In Ann Arbor, Mich., optimism and unanswered questions dominate the V2X conversation

When sight and attention fail, as in the fog bank that caused a 168-vehicle crash on Interstate 55 in New Orleans last month, connected infrastructure and vehicles can warn drivers of hazards through vehicle-to-everything, or V2X, technology.

The 5G Automotive Association hosted a demo last month at the University of Michigan's Mcity test track in Ann Arbor to illustrate V2X that is ready for deployment, including alerts prompted by a staged construction site, a demo wheelchair user in a crosswalk and a simulated emergency response from a police car.

At each of these road dangers, a signal beamed from the hazard into the cockpit of the vehicle and displayed the warning on a tablet or a built-in infotainment center, accompanied by a blip or a chime, to alert the driver.

"These are experiences we all have, where an emergency vehicle is approaching and we don't know what to do," said Jyoti Sharma, the senior manager of network planning at Verizon. "If you get an alert, you have some time to react."

The U.S. Department of Transportation predicts that 12 percent of potential crash scenarios could be avoided using communication between infrastructure and vehicles. Government agencies, engineers, Internet service providers and others descended upon Ann Arbor in October to discuss and demonstrate the technology. But some details of nationwide V2X deployment still have to be settled.

Widespread V2X deployment has been technically feasible for some time. Yet decades of stalemate caused by a lack of clarity around the type of wireless transmission powering V2X has held up widespread deployment. What many of the event's speakers called a "chicken and egg" situation has also fed inaction by both departments of transportation and automakers.

Now, DOT funding is flowing freely to states and municipalities that are installing the technology. Cellular networks are on board. The Federal Communications Commission has granted waivers for the use of a band of spectrum for lag-free communication. Automakers are engaged. Engineers are honing the technology.

At the event, the DOT announced applications are open for $40 million grants to one or two communities looking to install smart infrastructure at scale, which the DOT and others said would provide data that could supercharge deployment. Applications close in January and the winners will receive funding for fiscal year 2024.

But while the DOT announced its draft plan for nationwide V2X deployment last month and is taking feedback on the plan for 90 days, some key building blocks are still not in place. The department will revise the plan and release the final version in 2024.

Automakers and the Alliance for Automotive Innovation are questioning how to maintain vehicle affordability while adding the features necessary to receive messages from infrastructure, pedestrians and other vehicles.

"It's a challenging time" for automakers, Hilary Cain, the alliance's vice president of technology, innovation and mobility policy, said at the DOT summit. "They are putting billions of dollars into the electrification transformation that is underway, and at the same time continuing to deal with different ideas that Congress may have about what should or should not be in vehicles that range from driver camera detection technologies, to technology that can detect children in the back seat to — if you can believe it — AM radio."

The efficacy of widespread V2X also depends on what the sector is calling "interoperability" — mobile applications, infrastructure and vehicles using different cellular networks and operating systems still being able to communicate quickly and seamlessly. That means vehicles will have to speak the same technological language.

The DOT said in its draft plan that it would "work with NHTSA to explore data-driven strategies that could effectively incentivize interoperable systems and accelerated deployment."

While NHTSA sent a representative to the event, the agency did not commit explicitly to regulation or incentives for automakers that would aim to boost deployment of V2X.

Several of the V2X demos at Mcity illustrated interoperability, which allows access to messages across networks such as Verizon and T-Mobile. A subscriber to one network in a vehicle will not be cut off from communication by a pedestrian using a different network.

In an ideal world, every vehicle, pedestrian, cyclist and piece of infrastructure on the road would be connected. Because of this complexity, the V2X sector is also sorting out which party will mainly be responsible for aggregating and distributing data in real time when the data travels over a cellular network. A common pit stop for information would ensure that pieces of the puzzle, such as traffic lights, can make informed decisions, such as prioritizing emergency vehicles. Traffic data could also be used to redesign intersections or routes over time.

The data is largely siloed. State and local departments of transportation are sometimes the major data producers and collectors. Those offices are often understaffed and beset by low budgets and outdated technology.

An emerging consensus is that network providers will be the data intermediaries, said John Kwant, executive director of the Americas at 5G Automotive Association, because for each nodule of communication, the information is passing across the network. This also ensures V2X deployment will truly be nationwide — vehicles in Alaska will receive alerts in the same back-end format as vehicles in Florida.

"You need the service providers. You need somebody who's going to be responsible for housing" the information "and making sure that the quality is there, that the integrity is there," Kwant said. The infrastructure owners and operators, or DOTs, "can't do it on their own."

The industry also is sorting out how two underlying communications technologies can work in tandem to power V2X. The first transmits messages over cellular networks. There is a very slight delay in communications conveyed over cellular networks, depending on how the network is configured — less than a second — so less urgent communications such as active school zone warnings will likely be communicated this way.

For warnings of imminent crash scenarios, even milliseconds count, so those messages will use the 5.9 gigahertz band of radio spectrum.

The FCC has yet to release final rules governing the use of the 5.9-GHz band for cellular V2X applications. While automakers, departments of transportation and others can begin to use cellular networks, Cain of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation said at the summit that the lack of clarity from the FCC "is a huge missing piece" in the larger push for V2X.