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Speed Depth Attitude
Introduction |
2021/12/25
When Tesla repeatedly lays a new definition of "intelligence", for Chinese car companies, lidar is the key to its use to blow back the horn, regardless of the prospects.
Author 丨 Cao Jiadong
Responsible editor 丨 Xu Jinkai
Editor 丨Zhu Jinbin
Is the presence or absence of lidar a decisive factor for the new energy industry to move towards a new stage? Or a helpless move for Chinese car companies to counter Tesla? Since this year, these questions have begun to hover over industry trends.
Some people will say that Chinese car companies are so hard to "shout" lidar, but they have found the next knife that can quickly "cut leeks", but they can not reduce the market heat that has risen, and it seems to be counterattacking such a judgment head-on. "2022 will be the first year of large-scale lidar on the car", at this moment can become the consensus of the industry, but also at the source of the lidar name.
Indeed, the development of the new energy industry so far, too many unexpected things have emerged in an endless stream. Many years ago, no one expected that the Ningde era could become the current "King of Ning". Today, the rapid growth of the lidar industry, what kind of giants will be spawned in the future, and how to estimate?
Whether it's Sharon shouting out "How many lidar do you have?" If you have less than 4 stars, please don't talk", or "Wei Xiaoli" have begun to see it as a standard for achieving automatic driving. It is foreseeable that when Luminar begins to appear under the siege of Tuduitone, Sagitar Juchuang and Hesai Technology, these LiDAR suppliers originating in China are likely to take advantage of the situation.
In this process, the impetuous development of the industry is inevitable, and it is inevitable that some car companies will use lidar to hype, but as intelligence and electrification are tied deeper and deeper, it is difficult to say that the lidar is only a manifestation of hardware redundancy.
It seems useless, but it has to be done
On NIO Day 2020, Li Bin, the founder of NIO, brought a new model ET7 with standard mass-produced lidar to the outside world.
Although since then, the urban NGP function promoted by Xiaopeng has begun to land, and related technology companies such as Xiaoma Zhixing and Baidu Apollo have increased their investment in the field of automatic driving, in view of the high cost of the automatic driving system built with lidar as the core, ET7 at that time only seemed to be paving the way for the first year of opening the "lidar on the car".
In addition, Tesla while updating the visual driver assistance system FSD Beta to further improve its own high-level automatic driving, as the founder elon Musk, has never given a good face to the application of lidar, the development prospects of this industry is difficult to grasp.
Until the end of the Guangzhou Auto Show, as China's traditional car companies and new car-making forces entered the deep inner volume, Avita 011, Sharon Mecha Dragon, Aeon LX Plus and Xiaopeng G9, Weima M7, Zhiji L7 firepower, while using lidar as a new war buff, but also more and more show the trend of further studying the technical path.
What exactly is causing this situation in just one year?
First, at the beginning of the lidar's transition from mechanical configuration to semi-solid/solid-state technology route, subject to the dual inducements of performance improvement and cost reduction, the industry saw it as the key to matching or even surpassing Tesla's driver assistance system.
From the interpretation of the technical principles circulating on the network, the superior product characteristics of lidar compared to ordinary millimeter-wave radar have begun to be amplified with the almost crazy publicity of car companies, which has also led to the problem of "who can seize the wind outlet of lidar on the car, who can complete the original accumulation of the market", the next actions of Chinese car companies will be surprisingly consistent.
Overtaking in curves in the name of "intelligence" seems to accelerate from then on. However, facing the entire automobile market, let alone, how much consumers perceive and understand about lidar, only from the use of habits, road adaptability and regulatory boundaries and other factors to consider, the reason for the large-scale lidar on the car, is really based on market demand?
In this regard, as a domestic lidar supplier that has suddenly exploded in recent years, Innovusion (Tudtong) has thrown out a point of view. Liang Hongyi, vice president of the company, said, "In the process of promoting intelligence, Chinese car companies can better compete with Tesla by upgrading by equipping lidar. ”
The popular understanding is that under the premise of completely unequal advantage in the pure visual perception route, large-scale mass production and loading of lidar as soon as possible can enable Chinese car companies to put intelligent development ahead of most overseas car companies from another angle while leading electrification. It just has little to do with whether the needs of consumers are urgent or not.
