Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:05):
Joining me now is Colin Lee from Jaguar Land Rover. Colin, thanks for talking with TelecomTV. I had to ask you first of all, what is JLR's role within the connected mobility sector and what's your involvement in participation in 5Gaa?

Colin Lee, Jaguar Land Rover (00:20):
The reason why we're involved in 5GAA is about seven, eight years ago, we as Jaguar Land Rover and a couple of other OEMs, which are now of course part of 5G aa, were struggling to be able to communicate with the world easily. So we needed to have, I was part of the original founder, if you like, team that sat down and decided this is what we needed to do. Once we started pulling that team together and we started getting interest from MNOs and various other people, mobile network operators, it became obvious that once we started working together, we weren't experts of communication that we thought we were. And equally the MNOs in the communication world didn't really understand cars. So once we started talking, realizing that simple things like we need quality of service, of communications and stuff like that really, well, we didn't realize you needed that. So therefore we started working on technology with them or working on the ways of improving those links so that we can actually have a better communication level at data level. If you see me, that's what happened. It was as simple as that. So obviously

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:25):
Connectivity is a critical part of car vehicle manufacture now. So now that we're sort of about five years into the 5G era or so we're coming from 3G, 4G, we've got more capabilities with 5G. What role does 5G play today in the sector?

Colin Lee, Jaguar Land Rover (01:47):
So I think what's happened over the years is that we've become more and more reliant on being connected. There's all kinds of things that we can do when we're connected, like update the car so you don't have to go to get it repaired as much. We realized that actually we could repair something quicker by just updating the car, same as your pc. And what's happened is as you go through the 3G 4G, you can do things faster and more, and then 5G again, and then of course in the future, there's other things that we can do to improve that. Again, the main thing about cars these days is always being connected is the most important thing because if you want to update a car and you can't because it's not connected, then you can't do it. Whereas if you are connected, then you can do lots of things to help a car. Everything from help diagnose issues in the car to supporting use cases and features for the customer, help the customer journey, keep in touch with what they want to do. So you just can't do that on, if you go back to the old cars, like the old Jaguars, they were great cars look great, but they weren't integrated with the customer journey.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (02:49):
So as the telecoms industry keeps developing its technology, as we go into the second half of 5G to get 5G advance, and now who's looking at the next generation, technology is always progressing here. If we look ahead a bit, if we look ahead five, six years or so into the next decade, how do you see 5G and cellular connectivity technologies playing a role in the connectivity, the mobile connectivity sector?

Colin Lee, Jaguar Land Rover (03:17):
I think we need to break this down to three sections. So today we're pretty much, we share warnings, we get it all the time. You get things like there's technologies out there, we can tell you there's a stationary vehicle and all that kind of thing. So you've got warnings today. Then the next stage is where you start communicating with someone. So if you've got intersections, you can say, well, I'm here. I'm here. Okay, well the road says you can go first so therefore I'll stop and you carry on. Oh, good. Right? So that can all be happening behind the scene so you don't get crashes at junctions. You see what I mean? And then ultimately when we get to autonomous level, you need to do a whole load of more things to make sure that you are controlling the world. So we may not have any traffic lights at work at some point, for example, we might have everybody following a path and literally everybody goes, literally, you got to someone like this and they turn last minute because all the cars know where they're going. That's utopian moment, but the journey is much harder than that. You have to go through the, okay, now we're doing this. Have we got the right stuff to do that? That's what we're going to do next after this. So do we need a better environment to do that? And more importantly, we have to be in agreement as to what is good and what is bad on each one of those levels. It's really complex, but the benefits are great, safety, comfort, and the driver doesn't even know. They just become much more safe without

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (04:38):
Realizing it. Does the mobility sector get this generally, do you have buy-in from, I can see the telecom operator interest. I can see the telecom technology vendor interest, but from these automotive and mobility industries and those OEMs, do they see it now?

