Author | Pan Lei
Edit | Zi Yu
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If it weren't for the field visit, no one would have noticed Baidu's self-driving base, which would be "invisible" in the middle of a traditional factory that does not show mountain dew - this factory is called "Beikai Electric", which is said to be the predecessor of the Beijing Switch Factory.
Search for Apollo Park on the map and you'll find this factory near Rongchang East Street Station on the Yizhuang Line and with a strong industrial atmosphere such as tall workshops.
Image source: Taken by the author
The door swept the health code into the factory area, and on the right side there was a huge sign that read "Apollo" - this is Baidu's self-driving platform - in the empty factory area, Baidu's self-driving test vehicles can be seen shuttling back and forth from time to time.
After following the guidance sign further through a factory building and turning right for about 200 meters, you can see a clearing that has not yet been completely renovated, which is densely packed with self-driving test vehicles, and their common sign is that there is a radar device on the roof and the words "automatic driving test" printed on the body.
There is also an "Apollo autonomous driving experience station" next to this open space, much like a small bus stop, and in the factory building opposite it, it is the base of Baidu Apollo's automatic driving.
Dozens of self-driving vehicles from Beiqi Jihu are parked at the base, and Apollo-related billboards can be seen everywhere, and unlike the style of the big factory located in Haidian Shangdi or Northwest Wang, there is a pure industrial style everywhere.
As a "search giant," it looks like Baidu is launching an industrial revolution in the auto industry by building an infrastructure-like tool in this humble workshop in Yizhuang, Beijing.
Wang Yunpeng, vice president of Baidu and general manager of the autonomous driving technology department, said in a speech on "The Road to the Future" that Baidu Apollo has driven more than 25 million kilometers.
Industry insiders also believe that on the whole, Baidu is indeed a relatively good provider of autonomous driving solutions in China so far, and the accumulated data is also relatively large, which makes Baidu expected to become the "Android" of the automotive industry.
The "Android" of the automotive industry first caused a sensation, from a ticket from Robin Li.
Robin Li wants to disrupt the automotive industry
In recent years, Robin Li, who originally did not have much intersection with the automotive industry, has frequently gone out of the automotive industry.
At the Baidu World Congress at the end of 2017, Robin Li said he had eaten a traffic ticket.
The ticket came from the Baidu AI Developers Conference a few months ago, when Robin Li was video-connected with the host on his way to the venue, and the footage showed him sitting in the passenger seat.
That is, the car he was sitting in was in a "driverless" state.
The vehicle was on the fifth ring road, which is almost one of the most complex urban roads.
The incident became the explosive news of the time.
The traffic management department also took note of this news, and after verifying the situation, issued a traffic ticket to Robin Li in accordance with the current traffic regulations that do not allow driverless vehicles on the road.
But he seemed happy. "The driverless ticket is coming, will the mass production of unmanned vehicles be far away?"
Less than three years later, in October 2020, Baidu officially announced the opening of a self-driving taxi business in Haidian and Yizhuang, Beijing.
In April 2021, Baidu Apollo's self-driving car was licensed for commercial operation for the first time, thus officially operating a fleet of self-driving taxis.
While operating the autonomous driving fleet, Baidu also personally built the car itself.
At the 2021 Baidu AI Developer Conference held at the end of the year, Robin Li had a new and surprising remark, saying that he wanted to release a "car robot".
This "car robot" comes from Baidu's car-making entity "Jidu Automobile", which will be unveiled in the first half of this year.
This is the first time that a car company has named its product "car robot", and it will produce energy in 2023.
Based on this, Robin Li believes that intelligent transportation is a major change that will affect the next 10-40 years, and China's first-tier cities will no longer need to restrict purchases or restrict traffic in the next 5 years, and will solve the congestion problem in 10 years.
Baidu's solution is no longer limited to an "unmanned vehicle", but extended to intelligent transportation solutions such as intelligent information control and vehicle-road collaboration.
In addition to the above-mentioned self-driving taxis and Jidu cars, the latest news is that electric vehicle giant BYD has chosen Baidu as its intelligent driving supplier, but Chuangbang has not confirmed this news from both sides, but has not denied it.
