Our Malaysian Cities And Internet Are Not Yet Ready For Autonomous Cars.
We have to take note that Malaysian city planners, telecommunication providers, car manufacturers and our internet providers will need to be working hand in hand for autonomous driving to be a reality.
Let us not forget about the need for 5G network around the country to be working perfectly as the whole concept of the technology is for all vehicles on the road to be talking to each other to make sure they travel seamlessly without issue and also they need to be talking to traffic points and the ‘roads’ as well.
Smart
The arrival of ‘smart cars’ or the autonomous car opens up the possibilities for safer roads, more efficient travel and some might say, a better driving experience. But it also will take time to roll out for some reasons.
As you probably already know, smart cars need to be able to communicate with one another, which means high speed internet connectivity and the magical availability of a stable 5G network.
How Smart
There must also will be efficiencies in terms of cars talking to intersections, via smart traffic signals, whereby the traffic signals can start adapting because they know what the traffic patterns are.
Here, a large market penetration is not required. For example, if a car is near the end of a queue, that is sufficient. The car transmitting the data doesn’t have to be at the exact end of the queue. This starts to obviate the need for roadside sensors, which are quite expensive.
Another example involves emergency services vehicles and first responders. “What if they could themselves dial in with C-V2X green all the way, and do clearance for the entire trajectory, not just in the near field?
That is a combination of the wireless wide area network and short range,” he said. “It would make responses pretty quick, and the benefits happen instantly. That speaks to operational efficiency. A smart city is not a static set of infrastructure pertinences. A smart city is dynamic, so any road user is part of a smart city including pedestrians, and vehicles.”
While V2X and autonomy will develop concurrently, they most likely will have separate schedules for implementation.
Commercial Vehicles
On the other hand, in commercial vehicles like trucks, that use case is a lot more complex, and it will necessitate more expensive technology. That also has a different infrastructure, which will be deployed on corridors, but not necessarily in densely-populated areas.
A first use case could be depot-to-depot, followed by ‘last-mile’ scenarios, which will be needed in highly urbanized areas. So while these are parallel paths, it would make sense to build different infrastructure for the corridors.”
Then there is the vehicle itself. How V2X concepts play out within the vehicle is still being worked out, although clues are emerging.
Battery Life
From a processing point of view, power consumption is a huge consideration no matter where it is happening. But the dynamics are very different in a fully electric vehicle, which requires tradeoffs between energy consumption and performance.
Off-the-shelf processors won’t work in EVs, or in the infrastructure equipment. Although it’s technically possible to use off-the-shelf hardware to run exactly the same algorithms in a piece of infrastructure equipment, such as a roadside sign, for object detection and classification the power considerations alone are not workable.
