Adrian König

Technische Universität München | TUM · Institute of Automotive Technology

With the rise of battery electric vehicles to mass production, many technical improvements have been realized to drastically increase the electric range, efficiency, and sustainability. However, insights into those valuable state-of-the-art solutions are usually not shared with researchers due to the strict non-disclosure policies of electric vehic...

Automation and electrification are changing vehicles and mobility. Whereas electrification is mainly changing the powertrain, automation enables the rethinking of the vehicle and its applications. The actual driving range is an important requirement for the design of automated and electric vehicles, especially if they are part of a fleet. To size t...

Rapid prototyping has become increasingly popular over the past years. However, its application is heavily confined to a part size that fits the small build volume of additive machines. This paper presents a universal design method to overcome this limitation while preserving the economic advantages of rapid prototyping over conventional processes....

Vehicle doors have barely changed in recent decades, and nor has the car. Since autonomous driving will lead to changes in vehicles and how they are used, their doors will also have to be rethought. In the project UNICARagil, researchers from several universities in Germany design and build four prototypes of driverless and autonomous vehicles, whi...

Vehicle concept development is a domain that has applied and detailed its process over decades. The megatrends of the 21st century of “automation” and “sharing” influence the vehicle concept in such a manner that this well-running process needs an update. The vehicle itself and the customer of the vehicle are changing and therefore the components o...

Autonomous driving will not just change vehicles themselves, but also the entire concept of mobility. New business models and the expansion of individual mobility to new groups of society are merely examples of possible impact. In order to create optimal vehicles for new technologies right from the start, vehicle concept optimization helps to find...

The modeling of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) still represents a challenge for vehicle manufacturers. The installation of the new types of components needed for BEVs gives rise to uncertainties in the quantification of parameters like the vehicle's weight. Indeed, vehicle weight plays a key role, since it has a drastic effect on the vehicle's ra...

Although battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are locally emission-free and assist automakers in reducing their carbon footprint, two major disadvantages are their shorter range and higher production costs compared to combustion engines. These drawbacks are primarily due to the battery, which is generally the heaviest and most expensive component of a...

The launch of both battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and autonomous vehicles (AVs) on the global market has triggered ongoing radical changes in the automotive sector. On the one hand, the new characteristics of the BEV powertrain compared to the combustion type have resulted in new central parameters, such as vehicle range, which then become an imp...

Defining a vehicle concept during the early development phase is a challenging task, since only a limited number of design parameters are known. For battery electric vehicles (BEVs), vehicle weight is a design parameter, which needs to be estimated by using an iterative approach, thus causing weight fluctuations during the early development phase....

Automobile manufacturers are in the midst of the greatest phase of transformation in their history. The paradigms they used over recent decades are gradually dissolving. Two new megatrends are drastically changing the market. On the one hand, there is sustainability, which is causing the ever-increasing replacement of the combustion engine by the e...

Due to a variety of possible activities, which passengers are able to follow in a self-driving vehicle, we are convinced that the flexibility of mobility as a service allows offering different theme-taxis. Within the project UNICARagil (founded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany), we develop a concept for theme taxis. Sinc...

Dimensional chains are the basis for testing the feasibility of vehicle architectures in the early development phase since they allow for parametrical vehicle modeling. Parametrical modeling is employed in the early development of the vehicle in order to enable the estimation of the space available for powertrain components. For battery electric ve...

Increasing automation of road-bound vehicles will lead to autonomous, driverless vehicle concepts. Although vehicle manufacturers are showing visions of such concepts, their design process is still not largely researched. New degrees of freedom will not only eliminate the driver’s workplace, but will also make it possible to pursue secondary activi...