Car stuff (public number: chedongxi)
The author | Xiaohan
Editor| Xiao Han
ByteDance has invested in a self-driving company again!
Not long ago, the port autonomous driving company Si Nian Zhi Driving announced that it had obtained a round of financing of 100 million yuan, led by ByteDance, and old shareholders such as GF Xinde, Jinbang Capital and Chentao Capital continued to follow suit.
As an Internet giant with ace products such as Douyin and Today's Headlines, and an Internet small giant with revenue of more than 300 billion yuan in 2021, ByteDance's every move has attracted the attention of the industry. In contrast, Si Nian Intelligent Driving, which was only established in 2020, is only a newcomer to the autonomous driving industry.
So what kind of achievements has Si Nian Zhi Driving made and can be recognized by ByteDance? What is the company's development strategy in the port sector?
A few days ago, Che Dongxi rushed to the Headquarters of Si Nian Zhi Driving in Beijing and conducted an in-depth dialogue with ITS CEO He Bei and found the answers to these questions.
First, ByteDance is the third largest shareholder The company's valuation is 700 million
Founded in April 2020, although It is only a new company with less than 100 people in the field of autonomous driving, its CEO He Bei is an uncompromising self-driving veteran.
After graduating from the Department of Electronics of Tsinghua University, he served as a scientist in Baidu's Intelligent Vehicle Division, and then co-founded the main line technology of a well-known domestic autonomous driving company as a co-founder and CTO. In the years of work experience, He Bei has led or participated in the development of 17 automatic driving systems, involving unmanned collection cards in ports, unmanned trucks in trunk logistics and other directions.
▲Dr. He Bei, CEO of Si Nian Zhi Driving
Talking about the reasons for ByteDance's participation in the investment, He Bei smiled and said that it was inconvenient for the capital to explain, but at the same time revealed an interesting detail to the car.
"Once I went to a post-investment conference at Byte, and there were more than 100 people on the spot, almost all of whom were CTOs or technical directors." He Bei said, "Byte and we are both technology-led companies, and we are attracted to each other. ”
In early 2021, ByteDance also invested more than $25 million in Light Boat Zhihang, which focuses on unmanned buses, which was founded by several technical experts from Waymo - the technology label is also obvious.
He Bei revealed to Che Dongxi that the valuation of Si Nian Zhi Driving reached 700 million yuan after completing this round of financing, and ByteDance also became its third largest shareholder. The first and second largest shareholders are the founding team and early investor Chentao Capital, respectively.
In May 2020 and February 2021, Si Nian Zhi Driving received angel round and Pre-A round financing respectively.
Second, concentrate on helping the port transport containers Gross profit up to 50%
The main product of Si Nian Zhi Driving at this stage is unmanned collection card - an unmanned truck that transports containers in the port. As an autonomous driving company, the development model of Si Nian Intelligent Driving is different from other similar players.
In the autonomous driving industry, whether it is the direction of carrying people or goods, most companies position themselves as a technology provider - building autonomous vehicles and then selling the vehicles to the demand side (such as selling unmanned collection cards to port companies). The latter specifically uses these vehicles to carry people or transport goods, and the autonomous driving company provides technical support and after-sales service.
▲ Si Nianzhi drove the unmanned truck racing team
For autonomous driving companies that are good at technology research and development, this model is obviously the most appropriate, after all, this is also what technical experts are best at.
Si Nian Zhi Driving did the opposite, choosing to operate his own vehicles after developing unmanned collection cards, and making money for the port to pull containers.
According to reports, Si Nian Zhi Driving has deployed 25 cars and 16 cars in Tangshan Port and Ningbo Port respectively to provide transportation services, and pulling a container can obtain more than 20 yuan of income. This year, Si Nian Intelligent Driving plans to expand 4 more ports, and the fleet size will reach 200 units.
He Bei told the car that at this stage, the unmanned collection card has not yet undergone large-scale technical verification, or has not reached the state of perfect use when buying it back, so the willingness to buy a car at the port is not strong, and the path of directly selling the car is not feasible.
There is no such obstacle to the operating model – for ports, as long as the boxes can be transported away at the same cost, they do not care whether people drive or machines drive.
"The same is the delivery of goods, we do not have the labor cost of drivers. Each vehicle can have a gross profit of 50% of the annual freight revenue. When talking about the business model, He Bei directly calculated an account to the car, "After removing the safety officer, we can work 23 hours a day per car, pull almost 30,000 boxes in 1 year, and bring 600,000 yuan of income." ”
He Bei revealed that the revenue of Si Nian Intelligent Driving in 2021 has reached the order of ten million yuan. According to the calculation of 200 vehicles deployed in 2022, Si Nian Intelligent Driving can have an annual revenue of 120 million yuan.
By 2023, the company's unmanned collection card is also expected to land in the port of Hamburg, Germany. At that time, its unmanned collection card is expected to achieve commercial landing in 7 ports at home and abroad, reaching a fleet size of 600 to 700 units, and achieving breakeven.
