The article is reproduced from the brain polar body, the author of the Tibetan fox
If there is one word to describe the autonomous driving industry in 2021, it may be: scale effect.
When it comes to "automatic driving", most people are no longer confused. Many well-known technology companies have basically entered this field, Apple, Xiaomi, Huawei, Didi, etc. have announced their entry into the automatic driving track, and OEMs brands such as Geely and SAIC have also established electric vehicle brands to increase autonomous driving technology.
A group of players competed on the same stage, quite a feeling of "extremely blind, no fireworks", and the rise of the rookie became a situation in which the princes of one side and the monarch and the king of the clan played with each other, as recorded in the "Old Five Dynasties History an Chongrong Biography": "The son of heaven, the strong soldier and the strong horse, rather have a kind of Ya? ”
As long as the soldiers are strong and strong, they can gain a firm foothold in the chaotic world, and look at the players who have performed well in commercialization this year, such as Baidu, which got the first order of commercialization of driverless taxis, Xiaopeng Great Wall and other car companies that bravely entered the unmanned area of autonomous driving mass production and landed in no man's land, and whose sales and delivery volumes have increased significantly, and Whozhixing, which has achieved mass production of 34 models, will take "mass production" as the top priority.
Behind the fierce battle situation, we also see how important the "scale effect" is for autonomous driving to move towards a stable business model. The mass production speed and the dual carbon strategy promotion speed are superimposed, under the two-wheel drive, or will promote Tesla, Xiaopeng Motors, Millima Zhixing, Momenta and other enterprises that take the incremental technology route, and enter the "fast lane" of growth in 2022.
The end of the year is the inventory season, is a rare period of thinking after a wild run, today we may wish to see the evolution of the industrial pattern through the "mass production game" of automatic driving.
Heroes of the Times:
China's 2021 "Blowout" of Autonomous Driving
Having seen too many "first year" and "bubble", here we must first answer a question of everyone: is the commercial landing "blowout" of automatic driving in 2021 real and reliable?
Frankly speaking, the inflection point of the entire industry may be early, according to a research report released by McKinsey, the cost per kilometer of autonomous driving is roughly the same as the cost of driving a traditional car by drivers, and the inflection point of autonomous driving may come. At present, the cost of autonomous driving cannot be compared with traditional cars.
However, as more and more autonomous vehicle companies and technology companies achieve large-scale mass production, automatic driving has also begun to move towards a commercialization "watershed", and enterprises that can solve mass production problems have accelerated their progress, and enterprises that cannot do so may continue to be under pressure in the uncertain external environment and white-hot market competition.
From this perspective, 2021 has laid the groundwork for the future autonomous driving industry pattern. There are several main considerations:
1. The "road construction" is completed, and the basic software and hardware construction is mature
In 2021, with the adoption of smart travel, carbon neutrality, and digital new infrastructure as urban strategies in many provinces and cities in China, the progress of computing centers, 5G, edge computing, vehicle-to-road collaboration, high-precision geographic data, unmanned vehicle road testing and commercial practices has been vigorously promoted, making the software and hardware systems relied on for automatic driving tend to be perfect, which is equivalent to repairing an accelerated industrial highway.
2. The "opening of traffic" is completed, and a large number of autonomous driving products begin to be delivered on the road
In 2021, all kinds of L2-L4 self-driving vehicles began to walk out of the closed road test field and embark on a real urban road. Jingdong, Alibaba, Meituan, Wumart, White Rhinoceros, Zhixing, etc. of the real-time delivery of unmanned vehicles, large-scale landing in parks and business circles; "extra small" (Tesla, Xiaopeng, Great Wall) of the autonomous driving passenger car mass production delivery plan continues to accelerate, to achieve commercial operation at the same time, will also continue to feed the real road condition information to the background algorithm for iterative optimization and upgrading, earlier mass production commercial also means greater data advantages and algorithm advantages, automatic driving "Matthew effect" is emerging.
3. "Loved ones" are completed, and the mass affinity of technology is unprecedented
With the spread of digitalization and the habit of reducing contact in the post-epidemic era, autonomous driving has gradually become a service and tool that the public is familiar with and accepts. More than 20,000 users are reported to ride a robo-taxi at least 10 times a month. In some parks, JD.com, Alibaba, and the unmanned delivery vehicles created by Zhixing in cooperation with Wumart and Meituan have become the standard delivery equipment purchased by residents. It can be said that autonomous driving has never been so close to the lives of ordinary people, which also lays a mental foundation for subsequent exploration of business models.