Therefore, at the new NIO Day, no matter what the new model ET5 was released, what caused the scene to boil, weilai through the "intelligent" to create a human design, are invisibly affecting everyone's ideas. Among them, the significance of the existence of lidar also provided by ET5 can be described as obvious.
Looking at the development of the industry in recent years, the proposal of electrification has given Chinese car companies an opportunity to overtake in curves. The intelligent implementation of traditional car companies has given Chinese car companies a gap in shortcuts. So, when lidar happens to fall into the hunting range of Chinese tech companies, what reason do they miss such a good opportunity?
Even in the eyes of many suppliers, as Tudtong co-founder and CEO Bao Junwei agrees, lidar will become a chip for Chinese car companies to raise their brand image and empower the decorations of high-priced models in the early stage of getting on the car. I still believe that the existence of these slots will not restrict Chinese car companies from chasing the "lidar on the car".
Tudtong, not a "flower rack"
To this day, Elon Musk said, "Fools use lidar, and now whoever still relies on lidar is doomed!" Lidar uses a whole bunch of expensive sensors, which are unnecessary. "It's still evidence that most people question the promise of lidar." But the result? "The application of lidar is the only way to achieve deep autonomous driving" is no longer the view shared by Chinese car companies themselves.
Again, a lidar-led driver assistance system is almost the most feasible solution to surpass Tesla at the moment. Even if high-level automatic driving is not allowed under the restrictions of the law, lidar can still greatly improve the vulnerabilities and misjudgments that may occur in the "millimeter wave radar + camera" perception system, thereby improving the reliability of L2-level driving aids.
To this end, in the new stage of transformation electrification announced by overseas car companies, you will find that in addition to Chinese car companies, lidar is also getting more and more attention from foreigners.
In 2021, taking Volvo, which is the most active in electrification transformation, as an example, in order to seize the outlet of intelligence, it reached an agreement with Luminar, a large supplier of lidar in the name of its subsidiary Zenseact, hoping to carry the lidar provided by Luminar on the OnePilot autonomous driving decision software system developed to provide assistance for the autonomous driving business.
In this context, what kind of position lidar is in the planning of Chinese car companies is self-evident. It is not important to solve the gap between overseas car companies and overseas car companies. It is enough to package their own high-end brands and "scare" consumers who are interested in intelligence.
Of course, it is also inappropriate to say that Chinese manufacturers are only "idol" in the research and development of lidar.
For most Chinese car companies, the full set of Luminar lidar solutions is like a plug-in to enhance combat effectiveness, for example, SAIC Feifan, who pays for it, will see it as a powerful weapon into a new era. But in fact, in the game with the giants, domestic lidar suppliers do not appear too backward in terms of business capabilities.
The era of mechanical lidar is gradually coming to an end, and semi-solid/solid-state lidar is beginning to move towards the front of the stage. Luminar is well aware of this trend, and chinese companies of course understand it.
According to the "2021 LiDAR Application Report in the Automotive and Industrial Fields" released by Yole Développement, a world-renowned market research and strategy consulting company, the mechanical (including rotary, rotating mirror, etc.) lidar technology route will gradually fade after 2020, and the MEMS and Flash technology routes will become more and more prominent with the maturity and cost advantages of upstream components.
When Luminar uses a laser with a wavelength of 1550 nm that exceeds the mainstream level, and thus makes Luminar's lidar achieve a detection distance of 250 m, Chinese lidar suppliers such as Tudtong will definitely choose to keep up.
On the surface, compared with Luminar, which has made many overseas car companies, it is still slightly questionable whether Tudtong, which is currently only supplied by Weilai, can become the top stream of China's lidar industry.
