Telstra has secured a $3.5 million grant from the Victorian government to trial connected vehicle safety technology in partnership with Lexus Australia.
The project, dubbed Advanced Connected Vehicles Victoria (ACV2), will see Telstra equip two Lexus vehicles with its Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) technology, which allows vehicles to communicate with each other using Telstra's 4GX mobile network in order to test out the connected safety features.
The two companies will trial connected vehicle safety systems such as emergency braking alerts, in-vehicle speed limit compliance warnings, right-turn assist for vulnerable road users and warnings when surrounding cars are likely to violate red lights. Telstra and Lexus will also investigate how to securely send speed zone, traffic light timing and other signals to connected vehicles.
The technology also works without access to Telstra's 4G mobile network thanks to short-range 5.9 GHz radios which are based on the same 4G cellular technology.
The example Telstra used was that if a vehicle performs an emergency break, it will send a message to surrounding vehicles equipped with V2X technology before a potential collision.
Telstra's CTO Hakan Eriksson said the trials would also pave the way for future compatibility with 5G solutions.
"The strength of our 4G network and future 5G network will allow faster adoption of technologies such as this – ultimately helping make our roads a safer place. We will be creating a high-performance specialised link on our mobile network, so the Lexus vehicles can communicate with each other safely and reliably, even when beyond the distance of short-range radio," Eriksson said.
"This is the kind of 'network slice' that will be commonly used in 5G to support a huge variety of applications with different performance requirements. We will also be testing a specialised vehicle cloud, which coordinates messages between vehicles and connects them to services nearby, based on technology from our 5G network partner Ericsson."
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