Data from Gaogong Intelligent Vehicle Research Institute shows that in the first 11 months of 2025, the delivery of passenger vehicles with standard pre-installed V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) in the Chinese market reached 662,300 units, a year-on-year increase of 59.67%, with a penetration rate of 3.20%.
During the same period, the penetration rate of 5G configuration was 27.14%, more than eight times that of V2X.
A technology promoted for nearly a decade still sees its pre-installation penetration rate stuck in single digits. However, when applied to mining scenarios, the same technology has become highly sought after.
Fan Ju, Deputy General Manager of CICT Mobile, said in an interview with China Automotive News that C-V2X technology has basically become a standard configuration for autonomous driving in specific scenarios for commercial vehicles such as mining trucks. Why can V2X succeed in mining areas?
01. Where is Passenger Vehicle V2X Stuck?
The goal of passenger vehicle V2X is to enable vehicles and infrastructure to directly exchange information on position, speed, and intent. Features such as forward collision warning, blind-spot warning, and intersection movement assist, which can be achieved through single-vehicle intelligence using sensors like cameras and LiDAR combined with algorithms, require a different technical approach when implemented via V2X.
V2X does not rely on sensors to detect other entities; instead, it requires vehicles on the road and roadside equipment to possess communication capabilities simultaneously, assessing risks by directly receiving broadcasted status data from each other.
This also means that V2X warnings are not interfered with by factors such as whether the line of sight is obstructed, whether lighting is sufficient, or whether sensors are contaminated. It receives a definitive message rather than a probabilistic perception result.
However, popularizing V2X presents a two-sided market problem.
You install an OBU (On-Board Unit), but if the vast majority of surrounding vehicles are not equipped with one, the messages you receive are nearly zero. Roadside units are built, but if less than 4% of vehicles can communicate with them, the return on investment cannot be justified.
Among the data provided by Gaogong Intelligent Vehicle Research Institute, one figure is particularly worth examining.
In the delivery of passenger vehicles with standard pre-installed V2X in the Chinese market during the first 11 months of 2025, joint venture brands accounted for 77.50% of the pre-installation contribution for passenger vehicle V2X. However, domestic brands accounted for 73.21% of the 5G installation volume. Domestic brands are advancing faster in intelligence, yet they are precisely the ones acting more cautiously regarding V2X.
The reason for this phenomenon is not complicated. Domestic brands allocate more of their intelligence budgets to single-vehicle intelligence areas that consumers can perceive, such as LiDAR, high-computing-power chips, and end-to-end algorithms, which also serve as better selling points. The functional experience of V2X relies on the external environment, and users may not necessarily feel the difference after automakers invest in it.
Furthermore, the advancement of single-vehicle intelligence has further compressed the market for V2X development.
In 2025, official data released by Huawei showed that the assisted driving mileage of Qiankun ADS reached 5.42 billion kilometers, cumulatively avoiding 2.12 million potential collisions.
When a system based on single-vehicle sensors can already produce such safety data, the priority of V2X for both consumers and automakers is declining.
The difficulty in developing passenger vehicle V2X stems from its reliance on scale. However, scaling depends on everyone first recognizing its value, a value that is diminishing amid the rapid development of single-vehicle intelligence.
This cycle has yet to be broken on urban open roads.
02. Why Can V2X Be Utilized in Mining Areas?
V2X has not taken off in the passenger vehicle sector, but in mining areas, it is showing a thriving trend.
There is a fundamental difference between mining scenarios and urban roads: the participants in communication are controllable.
The operating area of an open-pit mine generally spans several square kilometers, with the number of vehicles ranging from dozens to hundreds, and the personnel consist of fixed mine employees.
Mine operators can simultaneously manage vehicle dispatch, personnel scheduling, and operational processes, acting as a single management entity. Whether to install OBUs or equip TAG terminals can be executed by issuing an internal notice, without needing to wait for the external ecosystem to mature.
This unilateral decision-making structure allows mining areas to bypass the cold-start problem of passenger vehicle V2X.
CiDi has delivered 56 autonomous mining trucks to a large open-pit coal mine in northwest China, which operate in a mixed fleet with over 500 manned trucks.
In such a mixed fleet scenario, mine operators can require all participating vehicles and key personnel to be equipped with communication terminals, ensuring that the coverage rate of the communication network is 100% from the very beginning.
However, controllability is only a prerequisite. What truly makes V2X necessary in mining areas is the rigid blockage that the physical environment imposes on single-vehicle perception.
Open-pit mine roads lack lane markings, traffic lights, paved surfaces, and unified traffic rules. Moreover, the blind spots for 100-ton-class mining trucks can reach up to 20 meters. To ensure their safe autonomous driving, more environmental information needs to be acquired.
Public industry safety analyses of mining areas generally believe that a significant proportion of transport accidents are related to blind spots, fatigued driving, and poor coordination. Working conditions such as dust, dense fog, and extreme cold simultaneously degrade the image quality of cameras, the point cloud density of LiDAR, and compromise the false alarm rate of millimeter-wave radars.
