In October 2021, during my first semester on exchange on THI (Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt), Germany, I applied to a temporary job on the (Center of Automotive Research on Integrated Safety Systems and Measurement Area) research center. On the job interview day, the teachers asked me if I wanted to write my course final project (TCC) as it would be more interesting for them to have a student doing a long-term work inside the laboratory. This is how Insper’s first Engineering Final Project (PFE) was done during exchange.

 

Car2X: what is it and how does it work?

 

The technology I chose to work on my PFE was Car2X due to its great potential to avoid traffic accidents and save lives. Car2X is a wide concept that refers to wireless communication among vehicles and several other peers (represented by an X in their names). Examples of those peers are streets and roads infrastructure (traffic lights, tolls, traffic signs, highway manager’s support cars), pedestrians or cyclists and their smartphones, including other vehicles (cars, trucks, ambulances and motorcycles). This communication takes place through 5G or protocol 802.11p (a home wifi version, optimized for automotive environment).

 

Regardless of the chosen protocol, the transmitted messages are standardized by international joint-ventures based on the needs established by the market, defined from research done with companies, universities and society members. In order to illustrate technology operation, I hereby bring three examples:

 

• Imagine you are driving on a highway on a rainy night, or a night with too much fog. This would be hard for you and for your car’s sensors to clearly see other cars in such situation. However, with Car2X, attributes such as your speed, your position’s coordinates and your car acceleration are constantly being shared with all cars enabled to receive intel through one of the mentioned protocols.
• Imagine you wish to overtake a car on the road, but you don’t know if such action is safe due to lack if visibility. In the future, your vehicle will be able to share the intention to overtake and the truck ahead of you will be able to send to you Vehicle information regarding what your sensors are capturing and will inform you if overtaking is safe or not.
• Imagine a smart crossroad capable of monitoring all cars going through its streets. N this scenario, to avoid collisions, traffic jam and unnecessary fuel consumption, traffic lights can instruct each vehicle about the speed to be maintained to ensure a nice traffic flow.

 

I noticed a common issue in those cases: hypothesis considered that all vehicles had Car2X communication modules, which is far from being a reality. However, current studies consider diferente technology insertion “depths”.

 

Technology motivation

 

Back on the 1990’s decade, a study called Vision Zero began on Sweden. Its target was to reduce traffic fatalities and major injuries to zero. This movement was groundbreaking on how traffic safety is seen, once it gave a new structure to the relationship among regulatory agencies, governments, industries and research centers. Nowadays, it is all around Europe territory (and in some American cities) and is used as base to develop all technologies regarding automotive safety. (More on the initiative can be read on the website Vision Zero Network.)

 

According to Vision Zero, the general base to develop automotive safety technology, it was one of scenarios for autonomous automobile system’s development work. Although current information received via Car 2X show as alerts on vehicle’s multimedia module, in the future, those messages will be received and interpreted by vehicles’ decision taking algorithms to add to the already obtained by the vehicles’ sensors, such as cameras, radars, LIDARs (Light detection and ranging) and ultrasonic sensors.

 

Contribution within C-ISAFE

 

In the laboratory where I developed my work within Carissma, the Institute of Safety in Future Mobility (C-ISAFE), the research was mainly turned to environmental perception technologies and integrated safety (that includes safety elements prior and after a vehicle crash), however there was few knowledge over Car2X. In this way, my contribution with this particular laboratory was to take knowledge about Car2X for their researchers, start to work with vehicles’ traffic simulation on the platform SUMO and to prepare a work plan for students that eventually dedicate themselves to the topic in future.

 

Why “taking driver out of the game”?

 

According to a data collection done by Germany’s Statistics Department, 88% of the road accidents were caused by drivers’ poor decisions. Facing statistics, taking driver off mobility’s scenario is an obvious decision, but such execution is harder than it looks.

 

A study done by 5GAA (joint venture involving companies, universities and other organizations from automotive, technology and telecom sectors) indicated that around 29,000 and 59,000 lives could be saved between 2018 and 2040 in Europe for scenarios of high and low penetration of 5G technology on market (projection is from 20,000 to 39,000 lives on the same conditions for 802.11p communication technology). With regards to avoided major injuries, those numbers are Around 275,000 and 600,00 with regards to 5G technology and between 180,000 and 360,000 for 802.11p within same analysis time frame.

 

(If you go interested by the topic and would like to know more about it, nice starting points for research are 5GAA and C2C-CC websites).

 

Perspectives for implementation on Brazil

 

Until the time this text was written, no official mentions were found (on Brazilian Telecom Association – Anatel, for example) regarding the implementation of Car2X systems in Brazil, or to the exportation of cars capable of communicating for Brazil or other countries where such technologies development occur (such as China, United States, Japan and Germany).

 

In academic terms, there are some publications with regards to the intervehicle communication, but none mentions Car2X systems implementation. In general, most part of these publications leans over the technology networks aspect, presenting, in example, a revision of all existing intervehicle’s networks simulators (J. S. Weber, M. Neves, and T. Ferreto, “Vanet simulators: an updated review,” Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society, vol. 27, no. 8, 2021).

 

By my analysis, the lack of Brazilian government incentive towards vehicle safety or to create programs with clear targets (such as Vision Zero), aligned to lack of investments in telecommunication infrastructure on roads, directly impacts communities’ low interest and spreading such technologies. Another example of how the governmental initiative is capable of pushing such development is to include Car2X as EuroNCAP (European program that scores cars based on safety criteria) evaluation criteria from 2025. As we don’t see such type of initiative on Brazil, maybe it takes a lot of time until car assembly industries being considering the inclusion of those systems in their vehicles in Brazilian market.