On January 15, 2020, Volvo Cars and China Unicom signed a cooperation agreement. The two parties announced that they will jointly research, develop and test 5G-enabled V2X technology for vehicles.
Yuan Xiaolin, Senior Vice President of Volvo Car Group, President and CEO of Volvo Cars Asia Pacific Region, is quite confident about Volvo’s development prospects in the 5G era. He said that “Volvo will seize opportunities, give full play to its advantages, develop collaboration, and make the vision of smart transportation land as soon as possible.” .
Liang Baojun, deputy general manager of China United Network Communications Group Co., Ltd., regards the automobile industry as “the most closely integrated with 5G, the most abundant application, and the broadest prospects.” He believes that 5G will better promote the four new automotive revolutions.
The cooperation between Volvo and China Unicom is “born in time.” If 2019 is the year when 5G sets sail globally, then 2020 will be the first year that 5G will be commercialized.
5G empowers Volvo’s “safe and smart car”?
As early as 2012, Volvo and China Unicom had started cooperation in the field of Internet of Vehicles. China Unicom has always been the communication provider of Volvo on call. In this strategic cooperation, the two parties will start to study various applications of 5G technology in the field of automotive and infrastructure communications to explore its potential for improvement in various aspects such as safety, sustainable development, customer convenience, and autonomous driving. The two parties will establish a joint research team in Shanghai to jointly research, develop and test the application of 5G and emerging V2X technologies in automobiles.
It is reported that the first phase of the 5G-V2X-based pre-research project of automatic valet parking has been successfully achieved by the two parties, through the installation of 5G and V2X communication equipment on the existing Volvo production cars, and intelligent on the field side Modified transformation, integrating V2N (car-to-cloud), V2I (car-to-infrastructure), V2V (car-to-car) and other technologies, as well as existing vehicle perception equipment, to realize automatic valet parking in a specific scenario (proving ground) , Let people see the dawn of the realization of some scenes of autonomous driving in the 5G era.
“In the early stage, what everyone did was focused on the field-side AVP project.” Xie Baojun, senior director of Volvo Cars Asia-Pacific R&D, revealed that the selection of the more technically difficult AVP scenario test is mainly because it has higher requirements for field-side equipment and communication quality. In the AVP project, Volvo has achieved automatic avoidance of pedestrians and vehicles.
(Xie Baojun, Senior Director of Volvo Cars Asia Pacific R&D)
Unmanned valet parking is only the starting point for cooperation between the two parties. Li Jun, CTO of China Unicom Smart Network Technology Co., Ltd., told Yiou Automobile that the conceptual discussion between the two parties will move toward commercialization in 2020.
The cooperation between Volvo and China Unicom further proves that the Internet of Vehicles industry has a strong industrial driving force.
The Internet of Vehicles requires the connection and interaction of multiple factors such as people, vehicles, roads, and networks, enabling multiple industries such as automobiles, electronics, information communications, transportation, and traffic management to break barriers, interconnect and develop in coordination. In the 5G-V2X industry ecology, there are too many companies that “build cars on the curve”.
Taking communication chips as an example, Huawei and other companies have launched LTE-V2X chips and chip-based communication modules for the Internet of Vehicles. ZTE has also released LTE-V2X test modules based on Qualcomm chips. In many fields such as application services, smart cockpits, and autonomous driving, China already has a huge industrial ecological foundation.
In the partnership between Volvo and China Unicom, the former is mainly responsible for the car-end business as a global luxury brand, and the latter, as a 5G network supplier, focuses more on 5G network business. “Smart cars, smart roads. To achieve smart roads , The basis is to have a network.” Li Jun emphasized.
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