Driverless 10 billion cake tempting it is necessary to cross the threshold of data security and business model

A driverless white Robotaxi convoy drove neatly along the road, and the logos of GAC Group, Wenyuan Zhixing and Ruqi Travel were printed on the body. In the near future, they will serve the citizens of Guangzhou. Last week, the three partners signed a contract to jointly promote the design and development of the Robotaxi model, front-loading mass production and commercial operation.

This is one of the application demonstrations of unmanned intelligent networking system in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Driverless taxis, driverless minibuses, driverless logistics vehicles, etc., will form a new product sales of more than 10 billion yuan together with unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned ships in the future, and promote the transformation and upgrading of the public transportation industry in the Greater Bay Area to the direction of networked, intelligent and unmanned services.

At the 2021 World Intelligent Car Congress, driverless driving has become a hot topic. Experts pointed out that data security and business models are still the thresholds that driverless cars need to cross. Li Leyan, technical director of the Fifth Research Institute of Electronics of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, revealed that mandatory standards such as China's intelligent and connected car automatic driving data recording system are expected to be officially implemented in 2023.

Driverless has four categories of players

Compared with a year ago, driverless cars have appeared more around the public this year. In June this year, the unmanned vehicles of Wenyuan Zhixing and Xiaoma Zhixing participated in the delivery of anti-epidemic materials in Guangzhou, which was impressive. The first financial reporter noted that at the 2021 World Intelligent Vehicle Conference, driverless driving has been implemented in subdivisions such as Robotaxi, smart trucks, logistics vehicles, and intelligent parking.

GAC Group (601238. SH and 02238.HK) revealed in the announcement of the proposal to invest in Wenyuan Zhixing on December 14 that in the next few years, the two sides plan to gradually establish a robotaxi fleet of tens of thousands of vehicles, with the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area as the core to radiate to the whole country, and launch safe, economical and green autonomous driving travel services for the public.

Han Xu, founder and CEO of Wenyuan Zhixing, said that the two sides will work together to achieve the first breakthrough in the mass production of L4 level autonomous driving front-loading and open up a new pattern of robotaxi in the next stage. On December 21, one week after GAC Group announced its investment in Wenyuan Zhixing, Wenyuan Zhixing signed a contract to invest in gac group's Ruqi travel platform, which will realize the commercialization pilot of Robotaxi through hybrid dispatch.

Previously, Wenyuan Zhixing has conducted two years of self-driving taxi safety tests in Huangpu District, Guangzhou. Han Xu revealed that Wenyuan Zhixing, GAC Group and Ruqi Chuxing will soon conduct Robotaxi tests in Guangzhou, with more than 300 driverless cars. He expects that 68% of people will live in cities in the future, and autonomous driving will help urban agglomerations such as the Greater Bay Area solve public transportation problems.

Driverless smart trucks that help road transport are also promoting commercialization. Li Hengyu, vice president of Xiaoma Zhixing and head of the truck business unit, believes that China's road transport logistics industry is facing many 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 Tier 1 suppliers and truck manufacturers to manufacture autonomous trucks, and on the other hand, it cooperates with logistics companies to build an intelligent logistics platform. Li Hengyu said that Xiaoma Zhixing has obtained the Beijing test license and the high-speed road section test license, and hopes to reduce the road transportation cost to 40% of the current in the future, and in 2022, Xiaoma Zhixing will launch a fleet of 100 intelligent logistics trucks.

Driverless logistics vehicles in ports are already working. Relying on the innovation of the autonomous driving technology of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, it provides the solution of nearly 100 driverless horizontal transport vehicles for the Nansha Port of Guangzhou, and cooperates with Zhenhua Heavy Industry to help improve the operation efficiency of the port cargo. Because of the non-magnetic nailing scheme, the construction cost of the terminal will save more than 40 million yuan.

"At present, there are four main types of players in autonomous driving." Zhan Peixun, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Yiqing Innovation, said that one is the main engine factory, like Xiaopeng Automobile also wants to do driverless buses in the future; the second type is a first-class supplier, like black sesame, horizon, etc. to provide autonomous driving chips, the industrial chain of driverless cars is very long, the space is very large; the third type is the vehicle technology solution company, focusing on the combination of good application ends, this subdivision track has begun to crowd; the fourth type is a platform company like Didi.

Liu Yan, deputy secretary-general of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, believes that the L2 level automatic driving function began to enter the initial stage of market popularization, and the penetration rate increased year by year. In the first three quarters of 2021, China's intelligent network L2 passenger car sales were 3.186 million units, with a penetration rate of 21.4%. 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.

The challenges of data security stand out

However, the "hurdle" in front of automatic driving is still a safety issue. At the sub-forum on the exploration of the commercial application of autonomous driving at the 2021 World Intelligent Vehicle Conference, Wang Junyu, deputy general manager of Skyworth Automobile, still had palpitations when he went to Baidu headquarters in July this year to test ride a driverless bus with a speed of 30 kilometers per hour, and he believed that only by relying on continuous improvement of technology can he enhance his sense of security.

