Edit | Yu Bin
Produced by | Chaoqi Network "Yu see column"
On the streets of Yizhuang, Beijing, passengers can use the Baidu Map App to get a Robotaxi (driverless taxi or online car), which is not much different from other manned vehicles when viewed from the outside, but in fact, it is equipped with various advanced scientific and technological equipment such as lidar and sensors.
Although there are still drivers sitting in the main driving position, they rarely take over the control of the car, they are perhaps the easiest car drivers in the world, and Baidu shared unmanned vehicles in the test environment of Beijing's Shougang Park have truly realized driverless driving without drivers, at the same time, Robotaxi of Companies such as Xiaoma Zhixing and Didi has also carried out fixed-point ride and test ride services in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other cities.
The era of driverless cars for all is coming to us
The automobile is one of the greatest inventions in the modern history of mankind, it has greatly improved our social and economic operation efficiency and quality of daily life, as people's lives gradually become rich, the number of domestic cars is also rising, there are currently about 300 million or so.
However, in the era of national driving, all kinds of traffic accidents and road killers are also emerging, the most critical factor is that people's ability and quality are uneven, and even strict traffic rules and driver's license tests cannot guarantee that everyone can reach the level of old drivers, nor can they ensure that everyone can drive carefully and with a high degree of concentration at any time, so the various traffic accidents that occur every year are also growing with the increase in car ownership.
According to the World Health Organization, about 1.35 million people worldwide lose their lives in traffic accidents every year, and 94% of them are caused by human causes, we can imagine that if the drivers are capable, experienced and always focused, the number of traffic accidents will inevitably drop significantly.
With the blessing of internet of vehicles (V2X), lidar, video analytics, 5G, artificial intelligence, Beidou positioning, sensors, big data and other technologies, the increasingly mature driverless technology is gradually making our vision a reality.
The era of unmanned driving has quietly arrived, one of the most likely application scenarios for driverless technology to be realized first is the taxi and online car market, Baidu's Apollo has developed to the fifth generation, there are 3 models, namely Apollo Moon Polar Fox Edition, Weima Version and Ean Edition.
The company has reached 18 million kilometers in terms of safety test mileage of automatic driving, coupled with its automatic driving service platform Radish Run, Baidu Apollo has carried out operational services in five cities in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Changsha and Cangzhou, and users can easily request a car through the Radish Run App.
Up to now, a total of more than 400,000 users have been provided with travel services, the company plans to gradually expand the scope of operations to 30 cities by 2023, in the middle of last year, AutoX (Antu) released the fifth generation of unmanned driving system AutoX Gen5, its third-generation unmanned driving system has already been tested in Shanghai, Shenzhen and other cities.
IHS Markit predicted in the "China Autonomous Driving Market and Future Mobility Market Outlook" that the domestic Robotaxi market size is expected to exceed 1.3 trillion, the future mobility service market will shift to the unmanned vehicle travel scenario, McKinsey also expects that the mainland is likely to become the world's largest autonomous driving market in the future, and the related revenue in the field of autonomous driving will exceed 500 billion US dollars by 2030.
At present, the degree of research and development and application in the field of unmanned driving in overseas markets is roughly the same, as the leader of L4 level autonomous driving technology, Waymo (which belongs to Alphabet with Google) has been working in the field of unmanned driving for more than a decade, but the company's service scope is still limited to Phoenix and Arizona in the United States.
Another application scenario of unmanned driving technology is unmanned delivery vehicles, in May last year, Jingdong, Meituan and Neolithic became the first 3 companies in China to obtain the qualification of unmanned delivery vehicles on the road, compared with manual delivery, unmanned delivery vehicles have a unique advantage in efficiency.
Especially in the face of a more serious epidemic, a community or even a city is in a closed and isolated state, and there is a possibility that the delivery of takeaways or fast people may increase the probability of infection. At this time, unmanned delivery vehicles can come in handy and show their skills,
In the past two years, Meituan's unmanned delivery vehicles have successively shown their skills in 5 cities where regional epidemics have occurred, distributing daily necessities to residents in quarantine and distributing medical supplies to epidemic prevention and control personnel, and the cumulative delivery volume of unmanned delivery vehicles has exceeded 20,000.
