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Car companies, starting with Volvo last summer, have laid out plans to electrify entire lineups of vehicles. But the fine print makes it clear that the coming decade and beyond will focus not just on massive battery packs powering electric motors, but also on adding a little extra juice to the venerable internal combustion engine.
Increasingly, that juice will arrive in the form of new electrical systems built to a 48-volt standard, instead of the 12-volt systems that have dominated since the 1950s. Simpler than Prius-type drivetrains and less expensive than Tesla-scale battery power, the new electrical architecture both satisfies the demands of cars made more power hungry by their gadget load and enables the use of lower-cost hybrid drive systems.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/electric-cars-48-volts.html
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday February 26 2018, @07:10PM (2 children)
People expect the aux power socket (the "lighter") to provide 12V at a decent amperage. After-market equipment is expected to just work.
EVENTUALLY, the 12V will go away entirely. I think you way under-estimate how much carry-over there is from year to year in design. Automotive engineering is quite conservative as a whole.
There's a reason that part catalogs generally include a list of model and year ranges that the same part fits. Warranty repairs and recalls are expensive and damaging to reputation.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday February 26 2018, @07:33PM (1 child)
Yes, it is conservative and a lot of parts are carried over, but that does not include instrument clusters (they're always updated with new generations, and sometimes in the middle of generations too), nor does it extend to circuit designs. As I said before, it would be completely idiotic to design an all-new instrument cluster PCB and not bother to design in a new power supply if you have a 48V bus available. It's not like designing for a 48V supply instead of 12V is something completely new and different. And you're not going to use the same DC-to-DC converter for a lighter socket as for something critical like your instrument cluster; that too would be idiotic, because someone could plug something into the lighter socket causing the DC-to-DC converter to fail, and now your dashboard is dead.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday February 26 2018, @09:10PM
As opposed to now where someone could plug something into the lighter socket and the whole electrical system is dead?
Or more likely in both cases, a fuse blows and life goes on.