Category: Powertrain

Electrified, Home Page, Powertrain

I’m really lucky to be working in an area where we’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible

mandalc

“I started with Jaguar Land Rover as a Diesel emissions engineer over six years ago, three years ago I was given the opportunity to work at a new test facility that we’d built to help with all of the emissions testing we needed to do. What I didn’t appreciate at the time was just how incredibly capable and world-class that facility is.

JLR has the largest number of powertrain test beds of any company in the world. For the last three years I’ve been working together with the team who operate these beds. My role is to work out how we can push the capabilities of these test facilities to replace the work we currently do on the road and do it faster, more accurately and with a higher level of quality and capturing more data.

I’m engaging with teams across powertrain and beyond to understand what testing we can do and if we run a car or a powertrain once, how many people can use that data for their own work?

I’ve also been pushing this further by taking these cases from the road into the fully virtual space. I work with our CAE teams to allow our development teams to work on technologies and understand how they perform before we’ve got something physical to test. By the time physical hardware turns up we know how it works and how best to extract the most performance from it.

I feel like I’m really lucky to be working in an area where we’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. I never have two days the same and I’m always thinking “what’s next?”, that to me is what we’re all about, we can’t stand still.

We’re in the midst of a massive change in the automotive industry and with Jaguar Land Rover, I’m getting a great opportunity to influence how we react to that.”

Come and get involved and #ReimagineYourFuture: http://ow.ly/u9Cj50GcPg0

#LifeatJLR #Engineering

Electrical Engineering, Hungary, India, Powertrain, Shannon, Software, Technology

The inaugural Jaguar Land Rover GDD Hackathon

Jaguar Land Rover Careers

True to its name, it was indeed a global event with teams joining across all the GDD hubs in Gaydon, Manchester, Portland, Shannon, Hungary and India. The first stage of the competition kicked off with sourcing problem statements from all Jaguar Land Rover colleagues in May, and finally six problem statements were announced in June across the three domains – Electrical engineering, Power Electronics and Mechatronics.

Putting ourselves forward for the challenge

My teammates, Abhijith N Balan and Ronit Hire Jaisingh, and I are Software Engineers at Jaguar Land Rover India. We heard about the hackathon through word of mouth and decided to register for it. It would be our first hackathon since graduating from college two years ago and we were excited to get this chance to showcase our skills. With about a week to go for the registration deadline, we started having meetings to go through each problem statement in detail and choose the one that aligns with our vision the most. We found the HMI Navigation Testing problem statement intriguing and implementable in the near future in our cars. This was ideal since our prime goal was to help improve the customer experience we offer by solving real world technical problems. We also reckoned that it might have the most teams competing (which turned out to be correct), which was perfect since we were up for a challenge.

One of our last meetings leading up to the hackathon was to decide our team’s name for registration, which ran for over an hour (not our proudest moment) before we ended up finalizing “Chaotic Coyotes” (combined with our GitLab GraphRunner, a nod to the beloved childhood cartoon, the Road Runner). At the end of the meeting, we joked that this might be the longest meeting we have for the entire duration of the hackathon. If only we knew how wrong we were going to be!

The hackathon kicked off on 1st July at 12 noon BST

We realized that the deadline for the competition was the next day midnight for the UK, which was 4:30 am on a Saturday for us, far from ideal. At the start we felt our chances to complete in time looked bleak due to this fact. Nevertheless, we decided upon one thing – whenever one of us is working, he will join the teams meeting so that the others know about it. This probably turned out to be a game changer for us as over the next 36 hours we ended up with more than 25 hours of meetings! For our problem statement, we had to develop an algorithm that was capable of automating the HMI Validation of the car infotainment screen.

Given the home screen our algorithm had to ensure that we clicked on all buttons and visited all the available screens so that they can be tested, with two key factors deciding the quality of the solution – the efficiency and randomness. The algorithm needed to be efficient enough to not keep on repeatedly testing the same screens or buttons, and yet random enough to mimic the typical user’s behaviour where they might choose to visit certain screens more often than others. Balancing this trade-off would be crucial to developing an acceptable solution. I have my teammates to thank for coming up with ingenious approaches and a few clever workarounds which we stitched together and incorporated into one satisfactory solution.

The 36 hours of the hackathon for us were replete with all the clichés of a typical coding hackathon during our college days – sacrificing all sleep, forgetting meals sometimes, discovering a blunder less than an hour from the deadline and scrambling to correct it! Finally, at exactly 4:30 am on Saturday we submitted our solution and heaved a sigh of relief.

