5G Lobbyist Argues It May Be a Long Time Before Autonomous Vehicles Reach Cities

Slashdot reader dkatana shares IoT Times interview with Dr. Johannes Springer, Director General for the 5G Automotive Association, an EU lobbying group pushing for the inclusion of short-range 5G wireless technology in autonomous vehicles for vehicle-to-vehicle communications. Springer describes some of the services already being tested (like in Hamburg, Germany, where even traffic lights can communicate with vehicles for "optimal speed advisories" for avoiding red lights): We have, for instance, an initiative in Europe called a European Data Task Force, or data task force for world safety. And in this activity, millions of vehicles are already sharing safety-related data between the different car manufacturers. Of course, this data sharing exists via cellular networks. One vehicle that detects, for instance, a black ice warning, or produces a black ice warning, sends this warning via the cellular networks to other vehicles. And this consensus, the data sharing via the cellular networks, creates a lot of benefits for other traffic participants, not, by the way, just the vehicles, but also to other vulnerable road users, cyclists, pedestrians, and so on... But they also discuss the prospects for automous vehicles beyond highway/intercity driving — and the idea of restricting them in cities to dedicated "safe corridors": Of course, the whole thing starts on a broad scale with restricted areas... And also, the private car industry is going heavily in this direction. If you take, for instance, the example of valet parking, automated parking. So, the automated driving task is restricted to a parking spot, to a parking garage: you can leave your car in front of the parking garage, and the car finds the free parking space by itself. And the same upon returning the vehicle. So this is something which takes place in the city but within a restricted area. Suppose it goes, for instance, to buses or something like that. In that case, you can also see two examples during the ITS World Congress, two different, let's say, technical setups, where automated driving buses happen in the city. One is in a, let's say, non-controlled environment, and the vehicle drives entirely on its own, yeah? So this is shown by Easy Drive, part of Continental, a company that produces these types of systems. Of course, there is still the need to have a backup driver in the bus, which directly destroys the business case for the bus operator. And secondly, the driving speed is relatively low; I think 30 kilometers per hour or something like that. The second example is, which is shown by Siemens, called the Heat Project, where the whole environment is completely controlled by roadside infrastructure. You have cameras and all these things equipped at the road to assess the situation and things around the bus. Personally, I don't believe that it can happen in cities or other open urban areas. Maybe, of course, if you have an airport, it might be different. But we cannot afford the necessary infrastructure, let's say, for monitoring the situation around the vehicle in real-time, whether it's a bus or another vehicle. No city is willing to pay for such an infrastructure just for the benefit of autonomous driving. So I'm pretty sure that this will not happen. In the comments on the original submission, long-time Slashdot reader Gravis Zero discounts this as the opinion of a lobbying group advocating for specific 5G technologies (rather than using WiFi for direct vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication). But for what it's worth, the IoT Times interviewer also says "I've been talking to some experts in smart cities and some vehicle manufacturers... They say that certain types of autonomous driving have been going around for some time... But they are mainly focusing on motorways and intercity driving. We still have many problems allowing full autonomous driving in cities because of the number of different things that can happen."

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