[karlkfi]

> Connected cars are already on the road, using lidar & radar, not the phone network. Xu points out, “even today we have the technology that can support autonomous driving”.

This point is silly.

Lidar and radar don't replace high bandwidth internet on a self-driving car. The beefy super computer in the trunk is trying to replace the cloud compute processing that is inaccessible because there's not enough low latency, reliable bandwidth available to stream a dozen camera, lidar, radar, and IR feeds over the internet for remote processing.

Self driving right now requires either precision 3D mapping and local processing of a huge amount of data from multiple sources OR highway-only limitations where there are fewer objects to track that all move in predictable ways. Both of these would be easier and produce better results with more bandwidth and lower latency.

5G may not be mature enough to make a difference today, but that doesn't mean connected and self-driving cars aren't a legitimate use case for the technology and its stated goals.