Stakeholders in the telecoms and automotive industries have formed a new coalition to address the 5G requirements of connected cars.
The 5G Automotive Association will include Audi, BMW Group, Daimler AG, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Nokia and Qualcomm.
It will work to develop, test and promote communications solutions, work to achieve standardisation and push solutions towards commercial ability.
This will include addressing issues around communications between vehicles and other machines and sensors, including wireless connectivity, security, privacy, authentication and use of the cloud.
In particular, the coalition will aim to realise the potential of next-generation mobile networks, including 5G, in connecting vehicles.
Christoph Voigt of Audi is Chairperson of the Board, while Dino Flore of Qualcomm has been appointed Director General of the Association.
The association members called on other interested partners to join the coalition. It will work with national and regional initiatives, such as the European Connected & Automated Driving Pre-Deployment Project.
Dr. Christoph Grote, Senior Vice President Electronics, BMW Group said that “it is essential that 5G fulfills the challenges of the era of digitalisation and autonomous driving.”
Members of the coalition emphasised the need for different parties to work together to build solutions.
Stakeholders are aiming to drive forward 5G development and adoption through industry cooperation.
This could ensure that the new technology follows the path of 4G standardisation, where, unlike with 3G, the entire industry united behind a single standardisation track and gave a mandate for 3GPP to succeed.
5G is the next generation of cellular connectivity technology that will follow 4G. It may include connecting the mobile phones that are commonly used today, but also connecting machine-to-machine and internet of things (IoT) devices.
In order to connect the latter, it will need to be a more energy-efficient network, with faster data download and upload speeds with lower latency.
