Source | Yunlian Think Tank (ID: tucmedia), author | Jia Yichao, Editor | Small L
On December 22, 2021, as a freight truck slowly drove into the China Resources Wanjia Pinghu Logistics Park, the joint operation of the first domestic retailer over-warehouse to warehouse automatic driving jointly created by China Resources Vanguard, Zhijia Technology and Coachman.com was completed. This trip also means that the commercialization of China's heavy-duty truck autonomous driving has completed the expansion of the territory of South China.
It is understood that the autonomous driving freight heavy truck departs from Jiashan Huarun Warehouse in Zhejiang Province to Shenzhen, with a total length of 1300 kilometers, connecting the Yangtze River Delta Economic Circle, the Pearl River Delta Economic Circle and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, which are the most economically developed and most frequently transported goods in China.
It is worth noting that the joint operation of automatic driving was jointly initiated by three enterprises, and it is also the first commercial operation of autonomous driving in China to be completed by the cooperation of retailers, technology companies and logistics carriers.
In the logistics industry, everyone is accustomed to using Sino-US benchmarking to find opportunities. From the perspective of capacity agencies, whether it is China or the United States, the market size of road transportation is huge. According to the data, the current domestic heavy truck ownership exceeded 8.5 million, and the highway mileage exceeded 160,000 kilometers, which together constitute China's trunk logistics and transportation network, and the overall market size is about 3 trillion yuan.
Based on multiple factors such as the scale of the trunk logistics market, the complexity of the scene, and the frequency of scene application, it is generally believed that the high-speed scenario of trunk logistics will be a major scenario for the commercialization of autonomous driving. This has also made the past many years, the autonomous driving under the trunk logistics scenario has become a hot track for innovation in the logistics industry, with billions of yuan of funds pouring into the market every year, and financing of 100 million yuan is the norm.
With the advancement of time, the head players have become active in the capital market, making this year not only the "first year of automatic driving listing", but also the head players have also begun to vigorously lay out the commercialization of mass production vehicles, and 2021 has also become the "first year of automatic driving mass production".
In this context, the future technology of the past has begun to enter reality, and "technology + operation" has become an effective strategy for autonomous driving companies to test the market. The joint operation of CR Vanguard, Together with Zhijia Technology and Chefu.com, the first retailer over-warehouse to warehouse automatic driving joint operation is a portrayal of "technology + operation".
Under the background of the current large-scale development of retail, how to effectively circulate goods in the field of logistics supply chain and safely reach consumers with the most efficient way and low cost has become an essential requirement for the logistics industry to be transformed and upgraded. On the other hand, logistics companies also urgently need pragmatic solutions to reduce operating costs and improve asset operational efficiency under the premise of on-time performance.
According to Zhijia Technology's survey of logistics fleets, logistics companies and other customers, road safety and operating costs are pain points that have plagued them for a long time.
From a safety perspective, more than 90% of current traffic accidents are caused by human factors. If autonomous driving can be achieved, or if the penetration of autonomous driving is high enough, it will have a huge improvement in reducing or even avoiding traffic accidents. And this value is huge for end customers and society as a whole.
From the cost point of view, the trillion-level trunk logistics market, the price war has been white-hot, the competition between logistics enterprises from the past information transparency, acquaintance relationships, etc. began to enter the point of spelling organizational costs and asset costs, and the industry is facing a structured demand for cost reduction and efficiency increase.
For the trunk line logistics transport fleet, its cost structure is basically "33211", especially with the increase in the scale and efficiency of trunk line vehicles, this structure tends to be stable. Among them, the majority of them are fuel consumption accounting for 30% and manpower accounting for 30%.
It is understood that the joint operation of this automatic driving adopts the FAW Jiefang mass-produced smart heavy-duty truck equipped with the Zhijia PlusDrive system, which has the advantages of safer, more convenient, more fuel-saving and environmentally friendly.
In fact, before that, Zhijia Technology has cooperated with Amazon abroad, and not long ago, it also jointly operated the first mass-produced smart heavy-duty truck operation line in East China and North China with Rongqing Logistics in China. The data accumulated by Zhijia Technology shows that in terms of fuel consumption alone, autonomous driving can reduce fuel consumption by 10%.
In addition, in terms of operation mode, with the continuous improvement of driving level, dual driving can become single driving, and the operation time of heavy trucks can be developed from the current 11 hours / day to almost 24 hours / day, which greatly improves operational efficiency and asset efficiency.
