Santa Clara County, Calif., is giving buses more green lights. Louisville, Ky., is collecting real-time data on viaduct flooding to prevent car drowning deaths. College Station, Texas, is outfitting five intersections with warnings for pedestrians when buses and emergency vehicles approach.
A long stalemate over the details of deploying vehicle-to-infrastructure, or V2I, technology has ended, and the investments keep coming. The federal government has requested proposals for more solutions this year, with vehicle connectivity groups calling 2023 “pivotal.” Federal Communications Commission waivers granted in April have given automakers clarity on the way forward after decades of ambiguity.
“We’re in the red zone, and I can finally see where we can get this ball over the goal line,” said John Kwant, executive director of the Americas at 5G Automotive Association and Ford’s former global director of mobility and advanced technologies. “This technology has the potential to have the same kind of step-level improvement in vehicle safety and reducing traffic fatalities that we’ve seen going all the way back to seat belts and airbags and advanced braking.”
Vehicle-to-infrastructure technology allows vehicles and smart public infrastructure, such as traffic lights, to interact. Departments of transportation and technology companies are testing and deploying products that can collect and act on data about road conditions, traffic, the presence of emergency vehicles, weather and other information, and automakers are adapting vehicles to be able to receive the data and share their own.
The U.S. Department of Transportation predicts that 12 percent of potential crash scenarios could be avoided using the technology.
This technology, paired with advanced driver assistance systems and ultimately autonomous features, could lead to “a great reduction” of crashes and fatalities, Kwant said.
There are many types of vehicle-to-infrastructure technology, but they all rely on the same principle — devices, such as roadside units or sensors, capture vehicle information and receive advisories and other messages from local agencies. The technologies then wirelessly provide that data to vehicles or to pieces of smart infrastructure that respond to adjust traffic flow or driver behavior.
Most vehicles on the road today don’t have the ability to communicate with infrastructure, but modern sensors, algorithms and other technology installed on streets can derive enough information from cars to start to make these systems work.
Israeli startup NoTraffic uses two tools to retrofit existing intersections and create smart traffic lights. One is a sensor that classifies road users such as pedestrians or vehicles and monitors their speed and location. The other is a control unit that municipalities install in existing traffic-light cabinets.
Using sensor data, control units manage the traffic lights at the individual level and across the system. The sensor also transmits data to the cloud and to individual connected vehicles, which can receive warnings if, for example, another vehicle is about to run a red light.
NoTraffic said it can retrofit an intersection in less than two hours.
Now agencies have “one hardware device with a lot of applications that you can activate or deactivate whenever you want,” said NoTraffic CEO Tal Kreisler. “That’s a big change. That’s a huge revolution for this space.”
North American cities such as Palo Alto, Calif., and Tucson, Ariz., have deployed NoTraffic, and the company said it’s on track to work with more than 100 departments of transportation and traffic agencies by the end of the year.
For the first time, there is serious momentum for a national deployment of vehicle-to-infrastructure technology as government grants and waivers pick up speed. For example, the U.S. Department of Transportation in 2022 awarded a nearly $1.9 million grant to Utah’s DOT, which is partnering with Ford, General Motors and Nissan to develop V2I test procedures and test tools to deploy nationally.
There are 59 smart transportation projects in 33 states receiving a total of $94 million in funding from the DOT in fiscal 2022.
In April, the FCC granted waivers to Audi of America, Ford Motor Co., Jaguar Land Rover and Panasonic Corp. of North America to use a band of spectrum designated for vehicle-to-everything technology while they write the final regulations.
The waivers are “massively significant,” said Lee Colman, global head of consulting at SBD Automotive. “You’ve got several threads there that are coming together that are kind of breaking the slow evolution of this corner of automotive.”
The quicker pace of development can be traced back to rulemaking in 2020 by the FCC.
In 1999, the FCC designated 75 megahertz of spectrum in the 5.9 gigahertz band for intelligent transportation services such as traffic light control and traffic monitoring. It expected the technology available, dedicated short-range communications, would be the means of communication between vehicles and infrastructure.
NHTSA proposed rulemaking in 2016 that would mandate the use of dedicated short-range communications devices in all light vehicles. But only a year later there was a new kid on the block — cellular vehicle-to-everything, or C-V2X, technology, which relies on LTE or 4G cellular data to transmit messages rather than Wi-Fi and offers a 20 to 30 percent longer range.
When President Donald Trump took office, he was generally opposed to more regulation, and the proposed rulemaking did not move forward as a mandate, said Michael Shulman, who co-founded the Crash Avoidance Metrics Partnership and consults for the Smart Intersection Project at the University of Michigan.
But automakers moved ahead. In 2019, Ford announced at the Consumer Electronics Show that it intended to deploy cellular vehicle-to everything technology in all new models in the U.S. starting in 2022. Ford, Volkswagen Group of America, BMW of North America, American Honda Motor Co., and other automakers and technology companies backed a request for the FCC to allow use of the upper 20 MHz of the previously designated 5.9 GHz spectrum band for the technology.
A lot has changed since 1999. Smartphones, tablets, computers, televisions and other devices rely on Wi-Fi to connect to the Internet. The FCC has said the U.S. will need up to 1.6 GHz of new mid-band spectrum by 2025 because of that growing Wi-Fi demand.
Rather than granting waivers for cellular vehicle-to-everything technology as automakers had advocated, the FCC put forth a proposal to turn the bottom 45 MHz into Wi-Fi territory, reserving only the top 30 for vehicle and infrastructure connectivity. At the stroke of a pen, the industry went from 75 MHz to 30.
Auto industry companies and departments of transportation “who were kind of led up to the altar in 2015 by NHTSA thinking that we were going to utilize” all 75 MHz “really felt like all of that work that they’d done for 15, 16 years was going away,” said Kwant of 5G Automotive Association.
In 2020, the FCC approved the rule change and decided to transition the entire upper 30 MHz from dedicated short-range communications to cellular vehicle-to-everything technology.
While the FCC decision required sacrifices from the automotive industry, it has offered some clarity. Cellular vehicle-to-everything has prevailed over its older cousin.
“The adage I use is that we have all gotten through our collective stages of grief, and we are emerging and getting to acceptance,” Kwant said.
The breaking of the vehicle-to-infrastructure stalemate has implications for other areas of connectivity. For vehicle-to-vehicle, or V2V, connectivity to work, there needs to be a critical mass of vehicles that can communicate with each other. Vehicle-to-infrastructure technology has a more immediate impact because smart infrastructure can respond to unconnected vehicles.
Automakers are “looking for the spark, the way forward, and V2I gives them early customer value,” Shulman said. “Once they’ve put the communication system in their vehicles, they can also send these V2V messages.”