Looking back at the industrial boom in 2021, the car-making fever in the field of autonomous driving is definitely on the list. Among them, the smart truck track ushered in a situation of a hundred flowers.
Some first-line manufacturers and new car-making forces have entered the track layout, and more and more companies have released smart heavy trucks, such as star start-ups Xiaoma Zhixing, Wenyuan Zhixing, Baidu, Didi, traditional car manufacturers SAIC Group, Geely, etc. 2021 can be described as the debut of smart heavy trucks.
We know that the easiest scenario for autonomous driving to land is a closed scene and a fixed route. This is the natural use scenario for smart heavy trucks. Under the trend of mature automatic driving technology, smart heavy trucks have reached the critical point of commercial landing, smart trucks have "emerged", and the mass production process has entered an accelerated situation.
For the track of smart heavy trucks, its rise is highly correlated with the constraints existing in the logistics industry:
1. The operation mode of the logistics industry has a low degree of centralization, high cost, and the efficiency of docking cargo and truck information is not high.
2. Heavy trucks are loaded with heavy loads, there are many blind spots, the working environment of practitioners is poor, and the safety risks are high. It is reported that the accident rate of commercial vehicles is as high as 1.9 per million kilometers. Of the accidents in which these trucks are primarily responsible, 37 percent are human factors and 35 percent are due to equipment blind spots.
3. Environmental pollution, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter emitted by high-power diesel trucks are equivalent to about 200 cars, and carbon emissions are equivalent to 100 cars, which causes a great burden on environmental pollution.
Behind the abundant materials that trucks bring us, safety and environmental protection have become areas that need to be changed urgently. Heavy trucks are recognized as "road killers", and many drivers on the highway will consciously avoid heavy trucks in addition to actively avoiding luxury cars. After learning about many tragic cases through the Internet and traffic video education, everyone is tacit about staying away from heavy trucks. With the continuous scale operation of the commodity economy, whether it is production or consumption, it needs a high-quality and efficient logistics system to support it. The demand for trunk logistics is also growing, and there is an urgent need for efficiency and safety changes.
The industrial process of smart heavy trucks has also pressed the accelerator key in the context of these "just needs".
Accelerate the entry into large-scale mass production
At the end of 2020, the Ministry of Transport of the People's Republic of China publicly issued the Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Development and Application of Road Traffic Autonomous Driving Technology (hereinafter referred to as the Opinions), which clearly proposed to encourage the demonstration application of autonomous driving cargo in combination with demand.
At the same time, on the landing path, the "Opinions" proposes to encourage ports, airports, logistics stations, transportation infrastructure construction sites and other areas with relatively closed environments and postal express terminal distribution scenarios, and under the premise of doing a good job of risk assessment and emergency plan, promote it to road freight and other scenarios as appropriate.
With the support of demand, technology and industrial policies, smart heavy trucks have entered the stage of accelerating large-scale mass production. Smart heavy trucks created the future of Sen, taking the lead in completing the IPO listing last year, with a market value of more than 10 billion US dollars. Recently, Tucson also announced the successful completion of all-unmanned tests on the open road in the United States. According to the prospectus, in 2020, Tucson has launched a front-loading mass production cooperation with Navistar and Volkswagen's Traton, planning to build and deliver L4 driverless trucks. At present, 5700 pre-orders have been received for the car, and it is scheduled to be delivered in 2024.
Entering the market in 2018, Wincher Technology, which is committed to building a mass-produced self-driving truck, has also entered the stage of delivering L3 production vehicles. At last year's artificial intelligence conference, Yinche Technology unveiled two mass-produced autonomous driving heavy trucks. These two models were jointly developed with Dongfeng Commercial Vehicle and Sinotruk and are equipped with the Yinche Xuanyuan automatic driving system.
Xiaoma Zhixing entered the field of autonomous trucks through the layout of Xiaoma smart heavy trucks in 2019, and Li Hengyu, head of Xiaoma Intelligent Heavy Trucks, released a report card at the 2021 Artificial Intelligence Conference. After obtaining the road transport business license, Xiaoma Smart Heavy Truck carried out commercial operations. Li Hengyu said that the Xiaoma Zhixing self-driving truck has completed about 13,650 tons of freight transportation, and the commercial operation mileage has reached 37,466 kilometers.
Heavy-duty truck autonomous driving enterprise Zhijia Technology and FAW Jiefang mass-produced high-level autonomous driving heavy-duty trucks, covering 150,000 kilometers of highways in China. At the same time, with FAW Jiefang, Manbang Group, Xinzhihong and other partners, we have also started the trial operation of high-speed trunk logistics SL4 autonomous heavy truck warehouse to warehouse in Wuhan and other places. Start-ups and traditional car manufacturers join hands to give full play to their own advantages in their fields.
In the field of automatic driving, The Internet giant is also a force that cannot be ignored. We know that Baidu can be described as blossoming everywhere in the field of automatic driving, and in the smart heavy-duty truck track, the smart heavy-duty truck "Deep Direction And Starway First Generation" jointly created with Shiqiao Technology and DeepWay was also unveiled in September last year. The Deep Direction Starway Smart Heavy Truck Series announced at the press conference that it plans to commercialize mass production in 2023 and achieve L4 level technically in 2025. In addition, the ali damo academy automatic driving laboratory and Didi automatic driving company are also laying out heavy truck autonomous driving research and development.
