After years of innovation in the world of smartphones, PCs, and tablets, there is a new tech gadget leader: the car. In fact, key chip companies that have powered those devices for years – including Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Intel’s Mobileye division – are now putting some of their most advanced technology efforts towards the automotive market, announcing car maker partnerships at a dizzying rate.

Cellular connectivity has also been an important driver in the evolution of cars for many years now, having been used to deliver everything from map updates to emergency services to over-the-air car feature updates. (This is a fact that owners of some older cars may have only recently painfully discovered when AT&T recently shutdown its 3G networks. T-Mobile and Verizon are soon to follow on that front.)

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Not surprisingly, the latest innovation in cellular technologies, 5G, has also now made its way into the automotive market. Last week, BMW launched the first 5G-equipped car –the 2022 BMW iX xDrive50, powered by T-Mobile’s new Magenta Drive service. The $20/month service provides high-speed connectivity to the car, both for calls and data services. In addition, it powers an internal Wi-Fi hotspot that can support up to 10 devices in and around the car.

But what 5G technology won’t do is enable autonomous driving features. Despite numerous suggestions of this possibility in the build-up to the launch and early deployment of 5G networks, it is not practical (or safe) to expect a cellular connection to control the operation of a car on a regular basis – regardless of the carmaker or wireless carrier.

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As we’ve all experienced on our smartphones, sometimes you just lose a connection – even in places that seem like they ought to have consistent wireless service. On a phone call, a dropped connection can be annoying, but in a fast-moving automobile, it could literally mean life and death. That’s why all autonomous cars are being designed and built to operate completely on their own, whether they have a cellular connection or not. In fact, they all have built-in redundancy designed around the concept of functional safety in their digital systems to ensure that even if one of the main processors controlling the autonomous system fails for some reason, another can immediately take over.