After more than a decade of continuous exploration and technology accumulation, unmanned driving technology has entered the development stage from quantitative change to qualitative change, driverless cars are getting closer and closer to large-scale market applications, McKinsey expects that unmanned driving will reach maturity and commercialization in all scenarios, which may wait until 2030.
CICC also predicts that by 2030 or so, it is expected to achieve highly autonomous driving on suburban and urban roads, and it is expected to achieve full automatic driving after 2035, but according to the current application speed of the mainland, it may not take so long for us to truly enter the era of large-scale national autonomous driving.
Driverless technology has entered the second half of rapid development
The progress of technology is endless, leaping forward in technology can always bring unexpected surprises, such as Baidu's driverless car can complete the start brake, acceleration and deceleration, parallel line follow-up, turn around, pull over and other conventional actions like a man-driven vehicle, and can quickly identify pedestrians and obstacles and avoid them in time.
At present, the maturity of unmanned driving technology is not far from the next commercial application, last June, Baidu and ARCFOX Pole Fox jointly released the Apollo Moon Extreme Fox Edition, according to the introduction of the car's driverless ability compared with the previous generation of models increased by nearly 10 times, on the complex urban road delivery success rate of up to 99.99%.
But experience tells us that the remaining 1% is probably the hardest, and that the reliability and safety of autonomous driving remains a major bottleneck, such as an accident at the Tokyo Paralympic Games last year, when a self-driving car from Toyota Motor Corporation injured a Japanese Paralympic athlete in the Olympic Village.
However, I believe that with the advancement of technology, these problems can be solved one by one, and today's driverless technology is not limited to the car itself, it is also developing to the cloud, in addition to the intelligent equipment of the driverless car itself, now relying on 5G and interconnection technology means, the road, vehicle and intelligent control platform can be organically and efficiently composed of a whole, which can greatly improve the driving safety of driverless cars.
Since the current bicycle intelligence is not yet able to cope with various sudden and complex road conditions, with the help of cloud data and cloud security, such as Baidu driverless cars encounter complex on-site environments such as road environment changes, temporary traffic control, road construction, etc., it can rely on Apollo 5G cloud driving to request remote assistance, which can take over the control of driverless cars and help vehicles solve unexpected situations or unconventional problems encountered in driving.
The driverless car of the future may be more like a mobile phone, becoming a smart terminal serving customers, or it may further develop into a transformer-like car robot, in addition to riding, it may also become your personal butler.
From the beginning of commercial application to the final maturity of the technology, driverless technology obviously has a long way to go, although in the experimental and small-scale operation stage, autonomous driving technology has been able to handle many complex road conditions, but if it is to run in the real environment in the future, it may still encounter a variety of unexpected and unexpected events or challenges.
In addition, in the process of commercial operation, it is also necessary to digitally transform the road infrastructure, and the acceptance of users, the commercial operation model, the refinement of laws and regulations, etc., all need to have a long-term adaptation and improvement process.
Although the cost and price of a driverless car is not cheap now, for example, the overall cost of Baidu Apollo Moon has reached 480,000 yuan, which is still difficult for ordinary people to bear, but this cost has dropped to about one-third of the average cost of the industry's L4 level autonomous driving models, which also makes Apollo Moon initially have the prospect of commercial application.
Just like the original new energy vehicles, with the subsequent large-scale mass production, the production and operating costs of driverless cars will also be greatly reduced, which will eventually lay the foundation for the large-scale shared operation of driverless cars and flying into the homes of ordinary people.
Unmanned driving technology is no longer an illusory castle in the air, the huge imagination space and market prospects that can be brought by it have triggered the attention and investment of enterprises and capital, and the financing scale of the global automatic driving industry in 2020 exceeded 40 billion yuan, a substantial increase of 30.19% year-on-year, such as Waymo has obtained 2 rounds of financing totaling 5.75 billion US dollars in two years.
Now the market competition in the field of automatic driving has become increasingly fierce, traditional car giants, new car-making forces and Internet manufacturers are pouring into this track, in addition to Baidu, Huawei, Didi, DJI, Xiaoma Zhixing, Wenyuan Zhixing, AutoX and other technology companies and Weilai, Xiaopeng and other car-making upstarts are laying out the relevant industrial chains with different entry points.
Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, SAIC, Ford, Audi and other traditional vehicle manufacturers have also increased their investment in this field, we have reason to believe that driverless + new energy will definitely break the existing automotive industry pattern, become the domestic automotive industry to achieve the overall transcendence of the opportunity.
