MWC Barcelona 2019: On the Road to Self-Driving Cars, 5G Will Make Us Better Drivers

I'm not sure I can describe the apprehension you feel when you sit down to drive a semi-truck for the first time in your life--and that semi-truck is roughly 2,500 kilometers away. In a demonstration at MWC Barcelona 2019 (formerly called Mobile World Congress), I overcame my anxiety and successfully drove a truck through a modest obstacle course in a parking lot in Götenberg, Sweden, while I sat surrounded by monitors in a conference hall in southern Spain. Thankfully, Einride, the company behind the truck I was driving, took precautions to make sure I didn't set a new world record for "Instigating a Traffic Accident from the Greatest Distance Away." Those precautions included limiting the top speed of the truck, called a T-pod, to five kilometers per hour regardless of how hard I stepped on the gas, and having an Einride employee on site in Götenberg with a kill switch at the ready. With a 4G network, driving a truck from half a continent away would be tricky, to say the least.