We can peek at the leopard from the enterprise management running in front of these industries, and the autonomous driving heavy truck track has completed the first half of the test and moved towards the commercial scale of the closed scene in the second half. Still, players involved still have a long way to go to emerge from the crowded self-driving truck track.
Reefs: The dilemma of mass production
In the field of commercial vehicles, we know that in some special scenarios, it can take the lead in applying relatively high-level automatic driving technology, such as semi-closed high-speed scenes, as well as open low-speed scenes and closed low-speed scenes. For smart heavy trucks, in the closed low-speed scene, the landing is the fastest, and the current policies and regulations are gradually opened and allowed, and the obstacles are reduced a lot. However, in terms of large-scale application, smart heavy trucks also face many problems, limiting the process of their scale.
1. The policy and supporting facilities of intelligent heavy truck road test are immature. For autonomous vehicles, road testing remains a key means of improving technology and safety. In terms of the opening of passenger car road testing, the attitude of local governments is still relatively positive, and in terms of the opening of the closed test area of the highway section, the policy and openness of the test are relatively limited. The main reason is also technical and security considerations, but this also creates a cycle of slow development: not opening up road tests, slow technological progress, security can not be guaranteed, and policies will be more conservative. The degree of road test opening is low, not to mention the real open road for trial operation.
2. Technology still requires a lot of room to upgrade. Whether it is L3 or L4 level routes, the automatic driving technology of smart heavy trucks is relatively immature, and the smart heavy trucks that can currently run on the road are all in the role of auxiliary driving, on the one hand, resulting in a situation of high costs, on the other hand, the industry's landing and initial development stage still needs continuous education from the market.
3. The norms and policies of safety and insurance are absent. Once there is a safety accident in the smart heavy truck, the determination of rights and responsibilities and the compensation of insurance, there are currently no clear norms, vague and blank rules and policies and other gray areas, curbing the healthy and orderly development of the industry.
The existence of these "speed bumps" also makes the development of smart heavy trucks as a whole show a contradictory situation of high voices, order outbreaks, and limited landing. This situation will not change much in the short term.
The maturity of the driverless technology of smart heavy trucks not only limits the security of smart heavy trucks, but also limits their ability to enter the commercial market, whether it can be upgraded to a higher level and form a higher replicability is the direction that smart heavy truck enterprises need to work together. The landing of scale means the maturity of the business model, and the problems of basic versatility, security, and cost urgently need to be solved before it is possible to land on a large scale.
Two-legged evolution: electrification + intelligence
Under the development trend of comprehensive attack and large waves, the development of smart heavy trucks also has a relatively obvious evolutionary trend: the development of electrification and intelligence. Among the domestic commercial vehicle manufacturing forces, two major trends are profoundly affecting the commercial vehicle manufacturing industry. First, under the background of the "double carbon" goal, green new energy vehicles are accelerating their development; second, the 5G network is evolving to the new 5G-Advanced standard (5.5G), helping the vehicle-to-road collaborative commercialization of autonomous driving and other vehicle networking and Internet of Things scenarios. New energy + intelligence has become an irreversible trend of the intelligent evolution of intelligent heavy truck electrification.
In the "2020 China Electric Vehicle Replacement Market Operating Model and Economic Analysis Report", we will find the reform value of smart heavy trucks in carbon reduction. In the report, it is reported that every 1,000 heavy trucks can reduce 140,000 tons of carbon dioxide and 12,500 tons of pollutant emissions per year, and the energy consumption cost is 5-10% less than that of fuel vehicles, and the energy saving and carbon reduction effect is remarkable. Driven by long-term carbon reduction policies, it is expected that by 2025, electric heavy trucks will show a spurt of development, and the market capacity will reach 140,000 vehicles, of which 50,000 will be short-distance heavy trucks, and urban logistics vehicles and urban light trucks are expected to exceed 90,000.
Among the newly promoted car-making forces, the electrification of smart heavy trucks is also a visible increase to the naked eye. For example, the electric mining cards that have landed in the mine have been widely recognized by the market due to their obvious economy and high emission reduction. DeepWay, Xijing Technology, Xidi Intelligent Driving, Yuandong New Energy, etc. are all green smart heavy-duty truck manufacturers that are growing under the background of double carbon, and electric heavy-duty trucks have also entered a period of rapid development under the support of policies.
Of course, in the process of development, smart heavy trucks are not just the continuous evolution of bicycles. Its supporting trunk logistics facilities are also constantly evolving. For example, the construction of smart highways, V2X facilities to support bicycle intelligence, intelligent logistics network coordination and operation, etc., used to achieve smart heavy truck replacement solutions faster, warehouse and warehouse, warehouse and car, car and order, etc.
The model of high-speed intelligent trunk logistics requires the coordination of multi-party forces to achieve qualitative upgrading, and this qualitative upgrade blueprint, smart heavy truck players have sharpened their knives in the advanced field, whether it is as a rich market choice, or as a role of providing think tanks and ecological builders, this trillion market has been stirred and revived.
Smart heavy trucks have injected new variables into the logistics and automatic driving industry, not only the upgrading of products and trunk logistics models, but also the development of the traditional logistics industry; and for the protection of the value of life, thanks to automatic driving technology, smart heavy trucks can also prevent fatigue driving and continuously reduce the probability of heavy truck accidents. For heavy-duty truck drivers who are decreasing due to the harsh environment, escort life and upgrade the working environment to improve the survival status of this group.