The author | Harry Zhang
At the end of 2021, two companies, MilleZhixing and Chase Technology, successfully completed the A round of financing, which drew a satisfactory end to the financing feast of the domestic autonomous driving field for a whole year. However, with the continuous investment of capital and the deepening of corporate research and development, the threshold in the field of automatic driving has become higher and higher, and the Matthew effect in the field of automatic driving in 2022 is likely to further appear.
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Back to the main engine factory good shade of the main engine factory automatic driving department
Millima Zhixing is the Great Wall's autonomous driving technology company, and it is thanks to this background that after completing a 300 million yuan Pre-A round of financing at the beginning of this year, in less than 10 months, it once again obtained nearly 1 billion yuan of A round financing from investors such as Hillhouse and Meituan, and the company's overall valuation exceeded 1 billion US dollars, becoming a unicorn enterprise in the domestic autonomous driving technology company with a spoof.
With the full support of Great Wall Motors, the assisted driving solutions of Mimu Zhixing have been successively installed in Weipai Mocha, Tank 300 City Edition, Weipai Latte, Weipai Machiduo, Haval Divine Beast and other models, and the driving mileage of auxiliary driving users has exceeded 4 million kilometers. It is expected that by the end of 2022, the millimae driver assistance system will be installed in 34 Great Wall passenger models, and the number of passenger cars in the next three years is expected to exceed 1 million units. For autonomous driving technology companies, both the amount of vehicles and the actual mileage are important indicators of their valuation. Judging from the current development momentum and scale of Great Wall Motors in China, it is easy to achieve the number of units equipped with more than 1 million units. On such a huge base, it is not difficult for Zhixing to accumulate enough road scene data.
Previously, GM and A.D. made self-driving technology companies such as Cruise and Argo AI their own autonomous driving technology divisions, but there has been a big controversy about whether to list them separately. This year, GM swept the CEO of Cruise out of the house, also because there was a big disagreement between the two sides over whether Cruise was listed separately in the United States. From GM's point of view, keeping Cruise in its own system can maximize GM's own stock price, after all, Cruise has core competitiveness and represents the future of the automotive industry; but in cruise's senior management, the IPO of a single Cruise can maximize high valuation and raise the most resources for Cruise's own development. So we don't judge which approach is better, the situation facing the Great Wall is not necessarily the same as that of General Motors, and the major shareholders usually take a judgment that is most in line with their own interests and their own positioning of the autonomous driving department.
Self-development of high-level autonomous driving requires a lot of investment. This investment is actually difficult for domestic OEMs to rely on their own profits, so from the perspective of Great Wall Motors, it is necessary to seek independence to raise enough funds for its business development to avoid automatic driving with unclear returns becoming its own burden. However, the extent to which the Great Wall's single-column Zhixing can be recognized by other OEMs is currently marked with a big question mark. After all, even Huawei cars have faced the soul torture of SAIC. In fact, zhixing is more embarrassing than Huawei's HI system in terms of status.
Self-driving technology companies are looking for their own way to survive
In addition to the chasing technology that has just completed the A round of financing, in fact, there are many domestic autonomous driving technology companies that are booming and are an important force in the current domestic automatic driving field. Wenyuan Zhixing, Tucson Future, Wincher Technology and Momenta have all obtained financing in 2021, especially Momenta has completed multiple rounds of financing and established joint ventures with SAIC and BYD, which is in the limelight.
For self-driving technology companies, their identity is somewhat awkward. How to convince OEMs to use their own products is a difficult thing, especially considering that high-level autonomous driving is difficult to land in the short term. The L2-level driver assistance technology has become very mature, and many mainstream parts companies have the ability to mass-produce. Baidu and Geely set up a joint venture company to create a new car brand set; Huawei, on the basis of cooperation with BAIC, Changan, and GAC, has also desperately supported Xilis, and even built a new brand AITO, all because it hopes to be able to obtain the dominance of autonomous driving technology, and can no longer rely on people's sniffles.
