On February 10, 2022, the California Transportation Authority DMV released a new 2021 full-year autonomous driving data, and the top self-driving companies in China and the United States continued to occupy the top of the list.
California DMV Annual Average Takeover Mileage (MPI) is one of the core metrics of autonomous driving, reflecting the comprehensive average annual mileage and takeover number, which is widely considered by the industry to be a more objective, quantitative and accurate measure than the test drive experience.
The top 10 companies in California by fleet size are:
According to the official statistics of DMV, in terms of autonomous driving accidents in 2021, Wenyuan Zhixing has 3 cases, Xiaoma Zhixing has 2 accidents in 2021, 4 car accidents have occurred before 2021, and all other Chinese players have not had accidents.
On the hardware, you can see that 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.
The latest road test models of each company
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.
Among them, Waymo and Cruise's new models show the technical confidence of completely eliminating human drivers, improving the unmanned Robotaxi ride experience and passenger flow (the new model can be used to retain people); in terms of mass production, Waymo has put into production in Detroit, where L4-level autonomous vehicles are planted.
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.
For all companies that bet on Robotaxi, the investment of capital and the relative slowness of commercialization are problems they must face and solve. However, as the mingming data listed on Waymo's official website claims, more than 1.35 million people die in car accidents every year, 94% of which are due to the misoperation of human drivers. In order to reach a safer way to travel, the difficulties are worth exploring and overcoming.
epilogue
There is no doubt that the driverless industry, at the intersection of the automotive industry, the transportation industry and the technology industry, represents the great changes in the development of contemporary science and technology, and nurtures huge commercial and social values. In this global ranking, China's representative players have achieved proud results, which also reflects the future of Robotaxi and even the autonomous driving industry, and the technical reserves and commercialization capabilities of Chinese enterprises will make them become global leading players that cannot be ignored.
At this year's Spring Festival Gala, unmanned driving has also become a topic of the limelight in the show. In the era of unmanned driving, we also look at China.