2G, not 5G, best bet to accelerate driverless tech

Making our existing cars more ‘clever’ could be a better way of getting autonomous cars safely on our streets rather than relying on 5G connectivity.

That’s the view of Dr Ramsey Faragher founder and CEO of FocalPoint and a Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge, who argues a 2G connection is ample when the car’s sensor arrays are sophisticated enough. Speaking exclusively to TU-Automotive, Faragher claimed cheap software can bridge the gap to truly smart automated transport rather than adding more expensive hardware.

He said the burden on bandwidth is driven by an increase in connected cars that is on a steep upward curve. Faragher said: “The two key points are that there are going to be a lot more connected vehicles around that will require the bandwidth and we will need 5G to achieve that yet this could give us more or a problem than we have at the moment in terms of range and mass.

“One of the solutions could be that we stop relying on the connectivity and make the vehicles so ‘clever’ that they barely need any communication with the rest of the world to function well. Then it will rely on how well their on-board sensors work and how clever is the programming at spotting any errors that are coming into those sensors.”

His own company claims a breakthrough in vehicle positioning using algorithms embedded in a vehicle’s positioning receivers. He explained: “This software application is a very powerful technology and it is also the cheapest part of the senor array on that autonomous vehicle. We are hoping to make the GPS chip much more clever by adding software to it in order to not having to add expensive hardware to the car like more cameras, radar or LiDAR. For autonomous vehicles to be truly here and ubiquitous they need to be economically viable and at the moment carmakers are putting more expensive hardware on the car which is not going to be viable in the long-term.”

To read the complete article, visit TU-Automotive.