Xiaoma Zhixing set up a logistics joint venture company to upgrade the trillion-level track competition

With the acceleration of autonomous driving technology in the field of commercial vehicles, autonomous driving companies have also increased their close connection with downstream scene parties.

On December 27, Xiaoma Zhixing, an autonomous driving company, signed an agreement with Sinotrans Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of China Merchants Group, to establish a joint venture company to jointly build a smart logistics capacity platform with autonomous driving technology as the core and explore a new model for large-scale commercial landing of autonomous driving trucks. The joint venture is expected to be formally established and put into operation in early 2022, and the two parties will initially invest 100 million yuan in the joint venture to deploy a fleet of more than 100 intelligent driving heavy trucks in the early stage, and will continue to expand in the future.

Since the route is mainly high-speed, the road environment is relatively closed and simple, and the landing of autonomous driving technology in the field of trunk logistics is easier. At present, trunk logistics has become a scene in which most autonomous driving companies are scrambling to layout. Compared with Robotaxi, the business model of autonomous driving heavy trucks is clearer and easier to achieve profitability. Because of this, self-driving heavy trucks are popular with capital, and in the past year, self-driving startups such as Zhijia Technology, Tucson Future and Empire Trucks have landed or will soon land in the US stock market.

At the end of last year, the Ministry of Transport issued the "Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Development and Application of Autonomous Driving Technology for Road Traffic", which clearly proposed to support the development of autonomous driving cargo transportation services, encourage the development of relatively closed areas such as ports, airports, logistics depots, transportation infrastructure construction sites and other relatively closed areas and postal express terminal distribution scenarios, combined with the needs of production operations, carry out demonstration applications of autonomous driving cargo, and under the premise of risk assessment and emergency plan, promote it to road freight, urban distribution and other scenarios as appropriate to create a safe, efficient and intelligent logistics and transportation service.

"With the advancement of various businesses, the potential of autonomous driving technology in the field of trunk logistics will be rapidly released, and a new ecosystem with autonomous driving technology as the core will gradually be formed." Li Hengyu, head of Xiaoma Zhika, said. Xiaoma Zhixing set up the truck division Xiaoma Zhika at the end of last year, and not long ago, Xiaoma Zhixing entered the Beijing-Taiwan Expressway to carry out L4 level normalized automatic driving test, which is the first time that the national fan internal automatic driving enterprises have conducted high-level automatic driving tests in the open highway section of the policy. In the past year, Xiaoma Zhika has obtained a number of testing and operation licenses in Beijing and Guangzhou, including the first autonomous driving card planning test license in Guangzhou, freight road transport business license, etc.

The market size of autonomous trucks is no less than that of the passenger car market, and its main application scenarios are trunk logistics and port logistics. Among them, trunk logistics is considered to be a trillion-dollar market. According to CICC's calculations, based on the average freight rate of road freight in the period from 2019 to 2020, China's road freight market space exceeds 3 trillion yuan, and the United States is close to 350 billion US dollars. According to a report released by the Yiou think tank, the number of heavy trucks in China's trunk logistics will be 3.14 million in 2021, and the potential alternative market size of autonomous driving will be 767.9 billion yuan. With the continuous decline in freight rates and the rise of manpower, fuel consumption and management costs, the profit margins of logistics fleets have been further squeezed, and the demand for cost reduction and efficiency increase has become increasingly strong. The application of autonomous driving technology can improve transportation efficiency and reduce costs, and compared with the realization of automatic driving in general passenger cars, buses, trucks and other running routes are more fixed, which also provides certain conditions for large-scale commercialization of automatic driving.

Xiaoma Zhixing said that in the main cost components of logistics, labor and fuel costs continue to rise. Especially for labor, there may be a huge manpower gap for truck drivers in the future. Autonomous driving can reduce the number of drivers in a single vehicle, as long as the marginal cost of a single vehicle for autonomous driving is reduced to lower than that of human drivers, it can reduce costs and fill the driver labor gap. At the same time, self-driving technology can help reduce the often downtime caused by physiological limits such as driver rest. This means that autonomous driving can significantly increase the mileage of bicycles in a single day, improve effectiveness and vehicle utilization. The joint venture will build a fleet of intelligent driving heavy trucks to provide safer, more efficient and low-cost transportation services and freight solutions.

At present, a number of commercial vehicle companies have given a timetable for the mass production of L3 level autonomous driving. Among them, Yingche Technology, Dongfeng Commercial Vehicle and China National Heavy Duty Truck are jointly developing two L3-level autonomous driving heavy trucks, which are planned to achieve mass production by the end of 2021; in September last year, FAW Jiefang released the L3-level J7 super truck, which was officially called "the world's first mass-produced L3 autonomous driving product". The driverless truck brand Tucson Future plans to produce a series of dedicated L4-class autonomous semi-trucks for the North American market by 2024.

There is a huge watershed between L3 and L4 autonomous driving, which is difficult to cross in a short period of time. According to the report released by Yiou Think Tank, the current L4 level autonomous driving heavy truck is still in the early stage of design verification. Technology, supply chain, laws and regulations are still three mountains that are difficult to overcome in the commercialization process of autonomous trunk logistics, and the commercialization of autonomous trunk logistics is obstructed and long. From a technical point of view, there is a huge watershed between L3 level and L4 automatic driving, which is difficult to cross in a short period of time. From the perspective of supply chain, there are three major difficulties in the commercialization of autonomous driving trunk logistics: one is the difficulty of mass production and supply of vehicle-grade products of key components such as lidar and computing platforms, the second is the relative weakness of online control chassis technology and product accumulation of local commercial vehicle OEMs and suppliers, and the third is the difficulty of research and development of key technologies and components to adapt to higher-order automatic driving systems.

"For autonomous driving technology or systems to be commercialized, they must go through very complex system certification. For example, the smartphones in our hands have both software and hardware, and if the software and hardware are not integrated and integrated, it is difficult to achieve a good experience. Autonomous driving cars are more complex than smart phones, both automatic driving software, as well as automatic driving hardware, as well as the vehicle platform itself, these things must be integrated or unified design, so in the field of trucks, we also need to cooperate with first-tier suppliers and car manufacturers in depth, rather than simply adapting our system to the vehicle, so that it can not reach the goal of truly replacing labor, large-scale production and safety, mass production needs to solve these problems first. Zhang Ning, vice president of Xiaoma Zhixing, previously told reporters.