Autonomous driving Geely launches satellites for its vehicles into space

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Autonomous electric vehicles guided by the satellites of the automotive group. That is the vision of the Chinese manufacturer Geely. With the successful launch of a carrier rocket, the car manufacturer has come one step closer to this goal at the beginning of this month.

Henrik Bork, a long-time China correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Frankfurter Rundschau, is the Managing Director at Asia Waypoint, a consulting agency specializing in China based in Beijing.

A rocket of the type "Long March 2C" launched on February 3, 2024, at 7:38 AM local time from the Chinese space launch site Xichang in Sichuan province. It carried onboard eleven satellites from Geespace, a subsidiary of Geely. A new world record for the number of satellites transported into space by a single rocket. The eleven communication satellites, which have been successfully catapulted into a low Earth orbit with this launch, are already the second group of Geely satellites now floating at an altitude of about 600 kilometers in the atmosphere. The first batch of nine satellites had been launched in the summer of 2022.

Expansion by 2025

What Geely is building is nothing less than the world's first satellite network specifically for the automotive industry. By 2025, the manufacturer plans to expand this "Geely Future Mobility Constellation" from its current 20 to initially 72 satellites. Then Geely will be able to offer "high-resolution remote sensing" of cars and trucks worldwide with an accuracy of one to five meters. The positioning of the vehicles - and their navigation in real-time, without any time delay - will be made possible through ground stations that communicate with the satellites.

In a second phase, which is already being prepared, Geely plans to launch an additional 168 satellites, which will allow for precise location of vehicles to the centimeter. This is of interest, among other things, in logistics, when one wants to operate unmanned transport vehicles at very close intervals to each other in ports or loading stations.

Several electric vehicles from subsidiary brands of the Geely Group, including the Zeekr models "001 FR" and "007" as well as the mid-sized sedan "Galaxy E8," are already equipped with satellite receivers. The commercial vehicles from Geely's subsidiary Farizon Auto, which are supposed to drive completely autonomously in the future, can already be ordered.

Satellite communication cheaper than vehicle sensor technology?

Geely founder Li Shufu, known in Germany as a major shareholder of the Daimler Group and whose corporation holds stakes in Volvo and Lotus, firmly believes in the future of autonomous driving – and that it can and will be realized with the help of satellite communication.

Li believes that in the long run, it is cheaper than equipping each individual car with more expensive sensors such as LiDAR and millimeter wave radar or cameras. Thus, his global satellite network for cars and trucks is kind of an eastern counter-design to the "individualistic" Western model of autonomous driving à la Tesla and Co.

Also available for other car brands

At Geely, they speak of "Space Ground Integration". The advantage of networked driving, vehicles controlled from space, is that unlike cars of other technological routes, which perceive their immediate surroundings with their own cameras and chips, they can also be informed about the position of all other road users, according to Geely. This enables new dimensions of safety and logistics, as well as possible connectivity with modern traffic control centers in "Smart Cities". Geely intends to make its satellite data available in the future for other car brands and even for consumer electronics manufacturers.

Recall campaign also in space

Even before it gets to that point, it will be extremely crowded in the lower orbit of our planet. Elon Musk's SpaceX has already launched around 5,300 satellites for its Starlink network into space. Now, Geely needs more and more space for its Geespace satellites. Other commercial providers are likely to follow.

SpaceX recently announced that 100 of its older satellites have an unspecified "fault" and will soon be recalled to Earth in a controlled descent. It's a kind of recall from space. This is something the automotive industry will likely soon face as well, whose recalls for safety reasons have so far ended at car workshops.

Launch satellites affordably in series

An important aspect of Geely's plan is the relatively cost-effective mass production of its own satellites. In the factory of Geespace in Taizhou, Zhejiang province, completed in 2021, highly automated and full of robots, 500 satellites can be manufactured annually.

This production capacity and the resulting scale effects are important because in a "Low-Orbit" concept like the Geely Future Mobility Constellation, individual satellites will need to be replaced regularly. They have a limited lifespan and, at these orbital altitudes, still contend with slight air resistance.

The Geely subsidiary is the first Chinese company to belong to an elite group of companies such as Iridium, SpaceX, OneWeb, Globalstar, and Orbcomm, that dare to undertake the commercial construction of a satellite network.( se)