The main driver is an empty self-driving car, do you want to experience it?
The opportunity finally came. On April 28, Beijing issued a notice of unmanned manned demonstration application.
As one of the first enterprises to receive the notice, Baidu's self-driving travel service platform Radish Run "holds a certificate" to provide unmanned travel services to passengers.
Baidu's unmanned vehicle operates in the Beijing High-level Autonomous Driving Demonstration Zone (about 60 square kilometers), and partners who want to experience it can go to Beijing Yizhuang and open the radish run to call a try.
Can't experience it in Beijing? It doesn't matter, AutoLab has rubbed on the first batch of Baidu unmanned vehicles to experience, we come to share the experience with you!
Turning right and encountering a rampage of a large straight truck, the AI old driver said that he could hold it completely, and the whole process was smooth and catered.
There are also such large trucks of different shapes, especially when they appear at a less common angle, which is a very difficult challenge for automatic driving perception, and Baidu unmanned vehicles have also accurately identified and avoided them.
Even at a complex intersection where people and vehicles are mixed, unmanned vehicles do not hesitate, and continue to move forward under the premise of confirming safety, convey their driving intentions to other vehicles, and efficiently pass through the intersection.
Unmanned vehicles will drive according to the maximum speed of the road section, and the perception of the environment will be displayed directly on the screen through modeling (there is also a display on the left and right of the rear row), so that passengers can ride more at ease.
There may be small partners worried that the main driver is completely empty, in case the system encounters a scene that cannot be solved, what to do? Don't panic, Baidu Apollo also has 5G cloud driving, parallel driving state, to help vehicles properly handle such extreme scenarios.
Normal driving cars, empty driver's seat, is there a sense of science fiction shining into reality? If you are excited, you can personally go to Yizhuang to experience a "crossing journey" of automatic driving.
China-US autonomous driving Battle, Baidu is ahead of Google
At present, Baidu will invest 10 unmanned vehicles in the demonstration area in the early stage, and plans to add another 30 vehicles in the future.
Don't underestimate these 10 unmanned cars, this is a big step for China's transportation powerhouse! Looking at the world, Beijing is the first megacity to land an unmanned vehicle for trial operation.
Unlike a million-level city such as Phoenix, Arizona, Beijing has a permanent population of nearly 22 million, with a higher population density, and the difficulty coefficient of technology landing will be geometrically multiplied.
In addition, due to the status of Beijing's administrative center, Beijing has opened unmanned vehicle operations, and the signal released is also stronger.
The results of this are also obvious, unlike the United States only Phoenix, San Francisco, Las Vegas spark, China is now blooming everywhere.
At present, only Baidu's Radish Run in China has launched autonomous driving travel services in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Changsha, Chongqing, Yangquan and other cities. According to the development goal of Radish Run, the future will expand to 65 cities in 2025 and cover 100 cities by 2030.
The rapid expansion of the scene is also an important reason why Baidu Apollo can develop so rapidly.
The development of autonomous driving to today, the fight is the number of effective data mined and the quality of data, and the biggest impact on these two things is the number of fleets invested, and the number of cities covered by the fleet.
Can collect data in different cities and different traffic environments, the greater the difference between the data, the closer to the real world traffic environment, artificial intelligence can see more to understand, and the driving skills can be steadily improved.
In order to visually show the comparison of the development speed of Self-driving Enterprises in China and the United States, AutoLab has made a visual comparison of the data of The Intelligent Driving Brother of China and the United States, Google Waymo and Baidu Apollo, and we speak with data!
Apollo's data is a visual comparison, and we speak with data!
Baidu Apollo in addition to the domestic team, but also in the United States California test, from the DMV report, even if the entire 2021 Baidu has focused on China, in California unmanned test, the process is no accidents, no takeover, and achieved the first place in the full unmanned autonomous driving test of the impressive results.
A more diverse test environment means that Baidu can collect higher quality test data, and although Baidu Apollo started a few years later than Google Waymo, the total test mileage grew faster than Google Waymo.
Although Baidu Apollo currently has a smaller fleet size than Google, the test mileage is growing very fast, also because it is driven by demand. According to the data released by Baidu Apollo in early 2022, the daily order volume can reach more than 2300 orders, almost 4 to 5 times that of Google Waymo, and this operational ability really crushes Waymo.
Richer test scenarios, more real road test data, and faster data growth rates have made Baidu Apollo's autonomous driving technology rapidly advanced and can solve more extreme scenarios.
Technological progress is often accompanied by a decrease in dependence on tools, just like the top masters in the martial arts world, who never rely on divine weapons. In recent years, Baidu Apollo has developed the Apollo Lite autonomous driving system that relies only on visual cameras, and the Apollo Air automatic driving system that relies only on roadside sensing and communication units.
