Volvo Cars and China Unicom collaborate on V2X

Whilst the rest of the world is arguing about 5G licenses or trying their best to remove Huawei from the vendor list, China is gently moving forward and has already rolled out the ultra-fast mobile network across several cities. As most of the global OEMs have some kind of joint venture going on in the country, China is an amazing testing ground for high speed data transfer applications. Volvo Cars just announced its collaboration with China Unicom Group, exactly for these reasons.

China Unicom Group

A new name to many people, China Unicom is a Fortune 500 telecom giant, whose activities are spread globally. The company has understood that future revenues will not come from SIM cards; their focus is on IoT applications and becoming more than an infrastructure supplier, hence the interest in the automotive industry. Or, as China Unicom’s VP, Liang Baojun puts it: “5G will fully enable the development of automatic driving, improve the safety of driving and bring a new experience by building a collaborative service system of people, vehicles, roadway, network and cloud.”

V2X

V2X or “vehicle to everything” technology is what will be powering autonomous vehicles, connect cars to infrastructure, communicate with other vehicles etc. Its applications – and the reasons that Volvo Cars gives us for its collaboration with China Unicom, will be all about safety, sustainability, customer convenience and autonomous driving. A simple example is finding a parking spot with the help of traffic cameras; another is a combination of traffic lights and vehicle speed limits to ensure safe exits and entries from an onto highways.

V2X tech and 5G connectivity will be part of the next generation of Volvo cars, integrated into the SPA2 modular vehicle architecture. Testing and development will happen in China.