Dongfeng Motor Corporation, one of China’s top five carmakers, is partnering with Tencent Holdings and China Mobile to develop connected vehicle services in preparation for the coming 5G era.
The Wuhan-based carmaker unveiled two joint labs on Monday that will focus on enhancing car safety and connectivity under the next-generation telecommunication technologies.
The tie-up comes as 5G is expected to transform the automotive industry, where access to data will be faster and computing workloads can be “dynamically shifted”, balancing the analysis between car and cloud ends, said Ericsson in a report in May.
Also known as the “internet of cars”, connected vehicles refers to the moving network made up of IoT-enabled cars through the latest communication technologies. China wants smart vehicles to account for half of all new cars sold at home by 2020, according to a plan by the National Development and Reform Commission, the top economic planning agency.
Carmakers and autonomous driving start-ups are also counting on 5G – with its faster speeds and low latency – to smooth the operation of driverless cars.
By 2020, about 90 per cent of motorways in big Chinese cities are expected to support vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, where sensors in a self-driving car can gather information and send the data to the car’s on-board computer, or a cloud computing platform, to make instant decisions.
Collaborative research by Dongfeng and Tencent is expected to enhance safety and the in-car digital experience, while a second joint lab with China Mobile will work on technical standards and internet solutions under 5G, according to the statement from Dongfeng.
The promise of a driverless and interconnected future for cars has also attracted Chinese tech companies like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent – collectively known as BAT – over the past few years. Meanwhile, dozens of start-ups such as Pony.ai, WeRide and AutoX have emerged, raising billions of yuan to fund their operations.
Baidu, a national champion in autonomous driving, has formed an alliance with nearly 150 partners for its autonomous driving system Apollo, including carmakers like Volvo, Daimler, Volkswagen and BYD.
Not to be outdone, Alibaba Group Holding, parent company of the Post, announced partnerships with auto giants Audi, Renault and Honda in June, to provide new cars with smart and internet-enabled features powered by the Alibaba Artificial Intelligence lab.
The move comes after Audi and Volvo became the first global car brands to adopt the company’s smart speaker system Tmall Genie last year.
In July, BMW announced a tie-up with Tencent to accelerate its development of self-driving cars in China and globally. Last month, the Shenzhen-based giant unveiled a voice-operated version of its popular WeChat social app for use in vehicles in partnership with Chinese carmaker Changan Automobile.