Gasgoo.com (Shanghai November 24) – An unnoticed agreement signed during Sino-Germany coalition cabinet summit in October might help to establish the form of connected cars and unpiloted in biggest auto market in the world, among which part of thinking will be undertaken by the cars.
Deutsche Telecom agrees to build connected cars together with China Mobile and also hopes to open a back door for closed market before by this agreement, aiming to show potential opportunities brought by the development of connected car technology.
These 2 companies will combine 4G network of China Mobile covering whole country with the system of Deutsche Telecom being used by 2 million German cars. As the biggest mobile company in the world, China Mobile will finish the construction of global biggest 4G network by the end of this year. There will be 500 thousand base station and 50 million users then.
The general manager of China Mobile data branch, Mr. Liu, says the technology of Deutsche Telecom in this field has been verified and China Mobile is confident to build 1 million base stations.
Connected cars is more and more popular in the world. Deutsche Telecom and China Mobile hope their joint venture could become a platform like Apple iOS or Google Android, which third party developers could use.
The vice president of T-Systems from Deutsche Telecom, Horst Leonberger, says, "You could develop services of entertainment, television, insurance and maintenance on the basis of our fundamental facilities." Although this system allows other companies to develop apps, Deutsche Telecom and China Mobile certainly wish to gain commission from their sales revenue on the network.
These 2 companies also hope to realize the communication among cars through their system. Leonberger says Chinese drivers could avoid being jammed in big cities of China if enough cars are connected. As he estimates, there needs to be 10% of cars are connected. "So you could predict traffic flow by calculation then." He says.
There are totally around 180 million passenger cars in China and more 20 million cars per year.
Leonberger says, "If you drive a Volkswagen car and I drive a Mercedes car, I hope to know when you will apply the brake. The auto industry standardization of data exchange could realize that but it needs plenty of time. Otherwise we establish a open system which could realize that. The purpose we organize this joint venture enterprise is to establish that kind of system.
The long target is to build unmanned network, which Google focuses on. There will be fierce competition and Google will be main competitor for this joint venture.
But as we know, Google faces a lot of difficulties in China. In the year of 2010, Google gave up internet search market of Chinese Mainland. The main reason is Google's " do no evil" principle is incompatible with Chinese government's censorship.
The internet users in Chinese mainland are guided to Google's search engine in Hong Kong but this website is often shielded by Chinese examining authority, just like what they do to Gmail. These 2 services could only be used by VPN in Chinese mainland.
