Is the connected car revolution finally here, or are we still stuck in neutral?

Host Jim Morrish of Transforma Insights returns with the GSMA Smart Mobility podcast, joined by Barbara Pareglio, Senior Technical Director and Smart Mobility lead at GSMA, and Nick Power, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Cubic³. Together they explore how automotive connectivity is transforming the driving experience from infotainment and eCall to V2X and autonomous vehicles. The guests unpack the global regulatory patchwork, the rise of non-terrestrial networks and the mounting cybersecurity challenges as cars become software-defined. 

Plus, discover how a journalist accidentally triggered a wave of Alexa dollhouse orders, and what it’s like to ride in China’s latest robot taxis.

Transcript

[00:00:00] 

Jim Morrish: Hello everybody, and welcome to this Trending Tech podcast, which is the third edition of the GSMA Smart Mobility Podcast series which is an association with IoT Now, and welcome to all of you around the world who are listening in. My name's Jim Morrish. I'm half of the co-founders of a company called Transforma Insights. We're a firm of industry analyst focused on all things related to digital transformation. For this episode of the podcast, I'm joined by Barbara Pareglio, who is the Senior Technical Director and Smart Mobility Lead with the GSMA Association.

Barbara Pareglio: Hi. Nice to meet you and nice to be here again.

Jim Morrish: Great to have you back, Barbara and I'm also joined by Nick Power, who is the Chief Product and Technology Officer with Cubic³.

Nick Power: Hi, Jim. Thank you for having me on.

Jim Morrish: Fantastic. Thanks for joining us, and as I mentioned earlier, this is the third in the series of podcasts in association with the GSM Association, and, the series explores digital transformation with a focus on cellular technologies.

Our last episode focused on marine [00:01:00] contexts and specifically - boating, but today we're focusing on automotive. Clearly this is a market for which high quality cellular connectivity is an increasingly critical aspect, and, you know, telecoms and automotive industries have poured billions into connectivity in the connected car, including 5G rollouts and V2X communications in vehicle platforms and ever evolving driver experiences.

Yet, the global picture is still somewhat fragmented in many ways, particularly in terms of regulatory environments, security policies and security regulations as well. Some regions around the world are racing ahead, others are barely out a pilot phase, and from the perspective of the vehicles themselves, the leading edge of the industry is almost unrecognisable from what it was a decade ago, with markets for EVs increasingly characterised by technology and drivetrain platforms.

Meanwhile, emerging V2V and V2X or vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-everything technologies promise reduced emission rates, reduced energy or fuel consumption and more efficient [00:02:00] traffic flows. But the reality on the roads is very much blended. The average age of a passenger car in the EU is a little over 12 years. That's not much different from the U.S. but in a market like China, it's an average of 5.1 years. So, bit different around the world. So I guess the question is, is the connected car revolution finally here, or are we still stuck in neutral? And we'll be discussing many of these topics through this podcast, and Barbara, Nick it's great to have you as guests to discuss these things.

But before we get motoring on the topic of connected vehicles, let's take a quick look at a serious tech news story that's been spotted, I think specifically Nick has spotted, and then we'll circle back with some lighter news in the 'What the Tech' segment at the end of the podcast. So Nick, what's the serious tech news story you found for us?

Nick Power: Yeah, I guess it was the Amazon outage last week, a couple of weeks ago, and it just highlights the prevalence of all the consolidation of infrastructure into those three big providers, Amazon, Azure and Google Cloud, and so as more and more companies push their infrastructure into that, you have to be [00:03:00] careful about making sure that you have redundancy built into that even on these platforms because that outage took out Signal, it took out Snapchat, the social media platforms. It took out Roblox, the gaming platform, Duolingo. It took out a number of banks, even the Ring doorbell as well.

So there was a lot of companies and services across the world that were affected by this one outage, and so it is important that we start to look as we plan out our infrastructure, that we do geo- redundancy into our infrastructure.

Jim Morrish: Absolutely. Barbara , did you spot the same story?

Barbara Pareglio: Well, the story circulated quite a lot, obviously in the industry because as the impact is quite big. But indeed, it's as you mentioned, particularly when we're talking about automotive, having a resilient or redundant network, it's quite important. You don't wanna have a situation where they have been blocks any stops because one single point of failure. So, yeah. So planning ahead a, planning the right architecture, the right connectivity is quite important having the backup, the redundancy, it's really, really on the core, I would say also of the automotive [00:04:00] industry.

Jim Morrish: Yes, I had some similar thoughts and you've both mentioned resiliency and redundancy. Some of the comments around the time I think, um, I won't say who, but there was a CEO of an organisation who basically said, "Hey, what can we do? We can only host it in this location because of the concentration of the industry." And the answer is, as you've both said, resiliency and redundancy and planning for these potential events although that does have consequences in terms of costs and what people are prepared to pay.

