A low cost of implementation

Despite its considerable fuel saving and CO2 reduction advantages, Sentience represents a potentially very low cost of implementation.

In a vehicle already equipped with a phone and GPS (e.g. for a navigation system) then no additional hardware would be needed for a production implementation. If these systems were not pre-installed, then the project team estimates that these functions could be provided for a unit cost of around €20 in high volumes.

Extra control and integration software would be needed but the processing and storage needs would be modest and likely to be readily integrated into almost any existing vehicle architecture. The availability of high resolution mapping would be a prerequisite for implementation but given the increased availability of such data, the project team estimate that a Sentience based system could be put into production in approximately 3-4 years based on technology availability for model year development programmes in around 18 months.