Over 1000 square kilometers! The scale of autonomous driving landed, competing for a "large area of the region"

From testing on sparsely populated roads to entering urban arterial roads to travel with social vehicles, self-driving cars have become more and more common in many cities in China.

On January 28, Nandu reporters learned from AutoX , a Chinese Robotaxi (self-driving taxi) company , that the latest total area of its autonomous driving area has exceeded 1,000 square kilometers. At present, AutoX has carried out autonomous driving road tests in the four first-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, and unmanned fleets can drive from the main roads of the city to the urban villages, with a wider coverage and more complex road conditions. If you compare the area of a single city, 1,000 square kilometers is equivalent to the size of half of Shenzhen.

At present, domestic autonomous driving companies mainly take the route of building L4-level Robotaxi, but to let Robotaxi land, in addition to the technology itself, the area and scope of operation also determine whether Robotaxi really has the ability to serve travel and serve urban transportation.

"For RoboTaxi to truly land, it is necessary to ensure three prerequisites: full of unmanned capabilities to ensure real safety; large coverage area, comparable to normal shared car services; high coverage density, streets and alleys can be reached to meet normal travel needs." An AutoX spokesperson told reporters, "Only when major breakthroughs have been made in the three aspects of full unmanned technology, large area of region, and capillary density, the large-scale landing of unmanned RoboTaxi can be gradually completed." ”

Autonomous vehicles pass through highway toll booths.

At the same time, AutoX synchronously released a 5-hour and 40-minute one-shot to the end of the unmanned vehicle video reality, autonomous vehicles from beginning to end can achieve zero takeover, from day to night, from CBD to urban villages, from tunnels to highways, autonomous vehicles can basically adapt to various scenarios and road conditions.

Nandu reporter learned that at present, a number of Robotaxi enterprises are rapidly expanding their operating area, SAIC's Xiangdao Travel RoboTaxi, is currently operating in Jiading, Shanghai and some areas in Suzhou, and will enter the Shenzhen area this year. The current operation scope of Wenyuan Zhixing mainly covers 144.65 square kilometers of core urban open roads in Guangzhou's Huangpu District, and the operating mileage has exceeded 10 million kilometers (as of mid-January 2022).

During last year's Guangzhou Auto Show, the autonomous driving shuttle car and experience car built by GAC Group, Ruqi Travel, and Wenyuan Zhixing became a beautiful landscape of the auto show, including AutoX, Zebra Zhixing, Ruqi Travel, iFLYTEK and other enterprises, gathered at the "Future Automotive Science and Technology Museum" to focus on displaying future automotive technology represented by artificial intelligence, automatic driving and 5G technology, so that ordinary citizens feel that automatic driving is no longer far away.

The more roads a smart drive vehicle can run, the closer it is to land on a large scale.

Feng Xingya, general manager of GAC Group, recently introduced to reporters that the landing of intelligent driving technology is inseparable from road testing, so that intelligent driving car test "there is a road to go" and "there is a road to go" is the key issue that determines the development speed of intelligent driving cars. At present, there are still multiple difficulties in restricting highway tests, incomplete test scenarios, cumbersome application procedures for road test notices for intelligent driving vehicles, and limited mutual recognition of off-site tests.

At the moment of the rapid development of intelligent driving, including how to open more abundant test scenarios such as highways, how to formulate test management rules for intelligent driving cars in richer scenarios, and how to promote mutual recognition of intelligent driving data in different places, etc., will be the challenges faced by Robotaxi's large-scale landing.

Nandu reporter Zhong Jianting