The battle to determine which technology wins out for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications has taken a definite turn toward cellular radio-based systems with an announcement from Ford at CES 2019. The Dearborn-based automaker is the first announce a definitive timeline for introduction of C-V2X communications beginning in calendar year 2022.
For the past couple of years, Ford has been indicating its support for the technology solution championed by Qualcomm in North America and Hauwei in China. This is a definite blow to supporters of dedicated short range communications (DSRC) such as Toyota. Until the emergence of C-V2X a few years ago, most of the industry and regulators seemed to be behind DSRC.
The proposed V2V communications mandate issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in late 2016 would have required DSRC equipment to be installed in new vehicles beginning in 2020 or 2021. However, NHTSA has not moved forward with the regulation under the Trump administration leaving the door open for C-V2X to gain a foothold.
DSRC is a variant of WiFi technology that enables reliable, low-latency messaging between directly between vehicles as well as to infrastructure. Initial versions of C-V2X have used 4G LTE radio technology to enable similar functionality. Prior to the development of C-V2X, messages between vehicles would have to be sent through the cellular network, significantly increasing the latency and making it largely unusable for real-time safety applications. C-V2X enables direct peer-to-peer communications between vehicles and also to roadside communications units, just like DSRC.
C-V2X uses the same messaging protocols and much of the software already developed for DSRC-based systems but a different radio communications system. While the message formats are common across the two, a vehicle equipped with C-V2X only could not communicate with a vehicle that only had DSRC.
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