Driverless is still one mile away from commercial application
"Yu see column" believes that there is no doubt that the automatic driving function will gradually become the standard and development direction of future cars, the ecological architecture system of the automobile and its industry will gradually change from bicycles to highly automated intelligent network integration, and driverless technology is still the last way to go from commercial application, but from the current situation, this road may be the most difficult in the whole process.
Now for unmanned driving technology, the biggest application resistance is not a technical problem, but the resulting changes in laws and regulations and management systems, and now the domestic emphasis on intelligent networked vehicles is constantly improving, in recent years, a series of rules and regulations and industrial policy supporting measures are also accelerating the establishment and improvement.
As early as September 2019, the State Council issued the "Outline for the Construction of a Transportation Powerhouse" proposed to strengthen the research and development of intelligent networked vehicles (intelligent vehicles, automatic driving, vehicle-road coordination) to form an independent and controllable complete industrial chain, and the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other departments also issued corresponding supporting documents.
For driverless cars, it is first necessary to obtain a legal status on the road, because the previous relevant laws and regulations are based on the premise of manned cars, and last year, the State Administration of Market Supervision (Standards Committee) officially issued the national recommended standard (GB/T 40429-2021) for the automatic driving function.
The standard divides the automatic driving of the car into 0 to 5 levels according to the driving scenario, such as the common car adaptive cruise control function belongs to level 1, that is, part of the driver assistance level, at this time the driver has the responsibility to ensure the safety of the vehicle and passengers, he should complete the driving operation together with the automation system.
Starting from level 3, the detection and response object in the vehicle driving from the driver to the system, this time has allowed the driver to get rid of the hand, only need to take over the driving right when necessary, many of the new cars currently on the market have been equipped with L2 level or even L3 level of automatic driving system, L4 and L5 level belong to the real sense of unmanned cars.
The new standard will be officially implemented from March 1 this year, which means that the mainland has its own official automatic driving classification standard, which has been borrowed from the SAE classification standard formulated by the United States in the past, and this new standard will become one of the basic standards in the field of autonomous vehicles in the mainland, which will provide standard support for the introduction of laws and regulations related to automatic driving and other general technical specifications.
With the basic standards in place, it is of course necessary to formulate detailed regulatory measures to solve specific problems that may be faced in practical applications.
For example, if an accident occurs in a driverless car, who is responsible for the corresponding responsibility, is it the car, the manufacturer, the rental car company or the passenger? What if a driverless car encounters a cyberattack, the vehicle is controlled and causes all sorts of unexpected hazards? Or what should we do if the passenger's personal privacy information is illegally collected and used, and how can we prevent the leakage and tampering of network data to ensure the security and confidentiality of data and information?
In this regard, some cities have begun to take the lead in the regulatory level, such as the "Shenzhen Special Economic Zone Intelligent NetworkEd Vehicle Management Regulations (Draft for Comments)" in March last year, which openly solicited the opinions of all sectors of society and the public, which made detailed provisions on the driving conditions of unmanned vehicles, privacy protection, accident violation identification and other issues.
At present, the regulations are being further revised and improved, when it is officially promulgated and implemented, the autonomous vehicle industry with regulatory guarantees will surely become a tiger and gain the opportunity to accelerate development, and users can also get the guarantee of relevant laws and regulations when enjoying driverless services.
It is not difficult for us to imagine that when driverless technology is widely used, our lives will usher in a huge change, when there is a driverless car, we no longer have to work hard to test the driver's license, everyone is an old driver, by establishing a cloud-based smart city traffic service system to uniformly dispatch driverless cars, the phenomenon of traffic congestion can also be greatly alleviated, and the road killer will be greatly reduced.
If the cost of Robotaxi can be reduced to a reasonable level, I believe that many people's willingness to buy a car will drop significantly, because if you only rent and do not buy, people can save many troubles such as car purchase, car maintenance, parking, charging, car insurance, etc. The only negative impact that driverless technology may bring is, what should taxi and online car drivers do at that time?
epilogue
The footsteps of the unmanned era are getting closer and closer to us, it is foreseeable that while redefining the relationship between people and vehicles and traffic rules, driverless technology will inevitably reshape and deeply affect our future lifestyle, at the same time, unmanned driving technology will also work with new energy technology to profoundly change the competitive landscape of the existing automobile industry.