Nick Power: Exactly. Yeah.

Jim Morrish: There's a question there for the end user and consumer. But thank you, really interesting story. One that was hard to avoid, to be perfectly honest. I'm sure we were all personally impacted by it in some way. But what we should do is proceed with the main discussion about cellular connectivity in the context of the automotive industry. And as a suggested point to start, let's look at the current state of global markets for connected vehicles.

Barbara, can I start with you? What's your view on the current status?

Barbara Pareglio: We are still, I think it's a, nowadays we see more and more vehicles are connected. So, the production of the new or the new vehicles, they [00:05:00] always have a connection. They always have a sim card, if not two or three, you know, that's a not an issue. The issues, I think it's more what is connectivity used for at the moment.

So for example, in Europe you have the mandatory obligation for the eCall, therefore you need to have a dedicated services. But it, uh, supports in for the emergency call, which is not mandated in other countries. So, it's a different, let's say, starting point. Then you also would like to have the general connectivity for just a tracking of the vehicle, the functionality, or then you also probably want to add on for the infotainment. So it depends on how far or where you want to have the services. I would say, as I said, in Europe there is a lot of connectivity, but it's mainly driven by regulatory compliance. While in other parts of the world it is probably more driven by infotainment and then you have uh, parts of the world which is in between.

So you have a little bit of both. So we see different directions, different usage. Still I would say still a [00:06:00] lot of room for improvement and for alignment. But yeah.. Nick, what is what you see maybe from your perspective.

Nick Power: Yeah, what I see is that the car is evolving from not anymore just getting from A to B. So it's all about the in-car experience now. So this concept of the car is this third space, the extension of your living room and your, so your home and your office requires more and more software to get it for that experience, right? And just the same way as the amount of software that's on your phone, and that creates that continuity of experience when you transition from your office to your home and vice versa. To your car, and it is, as Barbara said, a lot of it is around infotainment and personalisation. I think the Chinese, I was looking of, I think Barbara, you're in China, but I was looking of to visit there in April and I visited a lot of the OEMs. I visited the Shanghai Auto Show, and you can see that they are changing their model around this car as a living space, right? So you'll see front seats that rotate around when the car is parked up. So you can have these conversations. You'll see, you know, the back seats [00:07:00] turn into lazy boys, projectors come down so you can watch movies.

I even saw a car, which wasn't a concept car. It's gonna come to Europe this year, early next year, where the front lights turn into projectors for an outdoor movie, right? So it's this type of stuff that's really, they're starting to pioneer this now, and that's gonna become more and more expected by consumers in the future.

That will require a lot more software, a lot more software updates, and that's why connectivity is so important here, and then also what we're gonna see is NTN. So non-terrestrial networks, when you're going into low coverage areas, that's gonna become more prevalent. The technology's not really there just yet.

It's very low bandwidth stuff at the moment, but in the future it will have to catch up. So you can have this ubiquitous connectivity. No matter where you go, there'll be no more dead spots.

Jim Morrish: So really what we're doing is we're migrating from a situation broadly up until around about today, and the dates vary by markets clearly China's ahead, where the automotive story has been about point solutions, and you can have in-car entertainment and you can have eCall, and you can turn on your climate control remotely to a [00:08:00] network effect driven, connected environment, which is where things really take off, I guess.

Nick Power: Yeah. Yep.

Jim Morrish: Okay. Extremely interesting. So one of the critical considerations for any connected vehicle strategy, I mean, it's great to project these movies, wherever you happen to park your car, I think it's a fantastic idea but one of the most critical considerations is the regulatory environments, and I believe those tend to change around the world. So Nick, what are your thoughts on the most significant regulatory challenges auto OEMs face with global propositions?

Nick Power: Yeah you see, Barbara mentioned the eCall, but on top of that you've got permanent roaming bans. So a lot of connected cars is built on roaming, but now you're seeing a lot more of permanent roaming bans come in. So you can't roam for more than 60, 90 days within the country. So you have to use the local network, and in some jurisdictions, that's to protect the earnings of the, telecom operators. You know, 'cause they have to invest a lot in their infrastructure. You then have got data privacy laws. So strict protections on how data is used, data sovereignty, so keeping the data within a country, especially in a lot of Middle Eastern countries, China, U.S.