Can fall back to the deep technical end, compared to Hesai Technology, Sagitar Juchuang, etc., can be in the lidar laser transmitter, scanner, receiver and processing equipment of the four basic components, the use of 1550nm fiber laser, rotor + galvanometer scheme, APD avalanche diode and FPGA field can become a gate array, has been explained, in order to achieve image-level long-distance display of Tutton In the benchmark Luminar at the same time, China with the help of lidar to complete the leading automatic driving technology, Nor is it an empty phrase.
Based on this, even if we do not delve into the technical principles of the details, from the Xiaopeng P5 to use two DJI Livox HAP lidars to promote the evolution of the NGP pilot assistance system, to Weilai now intends to borrow Tudtong Falcon lidar, in 2022 against Tesla anti-general army, China's new energy development of deep binding lidar determination, will become more prominent.
Stick to it, there is a way out
Imagine that when Tesla's volume in China rises exponentially and expands to a considerable order of magnitude, if Chinese car companies also adopt an intelligent route of pure visual perception, or simply lie flat and deeply cultivate in the low-line market, what direction will the future Chinese car market develop?
Vehicles equipped with lidar are likely to cause trouble for consumers during use after delivery. How to maintain, how to determine whether its working attitude is normal, etc., will follow. However, as long as Tesla's catfish continues to bring China's new energy development into a new round of the arms race, I think that the rise of the lidar industry is only a strategic microcosm of China's car companies.
At this stage, you have also seen the brand, sales and technical advantages established by Chinese car companies in the new energy industry. Then, standing at the cusp of history, where is the reason to give up any opportunity that can widen the technological gap between overseas car companies.
Those Chinese lidar suppliers located in the core of the industry are all claiming what high level they have reached in their respective fields of expertise and how many partners they have won. But it is clear that at the level of overtaking by road, compared with the "cutting leeks", these technology companies without exception have a very firm direction.
Perhaps with the proposal of "lidar on the car" in the first year, Tudtong CEO Bao Junwei still frankly said, "The hybrid solid-state lidar that is now popular in the world is still a transitional stage between mechanical rotary lidar and pure solid-state lidar." "The new generation of electric vehicle brands is more exciting than one, and it has a certain meaning of eyeballs."
As long as the development is based on the data indicated by authoritative research institutions, that is, in 2025, China's lidar market is expected to reach 4.31 billion US dollars; 3 per 100 private cars in China will be equipped with lidar. The "spring" that belongs to this industry will eventually emerge.
Moreover, from the news that has been revealed so far, it can be seen that almost ten new cars have completed the lidar of each model and supplier. Whether the prosperity of industrial development can be opened at a glance.
By the way, there are people who have been worried about the high cost of lidar. Part of the reason Why Tesla focuses on the visual perception route is also derived from this.
However, the industry clearly remembers that Wang Chuanfu, chairman and president of BYD Group, shared at the "2021 Sequoia Digital Technology Global Leaders Summit" that the sales of new energy vehicles in the Chinese market this year are expected to exceed 3.3 million, and by the end of next year, the penetration rate of new energy vehicles in China will exceed 35%.
That is to say, no matter what kind of rhythm the story will develop, the cost problem that has always restricted the large-scale boarding of lidar may be solved under the effect of scale. Originally, like the Falcon LiDAR currently mass-produced by Tuduit, its installed price of 10,000 yuan has reached the acceptable range of car companies in cost control. Compared to Luminar Iris, which costs a $1,000 laser transmitter at $1,000, it is no different.
The view held by CEO Bao Junwei, "The technical route chosen by Tutton is based on a relatively mature industrial chain, which allows its cost to be significantly reduced with the increase of production." "Is it possible to land on the ground?"
A way out, a way out, there will always be a way. At present, the technical realization process of autonomous driving auxiliary equipment such as lidar has never been the focus of ordinary consumers. No matter how much it is said, the public is likely to only have the word "bullish", but as long as the stall is "intelligent", what lidar transmits is the signal that Chinese car companies are standing on the peak of the industry. In reality, hardware redundancy or where the advanced nature of technical means is, it is not important at this moment, so that consumers willingly pay for it, can continue to stimulate the potential of Chinese technology companies and independent car companies.
| Cao Jiadong |
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