How 5G is the Connected Car´s biggest enabler

The evolution of the connected car

The connected car has been a growing reality for decades. It was GM in partnership with Motorola that introduced the OnStar service back in 1996. Using its own embedded chipset and antenna, the platform gave GM an early start. With the advent of 3G came a broader market adoption of the connected car. Today vehicles leverage our smartphones’ powerful connectivity and software platforms to provide us with services through Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.

Currently, vehicles have 2 main modes of connectivity:

• Telematics: relating to operational vehicle data such as location, speed, status, diagnostics, etc. It’s used widely for maintenance, fleet management, innovation and in some cases to alert first responders immediately after an accident (e.g. OnStar).
• Infotainment: pertaining to user-centered services such as navigation, audio, calls, voice-to-text, Alexa, remote controls for engine-start or climate control, etc.

While cars remain some of the most important machines our societies depend on, they aren’t smart devices. They’re complex mechanical gadgets with components of smart devices. The current challenge is making the car connected as a true, fully integrated smart device.

If you compare the connected car with the evolution of the cell phone into the smartphone, we are just in the era of Symbian, Windows Mobile or Blackberry on GPRS or EDGE. You were able to walk around, do emails, send texts, make calls, navigate and listen to music, but the overall interconnected ecosystem where a multitude of devices communicate with each other and the cloud was not yet a reality.

At the time of its release, the first iPhone had more capabilities than the network could accommodate. As a massive flurry of users got a taste of the iPhone’s broad features, operators sped up 3G deployment to accommodate the explosion of disruption. App development became the new cool to fuel a variety of innovative services we now can’t live without and a whole novel industry of related devices (e.g. tablets, wearables) came to be. Similarly, this is what’s about to happen with cars as they break away from their smartphone dependency and transition into becoming smart devices themselves.

Challenges and outcomes ahead

Expanding the car’s technology stack with…

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