On February 10, the California Transportation Authority DMV released the annual automatic driving data for 2021, and the head autonomous driving companies in China and the United States continued to occupy the top of the list.
Because it is tested in California, we can see that the highest number of vehicles and test mileage are all domestic companies in the United States, and we have reported many times about the general Cruise and Google Waymo, while China's AutoX Antu, Didi Didi and WeRide Wenyuan Zhixing have advantages in MPI.
The California DMV's Annual Average Takeover Mileage (MPI) is one of the core metrics for autonomous driving, combining annual mileage and takeovers.
In the California team size of the top ten companies as follows, Waymo has been the largest head, GM Cruise is very low-key but MPI results are really good, AutoX Antu is the first Chinese enterprise, Apple Apple is a big rain, the media hype but do not see a lot of investment.
According to the official statistics of DMV, in terms of autonomous driving accidents in 2021, Wenyuan Zhixing has 3 cases, Xiaoma Zhixing has 2 cases, and all other Chinese players have not had accidents.
On the hardware, all players are equipped with multiple lidars. Except for Pony and Yuanrong Kaixing DeepRoute, who announced that they would abandon rotary lidar and use one-way radar embedded in the body, other head players chose rotary lidar. Rotary lidar remains the number one choice for the vast majority of head Robotaxi companies.
Speaking of the high-level stage of automatic driving "unmanned", many people will think of a video that went viral on the short video platform, when the photographer praised the driverless car, he watched the car downstairs directly hit the obstacle...
With the development of autonomous driving technology, the world's leading players have gradually established a common understanding that only through fully unmanned people can they truly reach the final form of Robotaxi. In December last year, Waymo announced that it would cooperate with Geely to launch the steering-wheelless Robotaxi model Zeekr; Cruise's model Origin also removed the steering wheel.
On this road, the California DMV is an extremely important part of the world - globally, California has the largest number and longest global self-driving companies, collecting a large amount of test data every year, and is also the first fully driverless licensing agency.
Whether it's Waymo, Cruise, or other industry players focused on RoboTaxi, they share the understanding that RoboTaxi carries the biggest and most core value of autonomous driving companies. Because of this, they often do not spend much effort to develop products such as trucks, park cars, sweepers and other products mentioned above, but always move in the direction of the driverless car Robotaxi.
For companies betting on RoboTaxi, mass production models and the provision of autonomous mobility services are the only way to commercialize. In addition to Waymo, which built the plant, Cruise received a $5 billion grant from GM's finance division last year for trial production of the Origin, a fully driverless car released in January 2020, and the first 100 Cruise Origins were mass-produced last summer for testing at GM's Milford Test Ground.
Waymo goes even further: Since 2017, it has been testing in Phoenix, USA; last August, Waymo began conducting a RoboTaxi test facing passengers in San Francisco. However, according to Bloomberg, the biggest challenge to its large-scale commercialization is to mass-produce vehicles and solve the final 1% of autonomous driving problems. In 2018, Waymo's pride in announcing that it would expand 60,000 vehicles was compared with the current number of about 800 vehicles, and it is not difficult to see the mass production problems it encountered.
As for the Chinese company AutoX Antu, I also wrote in the previous article: AutoX Gen5 is built from 0 for unmanned driving, with a total of more than 50 sensors, equipped with a large-scale sensor cluster, the total number of pixels reaches 220 million pixels per frame, equipped with high-definition 4D millimeter wave radar and can achieve 0.9 degree resolution. The lidar point cloud imaged per second has achieved 15 million, and the computing power platform supports the 2200 TOPS hashrate platform. Today, AutoX has more than 1,000 test vehicles worldwide and has built a RoboTaxi plant.