You've got things like [00:09:00] lawful intercepts, where government agencies have to be able to view the communications to and from a car. So voice, internet, data, SMS. In countries like Turkey, you've got the technology for the eSIM profile that manages it has to be localised, so has to be done by a semi-state agency, device certification, testing, and sign off. Also, OEMs cannot be seen to be a telco. So when they're selling consumer services out to their users, they have to make sure that they can't sell data that they have to sell the service itself, and there's some gray areas around that OEMs have to be very careful around.

And then you've got all these changing regulations in various jurisdictions and nuances around certain infrastructure that has to be in the country as well, and then you got the new cybersecurity law that came in, that the EU adopted at the U.N. R 155, which means that the car has to be connected for the lifetime of the vehicle, right. So that's more than 10 years, right? And this is for all the software updates, and we'll probably talk about it a little later on, but, this is just the changing landscape. This is continually [00:10:00] changes. More and more regulation will come in, especially in the car space in the next few years.

Jim Morrish: Yeah, this is one of the things that particularly strikes me is the fact that this is not a fixed regulatory environment. It changes. And specifically, I highlight, one of the things you mentioned there around Turkey and the eSIM operation. So it strikes me that many regulators around the world would've imposed bans on permanent roaming.

But that's because that's the tool that they had to force people to engage and establish operations in their country. And then, you know, once the eSIM comes along, Turkey then says, "Well now you've gotta have your eSIM infrastructure in Turkey". So you get this kind of evolving effect of regulations.

But Barbara, I think, regulatory readiness for auto is something that the GSMA has investigated, isn't it? And researched, what are your views on this?

Barbara Pareglio: Yeah, no. So as we mentioned, there are so many different aspects of regulation. So, apart from the traditional regulation of the automotive, it is not where we focus as a GSMA. What we try to understand is what are the key areas that are relevant in the, let's say [00:11:00] context of the connectivity. As you already mentioned Nick, now obviously is the roaming, what type of roaming if I can have permanent roaming, and we've been working a lot actually or indeed try to decouple the rule that are for consumer than for what we would consider kind of IoT, those type of solution where you manufacture something and you need the connectivity from the point of manufacturing so that it's really different. But the other aspects as we mentioned is the equal across different countries, but also the adoption, so spectrum or what are the rule for CV2X or vehicle-to-vehicle communication, vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle to the network. So, there are fragmented solutions. There's still a little bit of harmonisation happening, but there's still some divide, if we wanna say like this is between, I would say China has already chosen a direction of cellular, the US recently chose to move in a direction of cellular, and then we have Europe that, traditionally we are like an open market. It's open for options. So therefore [00:12:00] there is no single decision. There are different solutions which are possible, which that creates a little bit of delay compared to other parts of the world. So this is some of the areas where we look at and we try to understand, like a benchmark, which country is further ahead or which one is catching up and what are the differences? So we work with GSMA Intelligence to understand different countries, uh, what are their positions? I believe we have 15 countries only at the moment. Uh, we try to look at the 15 countries where we see most of the attractions.

So that includes some of the Europeans, some of the U.S. market and some of the Asian market. Just to give you an example, so the China is not mentioned as a comparison because it's already quite the advance, as we said. But then you can think about Japan, South Korea, Australia, U.K., France, Germany, some of the counter just to compare and see where we score and where we need maybe to focus a little bit more.

Jim Morrish: So are you finding fragmentation even [00:13:00] within Europe? You mentioned France and Germany there. Are they identical or are they slightly different?

Barbara Pareglio: Um, pretty much I would say there is quite a lot of similarity within the European country. There are maybe some delay or adoptions of different things, but the regulations pretty much is exactly the same because they all belong to the European commission type of ruling. U.K. of course, it's not anymore part of that, but it's not too much difference. So there are small differences, but it's maybe all the quantity of spectrum that they have a disposal, rather than the detail of say if you have equal so, um, or what are the regulations? So it's more on the nitty gritty detail of a how much spectrum we have adopted for CV2X, for example.

Jim Morrish: And there is potential to evolve in different ways. So formally the way that it works is that regulations which are, or texts which are set, scheduled to be implemented by EU member states as regulations are set at EU level, but how the [00:14:00] EU states actually implement those can vary slightly, and it's also a baseline. So, for instance, we see in Spain, they have instead of a warning triangle when you break down, they have to have these like connected little lights that you put on top of the car, which are all NB-IoT connected, and that's just a Spain solution.

So even getting fragmentation within what should be a homogenous environment you would expect. Nick, again, clearly Cubic³ is one of the leading providers of connected services to vehicles around the world and we've established thus far the conversation is incredibly complicated environment with many different factors to consider and fragmentation even down to the individual country level. How could an OEM hope to address all these challenges?

