Communicating with cars

摘要

There is a large and passionate debate going on in our society on the future of the car, mostly revolving around the vehicle drivetrain. However, there is a larger issue that will apply to every vehicle in the future, regardless of the motive force under the hood. That issue is the development of the connected car and its related infrastructure.This connectivity is inevitable. Cars are one of the few areas in society being impacted by every single disruptive technical advance being commercialized today from advanced power electronics to autonomous intelligent systems. Add cloud connectivity required for the vehicle infotainment and navigation systems, and you have the building blocks of a smart traffic environment.This connectivity extends from the board level to the municipal infrastructure itself and is expressed in the term "V2X," which means "vehicle-to-everything." The next generation of cars will not only talk to internal sensors and systems but to other cars and the road (Fig. 1). The subsets of V2X are vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), vehicle-to-network (V2N), and vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P). In many cases, some of the solutions and services will overlap, and convergence will integrate the functionality at the device level more and more as the core technologies continue to mature.