Connected and autonomous vehicles will transform the world of transportation as we know it. Although fully autonomous and self-driving vehicles are still years away from widespread usage, today’s 5G networks provide the broad coverage, speed, and low latency needed as a foundation for the rollout of these advances in transportation.
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Many elements of vehicular infotainment are already in place, such as navigation systems, media, and the ability to access information that your vehicle does not readily provide to you in the way of traffic updates and warnings.
But as we move toward self-driving vehicles, the focus shifts to making the most of the in-car multimedia experience. Gaming and content-streaming services are just a couple of the infotainment features we are beginning to see, which of course creates opportunities for content partnerships and advertisers.
Without a need for a human driver, the car becomes an extension of home and office. It’s easy to imagine that the typical commuter would start their workday in the car, with the ability to do pretty much everything they could do at their desk, including joining meetings, sharing presentations, and other collaborative work.
This connectivity will rely on what 5G has to offer:
The smarter vehicles get, whether driven by humans or traveling autonomously, the greater the need to connect to the world around them.
Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) will enable the vehicles of the future to communicate with each other, with traffic lights, and with other control devices via live traffic updates. Vehicles will take advantage of features such as seamless lane control, intelligent positioning, and the ability to preemptively adapt to speed changes, both improving road safety and making traffic jams less of a headache.
The low latency, high density attributes of 5G are proving capable of supporting many new safety applications where a direct vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) connection was previously necessary.
Autonomous vehicles are clearly the future of transportation, and even though it will take time to get to a world where most vehicles are self-driving, the industry is on that path already.
In the five stages of vehicular autonomy, the industry is stepping into the third stage, one in which a car is capable of most autonomous functions but still requires attention from the driver. The fifth and final stage is when a car requires no input from a human to drive.
In the future, autonomous vehicles will essentially become computing platforms on wheels. Estimates suggest that a typical autonomous vehicle will generate several terabytes of data per day. This data will need to be analyzed via artificial intelligence, with actionable insights provided to the vehicle in near real time to help keep passengers both safe and on time.
Considering how many vehicles will be on the road and the volume of data that must be handled for an efficient transportation system, the numbers are staggering. It will require a symphony of computing power—onboard, at the edge, and in the cloud. 5G is the thread that will knit them together.
Without a fast, reliable network that can handle all these demands, the world of connected vehicles that we envision simply would not be possible. 5G is helping drive us to the connected vehicle future.
