5G will enhance autonomous driving – but it should not be a requirement

The numbers suggest that European roads are the safest in the world, with an average 49 fatalities per one million inhabitants compared with a global average of 174, but some figures continue to prove a concern. Incident rates in Germany, for example, currently hover around at 7,100 road traffic incidents on the country’s roads every day, claiming an average of nine lives and causing over 1,000 injuries.

Tier 1s such as Continental see potential for improved cellular connectivity to help improve this situation, particularly with the advent of self-driving cars fitted with a full suite of sensors. Tomorrow’s vehicles could generate around a gigabyte of data per minute, and in that data will be traffic and road-user information that could be used to save lives. A 5G network could provide both the bandwidth and speed required to quickly process and share that data. Downlink speeds could hit 10 gigabits per second, and a tenfold reduction in latency – the delay between a message being sent and received – could reduce times to as low as a millisecond.