Colin Lee, Jaguar Land Rover (04:54):
Absolutely. Every single OEM I know anyway, really get excited about this. But more importantly, because we're getting excited about it, the road operators are getting excited about it because they're now saying, well, hang on. We now know how many cars are going to be coming through these set of traffic lights so I can change, switch these kind of phasing around a bit more. We know about emergency vehicles coming around. We know what we can almost tell the customer where we want them to be placed so that the ambulance can go whiz and through. But the governments are really into this because when you start looking at the facts and figures mean you only have to look at, I mean, I've seen some figures that are horrendous where people getting killed, like vulnerable road users where literally you could literally walk out the road. Imagine walking in front of a bus.

(05:38):
Kids do it all the time, you didn't know. But what we can do is we can either use a bus camera or we can have a phone in their pocket that's telling the car that there's someone now starting to walk in front of the bus. The car will automatically understand that, and it's got a choice of either informing the customer or taking action or both. So if it needs to take action, it will take action. And the beauty of it is that nobody knows, apart from the fact that the persons now we're going to cross the road alive, if you know what I mean, without being dramatic. But it's beautiful because we don't have that situation today and that if you look at the figures, they're horrendous. I mean, especially I think the US is terrible. That's the reason why I think this is really going to make a massive difference.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (06:23):
I want to sort of ask what's required for us to get to that stage and listening to you speak there, it seems really apparent that latency, for example, is a massive factor. You can't wait around for seconds or even milliseconds. It's got to be instantaneous communication here. So what is it that we need to achieve the goals we set for ourselves?

Colin Lee, Jaguar Land Rover (06:42):
Well, the interesting thing is we've got quite a lot of it already. So first of all, we need to all agree that what we're going to do, otherwise, if you don't have consensus, you can't really, you have to send a certain amount of data to understand it. So you have to have a trigger, an event of some kind, like I know someone's crossing the road. Then you need to have an idea of what's happening in terms of speed and what direction they're going in. So if I could got those two things, I can then make a decision whether I need to take action on it.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (07:06):
What is the main objective of five ga? What does five GA want to accomplish? Who does it need to talk to? Who do you need to talk to? What sort of ecosystem are we talking about here?

Colin Lee, Jaguar Land Rover (07:17):
Initially we thought it was just the OEMs and the communications industry. I mean, to be honest, that's what we thought we needed. Then we realized, ah, we need to talk to the roadside people because at the same time, whatever we do on the road, the roadside guys, the ones that look after the traffic lights and the gantries and stuff, we need to talk to those too. So we have been, then we realize, well hang on. A lot of that stuff is the government base. So we have to then work with the governments and then we've got standards we have to wear out. So what 5GAA is trying to do is we're literally trying to pull all these people together to a common interest. So road safety is obviously one of the things we're interested in, but better service for the customer journey is what some other industries want to do.

(08:03):
But ultimately to pull this into the same bucket so that the experience of driving is so effortless, you don't need to worry about parking costs, paying for parking. You have to worry about, I don't know whether somebody's going to be over that, go with a hill. Is there a traffic jam on the other side of that hill? You dunno. I'm going to say something that's probably a little bit weird, but it is going to make some sense to you. If I compare it to a human being, you've got eyes. So does a car, it has loads of senses. It can see quite a long distance, but your ears determine your safety. I can hear people downstairs, I can hear people that I can't even see. Do you get a sense of safety? So what V2X does, it can see with its ears, it's got long ears.

(08:47):
It can hear from up to kilomet away on one direction. Even beyond that through other means. It has an idea now like heat map of what's going on around it. So basically it can now go, right, well I know what's going on over there. I know what's going over there, so therefore I'm going to make this decision to do this. We can't do that today. So if you try it one day, cover your ears and try and figure out whether you fill differently through the years again, you suddenly realize that you've got more information. The car has never had this experience before. To be able to see beyond the horizon. Do stuff like see there's a big lorry in front of you. Be able to see through the lorry and then know what's going on and adjusted for it. You see what I mean? So it's a completely different mindset. This is what I love about the V2X

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (09:35):
Technology. Exciting possibilities. Colin, thanks very much for talking with us.