The global race for autonomous driving is getting hotter.
Tesla will officially launch its Robotaxi on October 11, Beijing time. Tesla CEO Elon · Musk even said: "This will be a day that will go down in history."
On October 9, it was reported that Baidu is about to release the Apollo autonomous driving open platform 10.0, equipped with Baidu's latest autonomous driving model ADFM (Autonomous Driving Foundation Model), which will greatly improve the safety, intelligence and ease of use of the autonomous driving open platform. At the same time, it is reported that Radish Express is actively carrying out global layout, has conducted in-depth communication with a number of international companies, and plans to enter the overseas market. Through cooperation with the world's leading car companies and technology companies, we strive to set a benchmark for China's autonomous driving in the international market and demonstrate China's innovation ability and international competitiveness in the field of autonomous driving.
With the continuous acceleration of the layout of technology giants in the field of autonomous driving, Carrot Express, Google, and Tesla are now forming a global autonomous driving "three majors" pattern. The real competition for global autonomous driving has just begun.
Tech giants are entering the game
As an important application of large-scale model technology in the physical world, autonomous driving has great development potential, attracting technology giants to enter the game.
Musk once said at Tesla's Q2 earnings conference: "I will be shocked if Tesla has not started Robotaxi operations by the end of 2025." "The data shows that the cumulative mileage of Tesla's FSD has exceeded 1.6 billion miles, and according to the plan, FSD V13 will be launched in October, and the necessary mileage will be increased by 6 times; It is expected that in the first quarter of 2025, the FSD will be implemented after regulatory approval in Europe and China.
On the other hand, Google's self-driving company, Waymo, has made more than 100,000 paid trips per week in the United States, doubling from May. On October 2, local time, Waymo announced that its driverless rental service in Austin, Texas, United States will soon be open to the public. On October 4, Korea's Hyundai Motor announced a strategic alliance with Waymo.
Uber has entered into a strategic partnership with Avride to expand its portfolio of autonomous vehicle partners. Under the agreement, Uber users can ride in Avride's self-driving cars and receive delivery services from Avride's self-driving cars. In addition to Avride, Uber has previously entered into autonomous vehicle partnerships with Waymo, Motional, and WeRide.
At present, the main thing that has achieved large-scale and normalized testing of domestic autonomous driving travel is Radish Run. The Radish Express service has covered more than 10 cities across the country.
"Safety" is the most critical factor for the realization of autonomous driving. As of June 2024, the actual road test and demonstration mileage of Carrot Express autonomous driving has exceeded 100 million kilometers, and there has never been a major casualty accident. At the same time, Carrot Express has purchased insurance with an insurance amount of 5 million for each unmanned vehicle and passengers, and the data of the past two years show that the actual vehicle accident rate is only 1/14 of that of human drivers.
The Apollo-ADFM (Auto-Driving Foundation Model), released at Apollo Day in May, is the world's first autonomous driving model that supports L4 autonomous driving applications, which is more than 10 times safer than human drivers and achieves city-level coverage of complex scenarios.
More than that, Baidu will soon release the Apollo autonomous driving open platform 10.0, which will be equipped with Baidu's latest autonomous driving model ADFM (Autonomous Driving Foundation Model), which will greatly improve the safety, intelligence and ease of use of the autonomous driving open platform.
According to Ark's latest research, the total valuation of autonomous driving operators will reach $28 trillion by 2030 – roughly nine times the total valuation of global automakers in 2023 ($3.1 trillion). The logic is that after the realization of autonomous driving, the lower cost of using cars will give rise to new demand, and the scale and overall value of the services that the automobile industry can provide will be several times that of today.
Multiple benefits support the development of the industry
At the policy level, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and relevant ministries and commissions have successively issued policy documents such as the "Guidelines for the Construction of the National Internet of Vehicles Industry Standard System (Intelligent Connected Vehicles)", "Guidelines for the Construction of the National Internet of Vehicles Industry Standard System (Overall Requirements)", "Action Plan for the Development of the Internet of Vehicles (Intelligent Networked Vehicles)" and "Intelligent Vehicle Innovation and Development Strategy" to plan the construction of the standard system for autonomous driving from various aspects.
Up to now, the General Office of the State Council has started the revision of the Road Traffic Safety Law and Road Transport Regulations, and more than 10 cities across the country have promoted local legislation on autonomous driving, including Shenzhen, Shanghai Pudong, Yangquan, Wuxi, Suzhou, Hangzhou 6 places have issued legislative documents, Wuhan, Beijing, Hefei, Guangzhou to accelerate the legislative process.
At the same time, many places are accelerating the promotion of autonomous driving on the road. According to public information statistics, 54 provinces and municipalities across the country have issued normative documents on open roads and demonstration applications, of which 28 cities support autonomous driving commercial exploration, 24 cities support autonomous driving unmanned testing, including Wuhan, and Beijing, Chongqing, Shenzhen and other 4 cities have carried out autonomous driving unmanned commercial pilot demonstrations, Hangzhou has completed the opening of the whole city's scenes, and Hefei and Suzhou have proposed city-wide opening plans.
