Dongfeng partners with Tencent and China Mobile on connected cars (original) (raw)

Dongfeng Motor Corporation, one of China’s top five carmakers, is partnering with Tencent Holdings and China Mobile to develop connected vehicle services in preparation for the coming 5G era.

The Wuhan-based carmaker unveiled two joint labs on Monday that will focus on enhancing car safety and connectivity under the next-generation telecommunication technologies.

The tie-up comes as 5G is expected to transform the automotive industry, where access to data will be faster and computing workloads can be “dynamically shifted”, balancing the analysis between car and cloud ends, said Ericsson in a report in May.

Also known as the “internet of cars”, connected vehicles refers to the moving network made up of IoT-enabled cars through the latest communication technologies. China wants smart vehicles to account for half of all new cars sold at home by 2020, according to a plan by the National Development and Reform Commission, the top economic planning agency.

Carmakers and autonomous driving start-ups are also counting on 5G – with its faster speeds and low latency – to smooth the operation of driverless cars.

By 2020, about 90 per cent of motorways in big Chinese cities are expected to support vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, where sensors in a self-driving car can gather information and send the data to the car’s on-board computer, or a cloud computing platform, to make instant decisions.