Despite the obvious attractions in Tokyo (our coverage wrapped here), Los Angeles and, for that matter Guangzhou, events elsewhere in China attracted many just-auto.com readers this week.
New, China-only brands have been springing up in that vast land, now the world’s largest vehicle market, and the latest is Denza, an electric vehicle marque from a joint venture between Daimler and EV specialist BYD – Shenzhen BYD Daimler New Technology (BDNT) – for which a small dealer network is being developed ahead of launch in Beijing in April 2014.
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Supporting that sort of development, suppliers continue to move in, setting up manufacturing plants and R&D centres. Bosal is one, with a new emissions controls factory specifically, as is increasingly common, for one automaker, Suzuki; and with plans for a research centre.
Across the world, safety systems specialist Takata has a new airbag plant in Hungary scheduled to open in October and employ 1,000. That’ll be welcome locally. As, no doubt, was the factory opened last August in Russia to supply automakers there.
A few years ago, visiting the Expo in Shanghai and stuck in the inevitable queue to see a pavilion, I was intrigued to watch a young woman send a text message using Chinese characters. She made several deft strokes with a stylus and the phone recognised the full character, completed it, shrank it and added it to the rest of the message line. And on to the next.
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I guess something like that is possible with a new ‘multi-mode character input system for Chinese navigation systems‘, or HMI (human machine interface) announced in time for the Tokyo show this week by Mitsubishi Electric.
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By GlobalDataAccording to the supplier, “the HMI accepts both QuanPin and ShuangPin input using PinYin phonetic symbols, and also recognises handwriting and audible commands for a total of four input modes”.
Interpreter?
“PinYin is the Romanisation of Chinese pronunciation, QuanPin predicts words based on the initial character and ShuangPin uses alphabetic input for each Chinese character.”
Thanks.
There are cursor buttons and a jog dial and the LED display touchscreen leaves trace marks to enable a user to confirm what they have just written without having to check the console. The touchscreen built into the steering wheel allows input with either hand and is curved to fit steering wheel contours. Even though I don’t know a word of Chinese, I’d love a go.
HMI cropped up again this week with news from Faurecia and Magneti Marelli about collaboration using each other’s parts to jointly pursue integrated cockpit business. Or that’s what I think the jargon-filled press release said.
Sounds like a plan.
Have a nice weekend.
Graeme Roberts, Deputy Editor, just-auto.com
