China Path to Autonomous Driving: CVIS/Smart Road
Although the automotive industry is suffering partially due to the COVID-19 pandemic, China’s strategy on “new infrastructure” investments including smart road might point another direction for the B2B companies and startups in the field.
In 2019 we covered autonomous driving technologies in China as a stand-alone system. This year I wanted to start looking at Cooperative Vehicle Infrastructure System (CVIS) and smart road.
CVIS at Technology Dilemma
The virus outbreak in January seemed like a push to the commercialization of autonomous driving technology in an unexpected and unpleasant way. The city of Wuhan witnessed various delivery vans automatically running in hospitals even residential areas. However, it is not the autonomous driving on open roads that human beings have imagined for years.
On the one hand, corner cases on open roads need more time to solve to reach 100% safety. On the other hand, given the cost of mounting sensors and computing powers on a single car, smartening up the road to transfer part of the sensing pressure might be more effective. Of course this requires real-time communications between roads and cars.
China Could Be an Early Adopter of CVIS
The social benefits of smart road have been researched and recognized since the 1950s. However, relevant projects have achieved very limited success throughout the world for many reasons.
In China, the strategy and investment have always been focused on projects that facilitate innovation and improve weak areas in economic and social development. For example, in the rapid and wide construction of high-speed trains, China has relatively flexible bureaucracy to facilitate technological innovation as well as strong manufacturing capacity to implement technologies on a large scale.
This year China is speeding up “new infrastructure” projects to offset the economic impact of COVID-19 and boost sustainable growth. Among the recent documents/guidelines, the Strategy for Innovative Development of Intelligent Vehicles issued by 11 ministerial-level authorities in February 2020 sets blueprints on the autonomous vehicles industry in China. By 2025, the goal is to have conditionally automated vehicles in scale production and autonomous vehicles commercialized in specific environment. Most importantly, the smart city projects will achieve major progress where LTE-V2X and 5G-V2X are most readily available.
Market Size
There are different ways to measure the market size of smart road that add up to some large numbers. For example, the budget for road transformation that includes roadside sensors, mechanical and electrical equipment, and accessories per km is RMB 10–20 million (roughly USD 1.5–2 million). There are 4,850,000 km roads in China, of which 143,000 km are highway.
In experts’ opinion, RMB 1 million per km would be practical for smart road projects to bring commercial value and be sustainable.
Opportunities
CVIS combines emerging technologies in many sectors like network communications, cloud/data platform, roadside hardware/software, and onboard unit (OBU). The industry chain involves communication chip, communication module, terminals & equipment, vehicle manufacturing, test & certification, operation services, etc.
There are mainly 5 applications of CVIS: vehicle platooning, lane change, intersection management, vehicle energy management, and road friction estimation.
Although telecom carriers, the Internet giants (BAT) and ICT giant Huawei have defined their particular roles in the CVIS landscape, it is still early for any big players to dominate the market. There are gaps to be filled, such as integrators of roadside sensors and algorism, or solutions for combining autonomous driving and CVIS. Future articles might share some interesting business models from Chinese startups.
Pilot Projects
At the end of 2019, there were 40+ demonstration zones for intelligent and connected solutions, and 20+ roads as pilot zones to smart road and CVIS across China.
This year, new demonstration zones continue to be built and existing areas expand in terms of size and functionality. For example, Jiangsu National Smart Transportation Test Zone (in the city of Wuxi) started in 2017 covering 3.7 km open road with 6 intersections. There were 9 V2I scenes and 3 V2V scenes for test. Between 2020 and 2021, the plan is to implement roadside control and communication equipment in 1,000 intersections covering 500 sq km.