A study on laser attenuation in coal dust environments published in the MDPI journal points out that the common dust and fog environments inside coal mines cause the diffusion and absorption of laser beams.
In the call for papers for the special issue on LiDAR Technology for Intelligent Transportation Systems and Smart Driving, the Sensors journal lists LiDAR data quality, denoising, and robustness under dusty conditions as one of the core topics.
The simultaneous degradation of three types of sensors by the same physical factor is rarely encountered on urban roads.
Perception failures in cities are generally localized; backlighting affects cameras, and heavy rain affects LiDAR, but not all sensors fail simultaneously.
Mining dust creates a global and continuous suppression of perception, turning the logic of "react after seeing" from a potential failure into a frequent occurrence.
The role of V2X in this scenario is not merely to complement perception, but to provide an information channel that does not rely on optical and electromagnetic wave reflection when physical perception approaches its limits.
C-V2X direct communication operates in the dedicated 5.9 GHz frequency band.
A study published by Clemson University in the IEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification modeled and analyzed the path loss of the 5.9 GHz DSRC and the 28 GHz to 73.5 GHz millimeter-wave bands under dust and sand conditions.
The conclusion is that the degree of attenuation depends on dust particle size, propagation frequency, and dust concentration, with 5G millimeter-wave channels being more affected by dust and sand than 5.9 GHz DSRC channels.
Therefore, under typical mining area dust conditions, the communication reliability of the 5.9 GHz band is superior to that of the millimeter-wave band, providing a physical layer guarantee for communication in dusty environments.
V2X replaces the probabilistic guessing of single-vehicle intelligence with deterministic information exchange.
The word "deterministic" carries significant weight in mining scenarios.
The output of single-vehicle perception is a probability distribution, meaning there is a high probability of detecting an obstacle ahead. In contrast, the output of V2X is a definitive message, such as Vehicle A traveling at 15 kilometers per hour at coordinates X, Y, heading towards Z.
In scenarios where 100-ton mining trucks travel at speeds of tens of kilometers per hour with braking distances often reaching tens of meters, the gap between probability and determinism is the difference between timely deceleration and collision accidents.
03. How to Solve the Problem of Mixed Human and Vehicle Traffic?
To popularize V2X in mining areas, one unavoidable scenario is the mixed traffic of humans and vehicles.
Unmanned mining trucks, manned vehicles, and on-site personnel all operate in the same area. Human positions change constantly, and visual systems have blind spots in detection under dusty and backlit conditions. Only by resolving the issue of mixed human and vehicle traffic can V2X truly possess the conditions for scaled replication in mining areas.
CiDi has a rather interesting solution: the TAG terminal it released in June 2026 is shaped like a work badge. Miners wear it around their necks, enabling vehicles to know the person's location within 30 milliseconds.
This technical approach is not complex. The TAG is built-in with a BeiDou dual-mode high-precision positioning module, integrating a dual-mode architecture of V2X direct communication and 5G private network. It actively broadcasts the wearer's location. Upon receiving this, the vehicle's OBU triggers an alert, while the TAG itself also vibrates or emits a sound to remind the wearer of nearby vehicles.
This solution does not rely on visual algorithms to identify humans; instead, it turns a person's location into a definitive communication message. Perception algorithms can be interfered with by dust, lighting, and occlusion, but the reliability of the communication link depends solely on signal strength and frequency band characteristics.
The TAG expands the coverage dimension of V2X from vehicle-road-cloud to human-vehicle-road-cloud.
For passenger vehicle V2X, pedestrians and cyclists are usually classified as vulnerable road users, but there is no scalable solution to make them part of the communication network. You cannot require every pedestrian to install an OBU.
Mining areas are different; personnel are managed workers, and wearing a badge-level terminal during working hours is feasible from a management perspective.
04. Final Words
The implementation of V2X in mining areas highly depends on several special attributes: controllable communication participants, a single management entity, rigid constraints imposed by the physical environment on single-vehicle perception, and the direct translation of safety benefits into operational efficiency.
These conditions cannot be simultaneously met on urban open roads, but this does not mean that the experience of mining area V2X has no reference value at all. Scenarios such as ports and logistics parks also share the characteristics of controllable communication participants and a single management entity. Solutions validated in mining areas have the potential to be transferred to these places.
Furthermore, is it possible to partially implement the deterministic communication logic of mining area V2X in cities through regulatory means? For instance, requiring all commercial vehicles, including buses, taxis, and freight trucks, to be mandatorily pre-installed with V2X, thereby first scaling up the base of communication participants to a usable level.
The 2024 version of C-NCAP has already included V2X in the scope of active safety evaluation, and the pilot program for the integration of vehicle-road-cloud by five ministries is also promoting the increase of new vehicle installation rates. However, there is still a long way to go before scaled popularization in the passenger vehicle market.