For the autonomous driving industry, 2021 is a year of acceleration.
This year, there has been a great acceleration in terms of policy, capital, talent and commercialization progress, bringing autonomous driving to an unprecedented height.
It shows what a wonderful power can erupt when an industry piles up enough money and talent, plus policy escorts.
There was also a landmark event in 2021, when Tesla's market capitalization exceeded one trillion US dollars.
The century-old auto industry is undergoing tremendous changes, and the valuation methods of the capital market for auto companies have completely changed; at the same time, Tesla has also triggered a series of ripple effects, driving a series of great changes in the intelligent driving supply chain, including battery materials, digital chips, cockpit chips, MCUs, IGBTs, chassis and other key technical links.
In this lively year, there are also a tidal wave of lidar on the car and a sliding chassis that has sprung up.
The capital market, which has always had the most sensitive sense of smell, uses money to push the wave of intelligence to the highest peak.
According to the "2022 China Autonomous Driving Industry Research Report" written by 36Kr and Hanergy Investment, there will be more than 94 financing incidents in the field of autonomous driving in 2021, and the cumulative financing amount will exceed 40 billion.
L4-level autonomous driving company Tucson successfully landed on the NASDAQ in the future, becoming the world's first autonomous driving stock, with a market value of more than 10 billion US dollars; Mobileye, which plans to be listed independently at a valuation of 50 billion.
The hustle and bustle doesn't belong to everyone.
2021 is a year of loneliness for executives of traditional car startups. The new car companies founded by traditional automakers represented by Tianji and Aiways are basically "lonely".
The contrast between the two is not to hold high and step low, but to better understand the reasons for the diversion of the "river" and where this intelligent tide will eventually flow.
01
Lidar on the car outbreak year
On October 25, 2021, Tesla's market value exceeded $1 trillion, which is a landmark event in the automotive industry.
This means that the capital market has jumped out of the previous vision of the "scale x gross profit" valuation of car companies, and software profits and service revenues are also taken into account, which is the biggest cornerstone and imagination space of Tesla's trillion valuation.
Model 3 turned out to be a new electronic and electrical architecture, and the intelligent experience brought by large computing power. Since then, intelligence has become the most important dimension for evaluating cars.
Tesla's FSD computing platform has laid a solid foundation for Autopliot's computing power; but Tesla only serves its own closed-loop ecology; therefore, other car companies have sought computing support from outside, and Nvidia, Horizon, and Black Sesame have become sought after targets; at the same time, MCU and cockpit chips have also ushered in a wave of investment frenzy.
Unlike the pure visual route that Tesla adheres to, all car companies are looking for a path to cover Tesla.
Adhering to the pure visual route on intelligent driving requires facing computational problems, AI problems, and data problems. The emergence of lidar will reduce the difficulty of the problem, because the perception ability of lidar is slightly stronger than pure vision, which can avoid problems such as visual recognition algorithms, chips, positioning maps, etc., making the ODD range of automatic driving further expanded, and even better at the safety level.
At the 2021 Guangzhou Auto Show, car companies have launched a marketing war with several lidar gimmicks.
In 2021, the models using lidar are: Xiaopeng P5, Xiaopeng G9, WM M7, NIO ET 7, NIO ET5, Great Wall Motor Mech Dragon, GAC Aian flagship Aion LX Plus, etc., new and old forces are on lidar.
In the matter of how to use lidar well, different car companies have different depths of thinking.
In the view of car companies that truly have the ability to intelligently underlay, how to transform the technical value of lidar into user value is the real meaning of using lidar, otherwise it is difficult for consumers to accept the price of bicycles for no reason.
Under such a purpose-oriented approach, they will think about the performance, cost, placement position, volume of lidar, and the degree of integration with the back-end algorithm, etc., not simply for the purpose of using lidar and using lidar.
