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As the first car company to "bet" on the coordinated route of the car road, Ford once again ushered in the expansion of the application city. From helping car owners solve the problem of "waiting for lights" to finally integrating with automatic driving, how far will the road to upgrade the road of vehicle-road coordination go? On June 15, Ford's relevant experts exchanged views with Autohome to discuss the development trend of vehicle-road synergy.
According to Fan Heng, senior manager of China's vehicle networking product delivery, starting this year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has organized major car companies to conduct research and explore the national traffic light service as the first standardized scenario for vehicle-road collaboration. With the epidemic effectively controlled, new infrastructure is also put back on the agenda. As an important branch of the new infrastructure of intelligent transportation, vehicle-road collaboration will play an increasingly important role. This is also The strength of Ford's firm commitment to vehicle-road coordination.
Ford is the first large-scale mass production of vehicle-to-road system system in China, from the beginning of 2021, all new models of Ford have been equipped with vehicle-road coordination system standard, and continue to optimize the "traffic light signal push", "green wave speed", "green light start reminder", "red light warning", "road information broadcast", "electronic road sign" six functions experience, high frequency use of the actual user more than 2500 people.
Ford originally planned to land a vehicle-road coordination system in nine cities in China before the end of 2021, and the premise of landing was that at least 100 intersections in the city formed a planned efficiency. Up to now, Ford has applied the vehicle-road coordination system in Wuxi, Changsha, Guangzhou and Xi'an, and other cities are still advancing. Fan Heng stressed that "our top priority is to expand the city."
The car goes first, driving the road
Vehicle-road collaboration is a systematic project, involving traffic managers, data operators, communication equipment suppliers, car companies, data cloud platforms and operators, high-precision map service providers, and so on. To provide a highly reliable vehicle-road collaborative service, it is necessary to work closely with every partner in the industry.
From a technical point of view, vehicle-road collaboration is essentially a communication mode, mainly two types: direct connection mode and network mode. The former has strong real-time and low latency, but the communication distance is short; The latter is not limited by distance, but the delay is relatively long. Based on reliability and data cost considerations, Ford's current technical route is a pure network-based "car-cloud-road" model, starting next year will switch to a network-based, direct connection as a supplement, equipped with new hardware on new models, and have new scenarios. In five years or more, the future will be direct connection, supplemented by network.
Fan Heng said that the change and layout of the route mainly depend on the value provided to consumers. After adding the direct connection mode, there will be new application scenarios, including V2V and V2I. For example, Ford and its partners launched an advance broadcast in Changsha when approaching the epidemic risk zone. In addition, the landing of the highway scene is also being verified.
In Ford's view, the technology of the vehicle-road collaboration product itself is very mature, and often the work of business promotion will be much greater than the technical work.
"Because the chain of collaborative design of vehicles and roads is very long, and the operation service is very complicated, it is a typical barrel effect." Fan Heng said that from the perspective of the product, the most critical thing is that all data and service chains must be determined and need to have a guarantee of a business relationship. Cities need to solve the problems of data attribution and related operations, and then Ford will sign commercial partnerships with local operators. The situation in each city is very different, and there is no standard template. In order to promote this service, Ford has established a framework agreement and pricing model, and then explored and confirmed according to the specific situation when it is landed.
Vehicle-road collaboration and autonomous driving will converge
In the country's "14th Five-Year Plan", the strategic significance of vehicle-road collaboration in the development of automatic driving is emphasized, and in the future, China will implement the dual-track parallel strategy of "bicycle intelligence + vehicle-road collaboration" to create a more reliable automatic driving implementation scenario.
Many cities in China are accelerating the deployment of C-V2X network environments, building intelligent road infrastructure, and promoting vehicle-road collaborative application demonstrations. At present, there are 4 national-level pilot areas for the Internet of Vehicles in the mainland, 6 pilot cities for the coordinated development of smart city infrastructure and intelligent networked vehicles, more than 10 national-level intelligent networking test demonstration areas, and more than 30 city-level and enterprise-level test demonstration areas.
Fan Heng believes that vehicle-road collaboration and bicycle intelligence will definitely converge, but it is impossible to determine the timetable for the time being. Because all changes ultimately need to be user-driven, on the other hand, the data and services provided by Vehicle-Road Synergy to L3 and L4 require a process of establishing a standard system.
Compared with other companies, Ford has gone faster in the commercialization and productization of vehicle-road collaboration, and has also undertaken the task of educating and developing the market. "We are not paving the city for the sake of paving the city, but we need to continuously evaluate the impact of the entire industrial policy to ensure that Ford's vehicle road synergy products meet the future direction of the entire industry, so as to achieve large-scale mass production applications." Our threshold is definitely based on whether the future vehicle-road collaboration products can be truly integrated into the L3 and L4 autonomous driving functions. ”