Autonomous cars? For now, only connected

The automotive industry and technology companies must work together to explore solutions that allow the arrival of vehicles without a driver in a few years

     The technology fairs have hundreds of cars parked in their corridors for a few years. The automotive sector has not wanted to be left out of technological advances and some manufacturers now present proposals to champion the race for the 5G . This is one of the most important fields for the sector, since the arrival of this network is necessary for the proper functioning of future autonomous cars.

Thus, it is normal that technology companies and car manufacturers work together more than ever for the launch of electric vehicles, connected and autonomous. In the framework of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) of Barcelona, ​​both present their proposals for the real car of the future. And you do not have to go far to see it. The Spanish Seat has been working for several years on the "connectivity of our entire range of vehicles", according to an interview with this newspaper Leyre Olavarría, director of Connected Car at Seat.


      Younger customers are always connected to their phone and do not understand why when they get into the car they have to stop being," he says. Its objective is that its vehicles incorporate entertainment in the most natural and safe way possible . "It's not just for leisure, but with this service you get not to use your mobile phone while driving," he explains


The manufacturer, which since last September incorporates the interactive service by voice control Amazon Alexa, has just announced in Barcelona that it becomes the first in the world to incorporate Shazam , the song recognition service. The consultant Nielsen indicates that 70% of the users of Shazam use this application to more than 30 km / h, what supposes an important danger.

The president of the company, Luca de Meo, also highlighted the creation of X Moba , a new independent entity whose objective will be to "identify, test, commercialize and invest" in projects that promote solutions that improve the mobility of the future. Your first service is Justmoove, an application that allows you to reserve and pay parking or put gasoline from your mobile. Another initiative under the umbrella of X Moba is Respiro, a car-sharing company that, for the time being, will operate only in Madrid, although they want to export it to other cities outside of Spain.

For its part, Olavarría says that the company is testing with Telefónica for the integration of its vehicles in the 5G ecosystem. "We want to be prepared for when 5G arrives in Spain." It is curious that despite the commitment of many of its competitors for electric vehicles, the firm based in Barcelona does not have any model. On this, the director of Connected Car explains that they are conducting pilot tests with some of them to see the behavior of users, but that their current focus is natural gas "as the necessary energy transition to electrification," he says.

A mobile drives the car
On the side of the technology there have been great advances in this MWC. The Chinese Huawei has presented the first vehicle driven by a smartphone with Artificial Intelligence (AI). The 'RoadReader' project has transformed a Porsche Panamera into a vehicle without a driver that not only detects obstacles, but also understands the stimuli it receives around it and differentiates between more than 1,000 objects or animals . The tests were made with the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, a smartphone that includes AI in its processor.


The head of Huawei Consumer Product, Fabio Arena, explains to this newspaper that the AI ​​is integrated into the device with the Kirin 970 chip, which has a neural processing unit (NPU) that acts as its brain, so the car can "understand and know the dangerous objects of the road" to perform the necessary maneuver. "This learning capacity of Artificial Intelligence is unique."

On the other hand, the Korean operator SK Telecom has presented its connected, autonomous and 5G car project at the MWC of Barcelona . "The vehicle is connected with the user, with the other cars and with a control tower", explains Marta Silva. The vehicle is surrounded by cameras for a 360º vision that also send images to the control tower. "If an accident happens, the car in front can send the video to others to recalculate the route and do not form a traffic jam." The same thing could happen with traffic lights, the vehicle reads them at a distance and calculates the fastest route.

This 5G car, which demonstrated its operation on February 5 in a closed circuit tests in Korea, is not yet available due to the need for a 5G network that allows "much faster" data transmission between vehicles.