Premium automotive manufacturers have traditionally relied on highly individualized vehicle configurations as a core business model, driven by extensive option catalogues and customer-specific feature combinations. While this approach has been commercially successful, it imposes significant scalability challenges on emerging Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV) architectures, particularly with respect to power distribution and safety concepts. As future architectures transition from conventional to electronic fusing, new constraints arise regarding diagnostic coverage, thermal management, latency, and functional safety. Existing partitioning principles for power and software domains - originally developed for classical fuse boxes and decentralized hardware - prove insufficient when applied to central electronic power distribution units.

This presentation analyzes the impact of unused content within electronic power distribution systems that must accommodate all potential customer options, regardless of actual vehicle configuration. By introducing a revised partitioning approach tailored to centralized architectures, it is possible to significantly reduce complexity, hardware overhead, and system cost. The work further outlines an optimized electrical energy distribution concept that maintains customer-specific flexibility while improving scalability and manufacturability. Finally, the talk provides an outlook on the transition toward 48-volt topologies, highlighting the associated challenges for scalable electronic protection and the implications for future migration strategies.

Customer functions and software define the requirements for future vehicle energy systems.

In software‑defined vehicles, rising power demand, safety‑critical functions and continuous feature updates can no longer be addressed by hardware scaling alone.

A software‑defined energy management orchestrates power generation, distribution and storage across a highly integrated high‑voltage system and a zonal low-voltage powernet. While hardware and software are architecturally decoupled, energy management software must explicitly account for physical limits, safety constraints, electromagnetic effects and aging behavior to ensure reliable operation over the entire vehicle lifecycle.

Clear electrical interfaces, consistent grounding and safety concepts, and intelligent operating strategies enable a shift from classical low‑voltage architectures toward scalable zonal power distribution. This includes redundant HV/LV conversion concepts, software‑controlled operating modes, and the replacement of large low‑voltage energy storage by minimized, function‑oriented “power storage” solutions for safety‑relevant loads and future SDV customer functions.

Comprehensive virtual development is a key enabler of this transition. Model‑based power net and harness optimization, high‑frequency interference and EMC simulation, and multi‑level virtual validation flows allow physical risks to be identified early and hardware to be right‑sized without compromising availability or safety.

Energy management thus becomes a core software capability in software‑defined vehicles, enabling cost‑efficient architecture, lifecycle resilience and continuous software‑driven innovation in future vehicle energy systems.

Modern electric vehicle HV wiring architectures are facing increasingly demanding requirements. Fast-paced developments in HV batteries and powertrains require a paradigm shift that addresses these developments at harness level as well.

Traditional approaches are no longer sufficient: physical limits are being exceeded, and subsystem management is becoming more complex. Active cooling of HV wiring systems becomes a key enabler for meeting modern architecture needs and avoiding system bottlenecks.

Early solutions often struggled due to unclear requirements, insufficient modeling, and a lack of system-level integration across domains such as thermal management, harness processing, and vehicle integration.

The transition from isolated component-level optimization to a holistic system perspective is therefore essential. With our major innovation Power2Flow® serving as core backbone, aligning electrical and thermal/fluidic principles, leveraging full-system analysis, and defining suitable interfaces, technical risks can be reduced while ensuring maximum scalability and seamless integration. 

Targeted cooling minimizes system overhead, while modular, validated designs accelerate adoption across platforms. This combination of focused thermal management, standardization, and collaborative development enables sustainable, scalable, and series-ready solutions that meet the increasing performance demands of e-mobility.

GG Group, VOSS Automotive and Amphenol Tuchel Electronics, joining forces in a unique partnership model, provide insights into how to fulfil all these system-integration requirements. Robust integration principles, transparent roles, and standardization ensure that increasing performance demands can be met without uncontrolled complexity, laying the foundation for reliable HV wiring in the era of electrified mobility.

The automotive industry is rapidly transitioning toward highly complex, software‑defined vehicles, demanding new methods for efficient and reliable wiring harness development. Today’s environment is characterized by distributed data across diverse tools, fragmented responsibilities, and a multitude of inconsistent data formats—all of which disrupt data continuity and hinder collaboration across the value chain.

This presentation demonstrates how establishing data continuity across technical disciplines and organizational boundaries—from architecture to wiring harness design, between ECAD and MCAD, and across OEM–TIER1 interfaces—prevents information loss and enables consistent, model‑based engineering. Consolidating distributed data into a single model‑based approach supports horizontal and vertical traceability, automated wiring synthesis, and the propagation of design variations from system architecture down to wiring and harness engineering.

OEMs face the challenge of managing variants within one unified platform, requiring a mindset shift from predefined hardware variants to feature‑centric, generic variation descriptions. This aligns with the industry‑wide move from pre‑build hardware configurations toward post‑build software activation.

TIER1 suppliers must evaluate and validate wiring and harness designs under continuous change, managing thousands of updates during production. Their tasks include concept evaluation, architecture studies, harness topology optimization, and the counting and costing activities required for RFQ processes.

Together, these advancements illustrate how data continuity serves as a critical enabler for handling complexity, improving collaboration, and accelerating development across the complete wiring harness ecosystem.

As vehicles become more electrified and increasingly automated, the stability of low-voltage power distribution gains strategic importance, especially for safety-relevant systems such as steering systems. Today’s dominant approaches, centered on advanced eFuses and rearchitected energy distribution networks, deliver the required protection performance but often at the cost of significant integration effort, tooling changes, and wiring harness redesign. This creates a growing challenge for OEMs and Tier1 suppliers aiming to upgrade existing platforms efficiently. 

