On the sixth day of the Chinese New Year, fortune is continuous! Thank you again to your fellow autoLab readers for taking the time to read our articles on the occasion of the Chinese New Year. In this article, we continue to select 3 readers and randomly send out a New Year's gift!
In this issue of "Q&A in the Year of the Tiger", we look forward to the intelligent driving experience in 2022.
Autonomous driving can be called the top of this Spring Festival. In the first language sketch of the Spring Festival Gala, "Father and Son", the entrepreneurial project of "son" is "unmanned". Although the sketch shows the popularity of self-driving entrepreneurship, 700,000 want to invest in automatic driving, and they do not understand the market.
After all, the financing of autonomous driving startups is often hundreds of millions of dollars, and 700,000 yuan is not enough to pay for the modification of a Robotaxi.
On the second day of the Chinese New Year, the "auto robot" from Baidu once again went abroad, and driverlessly participated in the torch relay of the 50-51 stick of the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Behind this car robot "torchbearer", there are also two Baidu Apollo fifth-generation Robotaxi based on the Polar Fox Alpha T modification - Apollo Moon.
This special Olympic torch relay, which is about 800 meters long and located in Shougang Park, is the first torch relay in Olympic history to be completed by unmanned driving.
Shougang Park is the seat of the Winter Olympic Organizing Committee of the Beijing Winter Olympics, as well as ski jumping competition venues and 3 Olympic training centers, which is an important park for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. As early as 2018, Shougang Park has planned to use automatic driving to serve the "Science and Technology East Olympic".
According to the plan, during the Winter Olympics, Baidu Apollo driverless taxi, Toyota e-Palette driverless minibus, Apollon driverless minibus, JD.com's unmanned logistics vehicle, Meituan's unmanned delivery vehicle, Neolithic unmanned retail car, Zhixinger's unmanned cleaning car, UBTECH's automatic inspection robot and other unmanned landing applications will perform their duties, serving staff and athletes.
In addition to Beijing Shougang Park, Chongli, another important venue for the Winter Olympics in Zhangjiakou, Hebei Province, also has automatic driving figures. Etech's hydrogen-powered self-driving bus will provide a shuttle service between the hotel and the venue for athletes during the Winter Olympics.
It can be said that at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, China's autonomous driving companies have shown enough muscles and demonstrated the application of autonomous driving technology in different scenarios.
As ordinary consumers, what self-driving services will we experience in 2022? How far is self-driving for private cars?
2022 Autonomous Driving Accelerates Integration into Our Lives
The concept of autonomous driving landing according to the scene has moved from consensus to common sense. At this stage, most of the automatic driving we are talking about refers to L4 automatic driving, that is, automatic driving without manual takeover under limited area restrictions.
In a sense, L2 assisted driving and L4 autonomous driving are not different stages of development of individuals, but two different technical directions and different choices. L2 and L4 do not have advantages or disadvantages, but only to achieve different design goals, can not be compared.
For example, many of the autonomous driving applications serving the Winter Olympics in shougang park are designed for automatic driving specifically to achieve a special function.
The driverless Bus provided by Toyota and Baidu is to provide driverless shuttle bus services in the park according to the set route and fixed stops. The neolithic unmanned retail car, also along a fixed route, provides retail services.
Fixed routes, relatively simple scenes, can make the system never seen the edge of the scene, the probability of appearing to a very low, so that automatic driving can be achieved. L4 automatic driving is somewhat similar to the exam with a question bank, although the passing line is very perverted, requiring more than 99.99% delivery rate, but fortunately the question bank is limited, as long as the question bank is brushed, the probability of reaching the standard is very high.
The past 2021, known as the first year of commercialization of L4 self-driving taxis, was the year that Beijing allowed driverless taxis to charge passengers, and Shenzhen also issued relevant guidance on autonomous vehicle insurance and operation charges.
But even in the first year of commercialization, in the past year, autonomous driving and many people's lives still have not intersected. The vast majority of self-driving taxis operate in suburban areas with limited capacity. Autonomous trucking services, the maturity is not high, and it cannot be rolled out on a large scale at present.
