Under the Hood: the innovation-rich Golf 8

By Junko Yoshida and Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio for EETIMES – The Volkswagen Golf 8 is no fancy supercar. But it is the German carmaker’s top-selling, high-volume model, packed with bells and whistles. It boasts a host of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) features and always-on connectivity, such as V2X for vehicle-to-everything communication and UWB for secure car access.

Golf 8 is also a mild hybrid electric vehicle with a lithium-ion battery. The latest model uses a new electrified drive system with 48-volt technology.

The fact that VW crammed “a lot of innovations” into “such a compact, mass-market car” caught the interest of System Plus Consulting (Nantes, France), according to the company CEO Romain Faux. System Plus, a part of market/technology research firm Yole Développement based in Lyon, conducted this teardown.

The Golf 8 teardown reveals that the vehicle uses no powerful central computing system such as Nvidia’s Xavier or Tesla’s Self-driving SoC.  Instead, a series of ECUs in separate domains independently manage different vehicle functions. How VW pulled off a seemingly advanced ADAS model without really changing the vehicle’s core electrical and electronic (E/E) architecture is interesting all by itself.

Remember the buzz over the Audi A8, initially trumpeted as the industry’s first passenger vehicle featuring Level 3 autonomy? That model, however, never got into real production. Audi, which faced regulatory hurdles, abandoned plans to introduce eyes-off autonomous driving technology in the A8 flagship sedan.

In contrast, the ADAS innards of the high-volume Golf 8, already on the market, are not theoretical… Full story

Get access to all the automotive systems analyzed by System Plus Consulting in its Automotive Teardown Track here : Automotive Track.