Visteon’s India team develops cockpit technologies for Tata Harrier

Visteon Corporation, the global technology company that designs, engineers and manufactures innovative cockpit electronics and connected car solutions for the world’s major vehicle manufacturers, is seeing strong momentum and contribution from its India team. The most recent development, specific to the Indian passenger vehicle market, has been for Tata Motors’ flagship SUV – the Harrier – where Visteon’s domain controller powers the 8.8-inch ‘floating island’ infotainment system and India’s first digital cluster with seven-inch colour TFT display.

Visteon Corporation, the market leader in the fast-growing cockpit domain controller segment, launched India’s first SmartCore cockpit domain controller that powers the infotainment system and digital and hybrid instrument cluster variants on the Tata Harrier.

The integrated digital cockpit of the future will consist of multiple displays powered by a single domain controller for instrument cluster, infotainment, connectivity, HUD and driver monitoring functions. Visteon’s SmartCore (above) was the industry’s first domain controller – launched with Mercedes Benz in March 2018.

The Tata Harrier delivers a new user experience based on an intelligently designed interior and future-ready connectivity and infotainment, incorporating high-resolution displays, voice recognition and driver alerts. The Harrier constitutes Visteon’s third SmartCore program launch with global automakers. SmartCore is Visteon's first-to-market domain controller. 

The Tata Harrier’s cockpit electronics technologies have been fully designed, developed and manufactured at Visteon’s facilities in India. The infotainment system and instrument clusters were designed by Visteon’s Technical Centers in Chennai and Pune and are produced by the manufacturing plant in Chennai.
Visteon’s SmartCore drives the infotainment and instrument cluster domains on one system-on-chip (SoC), offering large thin-film transistor (TFT) displays for a best-in-class user experience with seamless human-machine interaction (HMI) – a unique feature of Visteon’s first-to-market domain controller.

The SmartCore solution incorporates the silver box, a tablet-style infotainment display with button panel and a reconfigurable instrument cluster on premium models. The infotainment system variants offer display configurations ranging from 7-inch to 8.8-inch TFTs, while the instrument cluster options include a 4-inch LCD and a 7-inch color TFT – the first in the India market – and an intuitive user interface.

The main infotainment features include easy device convergence through Android Auto and CarPlay, voice recognition, Bluetooth and text-to-speech (TTS). The system also supports smartphone-based navigation and connected apps.

Visteon says it is the first auto supplier offering an automotive-grade, integrated domain controller approach that can independently operate the infotainment system, cluster and other domains on one SoC. SmartCore’s architecture is fully scalable and cybersecured through virtualisation of the different cores and controlled firewalls. This enables independent functional domains with different levels of ASIL requirements – initially driver information and infotainment – while future domains can be added to operate separately and securely.

Also read: Visteon targets ride on megatrends for India

Visteon opens fourth India tech centre in Goa, will work on AI, ADAS, deep learning

Sachin Lawande, Visteon president & CEO, writes on 'Evolving the digital cockpit on the path to autonomous driving' for Autocar Professional

Visteon premieres SmartCore cockpit domain controller on new Mercedes-Benz A-Class