Huawei aims to turbocharge design of self-driving cars

Huawei Technologies is designing the communications architecture for a new generation of “autonomous” cars which will be connected to the high-speed internet, according to Eric Xu, the company’s chief executive.The Chinese telecoms equipment maker hopes to have a series of technologies based on fifth-generation mobile networks commercially viable by 2020.The company, which rivals western telecoms equipment manufacturers led by Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent, is allocating $600m in research and development spending for 5G networks.

Huawei is one of several technology companies, led by Google, pioneering the development of autonomous, or self-driving, cars alongside established carmakers such as Mercedes-Benz. “We are in close partnerships with car manufacturers to find their requirements for 5G,” said Mr Xu.He added that Huawei has no plans to manufacture cars, but that it would design communications modules that will connect cars to networks – and eventually enable vehicles to be driven, at least partly, by remote control.

The company is already by some measures the world’s leading manufacturer of the digital world’s architecture – mobile and fixed-line networks.Mr Xu, who shares the post of chief executive with two other men on a six-month rotation, said he was confident Huawei will be a leader in 5G networks.The company announced last week that the first big test of its 5G mobile technology would come at the football World Cup in 2018, due to be held in Russia. The first commercial deployment is scheduled for 2020.

Mr Xu said a crucial requirement for self-driving cars was low “latency” – a reference to the time it takes for data to travel to a third-party server and back – as this would reduce delays when making video calls, for example.He added that 5G networks would ideally have a latency of one millisecond, compared with 40 to 80 milliseconds on 4G, to avoid collisions between cars.“Having said that, I’m not sure we can deliver one millisecond in the end. Maybe five milliseconds. Maybe three milliseconds,” said Mr Xu.