“Autonomous vehicles are software defined”, said Deepu Talla, vice president of autonomous machines at Nvidia, a high end chip maker, speaking at CES. That software will run on onboard computers, and won’t be processed served from the cloud via mobile broadband networks, he said. There are four reasons for that:

1. Latency. If you’re in a moving car, the round trip for data takes too long.
2. Bandwidth. Cars will continually generate huge amounts of data, particularly from the many high definition video cameras they’ll use to monitor where they’re going and what’s around them.
3. Connectivity. It’s not always there, particularly in rural areas, but even in cities there are momentary holes and bottlenecks in network coverage. Not big enough, perhaps, for a human to perceive but enough to delay machine to machine communication for critical milliseconds.
4. Privacy. Although it’s not as big of a concern for cars as for, say, medical devices, it’s still a limiting factor.

5G won’t solve the problem, Talla said. Latency may decrease but it will still be there and 5G’s greater bandwidth will be eaten up by greater demand. “the amount of data will increase too”, he said.

https://www.tellusventure.com/blog/self-driving-cars-will-need-wireless-broadband-but-not-for-heavy-duty-computing/

Dead zones in 5G coverage could limit self-driving cars to dense, urban population centers in the coming years, according to a new article from Motherboard.

That scenario could pose problems for autonomous vehicles relying on 5G connectivity, particularly as the cars become more affordable for consumers.

However, telecoms could actually take advantage of a slew of revenue opportunities by providing 5G connectivity in more rural areas, which will likely push them to extend coverage to those places eventually.

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-5g-will-drive-the-adoption-of-self-driving-cars-2017-12/?IR=T

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