Paul Gluckman

A new LG Electronics trademark application at the Patent and Trademark Office suggests further proof that the company wants to be a big player in components for autonomous cars. LG seeks to register the trademark “Lightminum” for a class of goods and services related to self-driving vehicles, including vehicle traction control systems, “sensors for use in the control of engines” and vehicle “braking devices” and systems, said the application (serial number 87070709), filed June 14. LG also wants to reserve use of Lightminum for a range of other possible goods and services in consumer and industrial applications, including battery chargers for mobile phones, tablets, headphones, digital signage and data-processing equipment, the application said. LG filed a similar application June 13 (application number 4020160044102) with South Korean trademark authorities, the PTO application said. “While I can’t comment on the trademark application specifically, it’s no secret that LG is working on autonomous car technologies," spokesman John Taylor emailed us Wednesday. For example, LG’s Advanced Driver Assistance Systems technologies "support autonomous driving systems," Taylor said. "The vehicle components business represents one of LG’s fastest growing areas, and our core technologies and open-standards philosophy position LG to be a strong player in autonomous vehicle components.”

Unit shipments of artificial intelligence systems used in car infotainment systems and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), including autonomous vehicles, are expected to rise from just 7 million in 2015 to 122 million by 2025, IHS said in a Monday report. The “attach rate” of AI-based systems in new vehicles was 8 percent in 2015, and “the vast majority were focused on speech recognition,” IHS said. “That number is forecast to rise to 109 percent in 2025, as there will be multiple AI systems of various types installed in many cars.” AI-based systems in automotive applications today are “relatively rare, but they will grow to become standard in new vehicles over the next five years,” IHS said. It sees the biggest growth in infotainment “human-machine interface” uses, such as speech and gesture recognition, eye tracking and driver monitoring, and ADAS and autonomous vehicles, including camera-based machine vision systems, radar-based detection units, driver condition evaluation, and sensor fusion engine control units, it said. In ADAS, “deep learning” functions that mimic “human neural networks,” will represent “a key milestone on the road to fully autonomous vehicles,” it said. “Deep learning allows detection and recognition of multiple objects, improves perception, reduces power consumption, supports object classification, enables recognition and prediction of actions, and will reduce development time of ADAS systems.”

IHS erred in its forecast that nearly 21 million autonomous vehicles will be sold globally by 2035 (see 1606080048), the firm said in a Thursday clarification. IHS sees 76 million autonomous vehicles being sold globally through 2035, including 21 million alone in 2035, the clarification said. IHS expects global sales will reach nearly 600,000 units in 2025 and rise at a 43 percent compound annual growth rate in the decade that follows, it said.

IHS sees nearly 21 million autonomous vehicles being sold globally by 2035, the firm said in a Tuesday forecast. “This is a substantial increase from previous estimates, and is influenced by recent research and development by automotive OEMs, supplier and technology companies who are investing in this area,” IHS said. It also based the new forecast “on a wave of recent developments and investments in this sector of the market, as well as activity within various regulatory environments,” it said. The U.S. market is expected to see “the earliest deployment of autonomous vehicles as it works through challenges posed by regulation, liability and consumer acceptance,” IHS said. Deployment in the U.S. will begin with several thousand autonomous vehicles in 2020, but grow to nearly 4.5 million vehicles by 2035, it said. In fashioning a market for autonomous vehicles, IHS “expects entirely new vehicle segments to be created, in addition to traditional vehicles adding autonomous capabilities,” it said. “Consumers gain new choices in personal mobility to complement mass transit, and these new choices will increasingly use battery electric and other efficient means of propulsion.”

The automotive and transportation industries must expand the scope and relevance of 5G cellular connectivity to enable vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X) communication for future vehicles, said an ABI report Wednesday. By 2025, ABI forecasts, 67 million automotive 5G vehicle subscriptions will be active, and 3 million of those will be low-latency connections deployed primarily in autonomous and driverless cars. ABI said 5G will “unify connectivity” in autonomous vehicles, enabling broadband multimedia streaming, cloud services for vehicle lifecycle management and the capturing and uploading of sensor data. V2X communication will enable “cooperative mobility,” which will allow vehicles to exchange status and event information via reliable, low-latency communication technologies so vehicles proactively can share “critical events happening locally with each other” to ensure safe driving practices, it said. The most promising capability of 5G for automotive applications will be its low latency, potentially as low as one millisecond, but that will require underlying URLL (ultra-reliable low latency) 5G capabilities based on the use of millimeter wave bands, latency reduction techniques and advanced device-to-device (D2D) communication, said ABI analyst Dominique Bonte. Whether those latencies will be achieved will depend on 5G standards and deployment strategies, "but the question is not so much if, but when the industry will embrace the disruptive approach,” said Bonte. Currently, the telecommunications industry is upgrading LTE/4G networks, Bonte said, but it will eventually build new radio access networks (RANs) based on millimeter waves. Bonte gave the second half of next decade as the timetable for RANs when “very low-latency capabilities will be achievable and V2X-enabled smart mobility applications will be possible.”

