Internet of Vehicles: Where the Industry Heads in the 14th Five-Year Period

As 5G, edge computing and other new technologies fuse deeper with connected vehicles, China’s internet-of-vehicles industry has progressed on many fronts, upgrading traditional automotive and transport industries and seeding new digital economy clusters.

The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology’s Internet of Vehicles White Paper finds the industry developing well across all five dimensions – vehicle, road, cloud, network and map – with cross-industry applications deploying in depth as the sector enters a new period of application rollout in the 14th Five-Year period.

Policy support speeds deployment

Globally, the ecosystem keeps enriching and vehicle connectivity keeps strengthening: smart connected features ship in over 45% of new vehicles, expected to approach 60% by 2025.

China has pushed orderly development from policy to standards. The 2020 new energy vehicle industry plan (2021-2035) promotes deep fusion of vehicles with energy, transport and communications, coordinated smart network infrastructure, and digital retrofitting of road signs and infrastructure. MIIT’s notice on accelerating 5G calls for 5G-plus-IoV coordination, inclusion in national new information infrastructure projects, large-scale LTE-V2X deployment and national pilot zones.

Since 2019, MIIT has approved national pilot zones in Wuxi, Tianjin (Xiqing), Changsha and Chongqing (Liangjiang), plus the Beijing-Shanghai expressway No. 1 project, while the housing and industry ministries jointly back 16 cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Wuhan as coordinated smart infrastructure and connected vehicle pilots. Over 4,000 roadside units are deployed – 3,500-plus on urban roads and 500-plus on expressways – with roadside perception systems and 5G capacity upgrades advancing on key corridors.

Security is fundamental. The Cybersecurity Law, Data Security Law and Personal Information Protection Law provide the baseline for automotive, transport and communications players, while specific notices and automotive data security rules tighten management of IoV network and data security, balancing development and safety.

Applications keep extending

IoV applications now serve not just assisted and high-level autonomous driving but systemic problems of traffic efficiency and urban governance. Information services are ubiquitous and innovating under networked technology; intelligent-driving applications are penetrating and coupling with networked systems; smart transport applications keep deepening into new scenes. Changsha’s pilot zone runs commercial LTE-V2X smart bus operations on routes 315, 3 and 9 – route 315 cut average journey time 12.6% and raised average speed 14%.

Applications are also extending from consumers to enterprise production: smart mines, smart ports and smart factories. Networked fleet scheduling and remote monitoring are commercially mature in defined conditions, and remote driving keeps being validated. The Baorixile open-pit coal mine runs autonomous mining trucks with over 96.7% system availability and 50,000-plus kilometres of platooned operation by August 2021; Tianjin Port operates nearly 80 autonomous vehicles with intelligent task scheduling, linking operations systems, quay cranes, rail cranes and smart unlock stations.

Vehicle networking and intelligence are accelerating together: automakers ship L2-plus assisted driving across the board, with FAW Hongqi and GAC Aion releasing mass-production C-V2X models; roadside fusion systems evolve toward integrated hardware and agile deployment; edge-region-cloud multi-tier platforms mature; and China fields autonomous C-V2X automotive-grade chip modules with international competitiveness alongside world-leading 5G infrastructure.

The white paper recommends holding to coordinated intelligence-plus-connectivity strategy in the 14th Five-Year period: cross-industry cooperation on technical paths and operations, deeper vehicle-road-cloud-network-map technology development, faster standardised infrastructure deployment, and sustainable replicable application scenes – on a solid foundation of communications, data and network security.

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