Compared with functional safety, the challenges of data security are also becoming more prominent. Li Leyan, technical director of the Fifth Research Institute of Electronics of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said for example, from the current test, the cloud platform of many car manufacturers has done a relatively weak job of protecting the information of car owners. For example, after tampering with a user account, a certain model can obtain the data of other users, which can easily lead to a large number of information leakage.

This year, China has intensively issued a series of relevant policies. Li Leyan said that in March 2021, the Ministry of Public Security issued a draft revision of the Road Traffic Safety Law to solicit opinions on automatic driving. The Data Security Law, issued in June 2021, mentions data sovereignty issues and data export issues, which is the focus of intelligent and connected vehicles.

In addition, in April 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the Guidelines for the Administration of Access to Intelligent and Connected Vehicle Manufacturers and Products (Trial Implementation) (Draft for Solicitation of Comments). In August 2021, the five ministries and commissions issued the Several Regulations on the Safety Management of Automobile Data (Trial Implementation). In September 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the Notice on Strengthening the Networking Networking Network and Data Security Work.

"Recently, there has been more attention in cybersecurity, data security, and software upgrades." Li Leyan revealed that China's "Intelligent Connected Vehicle Autonomous Driving Data Recording System", "Vehicle Information Security Technical Requirements", "Automotive Software Upgrade General Technical Requirements" and other relevant mandatory access standards for intelligent and connected vehicles are expected to be released at the end of 2022 and officially implemented in 2023.

Since data security involves the safety and interests of individuals, organizations, society and the country, Liu Yan believes that under the current legal framework, it is still necessary to further promote the improvement of relevant rules and regulations and technical standards such as the "Guidelines for the Administration of Access to Intelligent and Connected Vehicle Manufacturers and Products" and "Several Provisions on the Safety Management of Automotive Data Security", and introduce implementation rules to improve the data security management system.

"The technological development of intelligent networked vehicles is inseparable from the safe data interaction ecology." Liu Yan also said that at present, the phenomenon of "data islands" in the automobile industry is serious, and it is necessary to build a data trusted storage and interaction platform through the use of blockchain technology, so as to create an open, secure and credible data interaction ecology. The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers and relevant units are formulating the "Data Security Assessment Guidelines for Intelligent and Connected Vehicles" to jointly promote the voluntary assessment and certification of industry data security to meet the needs of the industry.

Liu Jianhao, head of information security at Baidu Apollo, believes that the WP.29 of the United Nations Automotive Cybersecurity Regulation in 2021 has been implemented, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has issued access requirements for intelligent and connected vehicle manufacturers and products, "It is expected that in 2023, smart cars must pass the information security access to allow listing, sales and driving on the road." The biggest problem this year is automotive data security, because the amount of automotive data is large, the types involved are many, and the processing is difficult, so a comprehensive and multi-dimensional security protection system is needed.

Role swaps explore new business models

Talking about the challenges of intelligent networked vehicles, Liu Yan also said that the business models such as high-level automatic driving mass production, driverless demonstration operation, test area construction, and data application are not yet clear, and it is recommended to promote data sharing, explore application innovation, and promote industrial docking.

Wang Junyu, deputy general manager of Skyworth Automobile, expects that autonomous driving will take the lead in several fields in the next three to five years. First of all, taxis, there are already driverless taxi companies in the West; secondly, logistics vehicles, because the route is fixed, the road conditions are simple; there are also operating vehicles, such as mines, urban sanitation vehicles, the route is relatively fixed, the road conditions are not very complicated; in addition, scenic spots, industrial park cars, such as Foxconn such a large industrial park, unmanned driving can save a lot of labor costs, which is very cost-effective for enterprises.

"The biggest market for driverless driving in the future is still in family passenger cars, but it will take a long time to land, and it will continue to be updated and iterated." Wang Junyu believes that the process of investment is huge, "enterprises must first live healthily, and it is the king's way to survive until the day when the automatic driving technology matures."

In fact, autonomous driving presents an opportunity for automakers to explore new business models. Xu Junhai, technical leader of GAC Aean New Energy Automobile Co., Ltd., revealed that GAC Aean will launch L4-level autonomous driving models in 2022. Wu Song, executive deputy general manager of GAC Group, said that by 2030, the sales volume of new energy vehicles of GAC Group will account for 50%, and GAC Group will accelerate the industrialization of batteries; GAC Group will join hands with more partners to create a low-carbon travel platform with more economic and social value.

Jin Jun, PwC China's head of the automotive industry, believes that under the development trend of intelligent, electrified, networked and shared vehicles, the roles of enterprises in the industrial chain may be interchangeable. Many suppliers may build cars, and OEMs will also invest in chips, batteries and other components. The opening up of data, scenarios, and capital may restructure the automotive supply chain and form a new situation.