ABI Research sees 5G as the “unifying connectivity technology" for future cars, the firm said in a Thursday report. By 2025, there will be 67 million active automotive 5G vehicle subscriptions, 3 million of which will be low-latency connections mainly deployed in autonomous cars, it said. Vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication (V2X) will be a “key requirement for the connected and autonomous vehicle of the future,” ABI said. “It is closely linked to the concept of cooperative mobility, allowing vehicles to exchange both status and event information with each other via reliable, low-latency communication technologies. With it, vehicles can be proactive and capture and share critical events happening locally with each other, ultimately ensuring safer driving practices.” But for V2X to become a reality, the automotive and transportation industries “must first expand the scope and relevance of 5G cellular connectivity,” it said. ABI expects this to dramatically increase through 2025, “allowing connectivity providers to bring more value-added services to the table and better position themselves in the automotive ecosystem,” it said. “From there, new business models will emerge and ultimately more closely align the automotive and telecom industries.”

Mobileye and STMicroelectronics are teaming to codevelop the next generation of Mobileye's EyeQ SoC, the EyeQ5, to be “the central computer performing sensor fusion” for fully autonomous vehicles when they’re commercialized starting in 2020, the chipmakers said in a Tuesday joint announcement. Engineering samples of EyeQ5 are expected to be available by first half of 2018, they said. EyeQ5 will be delivered to automakers and Tier-1 OEMs with “a full suite of hardware accelerated algorithms and applications that are required for autonomous driving,” they said. Mobileye also will support an “automotive-grade” standard operating system and provide a complete software development kit “to allow customers to differentiate their solutions by deploying their algorithms on EyeQ5,” they said. The companies expect to make the software development kit available by late 2018, they said.

Tier 1 suppliers are “losing their roles” as system innovators and developers in the nascent autonomous vehicle market because more OEMs are engaging directly with software developers and hardware and semiconductor vendors to make self-driving cars a commercial reality, ABI Research said in a Monday report. “It is becoming increasingly evident that no single Tier 1 supplier can deliver a complete autonomous driving system,” the firm said. “As a result, OEMs are increasingly engaging directly with component vendors, and becoming more aligned with product roadmaps from across the value chain.” Just last week, Nvidia estimated it’s working with about 80 companies on autonomous vehicles through its Drive PX platform (see 1605130032).

The auto industry hopes to push a decision about unlicensed use of the 5.9 MHz band to a later administration, Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld said Friday. Feld took aim at a letter automakers and others sent to the White House (see 1605050022). “Yesterday, the auto industry finally crossed a line on common decency that just pisses me off,” Feld wrote in a blog post. “It is one thing to claim that your technology saves lives and that if the FCC doesn’t do what you want, people will die. It is another thing to knowingly and deliberately invoke actual, real dead pedestrians and dead cyclists you know damned well your proposed technology could not conceivably save in an effort to support your own spectrum squatting.” The dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) system the auto industry wants to put in cars would replace the “actual existing collision avoidance system you are deploying today that would save cyclists and pedestrians,” namely car radar and sensing systems that use unlicensed spectrum, Feld said.

The rationale last month for creating Ford Smart Mobility as a new subsidiary "to design, build, grow and invest in emerging mobility services" (see report in the March 14 issue) was to allow the new unit “to have the organization and the structure to face off with some of the tech and mobility companies in terms of acting really fast,” yet still be “connected” to Ford’s “core operations,” CEO Mark Fields said. But “it's still way too early” to discuss Ford Smart Mobility’s work in much detail, Fields said in Q&A on an earnings call. With the new subsidiary, Ford will be “very focused” in the future “on where to play and how to win” in the mobility space, he said Thursday. “We are generally using experiments and pilots to, not only test technology and customer preferences, but very importantly test the business models, because at the end of the day, you want to make money on these things. And we're doing that before we make what I would call major bets on investments, whether it's internally or externally.” Fields promised the company will have “more to say about this as our Ford Smart Mobility strategy progresses this year.” Fields thinks global automakers will reach “an inflection point as an industry over the next number of years, given the technology that's available, not only in the product itself, but how to serve the customer,” he said. But “there's a lot of cars here in the U.S.,” and “it's going to take a long time, even with breakthrough technologies, where people will change that over,” and adopt autonomous, semi-autonomous or connected cars, he said. “Just the math will show you that will take a good amount of time.” Fields thinks “it's too early to tell” what technological trends will take over, “but we're really looking at this as vehicle miles traveled,” he said. Future autonomous vehicles “will be used 24/7, they'll rack up miles sooner,” which in turn will drive “more service revenue and, ultimately, more car sales,” he said. “Our strategy, very clearly, is to continue to make the investments on the technology side and the investments on the mobility side so that we can participate in both of those revenue streams.”