ITU News asked Roger Lanctot, Director of Automotive
Connected Mobility for Strategy Analytics, what he views as the top 5 trends we
can expect to see for automotive tech in 2020 and beyond.
1 Fleet-based operations
As cars are increasingly integrated into fleets, pressure
will grow to deliver ever more sophisticated connected car solutions capable of
collecting data, anticipating system failures, avoiding collisions, and
delivering desirable and contextually relevant content to drivers and
passengers.
While car
makers and commercial fleet operators — including ride hailing companies, car
sharing service providers, taxis, and rental car operators — dominate the world
of connected fleets today.
The future
may bring new operators into the market from technology companies to retailers,
transportation companies or even new car dealers offering networks of connected
cars to serve evolving transportation needs.
2 5G
introduces ubiquitous connectivity
Within two
years, 5G technology will fundamentally transform the business of connecting
cars allowing cars to communicate vital information for safer on-road
interactions and traffic management.
Significant
breakthroughs in crash avoidance — between cars and between pedestrians and
cars — will unfold as the global car park is “lit up” with higher speed, low latency,
wireless connections.
Regulators
will finally have the tools to take on active safety challenges and save lives.
At the same time, contextual navigation experiences will be amazingly enhanced
to ease the normal stresses of human driving even as the industry evolves
toward autonomy.
3 Ad-hoc
vehicle use cases undermine ownership
The
proliferation of networked vehicles offering mobility-as-a-service will push more
and more consumers out of their owned vehicles and into the world of shared
transportation.
End-to-end,
app-based transportation solutions will integrate payments and personalized experiences.
It remains
to be seen precisely which kinds of organizations will lead or eventually
dominate this new transportation environment — but car companies,
infrastructure companies, transportation suppliers, and others will all play a
role.
Regulators
and legislators may ultimately play a determinative role — as they are already
today in driving the industry toward electrification — by limiting the use of
individually owned vehicles in large cities.
4 EV
adoption impacts
As fleets of
connected cars come to dominate the transportation landscape, fleet operators
will continue their embrace of electrification as they recognize the lower cost
of operations for electric vehicles.
Where
consumers may hesitate to buy and own electric cars — fleet operators will not
hesitate.
5 Autonomy’s
path to market
While fully autonomous
and networked vehicle fleets may ultimately serve large cities and towns, the
evolutionary path to full autonomy may take a decade or more.
Regulators
continue to struggle to define certification strategies, but these same
regulators prefer not to stand in the path of this advancing technology.
Robotaxis, shuttles, trucks and buses and semi-autonomous personally operated cars will all represent different facets of the evolving world of autonomy as heterogeneous highway driving environments emerge to support both human and machine driven vehicles.
Ref: No.1 2020 ITU News Magazine