Buick opens up a second battlefield for autonomous driving, demonstrating V2X technology

Buick has figured out autonomous driving.

If you don't talk about autonomous driving within a week, you will feel out of date. However, in addition to hardware such as lidar, cameras and radar, neural networks and algorithms are a discipline to be pioneered, and there are not even ready-made formulas to follow. So if you really want to find an autonomous driving path that can make you feel at ease, the truly reliable one is V2X, which has been rumored for some time, although it is a bit of a copycat.

Buick released V2X technology at the Guangzhou Auto Show. It may be just the first step, but it has raised the level of connectivity. After hearing too much about in-car connectivity, you will feel that external connectivity is worthy of your expectations of "intelligence".

V2X originated in the United States. A search on Baidu shows that a school bus had a car accident at that time. Later, it was found that if the school bus could have known the situation at the intersection one kilometer (approximately) away earlier, it might have been able to predict it earlier, and the flowers on the bus would not have died prematurely.

This shows the two major routes of autonomous driving at present. One is the on-the-spot response ability emphasized by Tesla, just like the goalkeeper's defense, whether he can avoid obstacles and react fully (called algorithm and chip computing power in autonomous driving). This is of course one path; while others are advance predictions, with the conservative and cautious traces of traditional cars.

Traditional cars are absolutely unable to test unproven technologies directly with human flesh like new forces do. The NCAP tests you have seen use dummies or XX million-kilometer tests conducted in advance. For example, Nissan's current autonomous driving and even battery technology, as for the latter, the endurance has always been mediocre, but Nissan has always maintained a record of zero spontaneous combustion.

This may be a genetic problem. New forces can ignore the rules, but old brands cannot completely subvert tradition. This era is not fair. Double standards exist not only between oneself and others, but also between new car manufacturers and traditional car companies. People are naturally tolerant of newborns. "Immaturity" is an additional attribute of "on the road", but the latter is much more stringent in the threshold of crime and punishment.

Therefore, "early prediction" is consistent with the conservative route of the time-honored brand and the "preventive safety" concept that has long been introduced in traditional cars, but it mobilizes relatively large resources. It is basically equivalent to weaving a "Skynet", that is, the signals sent by Buick products can be received by other vehicles and then fed back. Anyway, it is equivalent to sharing your real-time location with many cars on WeChat, and then judging whether you will encounter any danger based on your car speed. In this way, problems can be prevented in advance through prediction.

It is said that this V2X communication technology can penetrate buildings, and has a fast connection speed and short transmission delay. As for whether it will be applied to 5G (my personal judgment is that it will be used, because only the 5G runway can allow for cosmic-level capacity budget data, and it is designed for autonomous driving. If the network overheats and then crashes, it basically means that you may also be down for a few days, or lose limbs, so bandwidth is necessary), the official has not mentioned it yet, and how to ensure that Buick vehicles are currently connected to vehicles on the road has not been said in detail, but the direction is set.

Starting from the so-called Internet of Everything, your product can be connected to everything, including controlling your curtains with voice control, which was demonstrated to us on site. It feels like the in-car connectivity has been upgraded to a higher level, from local area network access to the Internet. At the very least, it is no longer limited to the small space in the car.

Although there are still many details in autonomous driving, such as computing speed, and whether the computing power of base stations and chips in vehicles can support massive amounts of data as the number of connected objects increases, this may be regarded as a response by traditional car companies to new forces in autonomous driving.

The benefits may not only be in preventing safety and making active braking more effective, but also in that it will set the speed in time according to the road conditions ahead. For example, after encountering the first red light, we usually encounter several traffic lights in succession, or we may be entangled in whether to speed up and pass the next green signal light, or just let the red stop us...

Now it seems that you don’t have to worry about these things. The computer will set the speed according to the time when the light changes. It’s a bit like an ideal country, but it can be realized in theory. Although this means that your location becomes part of a shared network, depriving some personal driving rights, it also means that some privacy will be exposed.

But what is foreseeable is that the car is well organized and the sense of order is a strong hint of the future. Buick has also released some in-car smart technologies, such as more apps, upgraded details, voice recognition and feedback speed, which were not the strengths of joint venture cars before, and apps that change with the scene and time, maybe playing a rock song for you when you are sleepy.

The V2X blueprint for future autonomous driving that he constructed this time is the key. He brought out some unknowns, which may also be a multiple-choice question. How do you choose between controllable variables but with a sense of order, and uncontrollable but increasingly independent traffic conditions?