What is the Internet of Vehicles (IoV)?
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV), officially known as "Automotive Mobile Internet of Things" technology, is a term I personally prefer to call "connected car." Imagine this: in today's era of widespread internet access, when you turn on your computer, connect to the network, power on your smartphone, or turn on your smart TV to search for programs, you and the devices you're using become part of the internet. The IoV transforms the car into an internet terminal, making it part of the internet. Through three steps—vehicle data collection, vehicle network interconnection, and cloud-based control and scheduling—it achieves a win-win situation for customers, car manufacturers, third-party companies, and transportation departments, making our car travel safer, more efficient, and smarter.
Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) functions
1. OBD function
What is OBD? OBD is an abbreviation for On-Board Diagnostics, which translates to "in-vehicle diagnostic system." Simply put, OBD is like a doctor's stethoscope and ultrasound equipment. A doctor uses a stethoscope to hear your heartbeat and an ultrasound to check if your internal organs are functioning normally. An OBD device is a small box that connects to the car via its OBD port. It reads the car's data, stores it in the cloud via a wireless network, and allows the car owner to check the car's current status via a mobile app, including fuel consumption, exhaust system information, and fault codes. The display screen the doctor looks at during an ultrasound in a hospital is analogous to the OBD mobile app; the car owner can use the app to monitor their vehicle's condition.
2. Navigation function
Unlike navigation products like Baidu and Gaode, these products combine automatic navigation with human customer service. This is a widely used and popular product internationally, and I personally believe it's more user-friendly and practical. With a single button, you can call the customer service center, state your destination, and they will set up a navigation route for you. You can also ask the customer service center to check the weather, book flights, hotels, and more. Personally, I think this approach is more viable, both in terms of user experience and business model.
Are connected car projects legal?
First, the vehicle-to-everything (V2X) project is legal, and it has been listed as a major national special project. It is the 54th key project in the 13th Five-Year Plan, explicitly stating the need to accelerate the construction of V2X and ship-to-everything (S2X) networks, making it one of the key projects the country aimed to implement from 2016 to 2020.
What benefits can the Internet of Vehicles bring us?
1. Drive with greater peace of mind and greater safety. Road safety is our top priority. With the advent of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), cars can proactively explore their surroundings using their sensors, and then transmit the collected information to the onboard system via IoT cards, enabling automatic alerts and hazard avoidance. With the development of IoV, achieving a zero-accident rate in the future is not a dream.
2. Low-carbon travel is more environmentally friendly. In the process of building a low-carbon society, intelligent transportation brought about by the Internet of Vehicles will become an important driver of energy conservation and emission reduction. It can account for 20% of energy conservation and emission reduction tasks, and the smooth transportation network composed of people, vehicles, and roads will significantly reduce additional fuel consumption and pollution.
3. Smoother and More Convenient Traffic. Have you ever experienced this: a minor accident on the road causes a massive traffic jam? But in the era of the Internet of Vehicles, cars equipped with IoT cards (www.zjyiot.com/iotcard.html) have GPS positioning and a "vision" system. These cars can upload road conditions to traffic management departments, allowing the cloud to control traffic flow and plan routes, thus avoiding traffic congestion.
What exactly can the Internet of Vehicles do?
The Internet of Vehicles is a huge topic. Imagine this scenario: Sometime in the future, you receive a WeChat message from a family member while driving: "Please bring some rice home from work." When you reply "okay" via voice, the system has already placed an order on an e-commerce platform based on your past preferences. All you have to do is confirm, and the entire shopping process is completed from inside your car.
While implementing such functionality in a car is currently challenging, some are indeed working towards this goal. The scenario just described was given by Ying Yilun, founder and chairman of the PATEO Group, at the Intelligent Electric Vehicle Investor Conference.
As a connected car supplier, PATEO has always aimed to connect cars and the internet. Therefore, PATEO has a strong voice on the topic of what connected cars can actually do.
In fact, providing safer and more convenient in-car functions such as dining, entertainment, navigation, communication, and scheduling is almost a consensus among all players. Aside from differences in technological approaches, the ultimate goal is the same. Therefore, discussing the application scenarios of connected vehicles solely at these levels is clearly too superficial.
In Ying Yilun's view, the essence of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is the productization of data. This data includes users' personal data, vehicle-level data, cloud service data, and so on. Only by utilizing this data can the full potential of the IoV be developed.
For example, if data knew your usual three commute routes and cameras along those routes provided real-time traffic updates, you wouldn't need navigation anymore; you could simply avoid congestion. If all traffic accident data from the Ministry of Transport were analyzed to determine the causes of accidents, drivers could effectively prevent them, significantly reducing the accident rate.