For all car companies, the use of lidar is the "first" thing, different suppliers have different suggestions, such as placing on the roof, the field of view will be relatively open, but in the body of the streamline to make a certain sacrifice; the face noise before the car is relatively small, the disadvantage is the low utilization of measuring parameters.
In the face of such unknown risks, only the No. 1 person dared to make a decision. The placement position will also pose a challenge to the product itself, taking the lidar placement position on the roof of the WEILAI ET7 as an example, which is a challenge for many lidar manufacturers, and this placement position requires that the thickness of the lidar must be within 45 mm, otherwise it is difficult to enter the front installation.
For enterprises with intelligent underlying capabilities such as Xiaopeng and Weilai, they do not rely on the lidar to raise the price of the vehicle for the reason, because they are confident of making profits through the "automatic driving software subscription" model; and more car companies still look at lidar with a "hardware stacking" idea, and use lidar as a reason to raise prices to achieve the purpose of profitability, so that thinking down will lead to the cost of the entire set of automatic driving system hardware will be very expensive and not competitive.
But whatever kind of thinking about lidar, this wave has already begun.
By the end of 2021, a single-speed Tengjuchuang company has held a total of more than 40 fixed-point orders for models.
At the same time, the large-scale launch of lidar has also brought a comprehensive increase in valuation for lidar companies, and there is news that Sagitar is raising Series G financing at a valuation of 18 billion.
02
The opportunity for domestic suppliers has come
Tesla's success has verified the feasibility of the progressive path, and car companies are also looking for a path to sprint intelligence in many ways, and finding reliable suppliers has become one of the fastest methods.
As an example, Mobileye is the leader in assisted driving. Mobileye's loading volume was 37 million units in 2020 and a record 50 million vehicles in 2021.
Behind the soaring digital growth, it generally reflects the intelligent anxiety of car companies. On the one hand, car companies need Mobileye, on the other hand, car companies want to have better suppliers in addition to Mobileye.
This makes a large number of excellent domestic enterprises have more opportunities.
The CEO of a driver assistance company said to the heart of the car:
"By 2020, we believe that commercial vehicle penetration and availability will be significantly faster than passenger cars. Because commercial vehicles are a regulation-driven industry, now that the regulations for commercial vehicles have been introduced, it is very conducive to the development of assisted driving; and the passenger car market is more of a market-driven industry. After 2020, due to Tesla's drive, a large number of car companies are laying out the functions of L2+."
In the process of finding better intelligent suppliers, car companies have two eternal demands - "cost reduction" and "supply guarantee", and these two demands cannot be fully realized by relying only on foreign suppliers.
Therefore, all car companies need to cultivate domestic suppliers, especially in the business of assisted driving.
Only in the current context, localization is no longer a war that simply competes for cost, service, and response speed. Car companies also require suppliers to provide a set of intelligent driving systems that are more suitable for Chinese driving scenarios and better understand Chinese driving habits.
For driver assistance manufacturers, this is both an opportunity and a challenge.
Scaling and benchmarking delivery has become an important indicator for suppliers to compete, and now it is the era of "demo is demo, product is product".
The CEO told the heart of the car: "2022 is the year of delivery, and large-scale assisted driving will be on the car in large quantities. Creating benchmark customers will help us open up the situation and attract more customers; in addition, large-scale delivery is the most important issue, and the so-called large-scale delivery is a stable and reliable product line that can withstand thousands or even tens of thousands of shipments per month."
If the product quality is excellent, it can obtain the equal status of foreign suppliers in the supplier sequence of car companies, so as to achieve a real sense of equal strength; if it cannot win from the product strength level, it is necessary to continue the previous service and price play.
03
Lost traditional Autobots
At this moment when Tesla is soaring, it is intertwined with the loneliness of traditional automakers.
2021 is a year where the winners and losers are particularly distinct, Tesla's market value is trillions, and the "Wei Xiaoli" has drawn a clear line between wins and losses with an annual delivery volume of nearly 100,000 vehicles.