L4 level autonomous driving is not only a huge investment, but also difficult to mass-produce in the short term. But at the same time, this technology is also an area that has to be invested and takes time to accumulate. Therefore, the joint venture between Momenta and traditional OEMs has become a risk-sharing and most acceptable solution for all parties. For Momenta, on the one hand, it can lock in future customers, and at the same time, it can get more resource support from OEMs and share its own financial pressure. For OEMs, investing in a promising autonomous driving technology company or setting up a joint venture is also to ensure that they can maintain their technological leadership in related fields. After all, compared with the ambitious Huawei and Baidu, technology companies such as Momenta are difficult to challenge their own car-making status and will not become their direct competitors. In addition, Robotaxi is also a promising business for autonomous driving technology companies. But it has to be said that Robotaxi is more of a business model, a good story that self-driving technology companies can convince investors to invest. But to rely on Robotaxi to achieve business profitability for itself, it is still out of reach.
Once these self-driving technology companies have difficulty obtaining sustained financing, the best outcome is to be acquired by OEMs. After Xiaomi officially announced the car this year, it acquired a self-driving company that was only established in 2017 - DeepMotion (Deep Motion Technology) at a cost of 500 million yuan, as the core of its own automatic driving, which is a better case. Cruise and Argo AI were acquired by GM and Ford at the beginning of their establishment, which is a good example. With the increasingly high technical threshold of the entire industry, there will inevitably be many autonomous driving technology companies eliminated in the future, and some of them will be acquired by OEMs, and only a small part of them are destined to become market giants.
L4 level automatic driving is difficult to land in the short term
At present, many new models in China have taken lidar as their standard, which means that the new generation of domestic electric vehicles has changed from a pure visual solution to a visual + lidar solution. With the blessing of lidar, the vehicle's perception of the surrounding situation will be higher, which also lays a solid foundation for the expansion of the pilot function from highways to urban road conditions. However, given the complexity of the road conditions, there is still a long way to go to truly achieve L4 level autonomous driving on urban roads. Most likely, we can achieve autonomous driving from parking, parks to highways, and in urban roads, it may be necessary to accumulate a large amount of data and be achieved through the continuous self-learning of the controller. At the same time, V2X technology under 5G technology must also be accelerated to realize the interconnection of vehicles and vehicles, vehicles and infrastructure, vehicles and people, and vehicles and cloud platforms, and reduce the requirements of autonomous driving controllers for bicycle sensors.
In addition, for the main engine factory, what can be done at present is to achieve the configuration of L4 level automatic driving at the hardware level, including chips and sensors, and then realize the continuous update and upgrading of automatic driving software through OTA in the future, so as to achieve the function of gradually approaching L4 level automatic driving. At the hardware level, the focus of attention of all parties has moved from carrying lidar to self-developed chips. In addition to Tesla, Weilai and Xiaopeng have both released the news of self-developed chips. Many domestic chip design companies, including Horizon, have also risen, and the pattern of competing with NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Mobileye to compete for future autonomous driving master chips is about to take shape. Especially considering the previous maximum pressure exerted by the US government on Huawei, domestic independent brands will also use domestic chip solutions as a backup when developing autonomous driving systems, in case of emergency.
In 2022, the Matthew effect in the field of domestic autonomous driving will be more obvious. After all, Xiaopeng has opened the XPilot 3.5 era, expanding the navigation function from the highway to the urban road scene. However, no matter how advanced these functions are, drivers still need to pay attention to the road conditions at all times and be ready to take over. But including Mercedes-Benz will open L3 level automatic driving below 60km/h on the highway next year, it is actually a signal: the future of automatic driving will be closer and closer to us, and car companies will gradually unlock one after another areas and cities that can cover the pilot function. For ordinary people, this industry will inevitably continue to appear unicorn companies, who can take the lead in IPO and get enough resource support to achieve market value beyond tesla, BYD and Ningde era is not a dream! However, for more companies in this market, layoffs or even fade out of this market is not impossible.