in unnecessary delay during functional validation.
Increased lead time helps the engineering team identify problems, determine appropriate changes, and implement the changes for the next validation stage.
Conclusion
There, you must have a clear picture of the automotive wire harness industry. In case you have any further questions feel free to contact Cloom Tech.
