Landing in various scenarios, how big is the potential market space for autonomous driving?

Recently, the research department of CITIC Securities released research results, pointing out that the potential market space for autonomous driving exceeds trillions, and the potential space for urban open scenes is the largest. At present, the scenes that can be used for the landing of autonomous driving products can be roughly divided into urban open scenarios, high-speed scenarios, and closed scenarios, among which urban scenarios include Robotaxi, sanitation services, urban distribution logistics and last-mile distribution.

The potential market space for autonomous driving is huge

The research department of CITIC Securities pointed out that the high-speed scene is trunk line transportation, and the closed scene mainly includes ports and mining areas. It estimates that the potential market space of Robotaxi is about 3.2 trillion yuan (calculated in terms of 2040 forward space), and the total market space for autonomous driving of other commercial vehicles is about 3 trillion yuan, of which the urban special vehicle market has about 1.9 trillion yuan of automatic driving space, about 900 billion high-speed scenes, and about 100 billion closed scenes.

Robotaxi Autonomous Driving: According to McKinsey's "Winning the Second Half of the Automotive Industry", the number of miles in the form of autonomous vehicles used in China for mobility services is expected to reach 0.3/1.6 trillion km/year in 2030/2040. If it is assumed that its unit price is 2 yuan / km, then its 2030/2040 corresponding market space is about 0.6/3.2 trillion yuan.

Last mile: According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the total number of orders in the national instant logistics industry in 2020 is about 22.84 billion, corresponding to a market size of about 170 billion yuan. Considering that the terminal delivery scenario is relatively complex and cannot be delivered upstairs at present, if it is assumed that half of the market can use autonomous driving, the corresponding market size is about 85 billion yuan.

High-speed scenarios: High-speed scenarios are mainly aimed at trunk logistics applications for heavy truck transportation, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, the number of heavy trucks in the country in 2020 is 8.41 million. According to the industry chain survey, we estimate that about 65% of heavy trucks are used in the logistics and transportation field. If it is assumed that heavy trucks are equipped with an average of 1.5 drivers and the annual salary of drivers is 120,000 yuan, the potential market size corresponding to automatic driving is about 900 billion yuan.

Port scenario: According to the data of China's port network, as of 2019, a total of 6,000-8,000 internal collection cards have been configured at container terminals with a throughput of more than 1 million TEU in the mainland, with about 15,000-25,000 internal collector drivers. At present, the cost of collecting truck drivers in Chinese ports (including wages and social security) is about 150,000-200,000 yuan per year. According to this calculation, the potential space corresponding to the port autonomous driving is about 5 billion yuan.

High-level autonomous driving can effectively solve many pain points such as labor cost increases, traffic safety, and driver shortages. Under L3 level automatic driving conditions, automatic driving in specific scenarios does not require a driver, or the driver plays the role of vehicle manager, who can manage multiple vehicles by one person. L4 level or above is close to complete unmanned, which can effectively solve the problem of driver shortage and rising labor costs. At the same time, under the high-level automatic driving, the operation of the vehicle is more stable and reliable, it will not fatigue driving, and the safety is higher than that of the driver.

The potential market space for autonomous driving exceeds trillions, and the space for urban open scenes is the largest.

Urban distribution scenario: warehouse-to-warehouse autonomous driving solution

The research department of CITIC Securities pointed out that logistics and transportation penetrate into all aspects of production, circulation and consumption. The efficiency of social logistics in the mainland is gradually improving, but there is still a big gap compared with developed countries. Improving the transportation structure, improving the level of Internet and technology application, improving the level of standardization and service quality will become an important development trend in the logistics industry.

Light trucks play the role of short intercity and "last 50 kilometers" in freight logistics and are the capillaries of road transport. The pain points in the urban distribution scenario are similar to other pain points in the fields of trunk logistics and travel, the industry is highly dispersed, the shortage of drivers, the general age of drivers, the reluctance of young people to do, the difficulty of controlling drivers, poor working environment, fatigue driving and other factors have led to gradual changes in the industry, providing an opportunity for autonomous driving technology to replace urban drivers.

For autonomous driving companies, the city-wide "warehouse-to-warehouse" transportation scenario is very similar to Robotaxi in terms of technology. However, from the perspective of the overall urban distribution service process, the application of automatic driving in urban distribution scenarios is similar to sanitation, both of which are driven under urban roads, public scenes, and fixed lines, and the technical categories are relatively similar.

Autonomous driving technology for urban special vehicle scenarios

It is expected to expand to Robotaxi

CITIC Securities Research Department pointed out that in the urban open scene, Robotaxi market space is the broadest, but also the most test of the manufacturer L4 high-level automatic driving technology level, some autonomous driving companies began to layout the research and development of Robotaxi technology, and actively explore commercial landing solutions. Representative enterprises include: Waymo, Baidu Apollo, Xiaoma Zhixing, Wenyuan Zhixing, Kuwa Robot, Zhixing, etc.

Policy bottlenecks: By the end of 2020, the road for autonomous driving testing will be about 3,000 kilometers open nationwide, and government departments usually will not fully open the scope of operation to self-driving enterprises that have not yet matured in technology. For autonomous driving companies, if autonomous driving products can only be tested and operated in a small area such as suburbs and new cities, the speed of data accumulation and the commercial value of Robotaxi products will be limited.

Test mileage bottleneck: To achieve the goal of Robotaxi driverless taxi, its automatic driving must be above L4 level, under the existing algorithm framework, autonomous vehicles need to ensure that the real test mileage needs to reach 11 billion miles (about 18 billion kilometers) before it can exceed the safety of human driving.