Before the Spring Festival, Starry Sky Jun met the person in charge of an online platform for commercial vehicles, opening the door to a new world.
The so-called commercial vehicles are mainly trucks relative to passenger cars. Unlike passenger cars, commercial vehicles implement many new standards, far surpassing passenger cars in terms of platforming.
For example, it is mandatory to pre-install v2x and other car networking devices.
All the newly shipped commercial vehicles are online, and the data is uploaded in real time, including engine speed, speed, brakes, opening and closing doors, fuel volume and other data.
Starry Sky Jun half-jokingly said that it was only one step away from automatic driving. The other party laughed and said, you really guessed right, the platform is doing this work.
Compared with the automatic driving technology of passenger cars, the autonomous driving technology of commercial vehicles (trucks) is easier to land: the roads are basically high-speed, the driving mode is mainly based on following the car, and there are basically no complex road conditions and scenarios.
Truck drivers are very expensive and give companies enough motivation to buy self-driving technology.
It's a technology that's within reach and can land right away.
Starry Sky Jun has seen the information of some companies engaged in truck self-driving, so he asked, are your competitors those American companies?
The elder brother said very domineeringly, we have no competitors abroad.
It turns out that China and the United States have very different attitudes towards autonomous driving of commercial vehicles.
The United States is affected by trade union organizations, issued regulations, autonomous driving is only applicable to cars under 10,000 pounds (4.45 tons); while China has improved laws and regulations to encourage new technologies, on the one hand, the newly off-line commercial vehicles pre-installed v2x, in advance to adapt to vehicle-road coordination, on the other hand, a ministry and commission led the organization of several major commercial vehicle OEMs to invest in the construction of platforms, for the development of technologies such as automatic driving.
The reason why American companies are said is because Starry Sky Jun first learned about truck self-driving technology, or through Tucson Future.
TuSimple was originally a Chinese company, and slightly older netizens could roughly know the origin of the English name. Later, in order to go public in the United States, an R&D center was set up in San Diego, California. As a future-oriented company, the first customers selected were in the United States.
Is the U.S. really the future of truck self-driving?
Due to the influence of Sino-US relations, the prospectus tries to clear the shadow of Chinese companies and deliberately avoid Chinese stocks.
Realistically speaking, Starry Sky Jun is very optimistic about truck automatic driving technology, and therefore has been very optimistic about tucson's future. Because most of the trucks are To B, in order to reduce the cost of drivers, enterprises have this demand. Even if you only need to attract individual large customers, you can achieve a large enough order to ensure profitability.
Try SF? Try JD Logistics?
Of course, the two are also developing their own autonomous driving technology. Low-speed park autonomous driving has been truly implemented, and trial operation in many university parks.
In April 2021, Tucson Future went public on the NASDAQ, and in its prospectus, the company proposed that trucking faces serious challenges in several areas, including safety, efficiency and carbon footprint, which Tucson Future believes cannot be adequately solved without major technological innovations.
In particular, the prospectus mentions that driver shortages and high driver turnover rates continue to lead to increased labor costs in the freight industry, putting upward pressure on costs and reliable truck freight capacity. In 2018, labor costs accounted for more than 40 percent of total costs per mile of operation, up from about 33 percent in 2012.
Star Jun believes that the shortage of drivers is a pseudo-concept, essentially a cost problem; and to solve the problem of carbon emissions, it is not important whether autonomous driving can be achieved.
The only problem that Tucson can really solve is to help B-end enterprises reduce labor costs. The reason why I dare not say this is for fear of offending the union...
So, Tucson's choice of the U.S. market is a good future?
It should be said that in 2015, when Tucson was first established, there was a certain reason for choosing to pilot in the United States. Highway conditions in the United States are simple, and drivers earn relatively high incomes.
But now, China's truck market has become more dynamic than the United States.
For Tucson, there is an urgent need for performance to prove itself.
Since its inception in 2015, what is Tucson's current revenue scale?
According to the third quarter report of fiscal 2021, from January to September, the net profit attributable to the common shareholders of the parent company was -621 million US dollars, and the operating income was 4.211 million US dollars.
This is an unspeakable data, indicating that the company has not yet found a reasonable profit model, and even the best concept cannot withstand long-term burning money, and the stock price can be understood.
Simple summary: the United States is not a very good concept of the landing of the market, for truck automatic driving, China is a new world of great achievements, but China's competitors are very strong, either main engine factories, or logistics companies, their biggest feature, is the urgent demand, rich and powerful.