Nick Power: They've tried. I think a lot of OEMs or a number of 'em have tried to do this themselves, but if you think about it, Cubic³ provides access to about 550 plus mobile networks around the world in about 220 plus countries and territories, right? So we sit between the OEMs and all those mobile network operators. We have all those relationships. So it's a very difficult [00:15:00] landscape to navigate, if you're an OEM, you know, when it's not your core business, right? If you think about it, you wanna manufacture a car in, say Germany, you want to get it connected on the cellular network, on the assembly line to test it out, update the software, then you put it on a boat, ship it to the other side of the world, into a country that may have no roaming, has localised infrastructure, all that kinda stuff. So, is an OEM really gonna take all that on? Cubic³ does all that. So we provide legal entities in countries where it's needed. 'cause that's another regulation nightmare as well. You sometimes you have to have an actual physical entity in the country. We provide dedicated infrastructure, dedicated for automotive in the countries that require it by law. Localisations is our specialty. We probably one of the leading providers of local profile, local network integrations. We have a large number of them now. So we don't just rely on the gray area of roaming that some providers do. We sell services on behalf of the OEM as well. You know, we provide web shops and the whole kind of portals and stuff that consumers can go in and buy the services from the OEM on our behalf, right? So we are actually the telco operator, the seller. So we take that legal [00:16:00] piece away from them. We do the lawful intercept, so there's bespoke solutions we have to do for that. And there's a whole lot of other things aiding in device certification, working with the MNO and the OEM to get the device certified on the networks in the countries. And, you know, while we have a platform and a global network, we always think that our expertise is our product, right?

So all that regulatory expertise across the globe is what we do best, and we help OEMs solve those problems and get to market quicker and stay compliant.

Jim Morrish: Absolutely, many things you mentioned there, one I'd like to highlight though, particularly is those local entities, local contracting, local billing. This can be an incredibly complicated area. I remember at one time I looked at this and I dunno if it's still the case, but it certainly was at one point that if you send an invoice in South Korea to a consumer, you need to include with that invoice, a code which the recipients of the invoice can use to enter into some national lottery, and it was simply configured as a way to make it difficult for overseas providers to get into the market and invoice companies within the market.

So there's a lot of complexity in that space. Moving on though to [00:17:00] other topics. I think we'd be remiss to discuss digital transformation and connected devices without at least considering security, and I'm sure that automotive contexts are particularly complicated and challenging from a security perspective, or at least I'd certainly hope so!

So Nick, what are the cybersecurity trends in automotive and what challenges face OEMs when it comes to cyber security specifically?

Nick Power: Yeah. I mentioned earlier the R 155 that the EU adopted is UN regulation which the cars remain connected for 10+ years, and the reason is because cars provide a much larger surface area of attack. So there's more points of entry for attack, and if you look at some of them, right, so you've got the key in where its a signal that can be intercepted, right? So you can unlock the car, start the car and steal it. The app for unlock, remote unlock and start, that can be hacked again for car theft, and then you've got the one that everybody worries about, right? Which is the remote control of a vehicle. So you're able to take control of certain behaviours, you know, cars going down a motorway at so many miles an hour and you're able to take control of it, crash it, and all that.

That's the one that [00:18:00] people's fears, but it's a very sophisticated attack. Even the key and app test is very sophisticated, and there's a lower reward for it too, right? 'cause it's individual attacks on cars. Where the real goal is, is in the data, right? So that's where hackers would look at. Well, I could hack the cellular network and intercept the data over that, right? So I can get a million cars rather than just a handful. I could hack the backend telematics platforms or the OTA platforms, again, getting access to the data and being able to communicate with the car or putting malware on the car. So ransomware, so you could disable an entire fleet until the OEM pays a ransom or spyware where you can siphon data off without the OEM or the consumer even knowing that you're taking the data, right? So all of these things lead to more and more surface area of attack, and so you're gonna see a lot more OTA updates for security patches, just like you have on your phone or on your laptop.

The car is going to have to do that, and that's why this regulation came in, and I think that's one of the biggest challenges they're gonna face.

Jim Morrish: Interesting, so as we evolve to that network effect driven adoption of in-car services, [00:19:00] along with it comes the entire smorgasbord of threats that we face for PCs, handsets, etc today.

Nick Power: Yeah.

Barbara Pareglio: If I may say that it is also quite important because it's an environment, but traditionally, they never had to have a software that you need to upgrade. Normally they certify the vehicle is in its entirety and they ship it and they do not touch it anymore. This is quite a change and I see it not just in automotive but also in other parts, you know, like in aviation or in other places, is the difficulty of the regulator to understand how do I put in place a framework when I have software that changes and, you know, so it is certifying this aspects, but it's really, really important that indeed we have to have software upgrades, and patches because it's a very dynamic environment. So it's very relevant.

