At a time when the outside world is focused on driverless passenger cars, the driverless commercial vehicle track has been stormy. A number of port driverless R & D enterprises and car manufacturers are actively laying out and want to share the "cake". Nishii Technology has achieved mass production of intelligent power-changing driverless commercial vehicles in five years, and it is expected to achieve overall profitability soon.
Author | Zhang Chao Edited | Luo Lijuan
The port is connected to all seas, and the land is connected to all directions.
As we all know, China is both a land power and a maritime power. Nearly 3 million square kilometers of sea area and 32,000 kilometers of coastline, together with the Yangtze River, the Yellow River and other inland water transport channels, have jointly built China's developed port system.
According to data from the Ministry of Transport, the cargo throughput of ports in China in 2020 reached 14.55 billion tons, an increase of 4.3% year-on-year; the container throughput of ports reached 260 million TEUs, an increase of 1.2% year-on-year, and the port cargo throughput and container throughput ranked first in the world.
In the context of rising throughput, major ports urgently need to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and the development of port logistics automation is one of the solutions.
On January 15, Nishii Technology, an artificial intelligence company focusing on unmanned commercial applications in ports, announced that the Q-Truck, the world's first intelligent power-swap driverless commercial vehicle, has achieved mass production.
Q-Truck, the world's first intelligent power-swap driverless commercial vehicle
It is reported that since the establishment of the unmanned driving team in 2016, Nishii Technology has focused on the unmanned operation heavy truck in the port area, independently developed a full-time unmanned electric heavy truck Q-Truck, and promoted the commercial landing of unmanned commercial vehicles.
Up to now, in addition to the self-brand Q-Truck, coupled with the intelligent cross-transport vehicle that helps Zhenhua Heavy Industry, and the automatic driving system based on the IGV model platform provided for some port users, Nishii Technology has nearly 100 unmanned vehicles in operation around the world.
In 2022, Nishii Technology plans to simultaneously open driverless power exchange services in specific scenarios in four countries around the world.
With the mass production of intelligent power-changing driverless commercial vehicles, Tan Limin, founder and CEO of Nishijing Technology, revealed to All-Weather Technology that the company is expected to achieve profitability soon; and plans to go public when the business is ready.
Although the story of driverless commercial vehicles is not "fascinating" enough compared to driverless passenger cars, it is a full-fledged market of 100 billion. A number of driverless technology research and development and application enterprises such as Xijing Technology, Mainline Technology, and Si Nian Intelligent Driving have poured in and want to share the "cake".
Who will be the first to cross the line?
1
Mass production in five years
Xijing Technology is located in a quiet alley on Lixi Road in Changning District, Shanghai, which is particularly "unremarkable", but the core is one of the few artificial intelligence companies in China with full-stack development capabilities.
In 2015, Tan Limin, who was still working in a consulting company, coincidentally discovered the technical characteristics and application potential of the AI industry, "When the market has this demand (artificial intelligence), I think this may be a point in time." Since then, Tan Limin has embarked on the road of entrepreneurship.
Ideas are cool, but reality is hard. Direction, funding, team, are all tests.
In his view, the long-term survival of an AI company is to use people as a starting point and fulcrum to find the optimal solution to the relationship between artificial intelligence and everyone. As a result, product proof, customer certificate and business model proof need to be realized successively.
Eventually, he set his sights on the field of unmanned commercial vehicles in ports, focusing on the two scenarios of cargo and manned.
After a large number of investigations, Xijing Technology has found that as a scene that is almost accompanied by the history of human urban development, horizontal transportation in its area has increasingly become a major problem plaguing the cost and efficiency of modern ports. In the port area, the cost of heavy trucks and labor costs for container transportation has remained high, and heavy truck drivers have faced increasing labor fault problems in recent years.
Tan Limin and the team roughly calculated an account, a collector driver's annual salary is almost 100,000-150,000 yuan, a medium-sized dock needs to be equipped with about 200 collection cards, each set card is roughly equipped with four drivers, this cost reaches about 90 million yuan a year. If this part of the expenditure can be saved, it will help the port to reduce a lot of operating cost pressure.
Moreover, unlike driverless passenger cars that need to face complex urban traffic and ground environments, the port environment has the characteristics of limited areas and controllable rules, and there is a gap in demand, and it is easier for driverless technology to land commercially.
