V2X in mid-2026: where it's deployed, where it's stalled

In the first half of 2025, China fitted more than three million vehicles with C-V2X. In roughly the same window, South Korea’s government V2X programme lost about 97% of its budget against 2019 levels and was left fighting for survival. The same technology is scaling in one country and being abandoned in another.

That split is the real story of V2X right now, and it is mostly missing from the press releases, which tend to describe a single global momentum that does not exist. What exists instead is four regions at four completely different stages, and the gap between them is widening. At a glance:

Region	Stage	On the ground	Direction
China	Deploying	~11,000 RSUs · 3M+ cars fitted in H1 2025 · ~4% of fleet	scaling up
United States	Piloting	Atlanta district · 250k intersections planned	plan set, 20% by 2028
Europe	Deciding	pilots only · radio choice unsettled	stalled
South Korea	Retreating	national programme wound down	budget cut ~97%

China: the one place ambition meets asphalt

China is the only market where the deployment numbers are large and already in the ground. Around 11,000 roadside units are in the ground across roughly 20 cities with full-area coverage, and provincial smart-city programmes plan to add twelve to fifteen thousand a year, a rate that would double the installed base within a year of holding. On the vehicle side, close to 40% of new passenger models launching in 2026 carry native 5G-V2X, up from under 15% in 2023.

Even here, the picture is early. Overall fleet penetration sits near 4%, and analysts covering the market describe the familiar distance between policy ambition and commercial reality. But 4% of the Chinese fleet is millions of cars transmitting.

The United States: a plan with a number

The US has done the paperwork. The Department of Transportation published a national deployment plan targeting 100,000 signalised intersections in the near term and 250,000 longer term, with roughly 20% of the 250,000 due by 2028. The FCC settled the spectrum question in February 2025 by finalising C-V2X rules in the 5.9 GHz band, and the old DSRC systems have to vacate it by late 2026. Atlanta stood up the first “Day One Deployment District”.

What the US does not yet have is scale on the ground. The plan is specific and the intent is real, but a deployment district and a target of a quarter-million intersections are different kinds of object. The number underneath is the cost: infrastructure runs about six to seven thousand dollars per intersection, so 250,000 of them is well over a billion dollars in roadside hardware alone, and the plan is clearer about the count than about who funds it for fifteen years.

Europe: still deciding

Europe is the region that has the standards, the pilots and the least deployment to show for it. The blocker is not the specifications; ETSI defined the message set, the security and both access layers, ITS-G5 and C-V2X. The blocker is that Europe never committed to one of those two radios, and a V2X requirement in Euro NCAP is held up behind that open choice. A continent that helped write the C-ITS standards is still stuck picking the radio to carry them, and without either a settled radio or a rating that forces the feature, deployment has stayed in trials.

The retreats, and the twenty-year mood

South Korea is the sharpest reversal, but the mood it reflects is older. V2X has spent the better part of two decades in what analysts politely call the trough of disillusionment: a technology repeatedly declared imminent and repeatedly outrun by the single-vehicle sensors it was supposed to complement. Budget cuts like Korea’s are what that trough looks like when a government stops waiting.

The one metric that cuts through

Read enough announcements and every region sounds like it is winning. The number that deflates all of them at once is penetration: the share of the fleet equipped and transmitting. By that measure China leads at a low single-digit percentage, and everyone else rounds to zero. The map is not a story of global rollout with laggards. It is one country past the starting line, one drawing a detailed route it has not driven, one still arguing about the car, and one turning back.

For the mechanism that could change the American and European pictures fastest, the safety-rating lever, see the business model V2X was missing. For the data-interoperability problem waiting on the other side of deployment, see one hazard, three road-data worlds.