Jim Morrish: Absolutely. I mean, for instance, there's the EU Cyber Resilience Act, stipulating that software on a device must be tracked, audit, auditable and kept up to date. But I mean, having looked at the regulatory environments [00:20:00] overall, Barbara, how much of this challenge is going to be covered by regulations and simply the auto OEMs complying with those regulations versus how much of this is more of a proactive engagement of OEMs ensuring that they deliver, certainly, firstly is a solution that is compliance with regulations, but again, beyond that one that is actually secure.

Barbara Pareglio: Yeah, it's quite difficult to say because it's been a traditionally regulated environment, the automotive, but of course at this stage because the speed of technology is much faster, I think we cannot always wait for the regulations, so, it's shifting a little bit. Let's try it, let's do things a little bit in advance, and it does make sense. It's the similar things we also to try to do from the connectivity perspective is like to understand where we can play a role and where we can support to provide the resilience or for the security attack. But it is a twofold now, I would say instead of a completely wait for first the regulation and then we [00:21:00] implement it, I think I see more and more the OEM trying to put in place some of the industry driven solution rather than regulation driven. And this is can be done with association or other association that you see putting in place where they help to understand or how to do that. Those are quite relevant. As I said, it's just because of the nature of the changes in the speed that we see in this technology, going more to software based, also, you know, with the software defined vehicles, it is a nature that we have to be a little bit faster. So hopefully we will have a good balance. It's still difficult to say where the line will be. But yeah, so I think that I see a more and more tendency to have an industry driven rather than purely policy driven.

Jim Morrish: Yeah, I tend to agree with that, I think. Nick, what are your thoughts on how a vehicle OEM can best navigate this evolving security challenging landscape?

Nick Power: What we're seeing now is more of an emergence of vehicle security operation centers. Security operation [00:22:00] centers are quite standard in a corporate IT network, right? This is basically any event that happens on a laptop or a device, you know, gets centralised into a system and there's anomaly detection over for security behaviour, right? And that's prevalent now in cars. So the cars are streaming all this data back and we're looking for anomaly detection in the cars themselves. We're partnering with an ethical hacking company to spot anomalies on the network when the car is hacked. So then we can better do auto detection and remediation as well. And we're building an AI-enabled, anomaly pattern detection product. So we can actually provide this to an OEM or the OEM can do their own monitoring, and then we can provide the actual remediation, which is quarantining on the network. We can also throttle down certain endpoints to stop DDoS attacks, which will become more and more prevalent.

We can suspend devices on the network. We can restrict, we actually restrict for a number of OEMs what their cars can talk to and who can talk to the car. So if malware does get in, it doesn't spread through the network from what? From car to car. We segment traffic for customers, so it keeps it separate from other [00:23:00] customers.

And then we can directly send our traffic to our backends without sending it over to public internet as well. So just to keep it safe. And there's a whole slew of other things that can be done. You know, even isolating old devices on the network that cannot take security patches anymore because their hardware is so old they're not able to do that.

And that's an area we're looking into as well. So there's things like that providers have to start thinking more and more about, and OEMs have to start thinking about.

Jim Morrish: Excellent, and I mean, interesting. Let's take some of those evolving themes and really quite sophisticated approaches to managing the security environment and think what might the future bring? So Barbara, what new technologies are emerging in this sector and does that vary by region?

Barbara Pareglio: Um, maybe it doesn't vary, but, so the both what I see, as we mentioned before, the software defined vehicle is one. The other one is the how. How much of autonomy, let's put it, which level of autonomy. So also thinking about the introduction of AI, where AI is helps, again, in relation to the connectivity, uh, what's the difference is at the level where we are? [00:24:00] Where are they allowed to drive?

So for example, in US, there's never been a blockage, so to say, to try or test a autonomous vehicle on the road has been one of the first one. But then we see now China is much ahead. So they have already a lot of robot taxi on the streets. So that is slightly the difference that we see.

The other difference we see is where is the computational aspects or where are the decision taken or where the vehicle is considered the, let say the brain or it is a mixture. So at this stage, I believe that most of the autonomous vehicle are still think everything is, the decision is taken in the car. But also the usage of connectivity is quite different. So one example we knew with the Waymo, uh, which it got stuck when they drove close to a concert or some events. Then you using the network as a normal connection, so is the best effort when it's congested, then you don't have anymore the connectivity.

Therefore, if the [00:25:00] decision is taken, not in the vehicle, but if they needs required connectivity, then it creates those type of situations. In other places, we see that the vehicle is completely independent, so it takes decision right there and then so that therefore you have much more computational aspects of power within the vehicle rather than in the cloud.