The presentation

After catching up on all the lost sleep over the weekend, we prepared for the next stage of the competition – the presentation. The judges had a lot of questions for us which we answered confidently and a few valuable inputs too which could add to our algorithm. We felt good about our chances after the presentation, but were mindful of the other teams too who undoubtedly would have brilliant solutions of their own. Before the results were declared we even got the chance to view the work done by all the other teams, and we found some strong contenders among those with quite efficient approaches.

Winning!

We were delighted to learn that our team was announced the winner, and excited when we were told about what lied ahead. Our implementation had impressed the judges and post the hackathon we have been working on bettering it and pitching to the senior management. We received quite positive feedback for our solution from the Chief Engineer (Software Validation & Integration) at Jaguar Land Rover and his team.

Recently, we also pitched our solution to the Elec & Systems Engineering Director who reviewed all the winning entries from the hackathon. In the next few weeks, we will be working on integrating our algorithm with the current testing strategy by the validation team for a PoC. All in all, it was an exhilarating experience for us. It was a commendable effort by the organizing committee to set this up from scratch and we hope to see our project come to fruition in our cars soon!

Siddharth Brahmbhatt, Software Engineer – ADAS

Electrical Engineering, Engineering, People, Powertrain, Undergraduate

The real faces of JLR – Jose Cordova

Jaguar Land Rover Careers

Jaguar Land Rover was an ideal place to have my first engineering work experience. On the technical side, I applied the theory I was thought at University to real problems, this showed me a perspective of engineering that you rarely experience in uni and helped me develop my engineering and problem-solving skills.

On the non-technical side, working on different teams and sites helped me develop my communication, team working, and presentation skills.

Right now the automotive industry is going through numerous changes and JLR is leading in so many of them. It is an exciting time to work here, and I believe a great future awaits. I would like to work in the challenging but friendly environment that JLR fosters and help shape the company and the industry.

 

We’re looking for early talent with the ability to Think Beyond.

We want to transform the automotive landscape and shape the future of mobility – so our early careers training programmes are the route to an inspired career. Each is designed to give you the ideal mix of on-the-job training and focused, classroom-based learning.

Find out more

 

 

Early Careers, People, Powertrain, Research, Undergraduate, Who We Are

The real faces of JLR – Egheosa Ogbomo

Jaguar Land Rover Careers

My name is Egheosa Ogbomo and I am currently studying Mechanical Engineering at Warwick university.

I worked in the Powertrain Research department as part of the project management team during my summer at Jaguar. It was super exciting because I got to see how exactly JLR work to develop the niche and novel technology that makes their cars stand out from the competition!

Working with so many different stakeholders dramatically improved my teamwork skills and the nature of the project I worked on meant I took on a lot of technical knowledge too! Everyone I worked with was incredibly friendly and very supportive so I’d love to return to work with them again!

 

We’re looking for early talent with the ability to Think Beyond.

We want to transform the automotive landscape and shape the future of mobility – so our early careers training programmes are the route to an inspired career. Each is designed to give you the ideal mix of on-the-job training and focused, classroom-based learning.

Find out more

 

 

Early Careers, People, Post-Graduate, Powertrain, Research

Joan Abdennebi – Postgraduate Engineer

Jaguar Land Rover Careers

Whilst studying MSc Automotive Engineering at ISAT University (France), I chose to write my Master’s Thesis  in Jaguar Land Rover’s Powertrain Research Department – Engine Simulation Team.

I was excited to be part of a key project; requiring focused skills and allowing me to apply and improve my Engineering knowledge. This was a great way to learn to deliver a project in accordance with time, cost and quality consideration and working with people from the industry, meant that my business behaviours and presentation skills also significantly improved.

I had undertaken a number of placements during my studies and the one at Jaguar Land Rover gave a good balance between my desires and motivation. I received all the support I needed from my manager in order to feel integrated, achieve my objectives and ultimately find a permanent role.

Once my Placement was complete; JLR offered me a role as Lead Engineer for the Simulation Development team, within the Performance, Efficiency and Driveability Department; a role which allowed me to further improve my interpersonal and technical skills. My objective was to improve fuel consumption and emissions simulation at vehicle level for the new Real Driving Emissions (RDE) legislation cycle and I even got the opportunity to act as Mentor to one of the newer Postgraduate Engineers.

I have recently moved to a new role within the Engine Programme team and am looking forward to the different challenges this will bring.

Starting my adventure as a Postgraduate in Jaguar Land Rover was the best decision I ever made for my career.