The Emergence of Vehicle Computing

Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) are poised to revolutionize the conventional transportation industry. In this article, we first introduce the vision of vehicle computing in the autonomous driving era and highlight that CAVs are the perfect computation platforms, so connected devices/things with limited computation capacities may rely on surrounding CAVs to perform complex computational tasks. Next, we depict several reasons why vehicle computing is essential and emerging, followed by four case studies, including in-vehicle delivery, in-vehicle meeting, in-vehicle entertainment, and in-vehicle augmented reality, to further illustrate vehicle computing. Finally, we conclude this article by listing several technical challenges related to vehicular communication, open APIs, computation hardware, energy consumption, computation offloading, as well as security and privacy.