The Impact of 5G on the Roads with Dr. Simon Lok & Reid Estreicher

Cars and trucks have become exponentially more tech-enabled throughout the years. From the genesis of “self-driving mode” to the increased production of semi-autonomous and electric-hybrid vehicles, our roads and highways are filled with wireless computer technology.

What will happen when one of those vehicular networks is hacked?

On this episode of Recalibrate with Samsung Networks, Jason Claybrook, RGNets CTO Dr. Simon Lok and Samsung B2B Mobile Marketing’s Reid Estreicher break down how a hack of a BMW i3 transformed it into a self-driving car and how 5G on the roads can help eliminate traffic jams in the future by learning information about cars from miles away.

“Not every car needs to have a self-driving system for [fixing] a traffic jam to be solved,” Lok said. “All you need to know to mitigate that is to know that the slow-down is happening several miles ahead of your visual range.”

Lok proposed that if a driver at the site of a traffic-jam, regardless of whether the car is self-driving or semi-autonomous, could pass that knowledge to every car behind them and inform drivers to reduce their speeds according to computer models. This would effectively eliminate the traffic jam.

“If you were to have an entire 5G network on all of the highways, it would essentially eliminate traffic jams everywhere, without the need of having every [car] requiring the self-driving system, it’s actually just having the information that’s important,” Lok said. “That’s why having that 5G network everywhere would be so transformative. There’s a very clear way that you can get from having that network to having an immediate, huge benefit to which everything, every person, would see.”

Networks TechTalk podcast was previously named Recalibrate with Samsung Networks.