The Driven Hour

Data volume today

A study performed by ADAC in 2016 identified that the BMW i3 electric vehicle transmits the ‘Last State Call’ automatically every time the driver switches off the car and locks the doors (vehicle is not in motion). This call includes the content of the error memory, battery details including cell temperatures and charge level, the driving mode (eco, eco plus, sport), operational data of the range extender, the mileage at various driving operations, quality of the charging point including malfunctions and the position of the last 16 charging points used.

Key to note in the BMW case is that some information is obtained while the vehicle is in motion, with other information being collected at the end of the journey. Information provided by OEM A (a Japanese auto- maker) indicates that their personal light vehicles generate a report of ~10- 15MB per duty-cycle. How does this compare to the typical smartphone users? According to a 2018 report, monthly mobile data traffic per smartphone in North America reached 8.6GB (286MB per day) by the end of 2018.

What will the data consist of tomorrow?

As vehicle manufacturers increase the number of models within their vehicle fleets that are a) connected and b) carrying more data gathering capabilities from a range of different sensor types, one should expect that the data volumes that the manufacturers will gather will increase. In addition, new features and functionality will be added that will make use of network connectivity.

One of the major focus areas is safety – vehicle- to-vehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure as well as vehicle-to-vulnerable road users, such as cyclists and pedestrians. There are many safety use-cases detailed by bodies such as the US NHTSA. The onboard sensor sets in the vehicle will certainly contribute to the vehicle’s own ability to detect and (potentially) avoid risk scenarios. The current technologies to support communication-based safety applications such as ‘forwardcollision warning’ and ‘blind intersection warning’, are centred on the use of Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) and the emerging Cellular-Vehicle-to- Everything (C-V2X). In such use-cases, latency is a vital component.

In the case of DSRC, dedicated hardware is used for data communications to and from the vehicle. It is likely that C-V2X will also require a dedicated modem rather than trying to share bandwidth with a modem that is supporting infotainment services or vehicle telemetry. From the perspective of data-volume to the vehicle manufacturer, the safety data is exchanged over a different connectivity interface, however, it is very likely that indications will be recorded in the general vehicle telemetry.

Conclusion

The volumes of data being transmitted to and from Connected Vehicles will rise rapidly with global production approaching 25 million new vehicles per year and all vehicles forecast to be ‘connected’ by 2025. With such vehicles being sold world-wide, the impact of communication networks will be seen in all of the major markets.

How will the Connected Vehicle compare to the typical smartphone user? According to a 2018 report, monthly mobile data traffic per smartphone in North America will rise to 50GB (1.6GB per day) by the end of 2024. With a 2023 Connected Car transferring ~8GB per day, the data volume from vehicles will rapidly outstrip that of smartphones.

With vehicle fleets deployed globally and the ecosystem of dealerships, service partners, insurance and finance operating at regional levels, the opportunity exists to exploit in-region data processing capacity to reduce the amount of data that needs to be transported back to the vehicle manufacturer’s main data centres. At the same time, the in-region point of presence can serve as a gateway for data exchange with partners in the ecosystem.

	Data volume (GB)	Cost per GB (€) -low end (Jio, India)	Cost per GB (€) -high end (Proximus, Belgium)
2018 cost*		0.2	17.7
2019 data volume per vehicle	0.053	0.0106	0.9381
2023 forecast cost**		0.009	0.83
2023 data volume per vehicle	8.33	0.07497	6.9139