Pony Zhixing: "Ferry" at the outlet of autonomous driving

At the just-concluded Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, autonomous vehicles with different functions attracted the world's attention, covering scenes such as self-driving taxis, driverless buses, and unmanned logistics vehicles. The 2022 race for smart cars has begun, and the autonomous driving track has once again become the focus.

Recently, Guangzhou Xiaoma Zhixing Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Xiaoma Zhixing"), an autonomous driving unicorn company, disclosed the sixth generation of automatic driving system for the first time. Compared with the past, Xiaoma Zhixing is more concerned about whether the autonomous driving technology can be commercialized, and it is reported that the model equipped with the above system is scheduled to be put into operation in the first half of 2023.

At the same time, including Xiaopeng Motors, Volkswagen, and Baidu's "Radish Run", they all revealed their enthusiasm for marching towards automatic driving, and this enthusiasm is more rational in the face of the commercialization and scale of autonomous driving.

On the one hand, the amount of financing in the field of automatic driving shows an overall growth trend; on the other hand, in the past six months, autonomous driving companies, including Xiaoma Zhixing, have not received new financing. The autonomous driving market is undergoing a new round of "big waves and sand", and the representative pony Zhixing is "ferrying" on the wind outlet.

Find a way out with car companies

January 20, 2022, is a big day for Pony Zhixing. On that day, Xiaoma Zhixing disclosed for the first time the appearance design, sensor and computing platform solution of the sixth generation of automatic driving software and hardware system design for L4 vehicle specification-level mass production. In the introduction of the relevant person in charge of Xiaoma Zhixing, the sixth generation of automatic driving system has four highlights.

First, the system is designed around the mass production of the vehicle specification level, and the first Toyota "Xena SIENNA" Autono-MaaS vehicles (S-AM) equipped with the system will start road testing in China within 2022. Obviously, this move is to confirm to the industry the possibility of commercialization and scale of the sixth generation of Xiaoma Zhixing's autonomous driving technology.

In the field of autonomous driving, the terms commercialization and scale are not uncommon. With the gradual upgrading of autonomous driving technology, the market pays more attention to the possibility and profitability of autonomous driving technology. Peng Jun, co-founder and CEO of Xiaoma Zhixing, once said that promoting the application of autonomous driving technology in the field of passenger cars is one of the important strategic goals of Xiaoma Zhixing.

Peng Jun said: "Xiaoma Zhixing has accumulated more than 10 million kilometers of open road test mileage for autonomous driving around the world, and will continue to increase technology investment and expand the scale of Robotaxi's operations." Toyota S-AM models join the PonyPilot+ team, which is another major achievement of the in-depth strategic cooperation between Xiaoma Zhixing and Toyota, and the new generation of autonomous driving software and hardware systems designed for L4 vehicle specification mass production will further improve technical reliability and promote the large-scale application of autonomous driving technology. ”

In order to let the market see the prospect of commercialization and scale of autonomous driving technology, Xiaoma Zhixing has successively cooperated with Toyota Motor, Guangzhou Automobile Group, China FAW and other car companies. In fact, enterprises that make their fortunes in autonomous driving technology inevitably need to choose to cooperate with car companies, including autonomous driving Wenyuan Zhixing has also reached strategic cooperation with car companies such as GAC Group and Jiangling Motors.

As the automotive industry enters a new era of intelligence and networking, the market demand for automatic driving is gradually revealed, and major car companies have naturally noticed this change.

In fact, in addition to cooperation with self-driving companies such as Xiaoma Zhixing and Wenyuan Zhixing, car companies are also trying to expand their business in this field through other means. For example, Xiaopeng Automobile chose to set up a wholly-owned subsidiary, Guangzhou Pengxu Autonomous Driving Technology Co., Ltd., to do automatic driving on its own, and the legal representative of its subsidiary is Xia Heng, co-founder and president of Xiaopeng Automobile.

Volkswagen, on the other hand, opted for the acquisition model to devote itself to autonomous driving. According to foreign media reports, Volkswagen Group's top management to acquire Huawei's autonomous driving department has been negotiated for several months, and this acquisition also involves a technical system that Volkswagen is not good at, and the planned acquisition amount is billions of euros.

The industry is now hierarchically differentiated

Looking back at 2021, the amount of financing for autonomous driving-related enterprises that have been publicly disclosed exceeded 40 billion yuan, and the amount of financing in the field of autonomous driving in 2022 will still show an increasing trend. At the beginning of 2022, there were more than 15 important investment and financing events in the field of unmanned driving at home and abroad, and the total amount of financing disclosed exceeded 6 billion yuan, of which 13 were domestic enterprises.

