Autonomous driving spelling subdivision Driverless taxis, smart trucks, and automatic parking are the three major directions

Autonomous driving is one of the hot topics discussed at today's 2021 World Intelligent Vehicle Congress. The first financial reporter noted that autonomous driving companies have penetrated into the market segment, and driverless taxis, intelligent logistics trucks, and automatic parking are the three major development directions.

According to Han Xu, founder and CEO of Wenyuan Zhixing, Wenyuan Zhixing has been conducting safety tests for driverless taxis in Huangpu District, Guangzhou since 2019, and has now launched L4 driverless minibuses and driverless logistics vehicles. In June this year, Wenyuan Zhixing's driverless car participated in the delivery of anti-epidemic materials in Guangzhou. At present, Wenyuan Zhixing has obtained unmanned driving test licenses in China and the United States.

The driverless taxi fleet cooperated by Wenyuan Zhixing, Ruqi Travel and Baiyun Taxi Company will soon conduct Robotaxi (driverless taxi) tests in Guangzhou, with a driverless fleet of more than 300 vehicles. Han Xu predicts that 68% of people will live in cities in the future, and self-driving taxis and self-driving minibuses will help urban agglomerations like the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area solve public transportation problems.

Li Hengyu, vice president of Xiaoma Zhixing and head of the truck business department, revealed that Xiaoma Zhixing has trial operated driverless taxis in Nansha, Guangzhou, and actively developed the business of autonomous logistics trucks, and the underlying technologies of the two are connected. China's road transport logistics industry is facing challenges, with frequent accidents, rising costs and low efficiency. Smart trucks can bring help, one is that automatic driving is lower than the standard driving fuel consumption; the other is to make up for the lack of labor, reduce labor costs, long-distance freight lines, drivers eat, sleep and other rest time If replaced by machine driving, the single-day driving mileage can be improved, and transportation costs will be reduced; the third is that a super-large unmanned transportation fleet can be formed to achieve efficiency optimization.

On the one hand, Xiaoma Zhixing cooperates with First-tier suppliers and truck manufacturers to manufacture autonomous trucks, and on the other hand, it cooperates with a number of logistics companies to build intelligent logistics platforms and provide services. Li Hengyu said that Xiaoma Zhixing has obtained the Beijing test license and the high-speed road test license, and hopes to reduce the cost of road transport logistics to 40% in the future, and next year Xiaoma Zhixing will launch a fleet of 100 intelligent logistics trucks.

In November this year, Zhongmu Technology launched an automatic parking system product. Lv Xun, vice president of the brand and assistant to the chairman (CEO) of the longitudinal technology market, said that the problem of mainstream intelligent parking products in the market is that it is impossible to support complex parking, cross-layer scenarios, etc., and longitudinal aims to solve the problem by minimizing core architecture products, such as car-side SDK, mobile phone-side SDK, etc., and opening up access to more ecological partners.

With the further implementation of industrialization, investment in autonomous driving continues to increase. Following the investment from IDG, Yutong, Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, etc., Wenyuan Zhixing received investment from GAC this year. Pony Wisdom also completed a new round of financing this year, with a cumulative financing of US$1.1 billion. Longitudinal investors include Xiaomi, Changan Automobile, Legend Capital, Tongchuang Weiye, Fosun and so on.

Liu Yan, deputy secretary-general of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, said that the L2 level automatic driving function began to enter the early stage of market popularization, and the penetration rate increased year by year. In recent years, Chinese enterprises and local governments have joined hands in commercial innovation to actively explore autonomous driving application services in many scenarios, from consumer travel to cargo transportation, Robotaxi, automatic parking, trunk logistics, unmanned distribution, mine heavy load, port logistics and other scenarios have emerged and formed large-scale development.

Liu Yan also pointed out that the business model in the fields of high-level autonomous driving mass production, driverless demonstration operation, test area construction, and data application is still unclear. She suggested that we should promote data sharing, explore application innovation, and promote industrial docking.