Coverage of the digital economy
Define a transformed China
Written by | Tabor Network Yang Wenfei
Edit | Shikino
Despite the unfavorable years of its U.S. counterparts, Robotaxi's development at home is in full swing.
On December 8, SAIC Motor's L4 autonomous driving operation platform, Xiangdao Robotaxi, officially launched operation. On the same day, The Robotaxi was officially launched in Jiading, Shanghai, and the first batch of 20 operating vehicles was deployed.
On November 23, He Xiaopeng, chairman of Xiaopeng Motors, said that in the second half of 2022, Xiaopeng Motors will begin to explore the Robotaxi business. Two days later, Beijing officially opened the first pilot project for the commercialization of autonomous travel services in China, and announced the supporting management policy, and the domestic Robotaxi officially moved from the technical normalization test to the commercialization model verification stage.
Robotaxi is a track, why was the industry leader of the year in a chicken feather, and the successor was still brave to move forward?
The prospects are enormous, and this is where the prospects arise
In the next year, the demand for urban mobility is increasing.
According to the agency's forecast, China's urban population will reach 2.5 billion trips per day in 2050. In 2050, shared travel such as taxis and online ride-hailing will account for about 1/3 of the overall travel mode of China's urban population. Undoubtedly, the market prospects for urban public travel services are huge.
Robotaxi, or self-driving taxi, came into being.
In 2009, Google X Labs set up a driverless car program, after 7 years of research and development, at the end of 2018, Waymo officially launched the Waymo One application for autonomous driving online ride-hailing.
The driverless exploration of Chinese enterprises is the first Baidu, which launched the Baidu unmanned vehicle project in 2013 and officially applied it this year.
Wenyuan Zhixing, Xiaoma Zhixing, AutoX, Didi and Yuanrong were established after the start of the trip, and these 5 are called representatives of the driving back wave by the industry, and they are constantly exerting their strength to catch up with the front wave.
Autonomous driving is roughly divided into two routes.
One is straight to the point, research and development, road test direct L4 landing, represented by Waymo, Baidu; the other is winding, through mass production, after iteration on the road, from L2 to L4, Tesla, Xiaopeng, who has not yet begun to exert force, can be represented.
Waymo and Baidu needless to say, the route is to continuously expand the size of the fleet and directly launch the ultimate form of Robotaxi products. Tesla hopes that after enough mass production vehicles go on the road, it can let "idle" vehicles on the road to "make money".
The ultimate goal of both landing routes is Robotaxi.
In 2020, AutoX and Didi successively launched the driverless taxi business in Jiading, Shanghai, and the Volkswagen Group's autonomous driving service pilot officially landed in Hefei, and obtained the first autonomous vehicle test license in Hefei; since 2021, whether it is a start-up or a car company, the competition has become more intense.
As early as the end of 2018, Xiaoma Zhixing took the lead in piloting the normal operation of Robotaxi on open roads in urban areas in Nansha, Guangzhou; in May this year, it announced that it would expand its service scope and fleet size in Beijing, adding services covering the core operating area of 150 square kilometers in the Beijing Economic and Technological Development Zone; in July, Shanghai's Robotaxi business was fully launched and covered the main urban sections of Jiading District.
In November this year, Wenyuan Zhixing reached a strategic cooperation with GAC Group and its mobile travel platform "Ruqi Travel", announcing that based on GAC Group's vehicle research and development and fully redundant platform, Wenyuan Zhixing's autonomous driving software and hardware solutions, such as Qi Travel's smart travel platform, the three parties will jointly create Robotaxi products with first-class fully unmanned driving capabilities, and fully promote the large-scale operation of Robotaxi in the next few years.
According to incomplete statistics, so far, 27 cities in China, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Wuhan, Changsha, Cangzhou, Hangzhou, Hefei and so on, have issued autonomous driving test policies, and the open test road mileage has exceeded 3,000 kilometers.
Landing is still difficult
Robotaxi, who still lacks hematopoietic ability, can only survive by constantly burning money. Robotaxi has another name in the world of autonomous driving - the money-burning machine.
The appearance of the Robotaxi is almost the same as that of a normal ride-hailing car and taxi, but it is difficult for passengers to ignore the "cauldron lid" above its head.
