The 5G Automotive Association wants to make your car a cellular device

It's 2020. And there is so much going on that nobody expected. And, we have the biggest revolution in cellular and wireless technology we've seen in a very long time. How to cut through the noise and where is their opportunity right now, that's a complicated picture and then add in the vector of how this all applies to the auto industry. Now what? [MUSIC] I've got the right guest who can help us answer that. Joining me from Ford is John Quad who's global director of government relations, mobility and advanced technologies. And joining us from Qualcomm is Dean Brenner, who is Senior VP of spectrum strategy Technology Policy there at Qualcomm. Let me start with you, Dean. We're talking here about 5G cellular V2X. Can you unpack that phrase many people have seen it. They're not entirely sure what it is. So we have two cars that are devices that need the ability to communicate with one another. Why would we want cars to be able to communicate with one another? You'd like to know going around a curve where other cars are at an intersection you'd like to know be able to say I'm gonna go first you're gonna go second. We can enhance safety save lives, if cars can communicate with one another. So how do we do that? Well, in Qualcomm years ago, we started Developing technology to enable two phones to communicate with each other even when there wasn't a cellular network available. And then we thought, hey, a car is just a wireless device as well. There's already cellular going into cars. So what if we took this same technology and put it into cars thereby enabling cars to communicate with one another. All of these safety situations and many, many more, which I just described. So here's where it's interesting to a lot of people they see CV two x, which is the acronym that's applied to this. And the C stands for cellular vehicle two x, meaning just about anything. It's not always through the cellular network is what you're saying. It is car to car, sometimes. It can be card a car and it can also be card IT infrastructure. So for example, I'll be able to commute the traffic light would be able to communicate with me if we each had the technology to tell me what give me a countdown. When is the When is it gonna turn? Green -Yea,Audi's been doing that in a demo in Las Vegas over a year ago. Go. And this is when it can go without having to hop through the network. And this is what kind of gets some people concerned about this. They go, Wow, the network can be unreliable. I don't want the car to be doing mission critical things that have to go through the cellular network worried about how many bars it has. This other layer gets around that. You're saying. Absolutely. So there's some, there's some communications that are not immediate. Like if I'm driving and there's a traffic alert 15 miles ahead. I'd like to know that but it's not immediate. I don't need to know it, you know, with the highest degree of urgency. So for communications like that to my car That could be done through the cellular network. But there are other applications situations as I described, at an intersection around a curve down an alley where it really will save lives if the cars have the ability to communicate with one another. Directly and immediately and that's what this technology volunteer. Okay, John Kwan over at Ford. You guys are one of the earliest members of the 5G AA the 5G automotive association which of course Qualcomm and many other companies are part of. I found this interesting when this organization launched. Because I had never seen anything quite like this for 4g, and certainly for 3g, this marriage of auto and mobile. Why is Ford involved in 5g so early and so deeply? Well, I think primarily because we see CV to x and ultimately its transition to 5g is going to be a great enabler. To connect vehicles not only to one another, but as Dean mentioned, to infrastructure to other actors in the mobility ecosystem, as we've called it. So there's this term called vulnerable road users, which include pedestrians and bicyclists and now scooters in many cities. And what you see in this in this in this association, and what we envision is the ability for cars to talk to one another and to talk to the environment in which they're there. They're working. We've done demos with Qualcomm and other technology companies where we've shown. The ability for a pedestrian to signal that it wants to cross and you can imagine if this was a blind person or somebody with a physical handicap, the ability to signal to a person in their car that they're a pedestrian that wants to cross and that the car to acknowledge that it's going to stop and allow that person to cross This is the kind of communication where visioning is as we get things like autonomous vehicles up on the road. I think it's going to be important to leverage kind activity as an additional sense on top of those autonomous vehicles today. One of the things that's often said about 5G is it's going to enable things we can't do today but then a lot of folks look at 4G and go 4G is pretty darn good. Are these things you're talking about not possible with, let's say 4G? With 5g, you've just got back much more data carrying capacity, right? You can send a lot more images, you can send a lot more information. For 5G, all this same technology that I just described, can go into an autonomous cars. So today, the way autonomous cars Have been designed to work is they have these advanced sensors and computer vision. And that works great when broad daylight, when I'm going down a road where there isn't any problem seeing the other cars. But again, in these other scenarios that I've described around a curve, at night. During a thunderstorm. Many, many scenarios there is concern about how autonomous vehicles will operate safely. Every autonomous car is gonna be reporting to every other car around it What it sees, now why is that important, Brian? Well, we know that getting this technology so that 100% of the cars habit that's gonna take quite a while,right?