Humanity's vision of the future never stops.
In science fiction movies and literary stories, people exhaust their imagination of the future.
The success of the industrial revolutions of the 1860s and 1860s made humanity's imagination of the future more proactive: it is believed that since the human productive forces could make two great strides more than a century ago, the god of fate will most likely continue to favor us in this technological revolution.
In film and television works, we can see the sky full of small aircraft, automatic driving, information interconnection interaction... This implies that in the future, technology will free people from heavy labor, and life will become more convenient and efficient.
Automobiles have always been the integrators of human industrial development, facing the future, and autonomous driving has become a bridge linking the present and the future.
The year 2021 that has just passed is the year of autonomous driving. It is not that in this year people have made breakthrough achievements in the field of autonomous driving, on the contrary, this year's good news is entangled with bad news, pulling autonomous driving "slowly" forward.
There is always a chasm between reality and imagination. Stripped from the imaginary carnival of the rapid development of human productive forces two centuries ago, based on the dilemma of development at the present stage, we will find that this is a huge whirlpool, and people can only grope forward.
A tragedy about "autonomous driving" in 2021 speaks volumes about the problem.
In August 2021, Lin Wenqin, the owner of WEIO ES8 and the founder of the chain brand, died in a car accident. After the fermentation of the network, the spearhead of this accident pointed directly at Weilai's "automatic driving function".
The obituary said that Lin Wenqin died of a traffic accident in the Hanjiang section of the Shenhai Expressway after driving the WEIO ES8 to enable the automatic driving function (NOP pilot status).
The loss of a young life, or the factor of self-driving, always has to leave something behind.
While lamenting the loss of young lives, people fully discussed the "autonomous driving" technology promoted by Weilai.
The official statement is currently fixed in the Notice of putian Police on August 18: The accident is still under investigation and responsibility will be determined according to law.
However, the controversy over the definition and over-publicity of the network on the rights and responsibilities of automatic driving is still in the process. Have the new car-making companies over-promoted the concept of automatic driving?
On the surface, every car company reminds consumers that the function on the car is "assisted driving" rather than "automatic driving", and the driver has absolute control over the vehicle. But in the presentation and interpretation of many details, people have to doubt their original intentions.
Shen Fei, vice president of WEILAI Automobile, once posted a short video on his personal Weibo, with the text "NIO Pilot is becoming more and more addictive, starting at the end of the 1:30 meeting, with the help of automatic assisted driving, safely eating while driving."
After the accident of the owner of Weilai, Ideal and Xiaopeng have successively modified the description of the auxiliary driving system on the official website, removing the words "advanced" and "automatic".
These intentional and unintentional words and expressions will, to a certain extent, make ordinary consumers fall into the trap of cognition. Disguised by the imaginative concept of autonomous driving, some people drive their cars and their hands leave the steering wheel...
Just like in middle school, teenagers who are new to cycling, let go of their hands and venture to feel the art of balance and imbalance.
In fact, autonomous driving technology is far from being able to surpass manual operation, and the current mass production applications in the Chinese market are L2 level assisted driving.
Life is intolerable to trial and error. After the Weilai autonomous driving accident, industry experts and car-making peers have criticized this, believing that in the publicity of the concept of automatic driving, the new car-making enterprises are suspected of "false propaganda". Nio's shares fell in response, falling nearly 6%.
But that hasn't stopped the enthusiasm of the autonomous driving industry in 2021. According to incomplete statistics, investment in the fields of lidar and automatic driving will exceed 45 billion yuan in 2021.
In 2021, Baidu Radish Run completed the country's first paid order for autonomous travel in Yizhuang, Beijing, at a price of 1.34 yuan;
All kinds of L2-L4 level autonomous vehicles began to walk out of the closed road test site and embarked on the real urban road;
In the post-epidemic era, driverless vehicles have gone to the front line of the fight against the epidemic, delivering medicines and vegetables, close to the lives of ordinary people;
Many provinces and cities in China have taken smart travel, carbon neutrality, and digital new infrastructure as urban strategies, and vigorously promoted the progress of computing centers, 5G, edge computing, vehicle-road collaboration, high-precision geographic data, unmanned vehicle road testing, and commercial practices.
Autonomous driving is infiltrating daily life little by little, laying the foundation for subsequent technology explosions and business models.
Another interesting phenomenon is that in 2021, car companies set off an arms race of lidar.
Before the Guangzhou Auto Show, Sharon Motors shouted out the slogan of "less than 4, please don't talk" in a high profile, pushing the application of lidar to a climax.
Sharon Motors' first model, the Mech Dragon, was powered by four lidars. In mid-2021, WEIO ET7, Xiaopeng P5, Polar Fox Alpha S, Zhiji L7, and WM7 all announced that they were equipped with lidar. Major enterprises in the industry such as Hesai Technology, DJI Livox, and Huawei are accelerating the research and development and mass production of lidar.
