Major changes in the connectivity ecosystem will soon allow the automotive industry to generate and process sensor data from vehicles around the world, enabling new connectivity services to be consumed locally to where the data was collected. In 2025, there will be at least 400 million connected passenger vehicles on the road, with many supporting high-volume data services competing for processing time and space against new services designed to run in near real-time. Amid this congestion, the current cloud-based service model that relies on centralized compute and high volumes of data moving through the network will struggle to support future automotive use cases. As a result, many companies and partnerships are rapidly seeking solutions to avoid this scenario. Today, the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium (AECC) is developing a cross-industry collaboration to avoid the proliferation of incompatible data management and service architectures by gathering viewpoints and requirements from key players across the connected vehicle value chain.
The consortium projects that, by 2025, connected vehicles globally will send up to 10 exabytes of data every month. To combat this change in device usage, the telecommunications and data handling industries are already deploying localized processing facilities embedded into the wireless network infrastructure. These edge computing solutions enable the high-data, real-time, localized services that several industries will deploy in the next five years. The automotive industry itself can benefit from a variety of edge solutions, with dozens of industry-specific use cases enabled over the course of the next decade. However, to successfully enable these use cases on a global scale, the industry must prepare to use, and influence, the implementation of this network edge layer with its network and data partners.
Jointly authored by the AECC and SBD Automotive, the Breaking Down the Barriers to Automotive Edge Adoption white paper understands the potential benefits edge computing and its adjacent technologies can bring to the automotive industry at large. It provides thorough analysis into the obstacles preventing widespread edge adoption today while understanding the ways in which they can be overcome. It similarly highlights the role of the AECC in driving adoption rates today, identifying how the consortium is supporting the implementation of edge technologies in numerous automotive sectors across different regions.
In addition to profiling its various potential roles within the industry, the white paper also defines the edge itself – breaking down the core components that enable its key operations as well as the technologies and infrastructure that support it. In understanding the relationship between edge computing and automotive, it takes a deep dive into an example industry use case. Here, it comprehensively explores the various direct roles edge could play in the future of automotive while analyzing its benefits for OEMs, suppliers, and customers as well as firms outside the industry. The white paper then delivers a comprehensive, data-driven, forecast into the automotive adoption of edge technologies through 2050. In it, the industry milestones that are expected to be achieved along the way are noted with key insights into their impacts on both the development and rollout of new automotive edge use cases.