The challenge for automakers is determining the return on investment (ROI) from integrating 6G modules into their vehicles. Connectivity is mandatory due to the growing adoption of emergency-call regulations, such as those in European Union (EU) countries and, within the next few years, China. However, emergency-call mandates do not require the latest cellular standard.

The main large-scale driver for automakers to upgrade to next-generation cellular technologies has been network sunsets, such as the 3G sunset in EU countries. The Next Generation eCall (NGeCall) standard shifted the requirement from older in-band modems to 4G and 5G modules that use IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) technology. Widespread adoption of 6G is likely to be in the mid-to-late 2030s since most automakers would move to 5G before moving to 6G. At some point, automakers will have to integrate 6G-compatible modules (generally multi-band modules) in their vehicles, but there is no upcoming legal requirement in major automotive markets that would require this. Automakers can also get some of the benefits of 6G by using 5G Advanced modules or, in more cost-sensitive regions, move to 5G RedCap.

For automakers, the calculation is the same as it always has been when a new generation of cellular technology is on the horizon. What additional value can an automaker derive from installing a 6G-compatible module in a car? The main advantages for the automotive industry over 5G include:

• Enhanced quality of service (QoS) through dynamic network resource allocation.
• More efficient uplink (a 35% to 50% planned improvement), which is critical for any in-vehicle AI agents that need to access the network’s edge or the cloud.
• Integrated sensing and computing (ISAC), which can provide a new, real-time layer of network-level sensor data.

Automakers are currently planning their model lineups for 2030 and, over the next few years, will need to begin considering which features could benefit from 6G capabilities. One challenge automakers face is consumer expectations. The public has mixed-to-negative opinions about AI, but enterprises and many consumers are adopting it at a rapid pace. OpenAI passed one billion monthly active users in June and Google’s Gemini app reached the same number in August. A growing number of in-car digital assistants use hybrid architectures, running inference locally while sending prompts to the cloud for processing. Even if future in-vehicle digital assistants run more inference locally, they will still be sending data to the cloud, for example when interacting with systems outside the car. An example would be making a transaction (paying for charging, fueling or parking). As more cars come with in-car digital assistants that have agentic behavior, 6G’s uplink efficiency would improve their performance, though the total amount of additional uplink data traffic from cars will be low relative to data traffic from other devices. Although 6G could make digital assistants more performant, will this be critical for automakers or would 5G be “good enough”, especially when they have options such as 5G RedCap and 5G Advanced?

This takes us to the overall strategy that automakers could consider. 6G connectivity will most likely make sense in flagship models that want to define their brand as tech-forward. Also, robotaxis will eventually benefit from 6G once the networks are actually live. For mass-market vehicles, automakers will be taking a hard look at costs and are likely to take a similar approach to 6G as they took with 5G adoption.

Connected car market realities

The majority of the automotive industry is still using 4G cellular modules, according to Counterpoint’s Global Connected Car Tracker, with 66% of all vehicles sold in 2025 being equipped with 4G, just under 11% with 5G and the remaining not having cellular modules at all.

Although automotive-grade 6G modules do not exist yet, and therefore pricing information is not available, they will command a price premium over 5G modules, especially low-end 5G modules.

Looking beyond cost, it’s worth understanding where progress toward 6G is at. The 6G standard uses 5G technologies, including the following (the terms are defined in a glossary at the end of this report):

• Waveform: The 6G standard uses CP-OFDM for downlink and DFT-s-OFDM for uplink as the baseline.
• Modulation: It carries forward 5G NR constellation structures.
• Frame Structure and Numerology: It reuses 5G NR’s slot-based framework.
• Channel Coding: It uses low-density parity check (LDPC) for error correction and polar coding.

There are still major issues around spectrum allocation, especially in the sub-8 GHz band. Ideally, 6G would use contiguous blocks of 400 MHz spectrum. At the Qualcomm event, CTIA president (and former US FCC head) Ajit Pai spoke about the challenges related to spectrum auctions and allocations for the US market, which still need to be resolved.

From an implementation standpoint for end devices, it will also require new RF front-end (RFFE) technology, necessitating hardware upgrades to fully realize the capabilities of the 6G standard.

The 3GPP timeline for 6G is as follows:

• March 2027: 6G Work Item approval
• September 2028: Physical layer (L1) functional freeze
• December 2028: Protocol design (L2/L3) functional freeze
• March 2029: First full 6G standard release freeze (final ASN-1 freeze)

3GPP members, such as Qualcomm, have also described how the 6G standard will make use of AI in different layers of the network stack. Qualcomm’s vision for how AI can enhance the 6G network itself includes energy optimization of the radio access network (RAN) and agentic automation designed to optimize deployment and manage anomaly and threat detection on the RAN, as examples.

Telecommunication companies that plan to deploy 6G networks will face challenges including, as usual, the cost of deployment but also access to spectrum. 6G requires large, contiguous blocks of spectrum, such as in the 4 GHz and 7 GHz bands. To meet the performance and capacity targets for 6G, GSMA estimates that an additional 2-3 GHz of mid-band spectrum will be required to accommodate the wide 400 MHz channels. Regulators around the world are working on this, but the process is slow and far from uniform.