Lidar is one of the most important technologies for achieving autonomous driving. In terms of environmental perception performance, lidar is not affected by light, bad weather, and noisy working environments; in terms of detail separation ability, it is superior to millimeter-wave radar, ultrasonic radar, and cameras. At the same time, it also has the ability to detect distant objects.
As long as the cost is controlled, lidar can promote the qualitative improvement of the level of autonomous driving of car companies.
Such fragmentation coexists in mid-2021. On the one hand, automatic driving has encountered huge doubts in public opinion, on the other hand, upstream and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain have spared no effort in increasing automatic driving technology.
People are afraid that it will not come, and they are afraid that it will come randomly. This complex emotion can be understood as a psychological desire and a technical shackle.
Autonomous driving technology has a huge imagination for both capital and consumers, but at the same time it is an extremely complex and difficult technology to achieve.
Since the new four modernizations of automobiles, autonomous driving technology has always been compared with electrification technology, but in fact, the technical difficulty of the former is an exponential increase compared to the latter.
The challenge for electric vehicles is the replacement of the power system, and the test is the maturity of the three-electric technology. Electrification technology does not need an innovation process from 0 to 1, it only needs to achieve performance improvement on the road from 1 to 100, and reduce costs through scale.
As long as the power system is switched and the charging and replacing infrastructure is popularized, new energy vehicles can follow the existing laws and regulations and complete the closed loop of the industrial chain like fuel vehicles.
However, the difficulty of autonomous driving technology lies in the breakthrough from 0 to 1. It is a process of creating entities from nothingness, with no regularities to follow.
The underlying logic of autonomous driving is that calculations and machine manipulation replace human judgment and car driving. This is not only a technical issue, but also involves ethics, regulations, costs, infrastructure, supporting technologies, etc.
There is no accumulation of technology, no ready-made regulations, no ethical boundaries, and everything about autonomous driving is being explored.
According to a research report released by McKinsey, the cost per kilometer of autonomous driving is roughly the same as the cost of driving a traditional car by a driver, and the inflection point of autonomous driving may come.
If we look at the current development of autonomous driving with this goal, then autonomous driving is still in the wilderness.
The development of the car, at the beginning of the appeal is to run faster than the carriage is good, and later increased the pursuit of power performance, the pursuit of appearance, and more emphasis on comfort. Later development, people pay more attention to the safety of the car, fuel consumption performance, and the use of environmentally friendly materials.
There is no road in this world, and the more people who walk, the more they become the road. The development of automobiles to the era of intelligence, automatic driving has become another major trend. This trend is irreversible, and the upstream and downstream of the automotive industry chain, technology companies, and government departments are all making the most attempts for the advent of the era of true autonomous driving.
According to the statistics of the China Automobile Strategy Institute, in the past five years, autonomous driving has been the segment with the most financing in the automobile industry, surpassing new energy.
For the automotive industry, autonomous driving is an opportunity to reshuffle the cards, and it will be more thorough than the impact of new energy.
Veteran players are not willing to give up the initiative, and newcomers such as Weilai and Xiaopeng are eager to try. This excitement has been evident in 2021 and the past few years.
Despite the ambitious goals, car companies and technology companies are not afraid and are eager to promote their strength to the outside world. However, it should be noted that recommending a technology that is still being improved and full of science fiction to consumers is an extremely sophisticated craft.
On the one hand, to reflect the differences from competitors in communication, and on the other hand, to ensure that the technology itself can be objectively described, I think it is difficult to complete the balance of this language art except with enough reverence.
How to determine the responsibility for the NIO autonomous driving incident, there is no further news.
The good news is that the spread of the event itself has given consumers a lesson on "autonomous driving."
At the end of 2021, Germany approved the Mercedes-Benz L3 level autonomous driving system, which means that Mercedes-Benz's L3 level autonomous vehicles can not only be driven on the road, but also exported to overseas markets.
However, in China, any autonomous driving with L3 level is not allowed on the road.
There will definitely be a breakthrough in the future, and hopefully this day will come because the technology is mature enough, not at the cost of human life.
point of view:
Mr. Qian Zhongshu has a famous saying in the world: Look far away, everything is sad; if you look closer, you should be optimistic in order to cheer up.
Corresponding to the development of automatic driving, this sentence may be more realistic in turn: based on the long term, we should be optimistic about the prospects of automatic driving, which will definitely promote great changes in people's production and life. Based on the present, people should be cautious about this technology that is still maturing, and have enough reverence for science and life.
Trembling, like walking on thin ice, like approaching the abyss...