The global automotive industry is booming with the autonomous driving revolution, and in this revolution, no one wants to miss the industrial outlet, and hindsighters are beginning to catch up.
A few days ago, according to the Nikkei Shimbun, Toyota, Mazda and other Japanese automakers plan to equip major models with automatic driving functions around 2022, mainly L2 level and above automatic driving technology, which will still be mainly controlled by the driver during the vehicle driving process.
In major global auto markets such as China and Europe, autonomous driving has almost become the standard for new cars, but for Japanese car companies that are known for their conservativeness, the research and development process of autonomous driving seems to be slightly lagging behind. At present, as global automakers continue to implement autonomous driving technology, Japanese automakers are gradually beginning to feel the pressure.
The "cautious faction" of early entry
In the current context of the autonomous driving market, L4 and even L5 levels have been mentioned by many car companies and announced that they will be on the car. In the Japanese automotive market, the most emphasized is the L2 level.
According to Yano Research Institute, by 2030, 62% of self-driving cars in the Japanese automotive market will be equipped with L2 level autonomous driving technology. Among the models of Japanese auto giant Toyota Motor, only Lexus' high-end sedan and fuel cell car Mirai are currently equipped with L2 level automatic driving.
In this context, Toyota began to step up the process of getting on the car with the automatic driving function. According to Toyota's plan, the new Crown sedan launched at the end of 2022 will be equipped with L2 level autonomous driving function, while considering that it will also be equipped with this function in low-end models such as the Corolla. In addition to Toyota, Mazda Motor also plans to equip its medium- and large multi-purpose sports vehicles with L2 or L3 level autonomous driving functions from 2022. Subaru said it would introduce L2 level autonomous driving for global sales models.
In fact, Toyota's layout in self-driving technology is not too late, as early as 2015, Toyota announced the launch of self-driving cars, and plans to hit the road in 2020. In 2018, Toyota and SoftBank established a joint venture company, Monet, announcing a partnership in the field of autonomous driving technology. Since then, Toyota has cooperated with Didi Chuxing and Amazon subsidiaries. In 2019, Toyota announced that it has joined Baidu's autonomous driving Apollo program, saying that it hopes to build a research and development system for autonomous driving technology in the Chinese market. Through April 2021, Toyota is announcing the acquisition of Level 5, the self-driving arm of U.S. ride-hailing company Lyft, for $550 million.
Although the pace of investment and cooperation has not stopped, Toyota's attitude towards autonomous driving technology is still cautious. It was only in April of this year that Toyota announced the realization of L2-level autonomous driving technology "Advanced Drive", and it was the first to be installed in the Lexus LS and Toyota Mirai models.
The same thing happened in Toyota's brother car companies. Nissan motor vehicles also in 2015 in the field of autonomous driving with NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) cross-border cooperation, there are also models that achieve primary automatic driving functions to the market.
The cautious attitude of Japanese car companies is not unique, and neither Toyota nor Nissan has an aggressive autonomous driving research and development plan.
However, in the highly competitive market, the progress of technology landing is increasingly worrying.
The government has introduced policies to catch up with the progress
After entering 2021, the chip shortage has become the biggest haze hanging over the global auto industry, and this upstream field closely related to automatic driving has begun to receive widespread attention from all countries, setting off a wave of chip investment boom worldwide.
In mid-December, the Japanese government announced that it would provide more than 1.4 trillion yen (about 78.2 billion yuan) of investment in the Japanese semiconductor industry. Tetsuro Higashi, a senior adviser to the Government of Japan's Semiconductor Council and former president of Tokyo Electronics Corporation, called for the government to invest 10 trillion yen over the next decade to reinvigorate the domestic chip manufacturing industry.
Tetsuro Higashi said in an interview that it will take about a decade for Japan to reach the forefront of modern chip manufacturing, a goal that will determine the fate of Many Other Industries in Japan, including autonomous driving and healthcare.
In early December, the Japanese Police Agency proposed a licensing system for the use of L4 self-driving cars in rural areas. Whether it is chip manufacturing or the research and development of autonomous driving technology, Japan has consciously entered the acceleration stage at present.
In contrast, in foreign markets, electric vehicle giant Tesla has long set L2 level automatic driving as the standard configuration of vehicles, and Waymo, an autopilot head company, has already revealed that L4 level automatic driving has entered the learning stage. In the Chinese automotive market, research and development on L4 autonomous driving has also been carried out, Baidu previously announced at the developer conference that it will launch the first robot concept car with L4 level autonomous driving function in 2022, and is expected to achieve mass production in 2023.
CITIC Securities believes that it is expected that in 2022, among Chinese brand models, L3 levels will be landed in batches, and the price band will be lowered to the range of 200,000-500,000 yuan for the first time. Under the background of mature technology, scene expansion and mass production of L3 models, the commercial development of high-level autonomous driving is expected to explode.
On the eve of the outbreak of autonomous driving, conservatives such as Toyota cannot continue to hesitate, but whether Toyota can catch up with the pace of head car companies remains to be tested by the market.