Although the overall trend of the industry is still rising, new car-making forces, traditional car companies, etc. are competing to lay out the autonomous driving track, but another detailed change is emerging. According to public data, the latest investment of Pon Chi Heng was completed in February 2021, when Xiao Ma Zhi Hong announced that it had received a $100 million Series C+ financing, which also meant that it had completed a total of US$367 million of Series C financing.

The reporter of China Business Daily sent a letter to Xiaoma Zhixing for an interview on the financing situation of Xiaoma Zhixing, and the relevant person in charge of Xiaoma Zhixing said that the total financing of Xiaoma Zhixing currently exceeds 1.1 billion US dollars, and the valuation is more than 5.3 billion US dollars.

Turning its attention to other autonomous driving companies at home and abroad, Wenyuan Zhixing completed a Series C financing in June 2021 with a total amount of 310 million US dollars. In the five months before June 2021, Wenyuan Zhixing completed a total financing of more than US$600 million, with a post-investment valuation of 3.3 billion yuan. In the latest news, Wenyuan Zhixing received a strategic investment from GAC Group at the end of 2021.

Based on the financing situation at home and abroad, the overall investment market in the field of automatic driving is not bad, but the financing situation between enterprises is not even. When Xiaoma Zhixing received $100 million in financing in 2021, waymo abroad received $2.5 billion in financing in June 2021, with a difference of more than $2 billion. Momenta also received more than $500 million in financing in November 2021, a difference of $300 million from Pony's Wisdom Bank.

In contrast, it is not difficult to find that the capital market has recovered its sanity for autonomous driving companies, and although the overall trend of the industry is upward, the requirements for autonomous driving companies are becoming clearer. Entering 2022, the autonomous driving industry has paid more attention to the improvement of technologies such as automated computing power.

Zhang Cymbal, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and dean of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of Tsinghua University, has previously said: "Autonomous driving from L3, L4 to L5, we must solve the problem of computer vision insecurity, and now countries around the world are doing this, because automatic driving will definitely do the supercomputer on the four wheels of the future car, in other words, buy its car with very little money, and buy the computer equipment on it with a lot of money." ”

From March 1, 2022, the national standard of "Automobile Driving Automation Classification" will be officially implemented. While the level of automatic driving is gradually improving, the computing power of components such as chip computing power and sensor data collection has a profound impact on the development of the automatic driving industry.

Explore the possibilities of profitability

Recently, Xiaoma Zhixing has changed the industrial and commercial information and added the fields of auto parts research and development and sales. In response to the advantages of commercialization and scale of L4 vehicles, half of its text elaboration focuses on various autonomous driving road test qualifications. In the case that the current policy is still not perfect, to determine whether an autonomous driving company has the prospect of commercialization, road testing is an important sign, and it is also the direction that many autonomous driving companies in the industry are working towards.

In the introduction of Xiaoma Zhixing, it has obtained the California autonomous driving road test license, autonomous driving travel service license, Beijing autonomous driving manned test license, the first batch of Beijing intelligent network vehicle policy pilot area road test license and highway test license, automatic driving unmanned test license, autonomous driving service commercialization pilot license, Guangzhou unmanned remote test license, Guangzhou first batch of intelligent network vehicle road test license, and Shanghai intelligent network demonstration application license.

In the field of commercial vehicles, where the commercialization of autonomous driving is slightly more obvious, Xiaoma Zhixing has the first self-driving truck test license in Guangdong, the first batch of self-driving truck test licenses and highway test licenses in Beijing, and the freight road transport business license, and has carried out commercial operations.

Of course, road testing and the real meaning of autonomous driving are not the same, but also far from profitability. In addition to ensuring that the technology passes, autonomous driving companies also need to control the cost.

At present, most autonomous driving companies, including Xiaoma Zhixing, use chips from Intel, Nvidia, Huawei, Qualcomm and other manufacturers, and high-performance chips that can support the demand for automatic driving are expensive. Taking NVIDIA Orin as an example, public information shows that the unit price of the chip is about $320. In addition, mechanical lidar is also very expensive, for example, Velodyne is selling more than $8,000.

In addition, at present, it is still necessary to improve the laws and regulations on automatic driving data collection and other aspects, and improve the public's recognition and acceptance of automatic driving technology. As the focus of the development of intelligent cars in the second half, the real sense of automatic driving is still a long way from landing.