June 25, 2024
V2X has been talked about for so long that the kids in the backseat are getting restless. The good news, writes Alexander Wiefett, the Managing Director of WirelessMobility Automotive, is that the destination is now in sight.
Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) enables real-time communication and co-ordination among vehicles and road-side infrastructure and thus has the potential to deliver substantial socio-economic benefits. There are two main candidate technologies for V2X – Dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) and Cellular-V2X (C-V2X). While US and China are in favour of C-V2X, Europe is more technology neutral due to having an existing deployment of DSRC in terms of road-infrastructure and millions of Volkswagen cars.
The road-blocks
A large-scale deployment of V2X has not materialised so far due to several economic and political issues. On one side, there is the problem of “early adopters” (where the first V2X-equipped cars on the road don’t receive all the benefits of the technology). On the other side, the competition between DSRC and C-V2X has made it hard for regulators and car-makers to choose one or the other. There have been discussions about deploying both in parallel but that comes at an added cost for both road operators and car-makers and also raises some interoperability concerns.
The V2X technology market looked to be poised for a wave of consolidation when Qualcomm (a C-V2X chipset provider) agreed to purchase Autotalks (the biggest provider of DSRC chipsets) in a deal estimated to be worth US$350m. However, amid scrutiny from anti-trust regulators around the world, Qualcomm has terminated the transaction. It’s worth considering that the two companies were expected to control more than 70% of the global market for V2X chips by 2027, according to the European Commission.
On one hand, this will ultimately provide greater choice for the industry and help foster innovation from multiple vendors. On the other hand, this could limit investment and delay the sector’s efforts towards a large-scale V2X deployment that will increase economies of scale and help accelerate adoption.
Beyond critical mass
The above issues though don’t deny the benefits of V2X – safer driving due to collision avoidance, improved driving efficiency, reduced fuel consumption and so on. And to fully reap these rewards, Europe or other regions in the world need to plan for a mass-deployment, likely to be executed in phases.
V2X technologies have been adopted in various forms by manufacturers for almost a decade and V2X devices, such as WirelessMobility’s V2X electronic modules (supporting both C-V2X and DSRC), are ready to be put out there. So, the road to V2X deployment is becoming more visible. In fact, ABI Research predicts that by 2025 there will be more than 10 million vehicles capable of short range V2X communication with cellular connectivity available in 346 million vehicles and smart city cellular connections set to exceed 165 million.
Towards a mass-deployment
With China alone set to bring 30 million new C-V2X-enabled vehicles to the road every year by 2034, V2X is set to become the digital seatbelt of the future, reports IDTechEx. The firm foresees the pendulum swinging away from DSRC towards 5G-based C-V2X which, it forecasts, will be used by 90% of the market by 2034. China sets the adoption pace but is followed by Europe, where the unit sales of V2X-enabled vehicles will be around 11 million per year by 2034, and the US, in which sales per year will be around 9 million units by 2034.
This big growth is enabled by two substantial drivers – the regulatory requirements to install connectivity into vehicles for emergency communication and the ambitions of nations to roll-out V2X infrastructure to enable the socio-economic gains identified earlier. These drivers are already resulting in momentum with more enabled vehicles on the road and projects underway to equip highway corridors and cities with 5G and C- V2X infrastructure.
With a clear signal from regulators that larger mergers, such as that of Qualcomm and Autotalks, to create a single dominant player in the V2X vendor market will not be approved, the ecosystem will involve several big players that drive innovation and competition. They will support automotive OEMs and ultimately end-customers as they harness the benefits of V2X for safer, more fuel efficient and time-saving journeys. The move to V2X large-scale deployment is gathering momentum at last but there is still substantial mileage to cover.
Wireless Mobility Modules
WirelessMobility offers advanced V2X solutions such as the WMC590 module (5G + C-V2X) and the WMC190W-GL module (DSRC + C-V2X Release 15 & 16), which are poised to support the growing demands of V2X communication and enhance the capabilities of connected vehicles.
