CES 2025: Bosch Goes Right with Wrong-Way Alerts, Racing Hand Controls

Bosch is working to bring contextual safety notifications to the SiriusXM Connect mobile safety app.It’s just one technology the supplier was promoting at CES 2025.

Motorsport race driver Robert Wickens appears on stage with president of Bosch in North America Paul Thomas and Bosch board member Tanja Rückert at CES 2025 to discuss the company’s development of hand brake controllers that allow him to continue to race after a debilitating crash in 2018. (Steve Fecht)

Bosch took to CES 2025 with positive messages about its safety, accessibility and AI technologies, which it said will impact both the people who drive vehicles with its hardware and software inside and those might be watching such a vehicle from the bleachers.

Components from Bosch’s motorsport hybrid system on display at CES 2025. Bosch Motorsport is an exclusive partner for the hybrid powertrain in each LMDh vehicle. (Steve Fecht)

A racecar that would fit Into that latter category might use the new hand brake controls that Bosch developed along with motorsport race driver Robert Wickens. Wickens was badly hurt in a crash in 2018 but has since returned to racing using vehicles with hand controls. Wickens uses the new hand brakes in the Hyundai Elantra N TCR he drives for Bryan Herta Autosport, but they are an updated version of the electric brake system Bosch supplies for the LMDh class. Based on brake-by-wire technology, the hand brakes have software that balances the braking torque from the motor and the traditional hydraulic brakes. Bespoke software also allows Wickens to use the brakes with his pre-existing hand controls, translating pressure signals into actual breaking events. Jacob Bergenske, Bosch’s director of motorsport for NorthAmerica, told SAE Media that the engineering team is still improving the feel in the controls.

Number 31 in the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, from Whelen Engineering Cadillac Racing, was at the Bosch booth at CES 2025. (Steve Fecht)

“It's amazing the perception that a human has through touch,” he said. “The more that [Wickens] can perceive that threshold of breaking in his hands, and we can give the proper kind of feedback, the faster he's gonna be. Where we're at right now is a massive step forward from what he had with his previous system. In certain events, we have literally 10x improved in responsiveness.”

In 2025, Wickens will make his debut in IMSA’s WeatherTech SportsCar Championship with a Corvette Z06 GT3.R that will use a newer iteration of the hand brake system. Bergenske said the software learnings that the team made on this project could be used to make better hand brake controls for others.

“This is not just about Robert,” he said. “It’s about providing people opportunities who never thought that they would have had those opportunities before, people who never thought they would be able to drive a high-performance race car because they have a disability.”

The right move on wrong-way driving

Jacob Bergenske, Bosch’s director of motorsport for North America, at CES 2025. (Sebastian Blanco)

At the same press event at CES, Paul Thomas, president of Bosch North America, announced that the company’s wrong-way driver warning system will likely be coming to the new SiriusXM Connect mobile safety app in the near future. The reasons this technology would be beneficial are obvious, Thomas said, since there were over 700 wrong-way driving fatalities recorded in 2022, according to data from the U.S. Federal Highway Administration (FHA). The FHA has been concerned about wrong-way driving since at least 2012, when it published the results of a study conducted with the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) that found that darkness and driver impairment resulted in higher wrong-way drivers and that wrong-way crashes were “highly severe.” The study found  that 32% of wrong-way crashes resulted in at least one fatality or incapacitating injury, compared to 2% of all Michigan freeway crashes.

Bosch’s cloud-based system tracks vehicles as they get on or off a highway and uses anonymized data to tell if a vehicle is moving with or against traffic. Bosch’s wrong-way alert system does not require any supplemental hardware as long as they have SiriusXM installed, Thomas said at CES. Integration with SiriusXM Connect will allow Bosch’s technology to only alert people who are in the line of danger, he said.

“If you're on the road, [and someone is] traveling towards [you in a] car that's coming the wrong way, you will get an announcement audibly and potentially visually over your radio or over your sound system that says you have a wrong-way driver coming towards you,” he said. “It will also trigger the person that's driving the car in the wrong direction to say that they're moving in the wrong direction.”

But alerts are as far as Bosch wants to go for now. The technology wasn’t developed to take control of a vehicle going the wrong way, Thomas said, adding that there are likely legal restrictions against this kind of control. Still, Bosch is “actively working” to bring these wrong-way driver alerts to more vehicles and smartphones through other collaborations, Thomas said, adding that Bosch is not developing this to make money.

“I would give this technology away to save lives, if it was starting to be used,” he said.

Software, AI and hydrogen

Paul Thomas, president of Bosch in North America, speaks at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. (Steve Fecht)

One thing Bosch’s CES announcements have in common is software. Thomas said even as the company leans into AI and more software development – the company’s new slogan is “Coded #LikeABosch” – he remains a “balanced guy.”

“I'm never going to say we're going to go all in the software or all in the hardware,” he said. “I'm always going to find a level of balance between both. We still want to be a very strong hardware supplier because you need great actuators in your vehicle, or steering gears or braking systems, or whatever it may be.”

One place where Bosch is advancing its hardware development is with the hydrogen economy. Thomas said that even though the H2 market has slowed a bit, in general, Bosch remains involved with its government and corporate partners, including by developing better electrolyzer technology in order to produce hydrogen energy in the regions where it will be used. Improved pumps are also part of the picture.

“We're still heavily involved in hydrogen,” Thomas said. “With our Rexroth division, we've developed a way to deliver hydrogen in a much more effective way. One of the most inefficient things in the market today is how you fuel a hydrogen vehicle. You lose between 60 and 70% of the energy during the fueling process. Our Rexroth group has developed a new pump that actually delivers the hydrogen in a much more effective way, so you're not losing a lot of the energy to the environment.”

Where the next administration will go when it comes to supporting hydrogen is an open question, Thomas said.

“We all know that the new government might either go as heavy into hydrogen as before, or not,” he said. “We're closely tied with the DOE, and we're happy. We're happy with what we're seeing related to the production of hydrogen in the region and usage either in fuel cells [or combustible hydrogen]. We're still a partner with a large commercial vehicle manufacturer that makes hydrogen trucks and [with] combustible hydrogen, there's lots of discussions now with the government on whether that qualifies as a zero-emission vehicle or not. We’re just going to see how the regulatory environment works out.”