Huawei and 5G Cars

Suddenly, 5G cars seem to be upon us.

On June 16, GAC New Energy Aion V was launched, claiming to be "the world's first 5G car"; the BAIC ARCFOX α-T, which is currently on pre-sale, is said to be the world's first commercial vehicle equipped with 5G technology; the BYD Han, which will be launched soon, claims to be "the world's first model equipped with Huawei's 5G technology"; in addition, the Roewe MARVEL-R, which will be launched in August, is also customized as "the world's first mass-produced 5G car with full cabin interaction"...

BAIC ARCFOX α-T is equipped with Huawei 5G technology

These four models all use Huawei's 5G products. In early May, Huawei, together with three subsidiaries of FAW Group and 18 other automakers including Changan Automobile, officially announced the establishment of the "5G Automotive Ecosystem" to "accelerate the commercialization of 5G technology in the automotive industry and jointly create 5G cars that consumers can perceive."

What is a 5G car? How powerful is it? With the appearance of some of the above-mentioned cooperation results, we can get a glimpse of it. But everyone should not have too high expectations. Impatient industry insiders and consumers may need to be more patient.

1. 5G Cars Arrive  

In some 5G mobile phone tests, it only takes 8 seconds to download a 1.2G movie. Fast network speed is what most people imagine 5G to be.

In fact, the so-called 5G is the fifth generation of mobile communication technology, the latest generation of cellular mobile communication technology, and an extension of 4G, 3G and 2G.

Under the 5G network, the communication performance is extremely powerful. It is not only fast, but also has low latency - 1 millisecond; high network stability - 99.999%.

On June 6, 2019, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued 5G commercial licenses to the three major operators and China Radio and Television, and China officially entered the first year of 5G commercialization.

What level has 5G developed to now?

On the first anniversary of the licensing, Lu Chuncong, deputy director of the Information and Communications Administration of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, introduced that currently, basic telecommunications companies across the country have built more than 250,000 5G base stations.

250,000 base stations may seem like a lot, but since 5G base stations cover a much shorter distance, there is still a long way to go to achieve continuous coverage. Taking China Mobile as an example, as of the end of April 2020, the total number of base stations in the country reached 4.62 million, including 3.15 million 4G base stations and nearly 140,000 5G base stations. By the end of the year, the scale of 5G base stations will exceed 300,000. Even by the end of the year, it will only be one-tenth of the 4G base stations.

Source: Wu Hequan, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering

The national 5G base station construction goal for 2020 is to achieve continuous outdoor coverage in all prefecture-level cities across the country, key coverage in county towns and townships, and indoor coverage in key scenarios.

At the user level, there are more than 36 million 5G users. However, due to incomplete base station construction, many consumers have not enabled 5G communications. Moreover, if the current operator's pricing method for communication charges is used, although 5G transmission is fast, mobile phone users will also spend money very quickly. Therefore, the actual application of 5G mobile phones is still a small-scale, localized scenario.

5G has just been introduced to cars. As mentioned above, at least four models have been equipped with 5G. Currently, only the GAC New Energy Aion V has just been launched, and the other three models are still on pre-sale.

However, with these models as the starting point, products from 18 car companies that have cooperated with Huawei have been launched one after another, and in 2020 there will be a batch of 5G cars for consumers to choose from.

2 What can 5G cars do?

What is a 5G car? What powerful functions does it have? Let’s first look at what a 5G car has.

Source: Huawei 5G+C-V2X Internet of Vehicles Solution

To download the Huawei 5G+C-V2X Internet of Vehicles Solution, please follow our official account: evobserver, and enter: Huawei 5G or Huawei Internet of Vehicles in the official account dialog box.

According to Miao Junhai, general manager of Huawei's C-V2X and vehicle-road collaboration field, in his speech "Huawei 5G+C-V2X Internet of Vehicles Solution", from the perspective of car manufacturers and car users, Huawei provides 5G communication modules, or directly provides 5G T-Box. This is the hardware part. Based on this, vehicles can realize eMBB (enhanced mobile broadband) + C-V2X (cellular communication-based Internet of Vehicles) functions.

Huawei announced the launch of the above products during the 2019 Shanghai Auto Show. Huawei's 5G communication module and chip are also produced by Huawei itself - Balong 5000.

Huawei 5G module

What changes will happen to cars based on 5G communication technology from Huawei and other companies?

