Automotive And Telecommunications Giants Come Together To Form 5G Automotive Association

Audi, BMW, Daimler, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Nokia, and Qualcomm have banded together to form the ‘5G Automotive Association’ in the interest of communications solutions for connected mobility. 5G is expected to become the dominating standard for mobile communications across the globe in the next decade. This, in turn, necessitates cross-industry collaboration to help thrash out challenges of the next era of digitalisation and autonomous driving. The association will address key technical and regulatory issues, leveraging next generation mobile networks to develop communications solutions for the sake of connected mobility and road safety.The association will primarily work on:

a. Defining and harmonising use cases, technical requirements and implementation strategies.

b. Supporting standardisation and regulatory bodies, certification and approval processes.

c. Addressing vehicle-to-everything technology requirements, such as wireless connectivity, security, privacy, authentication, distributed cloud architectures and more.

d. Running joint innovation and development projects leading to integrated solutions, inter-operability testing, large scale pilots and trial deployments.

Dr. Christoph Grote, Senior Vice President Electronics, BMW Group, said, “We expect 5G to become the worldwide dominating mobile communications standard of the next decade. For the automotive industry it is essential that 5G fulfills the challenges of the era of digitalisation and autonomous driving. With the 5G Automotive Association we founded a cross-industry forum that allows us to shape the future 5G technology with leading ICT companies. As a co-founder of the 5G Automotive Association we would be excited to welcome further partners engaged in the automotive industry, the information and communication technologies or mobile network operators in the association.”

The future of connected mobility promises to deliver enhanced customer experience and is also instrumental to the era of autonomous driving. Hence, the increasing need for connected services on vehicles has prompted several automakers to pursue partnerships to enable the growth of this domain. The most recent example would be of the Renault-Nissan Alliance that has teamed up with Microsoft Corp. for the development of connected services for cars.