Autonomous driving can be described as one of the hottest and most cross-border keywords in the technology circle and the automobile circle since last year.
In 2016, since Baidu first drove unmanned vehicles on the fifth ring road in Beijing, autonomous driving has become the most popular spot for investors in China, and countless capital and talents have poured into this field that has been tepid for more than a decade, and self-driving startups have sprung up like mushrooms.
But six years later, although self-driving technology has indeed made great progress, the companies that have made revolutionary contributions in this process do not have much to do with many of the original ambitious entrepreneurial pioneers, and it is still giants such as Baidu, Google and Tesla that lead the development of the industry.
In the Internet industry that pays attention to entrepreneurship, a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of contention are often the right way for the development of the industry, why will it become a giant in the field of automatic driving, and the latecomers in the field of automatic driving, in the end, will there be a chance to break through from the existing market pattern?
The self-driving market is growing rapidly, but startups are in deep trouble
Since 2016, the autonomous driving market to obtain the first wave of dividends after the influx of capital, the company's market value and growth rate is like a rocket to soar, as one of the most successful countries in the world to transition from traditional cars to intelligent cars, China's automatic driving market size is even higher.
Data show that in 2020, China's ADAS (Advanced Driving Assistance System Advanced Driver Assistance System) market size reached 84.4 billion yuan, according to the relevant market analysis agencies predicted, 2025 will exceed 225 billion yuan, which is enough to show the popularity of the autonomous driving market today, and the market's huge expectations for its future development level.
In China, Robotaxi direction players represented by Baidu Apollo have not only achieved L4 level autonomous driving, but also successfully deployed regionalized Robotaxi vehicles in Cities such as Beijing, which has verified Robotaxi's business model and business prospects on a small scale.
On the other hand, intelligent car companies such as Tesla and Xiaopeng are also going farther and farther on the road of bicycle intelligence, while building cars, while developing automatic driving technology, it is only a matter of time before the automatic auxiliary driving system in the urban road environment is realized on the mass production model.
If we stop here, just from the perspective of these technology giants and the new forces that are doing well, the autonomous driving market is indeed a peaceful and singing and dancing, but when we look at the self-driving technology startups that emerged in 2016 and later, we will come to the conclusion of "a few joys and a few sorrows".
In 2016, three engineers from Baidu's U.S. R&D center left to start Roadstar, which focuses on the Robotaxi field like Baidu Apollo, but although Roadstar was founded late, the market paid less attention to it than Baidu that year.
The "young and famous" Roadstar received $128 million in Series A funding two years after its establishment, but after that, Roadstar turned into a process of decline, and Roadstar, which shouted the slogan of "Didi in unmanned cars", is now on the verge of closure.
Another high-profile self-driving startup, Wenyuan Zhixing, was also founded by Baidu executives, which is also the Robotaxi route, but unfortunately Wenyuan Zhixing has not been able to change the end of Roadstar, which has not been established for many years and still has not been able to commercialize Robotaxi products.
From a macro perspective of the market, although these self-driving technology startups that take the Robotaxi route have all won brief highlight moments, they are facing financial pressure after frequent commercialization encounters, which makes them lose the opportunity for industry giants to continue to compete.
The threshold of the autonomous driving market is indeed high, but there are still opportunities for latecomers
However, although from the current automatic driving market, although the autonomous driving companies founded after the giants are facing no small difficulties, this does not mean that today's market pattern has been determined, and the latecomers have no chance to catch up.
First of all, in order to understand why latecomers can still catch up with the old players who have been deeply involved in the field for many years, let's first talk about why the autonomous driving startups that take the Robotaxi route are not in a good position today.
According to the future vision given by a group of companies that carry out the Robotaxi technology route, the ultimate goal of Robotaxi is to replace existing taxis (including online ride-hailing, the same is true below), so that consumers can place orders directly with their mobile phones like taxis now, and then deliver them to their destinations by unmanned vehicles.
This is indeed a very great idea, because it can greatly reduce the chance of taxi safety accidents, and enhance the platform's vehicle scheduling capabilities and all-weather operation capabilities in the city, to achieve the next evolution of shared travel modes, but this also brings out a lot of problems, and it is still impossible to solve for some time to come.
For example, if you want to realize the idea of Robotaxi replacing taxis, you need to be able to realize the high-level fully autonomous driving technology of unmanned driving (no safety officers) in the whole road conditions of cities and towns, and there is still a certain gap in the existing technical level; the cost of shared taxis providing services is currently very high, such as Baidu and BAIC Jihu released a shared unmanned vehicle cost of up to 480,000 yuan in the middle of this year.
Therefore, we can also see from this that if we want to succeed in the field of Robotaxi, the company must have very good research and development strength and rich mobilizable resources, but for startups with limited funds, whether it is to recruit talents or resource investment, it will be very difficult, so frankly speaking, the current entry threshold of the autonomous driving market is indeed high, and it is not friendly to new players.
However, just as the so-called "do not put eggs in the same basket", although the threshold in the field of Robotaxi is high, it does not mean that the autonomous driving market does not leave opportunities for latecomers, and there is still a lot of room for development of "scenario-based" automatic driving technology based on the coordinated route of vehicles.
At the moment when the giants are piling up to do the robotaxi route of bicycle intelligent routes, scenes such as mining areas, ports, airports and terminal logistics have received very little attention in comparison, but under the slightly "lonely" market environment, there are opportunities for latecomers in the autonomous driving market to overtake in curves.
Taking Juefei Technology as an example, as a representative of the autonomous driving company with the vehicle-road collaborative route, although it was established not long ago, it has achieved good results in the automatic driving market. Taking the "vehicle-road collaboration" route, it does not need to invest the same resources as Baidu and Google in the automatic driving technology itself, and the automatic driving technology realized by doing a good job in the construction of supporting facilities and improving the vehicle's ability to obtain environmental information is enough to meet the needs of scenario-based automatic driving, and now we can see them in multiple specialized scenarios such as logistics parks and ports.
And with the advancement of the intelligent transformation process of traditional industries, the traditional industrial scenarios in the future automatic driving market will contribute a greater market share, after all, the traditional industrial fields with difficult environments and increasingly high labor costs will be very willing to let automatic driving technology replace the existing human transportation mode, thereby improving operational efficiency and reducing costs.
Therefore, in general, from the current autonomous driving market, although the operating conditions of a number of Robotaxi route startups are not good, this does not mean that the market has been completely controlled by the giants, because the Robotaxi route itself is a self-driving technology route with extremely high requirements for the company's available resources.
For autonomous driving startups, in the case of the Robotaxi route is not feasible, turning to the "vehicle-road collaboration" route to do "scenario-based" automatic driving like non-technology will be a better development route, which can not only realize the commercialization of existing technologies, but also conform to the country's "vehicle-road collaboration" policy to continue to develop autonomous driving technology, which can be said to be both ideal and bread development direction, so obviously in today's automatic driving market, startups still have the opportunity to break the game. But whether these startups can see this problem and seize the opportunity depends on the decision of the company's management.