Chen Hao, a veteran industry insider who has been engaged in research and development affairs in a number of car companies, told Chuangbang that it is not surprising that Baidu can make progress in the commercialization of autonomous driving, because Baidu does provide the best intelligent driving system in China, and is relatively ahead in terms of driving mileage (more than 25 million kilometers), high-precision maps, scene coverage, and autonomous driving licenses. In particular, there are 411 autonomous driving licenses held in China, including 231 manned licenses, which are the largest in the industry, and the test fleet exceeds 500 vehicles.
"At present, Baidu's data accumulation is still the most solid in China, which is the most important for automatic driving."
In the list of autonomous driving competitiveness released by market research firm Navigant Research in 2020, baidu Apollo, the only one on the list, entered the first echelon, which is only Waymo, Cruise and Ford Autonomou Vehicle.
In the latest report in 2021, Baidu Apollo is still in the first echelon.
Commercialization of Apollo
At present, the commercialization of Baidu Apollo is mainly concentrated in the self-driving taxi business, and its main carrier is "radish run".
At present, in Yizhuang, Beijing, baidu self-driving taxis can be experienced relatively conveniently.
Users can first find a nearest fixed pick-up point through the "Radish Run" app, and then call the vehicle, the process is similar to the experience of Didi Taxi, except that there are fewer self-driving taxis now, and it may take about ten minutes to wait during peak hours.
After the unmanned vehicle receives the order, it will automatically drive to the fixed boarding point, but according to the relevant regulations, the car is still equipped with safety officers.
The rest of the process is basically similar to the fuel car's online car, whether it is traffic lights or turns, the vehicle can be completed automatically, the only place to adapt is that if it encounters a situation similar to the opposite pedestrian or vehicle retrograde, the self-driving taxi will directly brake the vehicle, rather than slow down appropriately like a human driver.
In terms of cost, the starting price is 18 yuan + 4 yuan per kilometer, which is more expensive than most online ride-hailing cars, but at present, radish fast running has preferential activities, and it generally only takes a few dollars to take a ride, which attracts some users who like to taste early at the same time.
The business model of "Radish Run" is to replace the driver with a machine through L4-level high-level autonomous driving technology, so that the vehicle can earn revenue through a more efficient service model than a human taxi.
Baidu said that the cumulative orders of "Radish Run" in the third and fourth quarters of last year have exceeded 300,000.
According to Wei Dong, vice president and chief safety operation officer of Baidu's intelligent driving business group, the large-scale deployment of self-driving taxis requires a process, the technical level is from closed roads to open roads to the whole region, and the operation level is also starting from areas such as Yizhuang, Tongzhou and Shijingshan, and gradually going to the fourth ring road.
"Shanghai was initially only Jiading, and then Laigang and Pudong gradually opened. Guangzhou is opened successively around the main urban area. He said.
At the same time as the commercialization of the self-driving taxi business, Baidu's "Jidu Automobile" will demonstrate its first concept car, that is, the "car robot" in the first half of this year.
The autobot is closer to waymo's self-driving taxi business that removes safety officers.
Xu Baoqiang, director of Baidu's automotive robot department, told Chuangbang that the emergence of "automotive robots" is like the continuous increase in the penetration rate of electric vehicles, which also requires a gradual process.
In his view, the complexity of urban roads in China is much higher than that in the United States, and the density of urban road traffic participants in Beijing is 15 times that of California, which means that the technical difficulty of deploying autonomous vehicles on a large scale in China is higher.
According to Robin Li's description of the car robot at the end of last year, it can "move freely", "communicate naturally", and "grow itself", and will achieve mass production next year.
As a "new car-making force" jointly invested by Baidu and Geely, Jidu Automobile has been determined to settle in Yizhuang, Beijing, and is currently recruiting to expand the talent team.
Ruibeast analysis shows that in January this year, Jidu completed a series A financing of nearly $400 million.
