In the spring of 1994, the Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, at the request of Mercedes-Benz AG, hosted the first of a series of working group meetings to see if consensus could be achieved among car manufacturers and suppliers on the electrical loads in luxury vehicles in the 20052015 time frame. Agreement was also sought on the characteristics of the electrical system architecture that would best meet those load requirements. The group quantitatively assessed the attributes of alternative system architectures and proposed specific parameters to characterize advanced electrical systems.
Besides the authors, the working group included Fritz Schmidt and Dieter Blauensteiner of Mercedes-Benz; Michael Kokes of Daimler-Benz; Steven Stonestreet and Michael Matouka of General Motors; Shahram Zarei of Ford; Norman Traub of Delphi Packard Electric; Richard Granitz of AMP; James Burgess and Mark Baker of AFL--Automotive Division (formerly Electro-Wire); Paul Marshall and Robert Szudarek of United Technologies; Ludwig Brabetz and Ralph Krempl of Siemens Automotive; and Richard Tabors, Khurram Afridi, and Vahe Caliskan of MIT. The opinions stated in this article are those of the working group members and not necessarily those of their affiliated companies. --J.G.K., H.C.W., J.M.M., & C.J.H.