Telstra says automotive manufacturers chasing autonomy will increasingly need to work together.
Speaking to AutoTalk for the launch of its connected vehicle trials program in partnership with Lexus, VicRoads and the Transport Accident Commission, Telstra group executive for networks and IT, Nikos Katinakis, says carmakers won’t be able to go rogue for much longer.
Asked if he agrees with University of New South Wales artificial intelligence professor Toby Walsh, who has told AutoTalk previously that the likes of Tesla and others will need to join together in developing autonomous vehicle technology as regulations are established, Katinakis says it’s undeniable.
“Absolutely there needs to be cross-collaboration and the good thing about these programs is V2X is a standard, and as long as people and companies come together around these standards, we’re all okay,” he says.
Nikos Katinakis, group executive networks & IT, Telstra.
“When companies diverge and start creating their own technology, that’s when things start going wrong, so absolutely, they have to collaborate,” Katinakis explains.
He says the likes of Tesla, as well as being innovative and disruptive to the automotive and autonomous vehicle industry, need to keep safety and regulations within their operating procedures.
“In this case I would say yes, for autonomous driving every manufacturer has their own secret sauce and they can do whatever they want because it’s all contained within the car, but as the cars now interact with their environment and with other cars, in the absence of standards, those cars may not be very nice to each other,” Katinakis concedes.
“Today, you can run Microsoft software on an Apple, and that’s exactly how (in vehicle autonomy) everybody wins,” he adds.
Katinakis says troubleshooting future problems and faults in the autonomy sector within automotive, has largely already begun with the rise of smartphones, tablets and human-operated devices.
“We already have smartphones everywhere, they’re in cars, very fast-moving cars, even formula one cars, and they work – meaning the technology is fast enough to manage handovers between towers, the latency is low enough to manage this kind of speed,” he reveals,
“So when something happens we already have a lot of technology to troubleshoot this device; embed this in a car and it’s much the same thing, except the communication between cars is much faster,” Katinakis continues.
Katinakis agrees that the beta testing phase of smartphones and connectivity has already been done in the last 20 years.
“Instead of having human to human, now you have machine to machine – so the next step is trying to make it even faster, to the point of being seamless – but the basic, core troubleshooting capabilities are already there – we know what’s going on,” he concludes.
