SAA Announces the 2020 Mobility Innovation Award Winners

November 18, 2020 -- Today the Society of Automotive Analysts (SAA) awarded its Mobility Innovation Awards during the online Mobility Innovation Summit today. The winners included:

Innovations in Lightweighting Category:

First Place: BASF for the 2021 Toyota Sienna Third Row Plastic Freestanding Seat Frame. In the previous Sienna model, the third-row seat was comprised of 15 different steel components, making it very heavy. Toyota wanted the 2021 Sienna’s third seat to be lighter and cost competitive while exceeding all performance criteria. The seat is 30% lighter compared to the previous model. Toyota was able to meet their cost objective and saved 15% compared to the prior generation. The third-row seat is the first of its kind in the way it is designed without inserts as a fully injected seat back.

Second Place: Meridian Lightweight Technologies for its Lightweight Magnesium Door Upper Beltline Reinforcement Casting. The high-pressure die-cast magnesium door upper beltline reinforcement was a collaborative design between General Motors and Meridian for the 2020 Chevrolet Corvette. This casting application represents the industry first usage of magnesium for a beltline reinforcement.

Technologies Enabling a New Business Model Category:

First Place: Sibros for its Deep Connectivity Platform. The world’s first Deep Connectivity Platform is a single system for performing deep Over-the-Air software updates and data collection on over 80 electronic control units. The platform is a single, integrated suite of embedded vehicle firmware products with intelligent cloud applications to connect and manage all software and data from inside the vehicle, across various cellular and wireless networks and into cloud systems.

Second Place: Serinus Labs, Inc. for its Early Warning EV Lithium-Ion Battery System.  Electric vehicle OEMs are seeking solutions for advance early warning for safety against catastrophic failure, which today’s sensing technologies deployed in battery packs cannot do. Serinus introduced the idea of detecting trace amounts of vented gas from EV lithium-ion cells with its proprietary LiCANS (Lithium-ion Cell Analyte Nano Sensor) technology.

The Mobility Innovation Awards, sponsored by Ducker, were judged by a three-person panel consisting of:

Abhay (Abe) Vadhavkar, Retired Engineering Director

Noel Mack, Vice President of Technology, Lightweight Innovations for Tomorrow (LIFT)

Lindsay Brooke, Editor-in-Chief of Automotive Engineering and Autonomous Vehicle Engineering Magazines, SAE International

“The Mobility Innovation Awards provide us with the opportunity to recognize exceptional innovations that are developed anywhere in the world, and to encourage new ideas and perspectives,” said Abey Abraham, Managing Director, Ducker. “As an industry, we have been forced to think out of the box, be collaborative and put aside the notion of ‘that is always how we have done it.’ Mobility is evolving quickly and this year’s entries showed that we are ready to evolve with it.”

Honorable Mention entries were also recognized. These entries included:

Innovations in Lightweighting Category:

• ZF - Electric Park Brake
• Flash Steelworks - Stronger than Titanium, Lighter than Aluminum
• Magna -  EZ Entry Seat
• Vicor - Power Module
• Tesseract Structural Innovations, Inc. - Uniform Deceleration Unit

Technology Enabling New Business Model Category:

• Drishti - AI-powered production
• LexisNexis - Access management solutions
• Gentex - Integrated Toll Module
• Stoneridge - MirrorEye Camera Monitor System
• Nexteer Automotive - High-Output Electric Power Steering
• Freudenberg Sealing Technologies - DIAvent Intelligent Pressure Management Solution
• Quantifly - Automated Aerial Car Counting
• Otonomo - Self-Serve Data Platform and API
• Ford X - Mobile Healthcare Units

About the Society of Automotive Analysts (SAA)

The SAA’s mission is to provide members timely access to automotive insights from a wide range of perspectives. The SAA aims to provide automotive professionals exclusive access to industry leaders, early insights and outstanding networking opportunities. SAA members include every automotive industry professional interested in timely and useful auto industry data, discussion and dissemination of ideas, concepts and solutions. For more information on the SAA, go to www.SAAauto.com.

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