Tan Limin, who saw the timing, quickly cut into the unmanned logistics track of the port, and launched the first generation of unmanned heavy trucks based on the diesel vehicle in-line control chassis modification in January 2018, which can achieve single-vehicle operation; in June of the same year, the second generation of the unmanned collector card WellTruck D1 was developed and completed, which can achieve multi-vehicle operation; three months later (September 2018), a new generation of unmanned truck Q-Trunk was released, which can achieve a 150-kilometer endurance. It has a mature and stable chassis in-line and multi-vehicle operation V2X system.
After that, Nishii Technology also cooperated with Ports of Zhuhai and Tianjin in China, Laem Chabang Port in Thailand, and Khalifa Port in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, to promote the application of driverless commercial vehicles. Up to now, the products and services independently developed by Xijing Technology, such as WellOcean (artificial intelligence smart port solution) and Qomolo (new energy unmanned commercial solution), have been put into operation in more than 80 ports and logistics parks around the world.
From 2021 onwards, Nishii Technology began to explore the commercialization of solid-state batteries in the field of driverless commercial vehicles, and cooperated with enterprises such as GCL Energy, a development and operation enterprise of clean energy and cogeneration projects. Its newly released first intelligent power-changing driverless commercial vehicle is completed by the two sides. It is reported that it takes only 6 minutes to complete a power exchange process.
In 2022, Nishii Technology plans to simultaneously open unmanned power exchange services in specific scenarios in four countries around the world. The mass production of intelligent power exchange driverless commercial vehicles will undoubtedly accelerate the process of port logistics automation and intelligence.
After the business has improved, the funds are also constantly coming in. According to the information of Tianyancha, so far, Xijing Technology has obtained financing 11 times, and the investors include Hegao Capital, Guangxi Guangdong Investment, Shenzhen Investment Holding Union, COSCO Group, Anxin Securities, Fosun Group and other institutions.
Financing history of Xijing Technology (Source: Tianyancha)
After five or six years of development, the team size of Xijing Technology is constantly expanding.
According to Sun Zuolei, a partner in the unmanned driving business of Xijing Technology, as of November last year, the company's core technical team was close to 340 people, of which more than 77% were engineers; among these engineers, master's and doctoral degrees accounted for more than 50%, most of which had experience in AI technology research and development.
2
Different from the road of driverless passenger cars
Unlike most new car manufacturers who focus on automotive technology research and development and choose the OEM path, Xijing Technology adheres to the development of "software and hardware integration".
As we all know, the foundry of Nio Motors is Jacques Motors. The two have signed an agreement since 2016 to jointly build a "world-class all-aluminum body factory". Although WEILAI had plans to build its own factory in Jiading, Shanghai, it announced its cancellation in 2019, and later said it would increase investment and renovate the foundry.
This seems to indicate that Weilai will still adhere to the OEM cooperation model. In May last year, the two sides decided to "renew" the contract for three years and reached an agreement on the joint manufacturing of NIO and related expense arrangements.
Xiaopeng Motors also holds hands with Haima Motors without production qualifications; the two sides have cooperated since 2017, and the latter has produced cars for its OEM. Although Xiaopeng later built bases in Zhaoqing, Guangzhou and Wuhan, and also obtained production qualifications through the purchase method "curve", its OEM cooperation with Haima Automobile will continue until 2021.
It can be said that in order to deliver mass production as quickly as possible and reduce financial pressure, "OEM" is a way that driverless passenger car research and development enterprises cannot avoid in the early stage of development. Even Xiaomi, which officially announced the construction of the car, also has a list of "gossip" cooperative foundries, including the Great Wall, BYD and so on.
As a start-up, why does Nishii Technology choose independent research and development and manufacturing, and take the "software and hardware integration" route?
In this regard, Tan Limin explained to all-weather technology that the development of driverless commercial vehicles is not as difficult as driverless passenger cars, which is relatively simple; at the same time, due to the differences in thinking and rhythm with the main engine factory, the cooperation may not be particularly smooth, so it chooses to build self-made driverless commercial vehicles. In his view, independent research and development and manufacturing is not only conducive to grasping the rhythm of development, but also better product consistency.
Although from the cost side, building a factory will bring some financial pressure, but it is much smaller than manufacturing driverless passenger cars.
