(Photo/Xinhua)

Smart vehicles once again came into the limelight as China recently issued 5G licenses, a move which is expected to spur a new round of development within the auto industry.

5G technology will dramatically transform the auto industry in terms of autopilot and vehicle interconnection, said Jochen Goller, president and CEO of BMW Group Region China at a recent promotional activity.

With the characteristics of high speed, low delay, and large bandwidth, 5G will connect everything, and that is why many countries are pursuing this technology.

The vehicle industry generally agrees that 5G is the foundation of high-quality autopilot development. To make smart communication between vehicles and surroundings possible and to use applications that are more complicated and data-consuming, no other communication infrastructure can do better than 5G.

For instance, in China, every BMW autopilot test car produces up to 8TB of data each hour, which is equivalent to producing an HD movie every second. The current 4G technology is not capable of meeting such a huge demand.

Smart cars would push traffic transformation. However, this transformation also calls for the comprehensive upgrading of vehicle platforms, network information and infrastructure, as well as inter-discipline innovation and synergetic collaboration between industry, academy and research, said Wan Gang, president of the China Association of Science and Technology.

According to Miao Wei, head of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the ministry has issued a series of guiding documents, established platforms for synergetic innovation among different industries, and accelerated the construction of a national standard system, in a bid to enhance top-level design and push for innovation-driven development.

In the next 20 years, Chinese transportation will dramatically change, according to a McKinsey report. By 2040, 55 percent of passenger mileage in the country is expected to be made up of electric, autopilot, and shared vehicles. China is likely to possess a dominant position in the auto industry, as carmakers plan to build more electric and automated vehicles, the report noted.

China has already made progress in technology improvement and market size in new energy cars. Chinese enterprises accounted for half of the ten carmakers that sold the most NEVs (new energy vehicles) in the first five months of this year.