So those shift where we see from the perspective, as I said, of the connectivity is also where the connectivity plays a role, and what information needs to be transmitted and for which reason? So because you also see these vehicles that are mapping, with LiDar completely the environment, some situation they thinking about the digital twin, but the amount of data that you want to have also for the vehicle itself. So the digital vehicle, it's still not possible to transmit it as a raw data completed through the network. So there's a lot of changes that we see also how the role of having, edge computing closer or where should it be, this information, what type of information.

So I think that we're still gonna see a lot of changes. [00:26:00] But yeah, so this is the, some of the area where I believe we will see some transformation.

Jim Morrish: There's a couple of key connectivity developments as well, which we've kind of touched on a little through this discussion. It's probably worth just recapping what those are. So first was uh, NTN or Non-Terrestrial Networks, which is kind of early stage at the moment, but the potential for that is, I believe, quite significant. And V2X, which I guess is in a similar situation. It's early stage, but potentially quite significant. 

Barbara Pareglio: It still, it is there. So just to give you differences, so the V2X obviously started in the era of LTE. So there were some initial V2X in LTE, but because it was quite early, again, there was still a confusion of which protocol to use where, which one would be going forward. Now we have the 5G based type of it where V2X is performing much better.

So I would say that one, obviously we are still at the beginning compared to, to the rest. But then we worked actually in China to publish a document, understanding the situation in China because we believe that in [00:27:00] China is much further ahead on the 5G because the deployment of 5G network in China is quite advanced.

We are already have full coverage pretty much of 5G. So we work with China Industry Innovation Alliance. So for the intelligence connected vehicle together, we publish a document, which has given a little bit of an idea where they see the adoption of C-V2X based on 5G.

So the penetration for uh, V2X is already quite high in China, which is at 90%, as I said, but not 5G based, just overall, while in 2025 we have, on those vehicles, the 30% of penetration and we will probably reach the 95, if I'm not mistaken, in to 2030. So still some work to be done, but it's ramping up quite rapidly.

Again, hopefully we will see the adoption in U.S. also quite fast is again, is in Europe, is given a two level, the adoption of 5G standalone where we are, and also the changes is quite slow [00:28:00] compared to the rest. So maybe we will see a little bit later. And then, as you mentioned, definitely there's a lot of attention on the NTN at the moment.

We are on the level to be able maybe to support an emergency message, but the intention is to go much further and have a kind of a, sort of broadband that supports also for the connectivity when there is no coverage. So, but yes, we are still at the beginning. 

Jim Morrish: Excellent. So that's a far more, integrated and pervasive connectivity ecosystem environment, I guess to support these vehicles. Nick, what's on the horizon for the vehicle OEMs themselves? What are the major challenges in the sector?

Nick Power: What you're seeing now is, and Barbara mentioned autonomous vehicles, you mentioned robotaxi, so autonomous vehicles are starting to, we're working with OEMs now. We're actually working in the space of robotaxis to try and connect them. But what you're seeing is that even in Europe, it's gonna be hyper localisation.

So roaming will not work with autonomous, right? So even in the big markets like in Europe where we can roam, but you need reliability of the network. So you [00:29:00] need the local profile. What it's going to do is it's gonna drive a whole, a lot more data and a lot more cost to the OEM and OEMs see costs, as, you know, every single cent they spend after they sell a car is a loss to them, right. And so there's a little bit of a friction, I would say, between the telco operators and the OEMs. Telcos have to invest a lot of money into their infrastructure upfront. The requirements for a vehicle is very different to the requirements for a phone and especially when it gets into autonomous, the amount of data it's gonna have to use, the amount of OTA packages and the amount of OTAs that're gonna have to do on the software over time leads to a lot more cost and a lot more infrastructure, right. So that's the friction that's started to come in between the two providers, you'll also see a shift. if you look at the more innovative companies like BYD and Tesla, the innovators and the disruptors in the industry, they built their software stacks up from the ground. They own their whole ecosystem. If you look at the traditional OEMs, they outsourced a lot of that to multiple companies, and there's so many components in a car that has a software on [00:30:00] delivered by different companies, right? And so stitching all that together and the complexity of that stack has really slowed them down and actually driven a lot of the cost. Um, so it'll be interesting to see where that goes over time.

Do they try and consolidate? A number of OEMs have created software arms in their companies. Some's worked out, some hasn't. So it'll be interesting to see where that ends up in the next few years.

Barbara Pareglio: Yeah, it's interesting. I noticed indeed a change. The new entrant obviously starts from scratch, so they have maybe that advantage. They think more software based than traditional mechanical and design of the car. But also I was listening to Ford and mention indeed that they needed to set up the complete software environment within, because of that issues that it was so fragmented among all the supplier that that's made it difficult to have a control of the vehicle in the sense from the software perspective.