Ying Yulun, founder and chairman of the well-known Internet of Vehicles company Boya, summarized that 5G will mainly bring three major applications in automobiles.

"5G's low latency and high bandwidth are of great help to autonomous driving. Once 5G road network equipment matures, coupled with 5G communications and the collaboration of supercomputing brains like Huawei, Nvidia or Tesla, autonomous driving can be achieved," he said.

Secondly, after 5G communication is realized, "interaction with large bandwidth will become easy, so high-definition, flexible, curved screens... will become more popular because they can show higher-quality content." Ying Yilun said, "In the past, we may only need to watch 720p, but now we can watch 4K."

At the same time, the interconnectivity of devices will become even greater. Ying Yilun said that, for example, the image from the front camera of the car can be transmitted to the TV at home.

Third, in the 5G stage, smart cars will be connected to smart cities. "In a digital city, every road and street you walk on will be surrounded by various multimedia, whether it is 5G car networking, 5G mobile phones, or 5G smart devices, it will bring such a feeling."

When car companies promote their 5G cars, the functions they describe are also very attractive.

Source: GAC New Energy

GAC New Energy's Aion V uses Huawei's Balong 5000 chip and is equipped with a 5G T-BOX module. It is announced that it can provide a 100M transmission channel and use V2X to enable intelligent driving.

The Roewe MARVEL-R, which uses Huawei's 5G T-Box, is said to be able to "realize V2X smart travel and 5G smart cockpit."

When connected to the 5G network, BAIC ARCFOX αT can "provide users with a peak network speed of about 850~880M through WiFi, allowing unimpeded intelligent interconnection and realizing a truly new generation of 5G smart electric vehicle travel experience." In addition, the car's V2X will play the advantages of networked autonomous driving to assist the intelligence of the single vehicle. "For example, when our view is blocked by the vehicle in front of us at a traffic light, ARCFOX αT can connect to the traffic light information and feedback it to consumers."

For BYD, Huawei's 5G technology mainly provides support for BYD DiPilot and Dilink 3.0 systems, providing users with better intelligent driving assistance and Internet of Vehicles service experience.

In general, 5G car functions can be divided into two categories: very powerful network capabilities - eMBB (enhanced mobile broadband), and C-V2X vehicle-road collaboration capabilities (vehicle networking based on cellular communications), which help vehicles with automatic assisted driving.

However, can these two projects be realized at present?

3 Short-term heroes are useless

"5G is very popular now, and many car manufacturers hope to grab such a position and hope that it will be helpful for marketing in the market."

Ying Yulun said that there is not much in terms of product experience at present.

The high bandwidth and autonomous driving mentioned above are not yet possible.

Like 5G mobile phones, 5G cars can only communicate at 4G or even lower speeds in places without 5G signals. As mentioned earlier, although the construction speed of 5G base stations is very fast, the coverage is still very limited.

Therefore, high-bandwidth applications such as video opening in seconds and ultra-fast OTA mentioned by many car companies cannot be realized in most areas unless you specifically drive to an area covered by 5G signals.

Some car companies have proposed AR navigation functions, which are combined with 5G for communication. However, what car companies can currently achieve is just based on ordinary navigation, making the visual effects cooler, and essentially not using 5G technology.

However, an in-vehicle navigation engineer told Electric Vehicle Observer, "If it is AR navigation based on real scenes, it is necessary to obtain real scene images from the vehicle side, then identify and process them in the cloud, and then return them as AR images and navigation information, which has high requirements for transmission speed. If there is 5G, this aspect will be better."

Judging from the publicity of Aion V, it is talking about AR real-scene online navigation. However, the realization of this function is also based on the coverage of 5G base stations.

V2X empowers autonomous driving, which is even more exciting. Through V2N (vehicle to macro network), V2I (vehicle to infrastructure), V2V (vehicle to vehicle communication), and V2P (vehicle to person) communication, vehicles will have information that is beyond their own perception capabilities, helping with driving judgment, route planning and other autonomous driving functions.

5G V2X has a greater significance for the evolution of autonomous driving in China's automotive industry. According to the "Intelligent Vehicle Innovation and Development Strategy" issued by 11 ministries and commissions of the central government, China's automotive industry's autonomous driving focuses on the combination of single-vehicle intelligence and networked intelligence, which is different from the current route of Tesla and other automakers that emphasizes single-vehicle intelligence.