2020 to be the Year of Connected Mobility

Leading market advisory firm, ABI Research has published a white paper saying that 2020 will be the year of connected mobility with 10.46 million more connected cars to be added to roads across the globe this year.

The firm’s analysts identified 35 trends that will have an impact on the technology market and 19 others that, though they would attract a lot of attention are not likely to advance much in the coming year in the white paper titled “54 Technology Trends to Watch in 2020”.

“After a tumultuous 2019 that was beset by many challenges, both integral to technology markets and derived from global market dynamics, 2020 looks set to be equally challenging,” said Stuart Carlaw, chief research officer at ABI Research.

Maite Bezerra, smart mobility and automotive analyst at ABI Research said that 2020 will mark the advent of cooperative mobility. Currently, poor communication and coordination between the various road users result in many accidents and inefficiencies. 2020 will witness the advent of more cooperative forms of mobility, with 107 million connected cars being added to the roads. They will begin to share more information related to road and traffic conditions thus making it possible for other connected vehicles to anticipate hazards and improve the flow of traffic on the roads.

Initially, this greater level of connectivity will be in the form of low-bandwidth, high-latency communication via the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) network between connected cars and data ingestion platforms. This would facilitate applications like ice and oil hazard warnings and lane-level traffic assistance. During this year, we are likely to have millions of connected cars which will not only contribute data to these ingestion platforms but will also take advantage of the services that they enable.

2020 is also likely to be the first year in which we will see the first large-scale deployment of 802.11p V2X technology on the Volkswagen Golf in Europe. This is a model that normally has sales to the tune of 450,000+ units every year and the deployment of this technology in the Golf will enable low-bandwidth and low-latency broadcast communications between a growing number of connected cars to enable safety-critical collision avoidance.

Micro-mobility will also become prevalent with an increase in different micro-mobility transportation methods, according to James Hodgson, smart mobility and automotive principal analyst at ABI Research.

Though Chinese firms in this market like Mobike, Obike and Ofo experienced a crash,European-and American-based service providers have improved their market models so that they are not distributing at an aggressive rate.

“Micro-mobility methods of transportation, such as e-bikes and scooters, are now being marketed in the European and North American markets especially and are proving quite successful as providers plan to increase their fleet sizes,” Hodgson said.

He said that this year, the micro-mobility market is likely to improve with the introduction of increasingly different modes of transportation though the shared bike will continue to dominate the market with more than 26 million shared bike rides in 2020 across the globe.

Though at one time it seemed quite likely that SAE level 4, vision zero and shared mobility would become a reality in 2020, that is not the case.

Considerable technological advances were made with the development of powerful computing for autonomous vehicle software, Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) image cameras to make Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) affordable, and DL approaches.

Nevertheless, the automotive industry across the world experienced a significant downturn in recent years. Road accident casualties increased, OEM spending on autonomous technologies decreased with less funds earmarked for research and ride-hailing operations faced serious questions over profitability.

“At one point, 2020 seemed a distant target, a long-term horizon over which the technology trends that have dominated the automotive scene for the last 10 years — electrification, connectivity, autonomous driving — would all have harmonized to deliver safer, more efficient transportation for all. It’s not going to happen in 2020, or much before 2025,” said Hodgson.

The overall Connected, Autonomous, Shared and Electric (CASE) vision still seems attainable and most OEMs are still committed to the cause. The timeline has however shifted and most vehicle manufacturers are targeting 2025 or 2030 for the transition to connected, autonomous and electrified mobility.