So that is a quite complex environment. Definitely to think about it. One thing that I wanted to mention is like I noticed, uh particularly maybe in China is the shift in on the business model, but also to [00:31:00] the consumer. You not just, you sell the vehicle and that's it, but also trying to figure it out. If there is like a service that is, they can offer with the maintenance, but it has a connectivity package, but everything is included within this package, but it could be insurance or it could be the maintenance and for the vehicle. Did you notice something like this elsewhere or,

Nick Power: Yeah, a lot of the OEMs are trying to monetise services and sell additional services or different components of the car as an op spec, but I think they've struggled quite a bit in monetising services. That's another challenge that they will struggle with. It's not prevalent and it's not in the consumer's mind just yet that they have to pay extra a monthly fee for a feature that's already in the car. So that's a kind of a societal shift that'll have to happen I think, before they can be able to monetise this.

Jim Morrish: Hmm. Thank you. I mean, it's been an extremely interesting discussion. We've touched on many aspects of complexity within the industry, within the environment that the automotive industry operates, and also, you know, in terms of connecting these [00:32:00] devices, and things that the cellular industry can do in cellular players can do to help.

Um, what I just like to do though is to ask you both just to summarise what you think the key things, I'll start with you, Nick, what you think the key things are, that the cellular industry should be doing to really help OEMs and accelerate the adoption of connected vehicles and connected services within those vehicles.

Nick Power: Yeah, so if you look at telcos, they see automotive as just one sliver or one vertical within many that they have, right. That they have to serve. And then the autos, and they work on standards so that everything has to be standardised before it goes into a market and before it goes live. Whereas autos don't work that way. They work on evolving specs, different models, different brands over time, right? And what we're trying to do is we're working with GSMA, we're working with the 5G AA, which is the Automotive Association, to try and bring these groups together, telco, and auto together, and try and solve real world problems with real insights, and try and get standards in there so it's easy for them to manage the regulations going forward, [00:33:00] right? And we're a member of the 5G AA. We are actually going on the board taking a full board seat in January as well, and so through those associations, I think we can actually move the industry forward and try and move some of that friction between telco operators and the OEMs.

Jim Morrish: Thank you. And Barbara, same question to you. What is it that the cellular industry can really do to help this?

Barbara Pareglio: Well, yeah, so one thing is indeed there's been a lot of effort to try to understand each other, uh, you know, try to see what are the requirements. And at the moment, as I said, it is so many different networks of different countries has its own different networks. Even if it's standard, it's still, there's differences.

So one area that is also of interest possibly is the fact that we try to create, those API that you can manipulate the connectivity or have a more dynamic request. But instead of having always a fix, let's say, connections, which is always either at the top, normally you have to ask for the maximum performances and then, but you don't use always the maximum performance.

So it's, try to have a little bit [00:34:00] of a flexibility and an ability to have dynamic, changes and being able to support priorities when it's needed. So that's something that is happening, you know, right now, because of 5G is also, you know, is more, like architecture permits it to create those kind of environment.

Jim Morrish: Yes. I think that's one of the critical aspects of 5G standalone is it takes what has historically been operational technology within a telco and drags it into an information technology environment. So it makes it much more usable from an enterprise perspective. It's been an incredibly interesting conversation.

I think we're running out of time, but let's move on to the closing section. And as promised at the start of this podcast, we should have the, 'What the Tech' segment where we highlight a couple of interesting stories or experiences that we've had in the last couple of weeks. Nick, I'm gonna start with you on this one. What news story made you smile or frown or just despair?

Nick Power: Yeah, so it was one about Amazon Alexa and in-house assistant. So this little girl ordered a dollhouse and [00:35:00] actually four pounds of cookies, on Alexa, and the story got picked up by a local news station in San Diego. And the anchor, when he was finishing off the story, he said, I love how the little girl ordered a dollhouse. So had Alexa order me a dollhouse. And he didn't realise that his viewers would have Alexas in their homes. And when he said, "Alexa order me a dollhouse", those Alexas started to order dollhouses as well. So it's just, and because they didn't have purchase protection on their Alexas, it actually went and ordered doll houses.

So I thought that was quite interesting that he was able to mass buy doll houses all across San Diego.

Jim Morrish: Exactly. Well, I hope that people are listening to this podcast on headphones 'cause otherwise, it'll spread, it'll cascade around the world as, uh, as people hear this, but it does pretty much tick all the boxes. I thought the four pounds of sugar cookies was a nice touch

Nick Power: Yeah. Yeah.

Jim Morrish: just to round that one out.

