Improving the Automobile

Dear readers,

The ATZ, or "automotive technical journal" as it translates from the original German, is the oldest still existing automotive journal in the world. Ever since its inception, the ATZ has reported on the most mobile issue in the world: vehicles. The vehicle has been continuously adapting itself ever since its early beginnings and is now, once again, in a transformational phase: autonomous and electric driving, artificial intelligence, and micro-mobility will not reshape its appearance totally, but will still redefine it. Just as the vehicle and mobility itself are changing, so too has the ATZ over the decades. Always with the goal of providing insights into relevant and trail-blazing information regarding the latest research and development activities in the automotive sector, and to offer its readers high-quality and expert journalism.

Over many years, two fields of interest have crystallized out of the extremely wide range of topics the ATZ deals with that need to be examined individually: the powertrain and all its components in the MTZ, and the field of electrical and electronic technology with a stronger focus on a component-oriented view in the ATZelectronics. The latter has appeared with this focus as a sister journal to the ATZ for 18 years, depending on how you calculate it, or 25 years if you consider the start of the journal to be when it was a special supplement. Naturally, the MTZ with its 85^th anniversary next year beats that marginally.

The ATZelectronics considers itself to be a trend scout for automotive development and the manufacturing of electronic components and their software. From my point of view, a particular field of interest is the linking of new and further developments in the field of electronics with an application-oriented point of view: realized or planned applications via new components plus practical aspects of new electronics hardware in the sense of concrete solutions. For me as an editor, keeping an eye on this symbiosis is of the utmost importance for the target reader group of technical personnel working at OEMs as well as vehicle system and component suppliers. This is because in the meantime electronics has become the key enabler for basically all improvements in a vehicle, be it relating to the powertrain, the chassis, or software-based functions − and without (electronic) hardware, there can be no software.

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Enjoy reading this edition.

Robert Unseld

Responsible Editor