Third, unmanned driving has been achieved in the port The real difficulty is under the iceberg
"Driving is just the tip of the iceberg in the port, and the operational part is the real problem." Talking about the real doorway of autonomous driving in the port, He Bei gave such an example to the car thing.
Unlike urban and highway scenarios, ports, as closed operational campuses, have a much lower traffic complexity and are easier to control individual traffic participants through rules. Therefore, after solving specific problems such as centimeter-level precise positioning, electromagnetic interference, and identification of large equipment, unmanned can be quickly realized.
At the end of 2021, Si Nian zhi driving removed the safety officer of the vehicle in Tangshan Port and started the normal unmanned operation.
He Bei told Che Dong that the takeover rate of driverless vehicles driven by Si Nian Zhi was close to zero. According to his plan, in the first half of 2022, he will try to remove the safety officers of all vehicles and completely achieve unmanned.
▲Si Nian intelligent driving driverless collection card
In He Bei's view, the difficulty of the homework part is two parts.
First of all, it is necessary to solve a number of specific technical problems such as docking with the port operating system, communication middleware, redundant security, and hardware-in-the-loop testing.
Secondly, there are a large number of non-standard, non-regular special cases in the daily operation of the port, such as the wrong container loaded by the vehicle. In the era of manned driving, operators and drivers can easily solve this problem with a phone call. But for driverless cars, no rules mean no enforcement.
"Non-standard problems are handled manually on-site, and there is no such thing as an operating manual." He Bei shrugged his shoulders and said helplessly, "It can only be a little bit of groping." ”
Therefore, before realizing unmanned, Si Nian Zhi Driving actually spent a lot of energy on coordination and communication, such as discussing with the management personnel and equipment operators on the front line of the port how to formulate rules for special situations, and then determining the specific actions of unmanned vehicles on this basis, so as to gradually realize unmanned processing in special cases.
Fourth, entrepreneurship should consider the landing of technology Port autonomous driving is underestimated
In recent years, with the continuous acceleration of the development speed of frontier fields such as intelligent networked vehicles and intelligent transportation, a large amount of capital has entered the core track of automatic driving. One of the most eye-catching is a number of Robotaxi companies, from time to time to report hundreds of millions of dollars, or even more than a dozen, two billion dollars of huge financing, stirring the nerves of the entire industry, and even the whole society.
As an old cannon in the autonomous driving industry, how do He Bei and Si Nian Zhi Driving consider the problem of track selection?
Ho Bey gave a two-dimensional answer.
First, Ho says Robotaxi is difficult to commercialize in the short term. Although this track is very hot, because the urban scene is too complex and has countless Corner Cases, it may not be possible to truly achieve mature and profitable commercial landing results in 10 years.
▲ Si Nianzhi drove an unmanned truck to operate in the port
Because the scene of unmanned collection cards in the port is relatively simple, it has been able to achieve unmanned commercial operation, and has high replicability and can be deployed on a rapid scale.
"As engineers and entrepreneurs, we think about how to commercialize autonomous driving technology at the existing level of technology." Hobe said.
On the other hand, He Bei believes that the outside world underestimates the development prospects of the field of port autonomous driving.
From a narrow point of view, domestic container throughput will stabilize in the same order of magnitude in the short term, for example, the container throughput of all domestic ports in 2021 will be about 283 million. According to the calculation of transporting 20 yuan per box, the overall market size is 5.6 billion yuan, which is indeed much smaller than that of the trillion-level Robotaxi and Robotruck.
But if you look up, you'll find that the port autonomous driving market is far more than just pulling a box.
The first is the port bulk cargo transportation market (such as coal, ore transportation), the scale of about 24 billion. There is also a short-distance transportation market (short-distance barge) between different terminals, nearby parks and industrial zones under the jurisdiction of the port, with a scale of 120 billion yuan. These are all places where self-driving technology can come into play.
According to He Bei, Si Nian Zhi Driving will enter the short barge scene this year. This scenario is essentially a Robotruck for open road driving. After the self-driving technology of the open road matures, Si Nian Intelligent Driving can gradually enter more areas, and even expand to the field of trunk logistics - the ceiling is far less small than the outside world thinks.
As for the hot trunk logistics, He Bei said that it will be gradually popularized after 2025. The reason is consistent with Robotaxi, it is difficult to achieve L4 in the short term, and L2 has been proved to be not just needed.
Conclusion: Autonomous driving in ports is exciting
After communicating with He Bei, The Car Thing felt more and more that the autonomous driving of the port was exciting enough.
First of all, in theory, the automatic driving of the port is easier to land on a large scale, and the actual operation results of The Smart Drive also prove that the unmanned driving has been achieved in the port, and the next step is to make money.
Of course, in addition to the port's autonomous driving business, there is still a huge imagination space and landing possibility in the short-barge market between ports and between ports and parks.
There is no doubt that ports will be the first scenarios for self-driving technology to achieve profitability.