In addition, Ying Yilun also revealed PATEO's plans in many areas. For example, cooperation with Suning in auto finance and car-sharing; cooperation with mobile phone companies at the underlying ROM level, which can enable vehicle control via mobile phone; and cooperation with Baidu covering cloud processing, intelligent driving, maps, and other aspects, and is carried out at the deepest source code level.
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a new trend in the development of intelligent transportation.
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is the application of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the field of intelligent transportation, and IoV projects are an important component of intelligent transportation systems. Entering the new century, concepts such as the IoT, smart earth, and smart cities emerged, and their application in the transportation sector gave rise to the concepts of intelligent transportation and the IoV. The concept of the IoT was first proposed in China as early as 1999, but it was then called a sensor network. The emergence of the IoT concept and the rapid development of the IoT industry, combined with intelligent transportation, have created a new trend in the intelligent transportation industry—the IoV.
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV), or the Internet of Things for automobiles, refers to a network system that utilizes in-vehicle electronic sensors, mobile communication technology, car navigation systems, smart terminal devices, and information network platforms to enable real-time networking between vehicles and roads, vehicles and vehicles, vehicles and people, and vehicles and cities. This allows for information interconnection and interoperability, enabling effective intelligent monitoring, scheduling, and management of vehicles, people, objects, roads, and locations. The portion related only to "people and vehicles" is called Telematics in other countries, which is the "narrow" definition of the Internet of Vehicles. Telematics uses wireless voice, digital communication, and satellite navigation and positioning systems as platforms to provide drivers and passengers with traffic information, emergency response strategies, remote vehicle diagnostics, and internet services (financial transactions, news, email, etc.) through positioning systems and wireless communication networks.
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is essentially a massive wireless sensor network. Each car can be considered a super sensor node, typically equipped with internal and external thermometers, brightness sensors, one or more cameras, microphones, ultrasonic radar, and many other devices. Currently, a typical sedan has around 100 sensors, while luxury cars can have over 200. Furthermore, future cars will be equipped with onboard computers, GPS locators, and wireless transceivers. This enables wireless communication between cars, as well as between cars and roadside base stations. This unprecedented wireless sensor network expands the perception and control capabilities of computer systems across the entire world.
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) project has been listed as a key project within the National Major Science and Technology Project (the Third Project), with an initial investment of tens of billions of yuan. Implementing the National Major Science and Technology Project is a top priority in science and technology work. The third requirement of the National Twelfth Five-Year Plan for Science and Technology Development is to accelerate breakthroughs in core technologies such as mobile internet, broadband trunking systems, next-generation wireless LANs, and the Internet of Things (IoT), promote industrial applications, foster innovation in operational services and intellectual property creation, and enhance the core competitiveness of industries. As a core application in the IoT field, the IoV project has received tens of billions of yuan in initial funding, with support concentrated in the areas of automotive electronics, information and communication, and software solutions.
The "China Intelligent Transportation Development Strategy (2012-2020)" is about to be released, ushering in a new wave of investment and development in the intelligent transportation industry. From July 31st to August 1st, 2012, the 3rd Intelligent Transportation Conference (ITSCC), hosted by the Highway Research Institute of the Ministry of Transport and the Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport, was held in Beijing. During the conference, relevant officials from the Science and Technology Department of the Ministry of Transport publicly analyzed the "China Intelligent Transportation Development Strategy (2012-2020)" for the first time. The strategy proposes that by 2020, the overall goal of China's intelligent transportation development is to: basically establish an intelligent transportation system that meets the requirements of modern transportation development; achieve cross-regional, large-scale integrated application and collaborative operation of intelligent transportation; provide convenient travel services and efficient logistics services; and lay a solid foundation for the modernization of transportation by the middle of this century. Specific goals include: comprehensively improving urban traffic management and service levels; effectively improving highway traffic safety and travel reliability; focusing on enhancing waterway transportation efficiency and regulatory emergency response capabilities; significantly promoting the effective connection of various transportation modes; significantly improving technological innovation capabilities; and promoting the formation of an intelligent transportation industry. To achieve these goals, key support will be given to the integrated innovation of technologies such as real-time traffic data acquisition, traffic information exchange, traffic data processing, and intelligent traffic safety and intelligent organization and management. The development of fundamental and key standards and application service standards for intelligent transportation will also be accelerated, and the implementation of these standards and international cooperation will be promoted.
