Car maintenance is about to get a whole lot more sophisticated. In parallel to the physical vehicle sitting on your drive will be a digital version that mirrors it sitting on a computer server in the cloud. This will help the car travel through its lifecycle more smoothly, facilitating maintenance and even how it is recycled. During my recent visit to BMW’s facilities in South Africa, the company explained how all its new vehicles will have a digital twin, and many have already.
It may come as a surprise, but BMW, a German company, doesn’t have its central IT service in Germany. Instead, its largest IT Hub is in Pretoria, South Africa. BMW has three IT Hubs, and while there is still one in Munich, there was a problem with competition for computing talent in Bavaria. By moving a significant proportion of its operations away from Germany to South Africa, BMW has been able to take advantage of well-educated local talent through initiatives such as the Harambee Foundation. This has helped the South African economy (to the tune of R3.3 billion / $181 million) and solved its own skills shortage. The facility now employs over 2,300 people and provides IT services to over 70 countries.
One of the tasks of the ZA IT Hub in Pretoria has been to spearhead the digital twin strategy. Currently, when you buy a secondhand vehicle, if you’re lucky it will come with a big file full of paper receipts recording every service and piece of maintenance work performed on it. Some manufacturers now maintain at least the service history online, although some of this is driven by their desire to devalue the work of non-official garages who aren’t authorized with access to the tools to update online records. But the online file probably won’t include details of all repairs or upgrades anyway.
This is where the digital twin comes in. The idea is not a new one. The concept of a digital representation of a physical object was conceived over 30 years ago by Yale University computer scientist David Gelernter, and then formally introduced in 2002. It’s a major component of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), which was developed by AMC in 1985 to harness the emerging Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems to keep all drawings and documents in a central database. This streamlined processes to cut costs.
However, PLM is focused on the development engineering of a new car. Once that vehicle leaves the factory, the digital records are not updated. BMW’s idea (although it is not alone in implementing this) is to create a Digital Vehicle File that follows the car through its entire usable life. This goes into detail about every component in the car. If BMW changed the type of bolt it used for a particular production month, that will be recorded in the File. If a service includes an upgrade of a component, that will be recorded too.
One key benefit of the Digital Vehicle File is that it will facilitate predictive maintenance. The age and mileage of components on a specific vehicle can be compared to data from the overall fleet of vehicles of that model type. If the car is reaching a point when a component is likely to fail, it can be replaced proactively. Conversely, if a component has already been replaced, the vehicle can be excluded from any notifications that don’t apply to it.
However, the biggest benefit of the digital twin will be in managing the vehicle’s sustainability over its lifecycle. One of the problems with recycling cars at present is the considerable lack of knowledge about exactly which materials were used in their manufacture. The proportion of metals in alloys and bodywork, which plastics have been employed for interior trim, and even the blend used in bolts could vary between trim types, not just broad model variants. Recycling requires every component to be broken into its individual elements if they are to be made use of again in premium applications. Not knowing what materials to expect is one of the biggest problems in all recycling, not just in the automotive industry.
BMW has been laying the groundwork to change this situation with its Catena-X initiative, which aims to provide an industry-wide database for suppliers to record the material makeup of their components. This is a huge task that will take years to complete and requires buy-in across automakers and third-party OEMs. But it will have many benefits, not least in providing an accurate calculation of carbon output during manufacture. Using the digital twin, it will be possible to sell tokens of value forecast for vehicles still in use. This will make insurance premiums much more accurately related to the resale price of a car both in working order and as scrap.
For an EV, this might suggest reusing the battery for grid energy, if it reaches the end of its useful life in a car but still has value for static storage. After a crash, major components that are still in good condition, such as doors, could be made available on the market for use in repairing other vehicles. The basic materials could be valued for recycling and reuse in new manufacturing, greatly facilitating the circular economy, as showcased by BMW’s iVision Circular concept car.
The digital twin is likely to become an essential element of making the automotive industry more sustainable. It can also make cars more reliable, as it will provide more detailed information about each specific vehicle and likely causes of failures. So far, BMW has already documented over five million of its cars and the company plans to create a Digital Vehicle File for every car it produces going forward. So if you buy a new BMW in the future, and probably cars from many other manufacturers, it’s likely to have a digital doppelganger lurking in the cloud.