It is worth mentioning that the scale of the mainland Internet of Vehicles infrastructure also leads the world. According to data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, as of October 2023, the total number of 5G base stations in mainland China has reached 3.215 million, and the number of roadside communication units in the national Internet of Vehicles has exceeded 8,500, an increase of more than 2,000 sets over the same period of the previous year. In the future, with the continuous introduction of V2X construction plans in various regions, the scale of the industry is expected to accelerate growth.
With the new generation of artificial intelligence and information and communication technology accelerating the transformation of the automotive industry, Continental has taken the lead in proposing the innovative development path of "vehicle-road-cloud integration" intelligent networked vehicles. Li Keqiang, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, believes that there are inherent drawbacks in the large model training data of a single car company. First of all, the data volume is limited, and the massive amount of training data cannot be realized. Secondly, the data types are incomplete, and the completeness of the training data cannot be guaranteed. The vehicle-road-cloud integrated system integrates the data acquisition mode of vehicle self-reporting and roadside perception unified collection, which has a wider coverage, more complex traffic scenarios, and more complete data types, which has natural advantages.
At present, whether it is the pure visual school represented by Tesla, or the "LiDAR + high-precision map" school represented by Google, they all belong to the idea of bicycle intelligence. From a domestic point of view, Radish Express is actively promoting the "bicycle intelligence + vehicle-road collaboration" program. At the end of 2018, Baidu officially open-sourced the Apollo vehicle-road collaboration solution, allowing autonomous driving to enter a new stage of mutual collaboration between "smart cars" and "smart roads", and comprehensively building an intelligent road network with "one person, one vehicle, one road, one cloud" global data perception, which can support the wide-area perspective, redundant perception and over-the-horizon perception requirements of autonomous vehicles.
Grab the high ground for autonomous driving
In the development of new energy vehicles, China has been at the forefront of the world in terms of electrification. However, in the second half of the transformation to intelligence, it is unknown whether it can continue to maintain its leading position.
United States has developed integrated circuit technology and has maintained a leading position in the field of high-end chip design, laying a good foundation for the development of high-performance automotive chips. Whether it is Waymo or Tesla, the core capabilities behind it are artificial intelligence algorithms and decision-making chips, which have significant advantages.
"In the AI era, what the automotive industry lacks most is the infrastructure for intelligent computing, not production capacity." Zhang Yongwei, vice chairman and secretary general of the China Electric Vehicle 100 Association, said, "Tesla has built 1,000 EFLOPS of computing power, and China's domestic resources are far from enough. China has to invest heavily in computing power, and it must continue to invest to form a large-scale team around data, computing power, and algorithms. ”
According to Frost &Sullivan's forecast, the market size of China's Robotaxi will reach 488.8 billion yuan in 2030. Some analysts believe that Robotaxi may be one of the best scenarios for high-end intelligent driving. With the reduction of travel costs brought about by Robotaxi, the mobility market is expected to expand to trillions.
At present, domestic Robotaxi companies are mainly autonomous driving technology companies and traditional manufacturers, and the current progress of technology companies is relatively leading. From the perspective of landing cities and test mileage, technology companies represented by Radish Run, WeRide, and Pony.ai are leading the way.
"China and United States have always been the two most powerful forces at the global driverless table." Chen Yanyan, a professor at the School of Urban Transportation at Beijing University of Technology, said, "Over the past decade, China's unmanned driving has been trying to catch up with United States, and now it has achieved technological parity. If China wants to seize the opportunity in the future competition of artificial intelligence, especially the competition of unmanned driving, it needs the concerted efforts of the government and enterprises. ”
Chen Yanyan believes that on the one hand, China has to take a bigger step in the legislative end of unmanned driving. At present, most of the cities that develop unmanned driving in China are in a limited area and time of small-scale commercial trial operation, and the pace of local legislation should also be accelerated, and vigorously support unmanned driving enterprises to expand their operation areas and help large-scale implementation. On the other hand, the government should encourage independent innovation of unmanned driving enterprises, realize independent and controllable key technologies of unmanned driving as soon as possible, improve the technical performance of unmanned driving, and avoid stuck.
"At present, it is the window period for the development of global intelligent networked vehicles, the opportunity is fleeting, the mainland unmanned driving and other technologies are at the leading level in the world, and the policy actively supports the development of the industry. Lu Benfu, vice president of the China National Innovation and Development Strategy Research Association and professor at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, said.
In the field of Robotaxi, the menacing Tesla is about to officially join the competition, how will the global autonomous driving pattern be rewritten? We expect Chinese companies represented by Radish Express to accelerate their "wild running" and set a benchmark for China's autonomous driving in the international market.