Communication Standard For Autonomous Cars To Be Scheduled By China After 2018

The chief of the Society of Automotive Engineers of China (SAE-China) announced on Wednesday that it wants to set a common national standard for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, which is vital for driverless cars. The idea behind this rule is to ensure that the autonomous cars will "know" beforehand what each of them wants to do, and that nothing can intervene or intrude on the said discussion, according to Auto Evolution.

The self-driving cars which feature Car-To-X communication systems will not communicate like humans, but will have a "language" made especially for machines instead. The said language is what the technicians call a "protocol," and it refers to a series of predetermined commands, queries and other such things that will be necessary to prevent self-driving cars from congesting the roads or crashing into each other for whatever reason.

The resulting 450-page roadmap, issued on October, lays out specific policy objectives for virtually all of the aspects of the automotive industry, including driverless vehicles and electric cars. The roadmap covers three five-year periods up to 2030, according to Automotive News.

China will "lay the foundation" for V2V and V2I (vehicle-to-surrounding infrastructure) standards for autonomous cars in 2018 in the next update of the roadmap. A more exact standard will be developed between 2020 and 2025, to be agreed on by all automotive brands, said Fu Yuwu, Chief of SAE-China.

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology also announced that they would tighten a subsidy program for green energy cars. Fu said that the move would not get in the way of meeting the goal of at least 7 percent of cars sold in the electric and plug-in hybrid segment by 2020.

The aim of China to establish a national standard could speed up the implementation of autonomous cars in the world's biggest car market, contrasting a patchwork of state laws and standards in the United States that some in the industry say could impede development. Its method of central unified planning could prove more effective than nations like Japan, which is having trouble bringing its three biggest automakers together to enact a common standard, Fu added.