>>Yeah. People don't buy a new car every 18 months the way they might do with a cell phone. And so what happens when, No, my car has the technology but your car doesn't. And you're in some hazardous condition. And it would we could save lives if all the other cars that were approaching your car knew what was going on with your car. Yeah, I find that interesting. I get a lot of questions from people saying well until we have all autonomous cars What's the point of having any autonomous cars but your point you're painting the question that is no, it's a it's an increased density of benefit. Correct. And that's the way this technology is going to work. It's going to start out and it's going to be very beneficial for those cars that have it. And then as we ramp into the Capabilities of 5g, having this technology will even be beneficial for people who have the legacy cars and who don't yet have the technology. So John, tell me a little bit about how Ford's been thinking about that blend of legacy cars and the latest cars. What are you gonna do in the product roadmap as far as you can speak to, in your position to roll this stuff out? What's gonna look like in? First of all, how soon does it arrive in for products in the showroom where consumers have to be educated about it? So ,we're our plan and what we announced at the Consumer Electronics Show back in January of 2019 that we intend to start installing this on our vehicle starting in 2022. So we will be launching that with a couple of model launches and over ensuing ensuing years, couple years after that, all of Ford vehicles so the normal normal year, you know, we make about two, two and a half million vehicles a year. somewhere down the road in the middle of the decade. All of our vehicles will have this connectivity strategy. You're also obviously gonna have likely other auto makers declare their commitment to deploy as well. Which is a good thing, right? I mean, this is a place where the auto industry is rooting for each other, because of this need for a mesh affect. Absolutely, this is how you establish a network effect. When our vehicles can connect with other vehicles, when it can connect with infrastructure, when it can connect with all the devices that I've talked about. That's what will really provide a lot of, a lot of benefit in terms of not only safety, but in terms of traffic flow and congestion management. You know. Yeah. These are things that we hope will actually help in the future. Yeah. Now, those are things that get up to that sort of municipal infrastructure level, when I know you're not the marketing lead for Ford on this stuff, but in your mind. Everybody's marketing, everybody. [LAUGH] Very good point. So with that in mind, then do consumers need to be specifically brought up to speed about 5g in cars? Or do you just say, look, this car has certain things that work really well and don't bother them that it's 5g power. What do you think's the right philosophy on that? I don't think people have to understand the basic technologies necessarily that empower what they're doing and what they want are the safety features. And to be have that rendered in the right interface so that it's understandable so that it's timely. As long as we in the industry roll this out correctly. People can sense the benefit of what this is from a safety and a congestion management standpoint. It's gonna be something that they will desire and we'll look forward futures cars moving forward. Okay, let's talk about the global picture. I would say Deem that you've got about as big a global footprint as any member of the 5G A possibly the biggest. With that in mind, there seems to be still around the world in different markets continental speaking, some disagreement about whether to go with cellular 5G V to x or whether there's a Wi Fi alternative 802 11 p that some markets are at least open to. If not leaning toward, how is this gonna sort out? because we don't need two standards here. That sounds like a nightmare to me. Right, right, Brian and we agree with that. So first of all, we Qualcomm would never have invented CV-X. We work with partners like Ford and so many automakers around the world and our whole Wireless echo since we would never have done any of that if the other technology 802.11p, it's also called DSRC. If that worked great, we have tested CV2X Comparison to DSRC all over the world exhaustively, we've done it. Other groups have done it. When I say it has better range. When I say it's more reliable, that translates into, it's gonna work in situations where the other technology wouldn't work and that's gonna give safety benefits in situations That the other technology couldn't deliver safety benefits. And by the way, Qualcomm were a huge Wi Fi manufacturer. Yeah.>> We think Wi Fi has a bright long future. We just launched a whole new generation of Wi Fi chips using the six gigahertz band. So nothing I'm saying is to diminish the huge importance of Wi Fi. But in this auto application, we want the best, the best radio Which again has longer range, which is more reliable, which can deal with congestion situations we've proven time and again is CB to x. And so how do I see this playing out? Well, in the United States you've heard from for also in the United States where we've done public trials with Audi. Then in China, cb two x is going to be launched either by, you know, late this year or perhaps into early next year. But it does sound like it does sound like the European Union is your last area where there's a battlefield between these two and that's a big market. How do you think that's gonna play out in that market?. It is a big market and, of course, in the wireless industry we have lots of examples where these technology battles play out and ultimately in the market, they get resolved here again, because it's a safety application. That is the linchpin of the technology. Obviously, Brian, we would like to see it worked out as soon as possible that to their credit in Europe, there had