5G Accelerating Drive Towards Autonomous Cars

5G will be the driver of autonomous cars in the future, providing more efficient transportation, improved safety and more via cellular-based vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications, according to 5G Americas.

In a new white paper published this month, 5G Americas talked up the potential of 5G in the automotive industry, noting that it will positively impact lives on the road by making vehicles aware of their surroundings.

V2X communications, in conjunction with machine learning, means that autonomous cars will not only be able to "talk" to other vehicles, but also to nearby infrastructure, Internet-based networks and pedestrians to do things like warn drivers of potential collisions with oncoming vehicles, assist with emergency braking and monitor intersections.

Release 14 of the 3GPP's LTE standards supports C-V2X for basic safety use cases today, but standards are in the works for 5G-based V2X technology that will "add advanced features with high density, very high throughput, ultra-high reliability, ultra-low latency and sub-meter positioning," 5G Americas says. It's an important step on the way towards fully autonomous cars in which in-vehicle computers do the driving themselves, and 5G Americas believes that the deployment of commercial 5G networks will accelerate the move to an autonomous future on the road.

It is, however, very early days for autonomous cars, and there are kinks to work out. Just yesterday a self-driving Uber hit and killed a pedestrian in Arizona, the first known death by an autonomous vehicle on a public road, according to The Connected Car. Uber immediately suspended its self-driving cars in Tempe (where the accident happened), Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto.

The accident raises regulatory concerns, but also the question of how to teach autonomous cars to adjust for unpredictable human behavior on the road. They may be safer when it comes to automatically following all traffic laws, but -- as is the issue with all artificial intelligence -- learning how to adapt to unscripted scenarios is more challenging.

— Sarah Thomas, Contributing Editor, Telco Transformation