On the other hand, the new car companies founded by traditional automakers represented by Tianji and Aiways are "lost". These executives from traditional auto people want to regain the glory of a "Volkswagen", proving that traditional auto people are no weaker than Internet people.
But what is cruel is that this is an all-out war of thinking, concepts, organizational advancement, and methodology.
Three or four years ago, Skyrim also bet on the product of the extended range, and the ideal is also a teammate of this track.
The leaders smiled softly at the "Learning Ideals" from the staff inside Skyline, and when the Ideal ONE delivered 100,000 units, Skyline truly realized the need to learn from this formidable competitor.
At a time when autonomous driving is becoming a consensus today, there is even a discussion battle inside Skyline that "can't get on assisted driving". Skyline executives are very unfamiliar with autonomous driving, and such experience will lead to the conclusion that I am not at ease with the use of assisted driving, and how users can use it with confidence.
The limitations of experience are in many ways. For example, in the case of whether the car needs to start the button, Skyline once launched an "internal referendum" to decide whether the start button should be retained, and the final result was retention.
The departing Skyline engineer told Heart of the Car, "They [Skyrim's colleagues] have been driving Chevrolet for ten years and take it for granted that the vehicle needs a start button."
Not all the moments are shackled by experience, and everyone wants to make a change and get rid of the "carpooling" thinking of the past - the limitation of putting cars together at the lowest cost.
Skyrim realized that the car experience needed to converge on electronics, using Tesla as the target to create the same user experience.
Skyline hopes to replicate the same insensible entry and exit function as Tesla, but the final delivery is that the user is required to actively trigger the door opening button on the phone.
The core reason for this huge gap is that there are not enough antennas in the car, so it is impossible to judge the location of the mobile phone, nor can it judge the user's intention and location.
The solution is actually very simple, that is, to add an antenna in the car.
But adding antennas meant adding more costs, and eventually abandoned tesla's insensible access plan.
The departing Skyline engineer revealed to The Heart of the Car: "This incident fully demonstrates the significance and value of the leadership is not clear and unaware of the in-and-out. If this were to happen in an ideal car, it would be impossible for Li to give you money to buy antennas and modules, because Li would want to know what this means to users."
One of the things that shocked the engineer's heart the most was that after the three or four engineers of Skyline spent more than half a year finally completely smoothing out Tesla's shift logic, Tesla announced that the Model S Plaid canceled the gear lever and added the automatic shift function, one step in place, from manual shift to direct driving.
He said to the heart of the car: "It took more than half a year to finally copy Tesla, but others did not use it."
In September 2021, the Model Y became the first SUV in the list with sales of 33,033 units, officially replacing the Haval H6, the god car that has dominated the list for many years.
Ironclad facts prove that an old era has come to an end and a new era is rising.
04
The attitude of capital has changed
The era of "smart driving" is not a black swan, but a "gray rhinoceros". Money with a keen sense of smell shoulders the mission of "one million profits".
The success of Tesla and "Wei Xiaoli" this year has allowed capital to see opportunities for suppliers and upstream and downstream industry chains.
The biggest cake in between comes from the innovative track of OS system, middle key, battery material, MCU, IGBT, sliding chassis and so on.
Unlike the pursuit of self-driving companies a few years ago, the enthusiasm of capital for companies with excessive absolute values and unclear commercialization paths has been greatly reduced.
An executive of an investment institution told Auto Heart: "The fundamental reason is that there are fewer exit channels for capital. On the one hand, the tension between China and the United States coupled with data supervision has made self-driving companies almost unable to access the US capital market; on the other hand, although the Hong Kong stock market has no requirements for profits, it has requirements for sales, according to the regulations of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, listing on the main board and the ChiNext board, the revenue requirement for the last 1 year is greater than or equal to HK$500 million."
This is a fantasy for driverless companies that are still in the investment stage.