From this dimension, automatic driving has begun to accelerate, through the "technology + operation" method to accumulate real data in the actual scene, and explore the large-scale scenario of automatic driving in trunk logistics applications (such as the distribution of express delivery , the warehouse - warehouse of retail enterprises), the high-frequency demand for technology of logistics enterprises, etc., and then promote the mass production of automatic driving.
The characteristics of the trunk logistics operation network mean that the commercial landing of automatic driving should also be a network structure.
It is also based on this that the joint operation jointly initiated by China Resources Vanguard, Zhijia Technology and Chefu.com has a milestone significance for the commercialization of automatic driving.
On the one hand, the automatic driving operation network has been improved to lay the foundation for subsequent horizontal scale expansion. Previously, Zhijia Technology has completed the commercial operation line from East China to Central China and East China to North China with partners such as Xinzhihong and Rongqing Logistics, and the cooperation with CR Vanguard and Coachman Network has supplemented the gap in South China. Since then, the core grain producing areas of the logistics market - East China, South China, Central China and North China have been covered to a certain extent, laying the foundation for subsequent network expansion.
On the other hand, the addition of enterprises with business flow functions such as China Resources Vanguard has opened up the vertical depth of automatic driving and added a new dimension to the commercial operation of automatic driving.
At present, most of the logistics vehicles are distributed in the hands of individual drivers and large, medium, and small fleets of different sizes. Relatively speaking, the refined management of assets, the pursuit of asset efficiency and the control of operating costs of organized fleets have made fleet-based enterprises the first customers of autonomous driving.
In the past few years, the development of large fleet enterprises has mainly benefited from the unilateral line outsourcing that appeared in the rapid development of large express and express delivery enterprises, and the combination of lines between different logistics companies has improved the efficiency of logistics companies. This development is the ability to integrate resources.
In recent years, fleet-type enterprises have gradually entered the bottleneck of development, where is its breakthrough direction?
1) Program capability. In terms of the logic of Sino-US benchmarking, American companies JB Hunt and Robinson are regarded as the objects of domestic large fleet enterprises and network freight platforms to learn to benchmark, and their core capabilities are not capacity integration, but the transformation ability of programs.
2) Order density. As mentioned earlier, the network characteristics of trunk logistics determine that fleet enterprises must pursue scope economy.
3) Technical efficiency improvement. In the format of large fleets, a word often said in everyone's mouth is "heavy", but more people think that the core of "heavy" emphasizes "heavy operation" in addition to "heavy assets", that is, the use of mature technology to improve operation and management efficiency.
In this cooperation, THE ADDITION OF CR Vanguard further expands the circle of friends for automatic driving and forms an operating triangle of "scene + technology + transportation capacity". The in-depth cooperation with business flow enterprises can explore the imagination space of fleet enterprises from the vertical dimension.
In this process, as Huang Zhiguo, general manager of CR Vanguard Logistics Operation Center, said: "The cooperation with Zhijia Technology and Chefu.com will bring new ideas of cost reduction and efficiency increase, green energy saving for CR Vanguard logistics operations, and I believe that in the future, through more in-depth cooperation, we can explore better autonomous driving operation models and bring consumers more high-quality, efficient and intimate supply chain services." ”
It can be seen that the essence of technology is to help customers do business better. Taking technology as a bridge, upward help the supply chain operation mode optimization of business flow enterprises, and downward help fleet enterprises to polish the ultimate cost, and then precipitated technical barriers, program barriers, and scale barriers may be the real value of automatic driving.
Rong Li, general manager of Zhijia Technology China and senior vice president of group engineering, said: "2021 is the first year of automatic driving. In different social production and life scenarios, the application of autonomous driving technology has mushroomed. In the field of trunk logistics, Zhijia is pleased to join hands with like-minded industry partners such as CR Vanguard and Chefu.com to jointly bring the empowerment of intelligent driving to the retail industry, so that more consumers can enjoy a stable and reliable logistics experience brought by automatic driving. ”
With the initial construction of the commercial operation network of zhijia technology autonomous driving, the industry may usher in a more comprehensive force in 2022.
On December 30, 2021, at the "Annual Meeting of the Transport Federation: 2022 Trends and Forecasts and Modern Logistics Industry Cluster Forum", Cheng Shenghui, Vice President of Sales and Operations of Zhijia Technology, will take the stage to give a speech, so stay tuned!