Qin Lihong: 5G will definitely bring revolutionary changes to automated driving

Qin Lihong, co-founder and president of NIO, explained his thoughts on 5G for intelligent driving in his speech at the Future of Travel Forum. He said that communication is the new and necessary infrastructure to achieve smart driving. It's a huge step forward from 4G to 5G, and will definitely bring a revolutionary change in automated driving. According to Qin Lihong, as the car becomes smarter, it will change from a complex machine with a mechanical architecture to an intelligent terminal that can be moved. Then the 4G network coverage will give the car more functions. For example, NIO is currently doing FOTA on a large scale to remotely push updates to iterate on the underlying firmware and software performance systems of the vehicle, which can reduce the cycle time for a traditional car to solve a usage problem from months to seconds. "Remote iteration (in automotive) is not a very common thing. We're used to using our iPhones and thinking that remote upgrades are common. But in FOTA in the automotive industry, only two companies in the world can do it, one is NIO and one is Tesla." Qin Lihong said that this will even become a trend in the future, because in five to 10 years from now, cars that do not support remote iteration will not be sold. Qin Lihong believes that remote iteration as the beginning, the smart car industry will transition from automatic assisted driving to fully automated driving, but the local computing of the vehicle is not yet realistic for the new energy vehicle industry, so it is more since the cloud computing. It is also decided that, whether it is automatically assisted driving or fully automated driving, are inseparable from four steps - perception, transmission, computational decision-making and control. The transmission and computational decision process is closely related to communication. And in the next stage of intelligent driving, communication is the new and necessary infrastructure to achieve intelligent driving. "The move from 4G to 5G is definitely a huge one. But at a certain point, maybe 5G won't even be enough," Qin Lihong said. And in the fully automated driving stage, Qin Lihong believes that the roads as infrastructure also need to be intelligent, and smart cars become a key link in fully automated driving. He took the sea as an example of a group of sardines in the sea, a group of sardines has more than 200,000 sardines composed, but they steered when the action direction is unified, there is no collision with each other, this is the future of fully automated driving worth learning the bionic principle. Qin Lihong said yes, the current network form from the telecommunications upgrade, there are base stations, computers, optical fiber, signal. So the next step through the neural network, biomimicry, can we train and cultivate a new generation of network that can self-learn and self-judge, which is an advanced vehicle-road cooperative network, when an accident or a situation occurs, the traffic signs and signal system of the road will send signals to 100 or 1000 vehicles driving on the road at the same time, to do the same to avoid or stop the car. Action. "(Automated driving) relies on communication with high intensity. From 4G to 5G will definitely bring a revolutionary change in automated driving, then we can also expect 6G and 7G to bring faster, safer and more secure communications until we push vehicles like cars to achieve a full degree of driverlessness," Qin Lihong said.