For the above reasons, the Pony.ai that was originally planned to be listed through the SPAC method in June 2021 can only be shelved in the end; according to the heart of the car, there is also Zhijia Technology that also hopes to be listed in the SPAC method.
The difference is that it is rumored that Zhijia Technology will split China and the United States into two companies, with American companies listed on the US stock market and Chinese companies likely to sell to a logistics giant.
Unlike the vast majority of companies, Tucson is one of the lucky few to successfully go public in the future.
Some investors said to Auto Heart: "In my opinion, Tucson is an American company. Because its structure and business focus are in the United States, it is not unusual to be listed in the context of this Sino-US struggle. In addition, Tucson is somewhat scarce, so it can successfully card slots. But Tucson has risks from U.S. monetary policy, and once tightened, Tucson's valuation will plunge sharply."
After the successful listing of Tucson, more than $1 billion was raised through the IPO, which can successfully help Tucson build a driverless freight network and invest in research and development.
05
L4 presses the Commercialization Accelerator key
Capital's expectations have accelerated the commercialization of L4 autonomous driving companies, and they want to show the full range of changes brought about by L4 technology.
In the early stages, technology acts as a scarcity factor. At this stage, it is mainly to look at demos, initially prove its technical capabilities, and have a prototype of landing; when the technology develops to a certain stage, the judgment dimension of a company will be coupled with the progress of commercialization.
After several years of technological precipitation and money-burning wars, the market is calling for an L4-level autonomous driving company that will make money and make its own blood.
The first to explore commercialization was Baidu Apollo.
Entering autonomous driving for 8 years, Baidu has not actively announced the revenue of its business until August 2021, when Robin Li voluntarily disclosed that the revenue of ApolloACE intelligent transportation was 200 million.
According to Baidu's 2021 Q3 financial report, Apollo L4 accumulated test miles
Over 16 million kilometers, Apollo has been granted 411 autonomous driving test licenses, reflecting Apollo's ability to test in different geographic areas and in a wide range of scenarios;
In addition, Apollo's self-driving service platform Radish Quick Run has doubled orders from the previous month and has landed in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Changsha, Cangzhou and other places.
WM Motor signed an agreement with Baidu to install The Pilot Assisted Driving (ANP) provided by Baidu on the W6 SUV, bringing the total number of brands cooperating with Apollo in intelligent driving and infotainment solutions to 31.
On November 25, 2021, Wei Dong, vice president and chief safety operation officer of Baidu's intelligent driving business group, held a (autonomous driving) commercialization pilot certificate.
On the same day, a resident of Yizhuang, Beijing, used Baidu Apollo's self-driving travel service platform "Radish Run" to complete the first payment.
This is the first paid order for autonomous driving generated by Beijing since the launch of the pilot project of autonomous driving commercialization.
However, in Wei Dong's view, the current commercialization is still in the process of exploration, there is no order volume and other goals, more is to verify the real demand, as well as to understand the user's real consumption pattern after payment, so that there is more basis for follow-up investment calculation.
In addition to innovating in Robotaxi's business model, the exploration of commercialization has also entered the level of mass production and front-loading.
At the beginning of this year, the sixth generation of Pony's autonomous driving solution has a new upgrade in sensors and selection.
According to the official introduction, the new system is aimed at vehicle-level mass production from the aspects of modeling design, parts research and development and selection, software and hardware coupling, safety redundancy and system assembly production.
There is no doubt that the competition in 2022 will be even more intense.
In the smart car, the newly entered self-traveler, set the degree of sharpening the knife, and strive for the next ticket; in automatic driving, technology companies have moved closer to car companies, mass production and landing have become the two main themes.
This is a game of the brave, but also a contest and wrestling between the strong and the strong, and it will also be an all-round contest of technology, capital, operation, resources, etc.
The old order is being broken, new rules are being established, and the four wheels are being injected with a whole new imagination.