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5G is coming this year...will TESLA offer an upgrade

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I suspect that Tesla will require 5G in order to realize the FSD future they envision. I think they should offer complementary upgrades for all cars that purchased FSD, and offer optional paid upgrade for others the same way the 4G upgrade was made available. Either way it wont be necessary at launch of 5G but by 2020 which seems to be the magical year for all automakers thats when 5G will be widespread and a must have option.
 
By "coming this year"...what sort of adoption are you talking about? Pragmatically speaking, until the iPhone supports 5G, you're not going to have any real adoption. And Apple typically waits these things out, so I'd guess 5G will have to be available on all carriers for about a year before Apple bites. Not that the world revolves around Apple, but new tech adoption very often does in a real way (more often than not).
 
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It'll be years before 5G is widespread enough to be useful for FSD, in any form.

https://www.economist.com/news/busi...-barring-strong-business-case-next-generation

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I'm skeptical about V2V for FSD anyway, I think the extra bandwidth from 5G would be more useful for map bandwidth, and even so it may not be necessary. Brad Templeton has written a few articles covering V2V and why it makes sense to be cautious:

v2v | Brad Ideas
 
With that the Tesla LCD can do at this point, having 5G is practically useless. It wouldn't stream any better than what it is doing now. I would rather they focus on improving their LTE signal issue and Wifi Issue. The signal sucks
 
Yes, 3G works as well as LTE in the cars (I’ve got both). 5G is going to mostly be used in high density urban areas (think NYC), so won’t even get wide geographic adoption anytime soon. I don’t see Tesla using it in the next couple of years, if ever.
 
Upgrading to 5G should be similar to the 3G to LTE upgrade - just a module replacement.

Though the current software has limitations reducing the usable bandwidth for LTE or WiFi, so shifting to 5G probably wouldn't be noticeable unless a major change is made in the software.

V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) and V2I (vehicle-to-infrastructure) are a wild card - we don't know what regulatory approval will require for Full Self Driving. Since we're likely several years away from the technology being good enough to seek FSD approval, the government could add more requirements to get FSD certification - such as requiring V2V/V2I integration or possibly requiring the FSD systems also use audio sensors to detect the sound from emergency vehicles or an approaching train (even if the software can't see those objects).

But, even with V2V or V2I - the bandwidth required for those features is likely to be pretty small.

We don't know the architecture for the new navigation software Tesla is testing now. It's very possible the routing could be shifted to a cloud server, which would have access to significantly more and completely up-to-date data - but that connection would also be relatively low bandwidth - with the largest bandwidth likely needed for displaying the high resolution Google maps on the console display (same as we have today).

So - do we need 5G? Not clear...
 
"5G coming this year" is actually 5G targeted to begin roll out in roughly a dozen cities by the end of the year.

It's a field testbed, and IIRC the standards are even fully cemented yet? As others have pointed out in various ways, 5G is really at least a few years out from actual adoption and is likely to remain limited coverage for several years.

Also unclear how much the car would make use of the extra capability until V2V gets sorted.
 
I'm going to cosign on all the thoughts on how Tesla will upgrade cars as needed. However this thread has opened up the can of worms that is 5G for cars, to that end I will say that if there is going to be any near-term future of FSD, then 5G and DSRC are going to be needed for V2V or V2X communication.

This video sums it up perfectly.
 
BTW reliance on 5G for FSB is probably a bad idea for quite some time, maybe ever in NA. 5G is cellular so you need antenna tower rollouts to get coverage, and that's mind boggling infrastructure cost because 5G towers only have about a 2km range (because of the very high frequencies) and are going to require fiber run to each of them. That's about one tower every 2 miles of open highway, before you get into off-highway roads. Reasonable coverage is going to start at 100's of $B and go up from there.
 
How do you guys think 5G will help? The problem is the CPU is so damn slow. I bet it can't even keep up with LTE rates.

5G, with it's low latency (down to max 4ms, compared to about 20ms with LTE IIRC) helps build the vehicle's model of the world around it by reporting all vehicles and their state around it. That, at least in theory, reduces the processing requirements.
 
5G, with it's low latency (down to max 4ms, compared to about 20ms with LTE IIRC) helps build the vehicle's model of the world around it by reporting all vehicles and their state around it. That, at least in theory, reduces the processing requirements.

Uhh no. V2V won't ever happen, but this wouldn't do that anyway.

The car will fallback to LTE or 4G whenever you leave a city anyway. There's no damn way there's going to be any "self driving" based on this. Not only that, but it's philosophically against what Tesla is pursuing.