been an effort to band CV to X through regulation, that effort failed. So, we think if that we have this massive launch in China. Followed by the launch that john is talking about from Ford in the United States on the heels, hopefully, of an FCC spectrum decision. We think that will give a huge amount of momentum. Yeah. Yeah as as your decides what to do. And by the way there are European car companies in the United States they support CV to x. You know Audi and BMW support CV to x. So Again, this is the common sort of technology battle in the wireless industry, which you know, we would obviously like to see get sorted out as quickly as possible along the lines. And I will say for our viewers that, you know, CV two x five g based connectivity that we're talking about here does seem to have In the last year or so has gotten a lot of momentum wins it does seem which is one part of one of the reasons that we want to have this conversation today. John, let me go to you to talk a little bit more about how this rolls out. Now as we wrap up our last few minutes as we go to markets and consumers are looking at this, we talked about the benefits and how to portray those Will there be a cost? And if so, where does the cost live? A lot of the safety benefits that we've talked about that's going to become standard equipment on the vehicle for us. So it's gonna be bundled in into the base price of the vehicle. There won't be this this monthly cost. Over time, you'd have to begin to look at things like what are additional applications here, you know, that you could potentially use these technologies for. They include things like tolling, right? You know why do you have to have a device in the car and you switch between those? What are other services people could want? Those,we'd have to really explore and begin to look at that, but right now, it's trying to get these vehicles safe trying to get them connected so that they can be networked. You know, and, and really, i think the safety benefits are the most paramount. But the congestion mitigation opportunity here is pretty big once you get enough vehicles on this network. Together. So it sounds like you guys are committed to not putting any safety features of this technique or safety applications of this technology behind a paywall, if you will. But future services will get interesting much as 5G has got the wireless carriers saying hey, you know what we're gonna take a different role going forward. We're gonna Be hosting a lot more compute a lot more AI and intelligence on our 5G network or at least that's their argument. It sounds like carmakers can jump on this and say, Hey, you know what, we are a bunch of services. Now, because of 5G. Is that a reasonable expectation for the years ahead? Yeah I think we have to look at it and say you know, what are the opportunities for in the backseat you know in vehicle entertainment for for people as opposed to you know having to utilize discs or or brought in devices, you know, what are things that we can stream to folks you have to look at How in an autonomous vehicle ride service, you know, we might be able to stream in content and experiences for people within those. So they're all the world of possibilities in terms of what can be done, you know, again under in a 5G world where you actually have the capacity to deliver these types of things. Is limitless. Question about features as we wrap up here we've all seen the studies for year after year JD Power in particular. Most consumers use very few of the tech features in their car. They may get swayed by them at purchase time but then they end up often not using even adaptive cruise control befuddles a lot of owners today. And this is a very old technology by today's standards. How do you get usage of all these new features? This is a lot of new stuff coming very fast. Any thoughts on how that gets elevated in terms of actual engagement, not just ownership of the tech. I think when you see it, you know and it becomes this Background as the signals you get now when you back up the sensors that tell you you're about to hit something, right? Those things that help you adjust your own driving habits whether that's a little light in the upper corner of your rearview mirror, or other sensors on the car. These are the things that provide confirming evidence or jolt you to attention if you're not paying attention. Those are the things that I think people use regardless and then when you take them away, you know how many of us now go are used to traveling go to a rental car company. Yeah. And all of a sudden you don't have a backup, Backup camera and the first thing you notice is Wait a minute The first thing you notice is what's wrong with this car, doesn't have a backup camera. How can that exist? That's right. Yeah, it's very extraordinally. My children don't like getting in the car so don't parallel park themselves, right? They're a little spoiled. Yeah, they are spoiled. [LAUGH] Just like you know that. [LAUGH] All right. Thank you for the insights on this. Dean. Last thing I want to ask you then you get the last word here. By the end of 2020, given the year we've had with so many upheavals of different types, where will five GB compared to where you thought it would be? Give me the honest assessment there. There are hurdles and hiccups. Yeah, as I've said many times in the last two months, I never have to. Explain to anyone why it's important to have the best connectivity possible. It's become a lifeline for all of us through this terrible pandemic. I think however many phones anyone is projecting to be sold using 5G. I think you I think we'll exceed it. And I think 5G is gonna become so ingrained into All of our lives will just the way we can't really imagine life without all the things that 4G brought. I think that's even gonna increase exponentially, you know, unfortunately as a result of this terrible pandemic, All right, been talking to two major members of the 5g automotive Association John Kwan from Ford and Dean Brenner from Qualcomm. [BLANK_AUDIO]