5G Era to Accelerate Smart and Autonomous Vehicles

At the Taichung "Dadu Mountain Cross-Industry Innovation Summit," Transportation Minister Lin Chia-lung said with the advent of the 5G era, the possibilities of smart transportation has become endless thanks to 5G capabilities of wider broadband, low latency, and high connectivity.

The Transportation Ministry has set up a division overseeing transportation technologies, including 5G application development, electric buses, railway, bicycles, and smart transportation. The ministry aims to create a "national team" of related institutions, entities, and companies to aggregate resources and funding; the division is set to invest NTD$17.1 billion within five years as its primary budget to digitalize the industry. For example, Taiwan plans to overhaul its existing public bus transportation to include electric bus fleets by 2030. The overhaul expects to see a demand for 10,600 units, which would create NTD$170 billion in industry value and create 560,000 jobs.

With the pandemic impacting the global economy, experts envision a changed society in the post-pandemic era; urbanization will continue to develop; however, rural areas will continue to see their population age. The government must further integrate innovation and traditional society through technology, such as autonomous vehicles, UAV, and smart logistics. To do so, the Transportation Ministry's current roadmap includes achieving indigenous manufacturing of related technologies and equipment and connecting precision machinery, electronics, and parts manufacturing firms based in Taichung and Taoyuan into an industry cluster.

In a keynote topic of the automotive industry's technology transfer, Honghai Group CTO Wei Kuo-chang observed the current state of the auto industry is still thinking and designing from a hardware perspective. This leads to software systems that are comparatively closed and more complicated than necessary. Wei pointed out that Honghai's latest MIH Electric Vehicle Open Platform has based "software and transparency" as its core values. The MIH platform aims to support customized models for autonomous driving and smart vehicle applications. Currently, there are over 200 notable firms in the industry that are already part of the coalition, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, MediaTek, Qualcomm, TI, ST, and ROHM.

The platform also addresses existing issues within the auto industry that have hindered progress, including high R&D costs, long R&D periods, and sometimes lack of resources. The coalition ensures that member companies can work towards creating electric vehicle software, hardware, and parts that can be used interchangeably. The first characteristic of the MIH platform is in its modularization, flexibility, and customization; the second being focusing on lightweight and one-piece designs; the third trait is a strong EEA framework, and the final trait is autonomous vehicle technologies.

Honghai is slated to announce the first "EV Kit" platform this month, which will offer tools for members in the software interface, hardware specifications, and system framework areas. The group is aiming for global pre-ordering in February and order delivery at the end of April. In the future, there are plans to roll out drive-by-wire, autonomous driving, and IVI systems.

Chunghwa Telecom Research Institute Director Lin Chao-yang said AI and software are both changing the fabric of the transportation industry. The biggest factor behind electric vehicle maker Tesla's success was that it was able to create a new example with software and AI.

Lin pointed out that be it traditional or new-gen auto companies, they will all be discovering the new business model. Future challenges would include new competitors entering the market, the lack of software and modularization, and open-sourced standards in place.

Chunghwa is currently integrating its telecommunication network services with vehicle IoT, Lin said. At present, the telecommunications provider has offered solutions, ranging from autonomous shuttling, smart intersection monitoring. They are also closely working with self-driving vehicle partners in the field and partaking in government-led UAV innovation programs.

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