In this joint venture, Baidu can provide systematic core technical capabilities including Apollo autonomous driving platform, Baidu Map, Baidu Brain, etc., and Geely can provide assistance in the electronic and electrical architecture (SEA Haohan architecture), product design and manufacturing. In the case of a clear definition of the "automotive robot" product, the launch of a concept car in the first half of this year has become a high probability event.
But in addition to the "automotive robots" of self-driving taxis and Jidu cars, another commercialization that has attracted much attention lies in the cooperative attitude of other car companies.
The latest development is the rumor of cooperation between BYD and Baidu.
If the cooperation is solid, it means that Baidu Apollo's technology output has achieved a major breakthrough, and the previous dispute between "soul" and "body" has been broken at the industry level - in the middle of last year, Chen Hong, chairman of SAIC Motor, said that he would not use the autonomous driving solutions of third-party technology companies such as Huawei, because it would lead to "(Huawei) is the soul, SAIC is the body."
Bai Yiyang, a veteran industry insider at CMB International Securities, believes that for a long time, OEMs have been quite resistant to the adoption of overall solutions in autonomous driving, which has led to difficulties in Baidu's customer expansion.
The "operating system" of the automotive industry?
The reason why the rumors of Baidu and BYD launching a cooperation on intelligent driving have attracted attention is that BYD is the leading leader in the domestic new energy market - nearly 600,000 new energy vehicles will be sold in 2021.
And BYD's head Wang Chuanfu also raised the intelligence of the car to the strategic level, he once published the view that "electrification is the first half, intelligence is the second half".
BYD has also set up a special information committee, and "informatization" has thus become a "number one" project.
People close to BYD told Chuangbang that BYD can even compete with Tesla at the technical level, with a large number of public and undisclosed black technology, "blade battery, DM-i (a hybrid system) and EV3.0 platform are all king explosion level."
He believes that the reason why BYD does not worry about the "soul and body" problem is that the core control permissions required by Baidu in the cooperation are all made by BYD itself, so they can be opened, "other car companies do not have this technical ability, so they dare not open these permissions to suppliers like Baidu."
According to Huawei's previous response to SAIC's Chen Hong's "soul somatic theory", one way of cooperation is that Huawei and car companies jointly define and jointly develop, and the other is parts solutions.
At the same time, Baidu and BYD cooperated very early.
Public information shows that as early as 2015, Baidu and BYD launched cooperation on autonomous driving.
Wang Chuanfu even worked as Baidu's "autopilot consultant".
Xu Lide, former assistant to the president of Bo county automobile, believes that there is no way to understand the specific form of cooperation between BYD and Baidu, but "jointly establishing a research and development company" is a good direction, and the two sides can work together to collect data. However, even if Baidu and BYD reach a cooperation, it is difficult to form an endorsement effect in the short term.
Chen Hao believes that Baidu (Apollo) L4/L5 level (the two highest levels of automatic driving) system is to unify the sky, and Microsoft Windows, Google Android and Apple's iOS play a similar role, for other car companies, there is no need to spend a lot of money to re-do a similar operating system, just need to create other differentiated competitiveness according to their own technical conditions, "even if you do the above app can survive."
These differentiated competencies include the vehicle's powertrain, chassis and system fluency, as well as branding. "Similar to mobile phones, on Android, the improvement of the camera camera function of mobile phones is also regarded as a major innovation."
He further said that the car in the era of automatic driving is only a carrier, and the software and the big data behind it are the real value, "in the future, the car can be given to the user for free, and what software is paid."
Bai Yiyang, a veteran of CMB International Securities, believes that Baidu does have certain advantages in AI algorithms and data, and also has technical accumulation in natural speech processing, face recognition and other fields.
But he pointed out that it is too early to say that Baidu has been able to dominate the "operating system". Baidu's initial plan is to create a circle of friends ecology composed of head car companies, but from the current point of view, car companies are more resistant to the overall solution, (car companies) at least in the next one or two years or want to give it a go, try self-research, or partial self-research, and accumulate some data. "In the future, with the gradual determination of autonomous driving technology, when some car companies clearly do not have the corresponding development capabilities, they may choose platform-based enterprises such as Baidu and Huawei."