According to Tan Limin, the structure of driverless passenger cars is relatively complex, "even if a suspension, whether it is hydraulic or air suspension development and manufacturing is very expensive, and the truck uses steel plate suspension, which is very simple." Like the domestic 'Wei Xiaoli' in the development of the vehicle investment is tens of billions, we may be their 1%-2%. ”
But in terms of the scale of financing that has been disclosed so far, Xijing Technology still needs more "bullets".
With the mass production of intelligent power-changing driverless commercial vehicles, Tan Limin is full of confidence, revealing to all-weather technology that the company is expected to achieve profitability soon.
In addition to selling driverless commercial vehicles, Nishii Technology's business model includes vehicle retrieval services. In this mode, the driverless vehicle is self-sustained by Nishii Technology, and the platform will charge according to the number of vehicle operations that the user retrieves.
Q-Power intelligent energy service (substation) internal structure
In addition, after the opening of the era of power exchange for driverless commercial vehicles in Xijing, the company will also build a power station to develop a rental service model like a driverless passenger car.
3
"Vertical and horizontal" 100 billion unmanned port logistics
With the rapid development of global trade and the maturity of driverless technology, the scale of the port driverless industry is also expanding.
According to songhe capital, from the perspective of the proportion of autonomous driving scale in various fields in the world, the passenger car market accounted for 63%, ranking first; followed by the port, accounting for 11.3%, and the scale of the port driverless industry in 2020 has reached 27.9 billion US dollars (about 177.23 billion yuan).
Image source: Prospective Industry Research Institute
As the world's second largest economy and the largest trading country, after nearly three decades of development, China has formed five major coastal port groups around the Bohai Sea, the Yangtze River Delta, the southeast coast, the Pearl River Delta and the southwest coastal area, and the appearance of the port has undergone earth-shaking changes.
According to the Ministry of Transport, among the top 10 ports in terms of global port cargo throughput and container throughput in 2020, Chinese ports account for 8 and 7 seats respectively, and the scale of port logistics is developing rapidly.
However, in the context of rising port throughput, how to achieve cost reduction and efficiency increase has become the main problem that major ports need to solve.
According to the China Water Transport Network, the current cost of truck drivers in domestic port operations accounts for more than 50% of the entire port transportation costs; in addition, the driving experience and driving qualifications required by trucks are high, and the shortage of truck drivers during the peak period of port operations is serious, and a series of labor problems give ports the opportunity and space for unmanned development.
Looking at China's port unmanned driving industry, in addition to port driverless R&D enterprises such as Xijing Technology, Mainline Technology, and Si Nian Intelligent Driving, there are also automobile manufacturers such as SAIC, FAW Group, and Sany Heavy Industry in active layout.
As of October last year, Mainline Technology has delivered more than 100 driverless electric collector cards to domestic port customers; Si Nian Intelligent Driving, which started late, has also deployed nearly 40 vehicles to enter the normal unmanned operation as of December 2021, and it is expected to gradually remove all security personnel in 2022.
SAIC's 5G+L4 smart heavy-duty trucks have also completed a total of about 61,000 transshipment containers by the end of December 2021; sany's first five pure electric unmanned collection cards have been jointly tested and trial operated in Shenzhen Mawan Smart Port since June 2020, and the two sides have signed a cooperation agreement on 18 unmanned collection cards in early 2021.
At a time when the outside world is focused on driverless passenger cars, the driverless commercial vehicle track has been stormy. Nishii Technology, which is in it, plans to continue to develop "vertically" in the future.
Vertically, in the container logistics industry continue to deepen the cultivation, through unmanned technology to open up and connect the nodes of all aspects of port logistics, around the AI base to achieve the digitization of the whole port; horizontally, around the new energy driving and new energy heavy trucks to expand the business width and coverage, such as, from the initial technical system construction, to the intelligent network truck market, and then to battery research and development, around the new energy step by step.
At the beginning of 2022, Xijing Technology was exposed to obtain a new round of financing. Although the specific financing amount and valuation information were not announced, in terms of the number of financings, the company is not far from landing in the secondary market.
As for whether there is an IPO plan in China, Tan Limin did not answer positively, only saying that "we are working hard to develop the business, and we are ready to come back to fruition in the future." ”