Continental, Vodafone Claim C-V2X ‘Digital Safety Shield’
Continental and Vodafone are claiming 5G and cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) technologies can prevent car accidents.
At Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress, the companies will demonstrate the ‘digital safety shield’, tech they have developed under a partnership they announced last summer. They say it provides connectivity between drivers, pedestrians and cyclists, allowing them to communicate their intentions to each other. It works by cars being equipped with a V2X module that receives data from other road users’ smartphones on their current location and direction of travel through a cellular network base station.
The driver’s V2X module and the pedestrian or cyclist’s smartphone then issue both road users with warnings if the data shows they are likely to collide. The companies claim the system is made possible by in-vehicle cameras, mobile edge computing and 5G.
A Continental statement claims “small 5G data centers with extremely short access times near to cell towers allow analyses to be carried out almost in real time with the aid of artificial intelligence”. However, the statement did not address how the system would deal with the many ‘blind spots’ to cellular communications that still exist in major cities, how pedestrians and cyclists could be encouraged to adopt it, or how cyclists could receive the warnings without having to look at their phones.
The companies are also demonstrating a system they claim can inform the driver of data from vehicles further up the road, meaning they will know when they are approaching a traffic jam and can alter their speed accordingly, avoiding sudden and dangerous braking. They say this system can inform drivers when it is safe to overtake on narrow roads.
Vodafone Germany CEO Hannes Ametsreiter said: “Cars will become smartphones on wheels, with sensors and cameras that communicate in real time via mobile communications, warn of dangers, and protect us.”
The one gap between C-V2X and DSRC is the latency for collision avoidance warnings. DSRC has minimal latency for those types of V2V messages. C-V2X is still evolving but that latency gap is still the major challenge before many public agencies agree on a C-V2X future for all V2X communications.