It can be seen that in the upcoming 2021, autonomous driving is being rolled out on a large scale in China, which has the potential to become the world's largest autonomous driving market, and also hopes to give birth to a global driverless company.
The Truth About Mass Production:
From the concept of sexiness to pragmatic safety
The automotive industry has never lacked whimsical creativity, and fully autonomous vehicles can be the "pinnacle" of imagination. But the development of the industry to the present, L5 level automatic driving is far away, I am afraid has become a consensus.
When the entire industry has to land from the air to the ground, what kind of autonomous driving under "mass production" is growing is what the public can clearly see in 2021.
At present, there are three main common points in common with autonomous driving products and services that have been or are being mass-produced on a large scale.
1. L4 level automatic driving mass production, mainly commercial vehicles, concentrated in buses, logistics distribution vehicles, bus freight and other fields.
In the field of public travel, Wenyuan Zhixing, which focuses on L4 automatic driving technology, began to explore multi-scenario services such as buses and same-city freight; Zoox, Baidu Apollo, and Qingzhou Zhihang have also successively laid out robobus tracks. In the field of unmanned distribution, the autonomous driving AI company Mo Mo Zhixing, which is independent of the intelligent driving forward-looking branch of the Great Wall Technology Center, and the L4-level unmanned delivery vehicle "Little Wild Donkey" produced in cooperation with Ali Damo Academy have achieved large-scale mass production delivery, and opened the largest unmanned fleet delivery into the campus on the day of Double 11 this year. In the field of freight transport, Tucson Future TuSimple sounded the first bell of the global self-driving truck market, Andcher Technology also announced the realization of L3 mass production, follow-up OTA can be upgraded to L4, Xiaoma Zhixing, Zhijia Technology have also announced the mass production time of autonomous trucks.
In general, L4 level automatic driving is a high-level, leapfrog technology, technical challenges and difficulties are very large, directly facing passenger cars will have greater psychological concerns, and the road conditions are relatively simple, the accident rate is low, the quality and efficiency of the obvious commercial vehicles, it is easier to achieve L4 large-scale landing.
According to CITIC Securities, the potential space for autonomous driving software and hardware for commercial vehicles is about 400 billion yuan, and the space for autonomous driving operation services is about 3 trillion yuan. Players who have won an important place in this field can look forward to future business prospects.
2. Mass production of autonomous passenger cars, mainly based on L2-level technology, L4 and higher-level passenger car exploration or project termination, or slowdown in landing.
In the field of passenger cars, there have been misunderstandings about "autonomous driving" or "assisted driving" this year, which has triggered people's careful thinking about leapfrog technology. We found that most of the autonomous driving passenger cars that can be mass-produced on a large scale are L2-based, such as Xiaopeng Motors, which has always defined automatic driving as an L2-level assistance system; the "little magic box", an assisted driving product that is mass-produced and installed on thousands of Wei brand mocha cars, is the L2+ level intelligent driving assistance system of Zhixing. In an email to the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), Tesla also acknowledged that FSD, like Autopilot, is an L2-level automatic driver assistance system. Great Wall Motor's L2 level autonomous driving penetration rate is also as high as 40%.
In general, in order to achieve the goal of reliable technology and mass production, and to meet the growing demand for new energy vehicles from consumers, the choice of gradual development, from L2 and L3 assisted driving to L4 and L5 level unmanned driving, is the unanimous choice of Tesla, Xiaopeng, Great Wall and other vehicle manufacturers, as well as technology companies such as Mimu Zhixing, which are incubated in the main engine factory.
At the 3rd Beijing Zhiyuan Conference, the top conference in the field of AI held in 2021, Gu Weihao, CEO of Zhixing, mentioned that autonomous driving will be gradually and orderly landed in accordance with the three laws of "low speed to high speed, from load to manned, from commercial to civilian" with the development and improvement of laws and regulations on computing power, data, network and the entire social system.
Compared with the caution of progressive enterprises, the 2021 of leapfrog car companies is not good, following the sale of Uber ATG by Uber, Lyft also sold the L5 autonomous driving department to Toyota, getting rid of the burden of burning money; Apple's car, which is fully autonomous, has made little progress this year, and the team has also spread rumors of loss. Musk's claim to launch L5 fully autonomous driving capabilities in 2021 has not been realized. Waymo, which is known worldwide for its "fully automated driving system," has also been relatively quiet this year. Domestically, the autonomous driving companies that choose leapfrog technology also have the common difficulty of landing and mass production, such as the pony Zhixing, which focuses on L4/L5 automatic driving, and recently there has been news that the passenger car "car-making" plan has stalled.