This presentation introduces a Smart Safety Adapter that offers a streamlined, cost-sensitive  alternative. Installed directly in front of a safety-relevant load, the adapter provides an energy buffer during undervoltage events, isolating the protected system only when needed and without altering the surrounding wiring harness. Its ability to maintain bidirectional current flow, also for recuperation scenarios, helps avoid critical voltage deviations while preserving compatibility with established component interfaces. 

For wiring harness engineers and platform architects, the concept enables high safety levels without rewiring major parts of the harness. For OEMs, it offers a cost-sensitive path to integrate new safety-relevant functions into midcycle updates or derivative models. And for Tier1 suppliers, it opens opportunities to deliver value-added, safety-aligned modules with minimal impact on architectures. 

Overall, the Smart Safety Adapter presents a scalable, integration-friendly alternative to complex eFuse solutions, supporting fail-operational behavior while reducing redesign effort across the value chain.

Until recently the off-state of safety critical systems in cars could always assumed to be a safe state. However, with the advent of ADAS and especially autonomous driving functionality this is no longer the case. The electrification of other functionalities like the introduction of steer or break by wire systems also negates the off-state as a safe state. 

This fact leads to new design considerations in the architecture of the on-board power supply of cars and its wiring harness. New architectures have to be implemented to ensure the continuous power supply of safety critical items in case of a fault. 

To facilitate a quicker design optimization the preliminary safety verification of a large number of possible architecture layouts has to be automated. New, more innovative designs can be tried and cost reduction at the same safety integrity level can be achieved. 

Automation is facilitated with a model-based systems engineering approach. Architecture variations are automatically built from a base architecture, automatically simulated, verified with fault injection simulations and evaluates according to safety, quality and price criteria. 

Our example architecture for the wiring harness was defined by the Arbeitskreis 30 Elektrische Energie of the Forschungsvereinigung Automobiltechnik. It consists of four Power Distribution Units (PDUs) with up to four loads attached to each. Two of those are safety-critical and the rest are non-safety-critical. The PDUs can be connected by the main connection and an energy backbone as backup. They are protected by eFuses. The methodology for simulation, safety verification and evaluation is shown.

Aluminum is already a cornerstone material in modern automotive engineering — from body structures to chassis components — yet copper still dominates electrical contact technology. This contrast raises an timely question for the future of vehicle electrical systems: can aluminum become a reliable, scalable alternative for terminals and interfaces in wiring harnesses? When is a electrical contact reliable?

Our contribution explores a aluminum concept that integrates conductor, contact, and vehicle interface (if possible) into a consistent material system. By reducing material diversity, such an approach simplifies system architecture, minimizes galvanic interactions, and opens new opportunities for lightweight and sustainable design. The focus is not merely on replacing copper, but on understanding the functional, material, and process requirements that aluminum contacts must fulfill to be a valid option.

Through a combination of application insights, material comparisons, and design considerations, we discuss how aluminum terminals can achieve robust electrical and mechanical performance. The presentation highlights key factors such as plating strategies, connection reliability, manufacturability, and system integration. Ultimately, we aim to challenge established conventions and demonstrate how aluminum-based connection systems can support the electrical architectures.

Corrosion of grounding eyelets remains a major durability risk in automotive wire harnesses exposed to moisture, salt spray, temperature cycling, and vibration. Field experience shows that conventional sealing solutions, particularly adhesive-lined heat shrink tubing, can fail to provide robust protection when applied to complex eyelet geometries, high wire counts, or designs with extended side walls. These limitations allow water ingress through capillary pathways between wire strands, leading to corrosion, increased electrical resistance, and potential system malfunction.

This presentation examines the dominant root causes of grounding eyelet corrosion and evaluates the practical limits of traditional sealing concepts against current OEM requirements. Dip soldering is introduced as an intrinsic sealing method that fills internal voids between wire strands, effectively eliminating capillary leakage paths rather than relying solely on external barriers. Key process parameters, common failure modes, and the importance of automation for repeatability are discussed. The approach is compared with alternative sealing technologies, with validation considerations based on vehicle-level corrosion testing. The objective is to provide guidance for selecting robust, geometry-tolerant sealing strategies to improve long-term electrical reliability.

Key Contribution

This work systematically correlates grounding eyelet geometry, process parameters, and sealing technologies to demonstrate why conventional external sealing methods fail under complex harness conditions and how internal, capillary‑driven and hybrid sealing strategies can significantly improve long‑term corrosion resistance and electrical reliability.

As electric vehicles (EVs) evolve, busbar insulation materials face increasing performance and sustainability requirements, driven by emerging international standards and stakeholders’ expectations. ARKEMA, as a polymer material supplier, is actively developing innovative solutions to address these challenges. This presentation introduces two advancements in polyamide technology for high-voltage busbar applications. First, a biobased PA11 material designed to achieve temperature class 125 °C, overcoming limitations of conventional PA12 while reducing carbon footprint. Second, a partially biobased polyamide offering enhanced electrical properties to meet new demands. Comparative data and material characteristics will be discussed, highlighting how these solutions combine technical performance with sustainability. Additionally, insights from participation in the ISO committee shaping future busbar standards will illustrate how evolving requirements influence material development strategies, enabling safer, more efficient, and environmentally responsible EV technologies.