Urban Modular Vehicle (UMV)
At DLR, the Next Generation Car (NGC) project is aimed at developing various vehicles that incorporate the trends, technologies and development methods of future generation vehicles.
The main goals of the NGC are: protecting the climate, ensuring mobility, improving safety and comfort, and managing the transformation of the transport system. Part of the NGC family of new road vehicle concepts is the Urban Modular Vehicle (UMV), the focus of which is on urban mobility, electrification, the introduction of highly automated vehicle systems and on safe body structures for urban use.
The UMV is a unique way of illustrating the ability to move from conventional human-driven road vehicles to completely autonomous vehicles. The NGC UMV offers an intelligent, modular platform concept for the vehicle body structure, in the powertrain and the different levels of automation. The UMV has a number of variants: Basic, Long, Cargo with driver’s workplace, autonomous People Mover / Cargo Mover and Skateboard for flexible people/load carriers, with 90% common parts for the body-in-white.
The function-integrated modular body of the multi-material design offers optimised structures, particularly for battery-powered electric vehicles. The design philosophy is reflected in a frame structure that makes extensive use of aluminium for profiles and nodes, with function-integrated sandwich surfaces and flat components, and FRP surface components. All variants are based on the same electric body-in-white platform.
The intelligent design of the modularisation interfaces enables a high degree of parts commonality. This equal-share strategy extends to the exterior components; for example, the People Mover can use a large number of Basic rear parts thanks to the interface at the centre of the B-pillar. The body platforms of the UMV have been designed to meet the requirements of all current Euro NCAP crash tests and selected IIHS tests. The crash performance of the UMV floor crash module has been successfully tested by the project in a pole crash test. The various levels of automation from assisted to fully automated driving are reflected in the modularisation strategy. The UMV incrementally offers full 360-degree environment detection and C2X networking for coordination with other road users and the infrastructure.