Looking forward to 2022, the development of autonomous driving will be "more earthy". The first is that the vehicle itself is moving towards lower cost and front-loading mass production. It is expected that most autonomous driving companies will launch Robotaxi or Robobus equipped with vehicle-level computing power SoCs, vehicle-level semi-solid-state lidar, and vehicle-level cameras in 2022.
Compared with the industrial computers and mechanical lidar used at this stage, the new generation of autonomous vehicles is easier to achieve large-scale front-loading mass production with controllable quality, and the cost will be much lower. In terms of appearance, the new generation of autonomous vehicles will be close to some production cars with high-level assisted driving functions, such as the new HI version of the Polar Fox Alpha S.
The second is the landing area, which will be more in line with the actual needs of consumers. In fact, in our lives, there are many needs that can be met by automatic driving, such as short-distance buses from the community to the subway, express delivery services in the community, etc.
Imagine that your life in 2022 might be, get up in the morning and take the self-driving bus to the subway station, then the subway to the company, buy a breakfast in the company park through the self-driving retail car, the self-driving cleaning car works hard around you, and the self-driving patrol car passes by to take your temperature and remind you to use free hand sanitizer.
At this time, a courier from overseas, through the unmanned transport vehicle in the port, loaded with an unmanned trunk logistics vehicle to your city, and then sent to the community by the unmanned urban logistics vehicle, put into the unmanned logistics vehicle in the community. When you return to the community after work, you can turn the logistics truck into a mobile "express cabinet" with a courier waiting for you downstairs.
Through the relay of one station and one stop, we finally enjoyed the convenient service of autonomous driving.
2022 Assisted Driving ushers in a qualitative change in experience
How far is self-driving for private cars? Being able to buy an L5-level self-driving car in a lifetime is about the same as the likelihood of human immortality. L4 self-driving private cars are also out of reach, and at least 2022 is unlikely.
Therefore, in the field of private cars, assisted driving is still the main tone. If it is an L4 automatic driving test with a question bank, L2 assisted driving is an exam without a question bank, and 60 points can pass, but the scenes faced are very different, and it is necessary to have a very strong knowledge reserve and the ability to generalize the questions. L4 and L2 are just two different goals, there is no stronger or weaker.
Assisted driving in 2022 may develop in three directions, scene expansion, experience optimization, and dual-intelligence integration.
In terms of scene expansion, in 2022, there will be a number of heavy models equipped with lidar such as the Full HI Edition of the Polar Fox Alpha S, xiaopeng G9, and Weilai ET7, and assisted driving will enter the full-scene Pilot era of door to door.
We will experience that after setting up navigation, the vehicle automatically changes lanes along the route according to the speed limit, automatically goes up and down the ramp, and automatically avoids dangerous auxiliary driving. Although the whole process still needs to be put on the steering wheel with both hands and the eyes need to keep observing the road environment, the expansion of the assisted driving function will greatly reduce the fatigue of driving, especially long-distance driving, and the safety will also be greatly improved.
In terms of experience optimization, after the realization of urban road Pilot, highway Pilot, and AVP autonomous valet parking, the space for functional expansion has been very small, and what can open the gap is the user experience.
With the help of lidar, the perception system has a higher confidence in the output of the entire environment, which can help the vehicle to better match the planning control of different obstacles and different scenarios. It's like a driver who is more familiar with the route and is able to drive more smoothly.
One of the major directions of experience optimization is the integration of dual intelligence, that is, the integration of intelligent cockpit and intelligent driving, and at this stage, the two pieces are still relatively separate. By 2022, Xiaopeng G9, WEILAI ET7, Zhiji L7 and other models have applied a new central integrated electronic and electrical architecture, which will make the integration of automatic driving and intelligent cockpit more close.
For example, the information of the front-view camera and the information of the high-precision map can only serve intelligent driving, and the dual-intelligence fusion means that this information can also be put into the intelligent cockpit. Imagine that you can unlock the vehicle through the existing camera outside the car to log in to your personal account, stand in front of the car and make a gesture, the vehicle can enable the summon function to open the parking space, open the door and get on the car.
Lidar and a new centrally integrated electrical and electronic architecture, which can bring a qualitative change in the user experience to the assisted driving function of smart cars, will be a new starting point in 2022.