It does strike me though. I wonder if regulators are gonna have to intervene in terms of the wake up words because, you know, if it's that easy to trigger an Alexa, I [00:36:00] mean I was thinking what the consequences might be, and you could potentially have a thief who comes up to the front door of a house, opens the letter box, and shouts through it. "Alexa, open the front door" and the front door opens. You know, we really do need to start thinking about security in some of these contexts a little more, I think. Barbara, what caught your eye?

Barbara Pareglio: So it's not the news, but I wanna maybe share an experience. So I've been traveling quite a bit, but I was in Las Vegas, so I had the chance to try an autonomous vehicle, the Zoox, which started just a month ago. So it's quite new, and then I'm here in China. So today I actually went to try an autonomous vehicle from Baidu, which, in Chendu they only had eight of them.

So it was interesting to find them and to try it out. Uh, completely different system, I have to say. So the Zoox is not a car that looks like a car. It looks more like a box where you have four passengers and they face each other, so you don't feel like you are in a vehicle or driving a car. And because it's at the beginning, it's only go from A to [00:37:00] B. It's a fixed path, and you will see whether there are the car around the first map, the streets, and then it goes down to the same route. It was quite a nice, interesting, uh, experience, I have to say. Sometimes when he was trying to change or turn, it is bit abrupt. Uh, not as smooth as I thought. But it's quite safe overall, uh, it wasn't, uh, driving so fast. If you would try to remove like your seatbelt, it would stop it when we're near, so at least there are some safety feature in places. You had your, uh, kind of a smartphone you can control, you know, the music or the temperature, all those kind of things. So it is quite a nice, interesting vehicle. The other one I tried here, it's really a car. It looks more a traditional vehicle. You can book it and, um, it felt very safe, much more controlled in the movement and change of lanes. And we tried it in a six lanes road. So not small, but obviously [00:38:00] exactly not, obviously not many pass. Uh, like bicycles or distraction, let's say on those  realy big roads. The only, difficulty that I found is the pickup point and the drop off point. So the pickup point again, there are no dedicated zones where they can pick you up or drop you off. So basically drop us off on the as I said, six lane area and next to us there was grass. So we had to jump out and good luck. Uh, so those are the tiny issues, but again, I think it will change when they're more used to autonomous vehicle. They can have zones where you have the pick up and a drop off because literally you couldn't have other places, because either is forbidden to park. So he was following the rule, you know, not park where you're not supposed to. If you have a taxi driver, it would've stopped you there, but not,and not an autonomous vehicle. So it's safe. We felt safe. There was no feeling of not being safe. But yeah. So there's still some more work [00:39:00] to do for being a really usable in a more context, um, in different cities. So.

Jim Morrish: Yeah, it's, it's a fast developing area. What I find particularly interesting about this autonomous vehicle space, is the impact it's gonna have on society. So when the three of us get to the kind of ages where we're going to need looking after and porting around and access to hospitals and you find it inconvenience to go in shopping, et cetera, automatic driving vehicles will be quite easy to get hold of. Suddenly there's a lot less constraint placed that will be placed on our lives in 20, 30 years time, than there are on the lives of old folks now.

Interesting though we could go on for a long time, but we ought to draw this podcast to a close. What I'd like to do though, just as we do that is, is ask you, Barbara, to tell us a little bit more about the GSMA activities in automotive contexts and just the community that you've got going.

Barbara Pareglio: Yeah, no, thank you very much for that. So, yes, GSMA has Smart Mobile community. What we try is to share, educate, [00:40:00] all our stakeholders in, the requirements, as we mentioned, understand the other, the two party, on the tables. But what we do is, produce documents or publications case study, but also uh, we advertise to become part of our community. If you're a member, it's quite easy. You can join. But if you're not a member, you wanna keep in touch with us. Please subscribe to our newsletter. We will share all the documentation that we have. We will share news and also we will share this podcast with all our audience so you can keep track of all the activity.

Jim Morrish: Fantastic. Thank you, and it's definitely going, a lot going on in the automotive space. As we've heard GSMA is very central to many of these developments. So Barbara and Nick, it's been fantastic for both of you to join us. Thank you so much for doing that, and thank you for taking the time.

But I think at this point, we ought to draw the podcast to a close, and just a reminder that you can subscribe to the TrendingTech podcast in association with IoT Now wherever you found us today and indeed, thank you for joining us, and thank you for [00:41:00] taking the time out of your day to listen to us talk about connected vehicles.

I hope that it was interesting. I'm glad that you are part of our growing audience around the world. We'll be back with another edition of the TrendingTech podcast soon, focusing on another aspect of digital transformation. So thanks again for joining and bye for now.