In general, the leapfrog, high-level automatic driving technology is difficult to achieve, the research and development cycle is long, and related companies will inevitably face commercialization problems, while Tesla, Millima Zhixing, Momenta, Xiaopeng, etc., which take the gradual route, step by step at the commercial operation level, the mass production situation is better, the sales volume is all the way up, and the valuation has repeatedly reached new highs.
3. The power of ecology, from individual battles to factional defense. In the early days, the autonomous driving industry was still a battle for technology companies, OEMs, etc., but in 2021, most of the mass production deliveries were the systematic attack of the ecological alliance.
For example, Tesla has cooperated with charging pile companies to build a national charging network in the United States; at the recent "1024 Xiaopeng Automobile Technology Day", Xiaopeng also stressed that it is necessary to do a good job in AI and manufacturing capabilities before building its own ecology and giving back to ecological companies. Through large-scale mass production and growing together with ecological partners, it is the mass production road of Zhixing, in addition to relying on the manufacturing capacity and vehicle business of Great Wall Motors, it also comes from the blessing of hundreds of ecological partners such as Meituan, Wumart, Tencent, Qualcomm, Baidu, zhongke Chuangda, etc., and jointly explores the key aspects of commercialization such as research and development, manufacturing, landing, iteration and operation.
Under the background of global "lack of cores", mass production is naturally inseparable from the support of ecological partners such as chips, and domestic companies such as Xiaopeng, Weilai, and GAC have maintained cooperation with overseas chip manufacturers such as Mobileye and Qualcomm.
From the above three truths of mass production, it can be found that the market is becoming more pragmatic and prudent from chasing the sexy concept of leapfrog technology, so it has re-regarded the gradual route as the next development hope and embarked on a virtuous path that pays more attention to sustainable business cycles.
The opening of the unmanned commercial space requires the main engine factory, technology companies, and the industrial chain community to jointly split the world with the sharp weapon of "mass production" to form a large-scale and high-speed market demand and development space.
So the question is, if you only grab, do not build, this newly opened commercial space must be chaotic, disorderly, automatic driving on what to support industrial logic and business norms?
The Firmament of Industry:
The sky and the earth that underpin autonomous driving
Combing through the actions of China's autonomous driving technology and commercial application leaders, it will be found that these companies are strong and strong, although they have the influence of market trends, but also more support for long-term strategic choices.
Safety is the sky, supporting the real needs of the market.
With the landing of scale, whether it is a passenger car or a commercial vehicle, the safety and stability of automatic driving determine the business efficiency and personal safety, and the public will inevitably have more and more stringent expectations for safety issues.
It can be seen that self-driving taxis, all regard safety as the first day, have experienced a long period of closed road tests and public road tests, Baidu Apollo autonomous driving in the 18 million kilometers of test mileage, so far "zero" accidents. The business scope includes passenger cars, low-speed unmanned vehicles and intelligent hardware, and it follows the three laws of automatic driving of "from low speed to high speed, from carrier to manned, from commercial to civilian", collecting data step by step, iterating on products, and on the basis of absolute safety, and then pursuing as smart as possible.
The exploration of these companies also shows that only by treating security as a big thing can we make our business sustainable.
Data-driven, nurturing leading technological innovation.
Safety awareness is the most important landing on excellent products and systems, throughout the world's leading autonomous driving companies, all of them take the accumulation of real data as the premise of technological innovation.
Tesla is based on a large number of car users, the real road of the diverse data, so that its system performance is better than the road test data and simulation data based on the system. China's intricate real-world road scene is the best technology testing ground for autonomous driving companies. For example, Zhixing is expected to carry 1 million passenger cars in 3 years, which means tens of billions of real road mileage data every year, and this platform-based data advantage can form barriers and build leading algorithms to implement reliable autonomous driving strategies in different traffic scenarios.
Only with real and huge data soil can we grow safe product capabilities and support the commercial imagination of large-scale deployment.
In the field of autonomous driving, who can become a prince in the chaos of "five generations and ten countries" is still unknown. Autonomous driving companies are working hard to seize the opportunity in large-scale commercialization, and 2022 may see a round of reshuffle and change.
But there is no doubt that the source and end of large-scale commercial use are for dingge tiandi, so that every ordinary person can enjoy a better autonomous driving experience in the era of smart travel.
From this point of view, the energy released by the "scale effect" of autonomous driving is just the beginning.
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