The team was led by corporate partner Thomas Tschentscher, alongside corporate counsel Danielle Herrmann and litigation counsel Karin Geissl

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP (‘Freshfields’) has advised Audi AG on founding the 5G Automotive Association e.V. (‘5GAA’). Together, the members want to develop, test and promote new communications solutions. The global alliance is open to additional partners from the information and communications sectors, the automotive industry and other vehicular and road transport fields. Alongside Audi, other founding members of the cross-sector 5GAA are the BMW Group, Daimler AG, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Nokia and Qualcomm Inc.

5GAA’s goal is to support networked, autonomous driving, service access and intelligent traffic solutions for the smart city, and in doing so to meet society’s needs for mobility and road safety. Areas of cooperation include infotainment and autonomous driving, standardisation and certification issues as well as technical vehicle requirements with regards to wireless connectivity, security, data protection, authentication and cloud architecture. In the coming decade, 5GAA stands to become the standard-bearer for mobile technology and  gain particular significance both for digitalisation and the route towards autonomous driving.

The Freshfields team was made up of partners Peter Chrocziel, Tobias Larisch and Georg Roderburg and associates Magdalene Steup, Jan Bösing and Martin Rehberg.

A team led by corporate partner Thomas Tschentscher, alongside corporate counsel Danielle Herrmann and litigation counsel Karin Geissl had previously advised Audi on the roll-out of the next generation AudiConnect system in 27 countries. The advice comprised data protection, regulatory requirements in the area of telecommunications and IT security, consumer protection, product liability and distribution as well as contracts with mobile phone providers regarding the network connection of the vehicles.