Smile, You’re on Magna Camera!

June 1, 2016

Lindsay Brooke

Near the small Michigan town of Holly (pop. 6300) an hour north of Detroit, the Magna Electronics complex has quietly become a goliath within the automotive sensor industry.

Output of tiny and complex CMOS rearview cameras in Holly, currently the sole U.S. source for these increasingly vital optical components, has nearly doubled since 2014, when the facility—two plants totaling 130,000-ft² — shipped its milestone 10-millionth rear-view camera to one of 47 customer locations. Since then, the Magna Holly operation has grown like the Incredible Hulk.

The site has added a third plant and now totals 190,000 ft2 of camera-making floor space, noted General Manager Jeff Gary. He said daily output of rearview cameras has been expanded to about 33,000 units, up from 20,000 two years ago. They are produced on 10 dedicated assembly lines, an increase of three lines since 2014 and fed by an impressive cell-manufacturing system whose quality-assurance processes would not seem out of place in the Swiss watchmaking industry.

Three separate lines dedicated to more sophisticated front-view cameras with greater processing speed — a fourth line is in the works — have added nearly 1.5 M units per year since 2014. The Holly complex now ships to 181 customer points, mostly in North America. To handle the additional volume, Magna has boosted employment to 560, up from 400 workers (including engineers and technical staff) in 2014. They work a three-shift/five-day week and consider the facility to be a highly desirable place to work, at least according to a review of local social-media posts.

Employees expect daily output to reach 40,000 units as they ramp up this summer to meet the 2017 rearview-camera regulatory milestone. The Holly complex also holds the distinction of the “mother” plant for all Magna Electronics’ global camera manufacturing, proving-out new processes and tooling prior to their use in sister pants in Zhangjiagang, China and Waldshut-Tiengen, Germany, Gary noted.

Driven by (and driving) ADAS

“We’ve been planning for this [growth] with plenty of room to expand since the government mandate was issued. But there’s much more driving it,” said Gary during an Automotive Engineering plant tour. He was referring to the U.S. DoT ruling that requires rearview cameras to be standard equipment by 2018 in all vehicles weighing less than 10,000 lb (4535 kg), with a 10% phase-in by May 1, 2017. That rises to 40% in 2018 then becomes 100% penetration a year later.

More than 200 fatalities and 15,000 injuries per year are caused by backup accidents and crashes in the U.S., according to NHTSA.

Beyond the DoT’s full-production mandate, however, Gary and other Magna Electronics officials at Holly noted that rear cameras have a major role in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) that underpin the connected- and autonomous-vehicle future. ADAS fuses optical and radar/LiDAR sensing plus ultrasonics and V2X connectivity. The systems’ increasingly capable cameras and their ECUs are integral to self-parking systems, lane-departure warning and 360° surround view — the latter offering a minimum 4-cameras-per vehicle platform.

The CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) sensor technology was perfected in consumer digital cameras and offers small package size, low power consumption, increasingly higher resolution and steadily decreasing cost for automotive applications, Gary explained. While Magna officials at Holly refrained from providing per-unit costs, industry experts say rearview camera costs have dropped from about $130 per unit in the early 1990s, when Magna landed its first application for the General Motors Hummer H2, to less than $40 in 2016.

Parking assistance currently is the biggest slice of the North American automotive camera market. It is expected to expand at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26.3% through 2020, tops among global regions and representing $11.2 B, according to Research & Markets. Magna currently has over 45% of the North American market in rearview cameras, Gary said, and 27% of the forward-facing camera market. Competitors include Aisin Seiki, Autoliv, Bosch, Continental, Delphi Automotive, Denso, Mobilieye, Panasonic, Valeo and ZF TRW.

A recent example of the state-of-the-art in backup-system integration is Ford’s Pro Trailer Backup Assist in the 2016 F-150. The system features a Magna rear-view camera that measures the angle between truck and trailer and uses a Magna image-processing algorithm to calculate trailer angle by detecting target decals on the trailer. The system earned a technology award at CES 2016.

Moving to 2 megapixels

Magna’s increasing investment in forward-looking camera production at Holly is a glimpse of things to come. The company’s recent announcement that it is supplying its new Eyeris Gen 3.0 camera system to FCA for the 2016 Jeep Grand Cherokee and 2017 Chrysler Pacifica shows the near-term application of ADAS. But to support vehicle automation at and above SAE Level 3 will require faster and more precise integration (fusion) of inputs from the multiple sensor technologies noted above.

Such capability requires ADAS to be 100% robust under all driving conditions and provide 360° coverage to detect vehicles, pedestrians and objects that “come out of nowhere.”

Next-generation ADAS will incorporate machine learning, providing the ability to “read” traffic signs and “decide” when to override driver control, or when to give the human a benefit of the doubt.

Imaging systems will feature “smaller form factor with increased resolution — we’ll be seeing cameras with up to 2 megapixels in volume,” said Jeremy Carlson, an electronics and vision systems analyst at IHS Automotive.

Magna experts envision future vehicles with eight to 12 vision sensors, two long-range radar sensors and four LiDARs at the corners with V2X connectivity. They say development challenges and integration issues include how to reliably employ V2X and cloud-based solutions, whether control should be centralized or decentralized and the role of cloud-based data.

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