At the beginning of 2022, Yiou Think Tank presented the year-end report card of the 2021 autonomous driving industry and opened the New Year's outlook.
Looking back at 2021, autonomous driving has experienced a number of milestone events, Internet companies have entered the car joint car manufacturing, the road end has begun to deploy vehicle-road collaboration equipment on a large scale, the trunk logistics autonomous driving truck has been tested on the road, Robotaxi has opened the hematopoietic mode, and the domestic automatic driving chip has begun to be installed and mass-produced under the "lack of core tide".
Local governments, autonomous driving technology enterprises, OEMs and scene parties work together to create autonomous driving applications in closed scenarios, semi-closed scenarios, and urban open scenarios, so that automatic driving can get rid of the "concept definition" and truly enter the public life, and the market demand is released.
On January 28, 2022, Yiou Think Tank officially released the "2021-2022 China Autonomous Driving Industry Annual Summary Report". In this report, Yiou Think Tank conducts annual review and analysis from multiple dimensions such as the automotive industry value chain, technology development path, multi-scenario application, enterprise business model, and core component supply, and outputs future trend insights for industry reference.
Car companies opened V2X front-loading mass production, and the government further promoted the intelligent construction of the road end and enabled the landing of automatic driving.
"Bicycle intelligence + vehicle-road collaboration" is a technical path for China to achieve automatic driving landing. In 2021, a number of V2X front-loading mass production models will be launched centrally, and under the impetus of the dual-smart city policy, the road end will begin to deploy the cellular car networking C-V2X network and equipment on a large scale to promote the technical verification of vehicle intelligence and road end intelligence.
China's vehicle-road collaboration is still in the stage of step-by-step construction of the vehicle-road cloud network, and it is expected to open up the technical end, information end and application end in the future, realize interconnection, and create a real vehicle-road collaboration. According to the prediction of Yiou Think Tank, as the vehicle-road synergy gradually moves towards scale and marketization, the scale of China's vehicle-road collaboration market is expected to reach 496 billion yuan in 2030, and the market potential is huge.
Supply and demand resonate, and the application of autonomous driving scenarios begins to accelerate.
In 2021, the autonomous driving closed scene represented by ports and mining areas will be driven by policies, and the demand for intelligence will be strong, driving the growth of commercial orders on the supply side. Trunk logistics autonomous driving for the first time opened high-speed road test, with the logistics side customers to improve the acceptance of automatic driving technology, the industry ecological construction is more diversified.
In the urban ecology, the autonomous driving sanitation scene has opened for large-scale commercial use, and the autonomous driving enterprises have placed more emphasis on operational attributes, and with the further acceptance of the concept of smart city sanitation services, the business needs of the government have been released. Robotaxi opened the hematopoietic mode, and with the entry of more and more car companies, the "trinity" business model of car companies, travel platforms and autonomous driving technology providers has gradually taken shape.
In the urban scenario, automatic driving will move from vertical scenarios to generalized scenarios, Yiou Think Tank predicts that the closed low-speed scenarios of park sanitation, terminal distribution, factory logistics and airport logistics will usher in batch replication nodes in the next 2-3 years, the sanitation, logistics, and Robobus scenarios in the open road will gradually achieve commercialization in the next 5-10 years, and Robotaxi under the high-speed open scenario is expected to achieve large-scale commercialization after 2030.
At present, the automatic driving scenario is gradually subdivided, and the autonomous driving market pattern is divided into two camps, including players who use the "technology + operation" dual-drive heavy asset mode automatic driving scenario players, such as Alibaba Damo Academy, Yingche Technology and other enterprises, as well as technology empowerment enterprises represented by Driving Technology and Zhixing, which provide a general-purpose automatic driving technology platform. The two camps have their own strengths and weaknesses, and they empower the landing of autonomous driving with different technical paths.
Autonomous driving technology has spawned new formats in the automotive industry, and OEMs have accelerated the opening up of front-end users and back-end research and development.
Traditional car companies have the core advantages of integrated manufacturing, and in the future, it is expected to create industrial collaboration through self-developed core software and the mode of purchasing standardized hardware, and achieve win-win results through division of labor and cooperation.
Under the trend of digitalization, user experience is becoming a demand driver, and the realization of user life cycle management is expected to achieve efficient product upgrades and brand power improvement. In addition, building an autonomous driving ecosystem and exploring mature business models have become "compulsory courses" for car companies.
The traditional supply chain is facing a reshuffle and is expected to form a "moat" in terms of technical barriers and business models.
Under the new generation of electronic, electrical and software architecture, the traditional chain automotive supply chain has begun to transform into a more open and diversified circular supply chain, and extended the industrial chain to the field of operation services. Compared with the "turnkey" model of Tier1 in the traditional automotive supply chain, current automotive brands and suppliers are more inclined to "fight side by side", and joint research and development and flat cooperation have made the needs of supply chain business models more and more diversified.
Under the trend of autonomous driving hardware standardization and software platform, Yiou Think Tank believes that TIER 2 is expected to form its core competitiveness by standardizing products and creating technical barriers in the future, while TIER 1 tends to seek a more flexible and open cooperation model and form a division of labor and cooperation model with upstream and downstream.
With the growing demand for intelligence, core component suppliers have ushered in an incremental market.
China's automotive electronic and electrical architecture is transitioning from a distributed architecture to a domain-centralized architecture, and some mainstream car companies have achieved mass production of a new generation of architecture platforms in 2021, promoting software system upgrades and iterations for automobiles.
Millimeter-wave radar and lidar, the core components of autonomous driving, are ushering in the release of demand. In 2021, the ADAS penetration rate of China's automotive market has increased significantly, and the millimeter wave thunder equipped with bicycles has reached 3-5, according to the calculation of Yiou Think Tank, the market demand for China's vehicle-mounted millimeter wave radar will reach 33.93 million in 2021, an increase of 70% over 2020, bringing about rapid growth in upstream orders.
Although no L3-level automatic driving related policies have been introduced, some car companies have laid out L3 technology through hardware to bring front-loading mass production orders to lidar. Large-scale production is expected to further promote cost reduction and accelerate the maturity of technology.
Under the wave of "lack of cores", the research and development of China's chip industry began to accelerate, the localization chip supply chain was gradually improved, and in 2021, the domestic chip brand horizon achieved mass production, and domestic substitution is expected to accelerate. Car companies have strengthened their ability to control the research and development of core software, and the cooperation model with chip manufacturers is changing from the "black box" model to the open.
epilogue
In 2021, catalyzed by black swan events such as the epidemic, trade war, and lack of core tide, autonomous driving terminal applications have burst out unprecedented demand and taken a big step in the commercialization journey. Looking forward to 2022, autonomous driving is expected to usher in the era of large-scale commercial use and accelerate the realization of mass production. Competition has intensified, the "knockout round" has begun, and Chinese autonomous driving companies are accelerating their ecological layout and grabbing the "final circle" tickets.