The autonomous driving market space will reach trillions, and the competition for assisted driving will enter the second half

"2022 will be the most critical year for the development of the autonomous driving industry, the competition in the field of passenger car assisted driving will officially enter the second half, and the automatic driving of other scenarios will also officially enter the first year of commercialization." Zhang Kai, chairman of The Wisdom Company, said on December 23 that 2022 is the beginning of the era of full competition for smart cars, and smart cars are accelerating to the head of the automotive industry, and the Matthew effect of the industry is highlighted.

Recently, after obtaining 1 billion yuan of financing, Miller Zhixing released Mana, China's first autonomous driving data intelligence system, and plans to deliver the all-scenario intelligent pilot assistance system (NOH) in the second half of next year, and launch a fleet with a terminal driving system in 2023. Gu Weihao, CEO of Miller Zhixing, revealed that in 2022, the passenger car assistance project of Miller Zhixing will be expanded by 7 times, and the terminal unmanned logistics vehicle project will be expanded by 3 times. At the same time, in order to promote the rapid development of the millima data intelligence system, the millipede supercomputing center is also in preparation.

On December 24, Xiaoma Zhixing announced that it has reached a strategic cooperation with FAW (Nanjing) Technology Development Co., Ltd., a wholly-owned subsidiary of China FAW, a strategic investor, to deeply integrate the resources and advantages of both parties in the fields of L4 autonomous driving technology research and development, vehicle research and development and manufacturing, and accelerate the large-scale application of autonomous driving services (Robotaxi). MINIEYE also recently announced that it has joined hands with Huawei to release the iPilot intelligent driving solution, which takes mass production as the core, researches and develops different levels of intelligent driving solutions, and has achieved 4 L2+/L2++ level mass production projects, including cars, coupes, suvs, covering new energy and fuel vehicles.

Roland Berger, an international management consultancy, expects that by 2025, L4 and L3 will account for more than 20% of new self-driving cars. Yuan Wenbo, a partner at Roland Berger, said that the basis of this prediction is the wide application of 5G technology, the improvement of artificial intelligence technology, and the popularization of big data technology, which has promoted the rapid expansion of China's intelligent networking market.

CITIC Securities Research Report pointed out that autonomous driving is expected to be a trillion-level vast market, is expected to solve many pain points such as labor cost improvement, traffic safety, driver shortage, etc., of which the market space of urban open scenes is the largest, including Robotaxi (self-driving taxis), sanitation services, urban distribution logistics and last-mile distribution. CITIC Securities Research Report believes that the Robotaxi market space is the broadest field in the application scenario of autonomous driving.

Robotaxi and terminal logistics are seen as the first scenarios for autonomous driving to be commercialized. At present, GAC, SAIC, Baidu, Xiaoma Zhixing and Yuanrong Qixing are all launching autonomous driving travel services. Among them, Xiaoma Zhixing plans to jointly establish an autonomous driving demonstration operation fleet with FAW subsidiaries and carry out commercial operation cooperation in Guangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, Changchun, Nanjing and other places. In the field of terminal logistics, The company received orders from Meituan and Ali, ushering in the 1,000th mass production of vehicles off the production line. Zhang Kai believes that in 2022, the commercialization of the unmanned logistics field at the end of 2022 will show continuity, and the head player will try the possibility of scene replication, and the end of zhixing hopes to expand the market capacity in this field by 3 times, while achieving commercial closed loop.

In Zhang Kai's view, the data intelligence system is the key to the closed loop of automatic driving commercialization, and building an efficient and low-cost data intelligence system is the foundation for the healthy development of automatic driving, and it is also an important link for the automatic driving system to continuously iterate forward.

"Data and algorithms are the basis for achieving automatic driving, in which the algorithm is determined by the level of scientific research, if there is no breakthrough in scientific research, it is actually difficult for the engineering community and industry to do some optimization." From the data point of view, the more the better, but the data is also a bottleneck, from 10,000 to 100,000 there will be very drastic changes, but from 100,000 to 1 million, 1 million to 10 million is troublesome, such as 1 million people voting, 990,000 people tell you that it is a bad person, the rest of the people tell you that it is a good person, do you believe it or not? He Bei, CEO of Si Nian Intelligent Driving, previously said that data and algorithms are the foundation, and the system must be redundant and secure enough, and finally familiar with the characteristics of each scenario.

Feng Xingya, general manager of GAC Group, believes that smart cars still face many problems in key technology areas, the gap between autonomous driving assistive technology and driverless cars is very deep, high single-vehicle costs and infrastructure investment are important factors restricting large-scale mass production, the application of 5G nationwide may take more than 5 years, and the mass production of L4 and L5 autonomous vehicles takes ten years.