On the one hand, this means that Baidu can achieve higher safety through the cooperation of multiple mature subsystems, and it also means that Baidu can reduce the demand for hardware and achieve automatic driving at a lower cost.
Baidu Apollo's latest release of the Apollo Moon fifth-generation unmanned car, the cost of unmanned vehicles further down to 480,000, the cost of bicycles is almost 1/3 of Google Waymo. The lower cost can help Baidu achieve more unmanned vehicles and obtain faster data mining speed.
This is like a flywheel, and Baidu Apollo's speed is now faster than Google Waymo, closer to the large-scale commercialization of autonomous driving.
China has a better environment for autonomous driving growth
The rapid development of Baidu Apollo also benefits from China's good autonomous driving development environment, especially the orderly guidance of policies. China's legislation on autonomous driving is moving forward very quickly, and at the same time very detailed, emphasizing high-quality development and advancing in an orderly manner.
In contrast, the United States has introduced 5 national policies in the past 6 years, such as allowing companies to produce models without steering wheels and throttle brakes, the main goal is to reduce the shackles on innovation, but lack of initiative in specific implementation and guidance.
China has introduced a national policy within 6 years, formulating strict standards, and autonomous vehicles need to complete the corresponding field examinations and reach a certain number of total mileage in open road tests to successfully unlock the next stage. For example, this time Baidu got the notice of unmanned vehicle demonstration operation, which has undergone layers of assessment.
This is also the difference between The cultures of the East and the West, there is no right or wrong, but it is clear that the feedback given by the market can at least reflect the efficiency difference between the two ways. Of course, if China can increase the speed of development and policy promotion, such as the introduction of vehicles as soon as possible, this efficiency difference will be more obvious.
The advantage of the Chinese approach is safety, and at present, there have been no safety accidents such as the Uber incident in North America in the country's autonomous driving open road test. Thanks to the consistently high standards and high safety, the Chinese consumer market has also adopted autonomous driving more.
Baidu Apollo's single-day order volume can be more than 2,000, which is a good example.
In addition, with reference to the "2021 Chinese Consumer Confidence Index survey on autonomous driving" released by J.D.Power, the Confidence Index of Chinese consumers in autonomous driving technology reached 50 points, which is much higher than the 36 points of American consumers.
Research from the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility also points out that Chinese consumers are willing to pay a premium of up to $4,600 for self-driving cars, compared to just $3,900 in the United States. This also shows that Chinese consumers are more accepting of autonomous driving.
A more positive and optimistic market response can greatly promote market vitality, and China's huge market size can provide a broader place for science and technology innovation enterprises such as Baidu.
Autonomous driving is a catalyst for core technological advances
Why autonomous driving? Of course, the primary goal is to improve the travel experience of citizens and make travel more efficient and safer. But from a more macroscopic perspective, the development of autonomous driving is a catalyst for core scientific and technological progress.
Betting on a technology to take off an entire economy has been an example of a million instances in our past civilizations, such as mobile phones and computers in the United States. As a technology that can change the future business form, autonomous driving will inevitably become a catalyst for promoting the progress of core scientific and technological progress.
Autonomous driving requires high-precision sensors, high-computing chips, and efficient cloud services. China's investment in smart electric vehicles and autonomous driving has spawned a large number of excellent technology companies.
Especially in the field of lidar, at this stage, domestic enterprises such as Hesai Technology, Sagitar Juchuang, and Tudtong have achieved a leading position in products and technologies.
In terms of computing chips, although the new black sesame, horizon and other domestic car computing chip manufacturers, at this stage can not shake the status of traditional chip manufacturers, but the development speed is very fast, the future can be expected.
The construction of infrastructure such as cloud services and V2X, China has always been at the forefront of the world, and the development of automatic driving will also promote the rapid arrival of the era of internet of everything.
Autonomous driving and smart cockpits will transform cars from vehicles that meet transportation needs into mobile digital spaces that support diverse smart lives. And autonomous driving is like the Internet many years ago, and it can also empower thousands of industries through "automatic driving +", such as unmanned retail cars in the new era under exploration.
It is foreseeable that with the maturity of autonomous driving technology, the automobile industry will further develop from the traditional single automobile industry chain to the direction of the network intelligent shared travel industry chain group compiled by the cross-industry industrial chain.
Build a China that stands on robots
In the era of large-scale industrial production, the United States became a "country on wheels." And when artificial intelligence injects soul into the car, the competition for automatic driving is actually an all-round competition of core technologies such as software algorithms, communications, and semiconductors.
Under the guidance of the policy, China's intelligent driving enterprises represented by Baidu Apollo are building a China standing on robots.