This "pot lid" is mainly radar and camera and other sensors, although the cost scale has been greatly reduced under the efforts of domestic radar companies, but in the early days, an imported lidar was worth up to 800,000 yuan.
Meng Xing, COO of Didi Autonomous Driving Company, once introduced that Didi's self-driving vehicles are equipped with nearly 20 sensors, including 1 64-line lidar, 2 16-line lidar, 7 cameras, and millimeter-wave radar and ultrasonic radar, and the cost of a car is more than 1 million.
A foreign market research company also pointed out that the cost of self-driving car modifications for autonomous driving companies represented by Waymo in the United States is basically around $200,000.
"Even if Google has the determination to invest at any cost, 12 consecutive years of continuous burning money since 2009 have also caused headaches for Google executives," someone once commented.
Jie Fei, deputy director of the Science and Technology Innovation Bureau of Beijing Economic and Technological Development Zone, pointed out: "At present, Robotaxi is mostly concentrated in first-tier cities, whether it is manpower or site rental costs are very high, vehicle procurement and insurance, the cost of applying for licenses exceeds one million, so it is difficult to expand the scale of this fleet." Enterprises do not have the qualifications to operate services, and there is no way to carry out trial operations to achieve revenue. A while ago, Waymo even experienced an embarrassing encounter.
On May 3, a passenger broke the news that a Waymo Robotaxi he was riding in was required to turn right into a multi-lane main road when it found that the rightmost lane was closed by an orange engineering cone barrel.
This disrupted waymo Robotaxi's route planning, and the car was instantly "confused." Before rescuers arrived, the car moved again and stopped in the middle of the road, causing traffic congestion.
Afterwards, Waymo responded that Robotaxi's performance was not satisfactory this time. "We have evaluated the incident and improved the operational process.".
According to data, from 2015 to 2019, Waymo's operating loss has exceeded $20 billion. As of April, Waymo's driverless fleet was about 700 vehicles, a far cry from its target of 20,000 vehicles.
△ Founder of waymo
Waymo, which has always been a beacon in the self-driving industry, does not dare to claim to have surpassed it in the technical dimension. The bellwethers are still struggling to move forward, and the latecomers are even more in a state of flux.
In a test ride of The Robotaxi, this situation occurred: the car encountered a vehicle cutting into lanes at the same time before and after the encounter, suddenly stopped, and the safety officer briefly took over the steering wheel before restarting the automatic driving function; later, after the car found the roadblock, it tried to change lanes several times, stopped directly, and the safety officer took over the steering wheel again.
Robotaxi's commercialization road to land on the reef continues.
The development stage at home and abroad is different, and the foreign Robotaxi has reached the liquidation stage, and players with insufficient strength will inevitably face withdrawal. The domestic market is still in the stage of competing for deer, at this stage, enterprises need a lot of financing to survive in the next few years, and the top priority is to accumulate enough grain and grass.
In the process of commercialization of Robotaxi, after overcoming the easiest obstacle of cost, the more difficult links continue to increase.
Robotaxi's low speed and inability to remove the "safety officer" have always existed, can technology meet passengers' needs for safety and experience at the same time? Can government departments promote more open space in terms of policies and regulations, infrastructure support, demonstration road planning, connected vehicle assistance services, and the formulation of traffic regulations?
Su Zhen, the former director of Huawei's intelligent driving product department, previously said: "Killing will not do Robotaxi."
"At this stage, the companies that do Robotaxi have to be finished, Robotaxi is the result rather than the commercial goal, the Chinese market taxi experience is already very good, and autonomous driving will not make this experience better."
However, more players are still on the track. Autonomous driving company Mushroom Car Union is laying out its Robotaxi business based on vehicle-road collaboration technology; car companies Xiaopeng Automobile and Hyundai Motor have also announced that they will enter the Robotaxi business.
SAIC, which has just entered the game, is also full of confidence. Chen Demei, vice president of the group, said that the landing of Robotaxi's operating model will feed back the continuous optimization of SAIC's advanced assisted driving program. By 2025, SAIC motor will form a commercial Robotaxi fleet to define a new form of shared mobility and achieve a sustainable and profitable business model.
Everyone knows that there is a huge dawn behind this track, and when it will be seen, no one can guarantee it.
Add group tips
Legal Counsel: Jingshi Law Firm Yingke Law Firm
Intensive Reading