For automakers, automotive-grade 6G-compatible modules still need to be designed and developed, as well as compatible in-vehicle antennas. Automotive Tier-1 suppliers will of course need to design 6G telematics control units or other systems (such as a cockpit high-performance computer or similar system) that integrate these modules. All of this means that even though the standard is likely to be ready by early 2029, and hardware is ready roughly when the standard releases, the timeline for mass-market adoption will still be in the early-to-mid 2030s.

6G advantages

6G offers key advantages over 5G, such as better power and spectral efficiency and fundamental improvements in bandwidth and traffic capacity. 6G aims to provide a 3x user download speed increase and a 5x traffic capacity gain. Further, the 6G standard will unlock broadband in upper mid-band spectrum (6-8 GHz, 100-400 MHz channel sizes) and improve uplink, with a target of 1.5x downlink and uplink capacity and a 2.5x uplink edge data rate.

Qualcomm executives cited an Ericsson report that noted that AI is changing network demands, with uplink increasing. As AI agents become more common, uplink will be crucial since they access the network much more frequently (9x that of just chatbots) due to tool calls, scripts, and crawling the web, for example.

QoS will improve and become more dynamic with 6G, thanks to on-device AI and AI running on the network. This will enable a device to request additional resources from the network or tell the network it doesn't need as many resources. The 6G protocol stack is being designed with this dynamism in mind so that AI can allocate network resources as needed.

QoS will be particularly important for robotaxis since connectivity is required to ensure an operator can manage those vehicles, monitoring them for issues that AI or other systems cannot resolve and enabling either teleoperation or remote assistance, from either human operators or cloud-based AI, as required. QoS improvements will help ensure that additional network resources are allocated when required, such as in areas with many robotaxis operating during major events in cities, or during commute periods.

A unique capability that 6G will enable is ISAC (Integrated Sensing and Communication), i.e. RF sensing. ISAC can detect presence, location and motion. Qualcomm described it as enabling “wide area, high-density tracking”. This will use existing network deployments and massive MIMO arrays to gain real-time insights into the network environment. Data from ISAC can be combined with data from other sensor types, such as cameras, and would give cars another type of sensor data they could utilize to detect traffic jam tails and other issues.

The standard will also incorporate non-terrestrial networks (NTN) with terrestrial networks (TN). It is already part of the current 5G standard, so work will continue to improve NTN’s integration. One area they are working on is a seamless hand-off between TN and NTN. This is required for better utilization of NTN connectivity from LEO constellations.

Demos during the Qualcomm event included a Giga MIMO full-duplex antenna, showing that 6G technology is real and actively in development, and an ISAC demo, where a single Giga MIMO antenna could enhance data from a drone's camera (the drone was flying over the Qualcomm campus, so the demo was live/real-time), demonstrating how ISAC can provide that additional layer of sensor data.

Analyst takes

Automakers that have pledged support for 6G include Chery Automobile, Geely Auto, Great Wall Motors, Hyundai, Leap Motor, Li Auto, NIO, SAIC Motor, Stellantis and Xpeng. Out of those, only two are not Chinese. It is worth noting that in China, Huawei is driving 6G research and plans to help the country’s mobile network operators, such as China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, scale up. China clearly wants to lead in 6G, so it is no surprise that so many Chinese automakers have pledged early support for the standard. This is not to say that other OEMs may not decide to launch vehicles with 6G. Rather, automotive product planners are keen to see how the standard develops, what related costs will be, and when and where 6G networks will go live before making that decision.

The automotive industry is still in the middle of the transition to 5G, with less than 11% of automakers in the world selling cars with 5G in 2025. Counterpoint expects the transition to 5G to speed up over the next few years as automakers seek to future-proof their models as people own cars for longer periods of time. Also, automakers have seen network shutdowns render in-vehicle network access devices useless, with examples including the 2G network sunset affecting General Motors in the US (models sold from 2006 to 2010) and the 3G sunset affecting many automakers in Europe that had installed hardware to comply with the regional eCall mandate.

In future models, especially robotaxis, robust cellular connectivity, an additional layer of sensor data from the cellular network itself, and better in-vehicle AI agent performance will be increasingly important. Automakers are already running AI agents in new models and robotaxis are real, with thousands more coming online this year (as noted in Counterpoint’s ‘Global Leaders in Robotaxis, 2026’ report). As the automotive industry transforms over the next decade, embracing AI in many forms, 6G will aid this transition.

Glossary

Constellation: In this case, constellation refers not to satellites but to a two-dimensional graph of the shapes a radio signal can have to represent data. Each point on the graph is a combination of amplitude and phase that a radio transmitter can send.

Cyclic Prefix - Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (CP-OFDM): This is a multiplexing and modulation technique designed to prevent data corruption when sending information wirelessly.

Discrete Fourier Transform-spread-Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (DFT-s-OFDM): OFDM splits a carrier’s signal into parallel, narrowband sub-carriers. Then, the data symbols (where a symbol is part of the waveform that represents digital data) are passed through a Discrete Fourier Transform and then that output is mapped onto the sub-carriers. This gives it a lower peak-to-average power ratio, which means improved power efficiency and device battery life.

Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC): This is a class of error-correcting codes designed to fix data corrupted by noise during wireless transmission.