Recently, BYD's cooperation in the field of autonomous driving technology can be described as frequent action. On March 23, BYD announced a cooperation with NVIDIA on intelligent driving technology. From the first half of 2023, BYD will be equipped with NVIDIA's DRIVE Hyperion platform on some new energy vehicles.
As an artificial intelligence computing company, Nvidia not only plays a pivotal role in the field of graphics card chips and host chips, but also plays an important role in the development of autonomous driving, and is one of the first companies to attend the 2018 Autonomous Vehicle Conference in the United States. At present, new car-making forces such as "Wei Xiaoli" that focus on intelligent driving, as well as well-known traditional car companies such as Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar and Land Rover, have reached cooperation with Nvidia.
It is understood that BYD Auto will be equipped with NVIDIA's DRIVE Orin vehicle specification chip, which is currently the world's highest performance vehicle specification chip can calculate 254 trillion times per second, with high-speed peripheral interface and high memory bandwidth (205GB / s), which can seamlessly process data from multiple sensor configurations to achieve safe and reliable intelligent driving.
Coincidentally, just last month, BYD chose Baidu, a giant in the field of autonomous driving, to become its supplier of intelligent driving technology. It is understood that Baidu will provide BYD with ANP intelligent driving products and man-machine co-driving maps. At present, Baidu's intelligent driving team has entered the field in advance to cooperate with BYD for development, and will soon achieve mass production of cooperative models.
Judging from the cooperation between BYD and Baidu and NVIDIA, two giants in the field of automatic driving, IT seems that BYD is going to "outsource" its driving technology to a third party to complete it.
BYD selling out the "soul" of autonomous driving?
Regarding the importance of self-research capabilities of autonomous driving for car companies, Chen Hong, chairman of SAIC Motor, once expressed an opinion that made Xiao Lei deeply believe in the possibility of cooperating with Huawei on automatic driving. Chen Hong believes that it is unacceptable for SAIC to cooperate with third-party companies such as Huawei for autonomous driving, and autonomous driving technology is like the soul of a car, and SAIC must take the soul into its own hands.
In Xiao Lei's view, the automatic driving technology in the era of intelligent cars is one of the core contents of the new four modernizations of automobiles, so it is not too much to compare automatic driving technology to the soul of the car.
If BYD relies heavily on the autonomous driving technology provided by third-party companies such as Baidu and NVIDIA, it means that it will not only be subject to the mainstream core technology of autonomous driving, but also make him lose his qualification to compete with the industry's top masters in this field.
You know, Baidu and NVIDIA, as suppliers of autonomous driving technology, can provide technical support to BYD, and they can also provide technical support to BYD's competitors. In this way, bydir, which handed over the self-driving technology to Baidu and NVIDIA, is indeed like losing its soul.
You know, BYD has always been known for its high degree of self-research, and with the persistence of dead-end technology, it dared to pull out the tiger whiskers of bosch, a top automotive technology supplier, and even left a lie that Bosch products were forced to reduce prices. However, why does BYD today fall to the point of selling its "soul"?
Why did BYD "sell" the soul of self-driving?
BYD is a giant in the field of new energy vehicles, and has a very good performance in the research and development capabilities of Sandetsu technology and even traditional car companies. However, with the rapid development of automatic driving, compared with the new forces of car manufacturing with Internet and scientific and technological backgrounds, BYD, which is from a traditional car company, seems to have lagged behind in automatic driving technology.
Taking the evaluation results of the Han EV, BYD's flagship car in Garage 42 as an example, the hardware of the Han EV DiPilot Intelligent Driver Assistance System adopts the hardware solution of 3 millimeter wave radar + monocular camera. It is reasonable to say that such an excellent autonomous driving hardware solution should have a strong upper limit of capabilities.
However, this BYD Han EV with powerful hardware technology is at the bottom of the Mark assisted driving ability ranking in Garage 42. The intelligent driving ability of BYD's flagship sedan is still the same, and the intelligent driving performance of other models can be imagined.
In the eyes of many people, BYD has a strong self-research ability, it can complete the electrification transformation with its own efforts, and naturally it can also complete the technical improvement of automatic driving through its own efforts. In the long run, Xiao Lei also believes that BYD has this strength, and we will talk about this later. In the short term, it is urgent for it to supplement the lack of technology in L2 and L3 level autonomous driving.
You know, as early as the end of 2021, Mercedes-Benz became the world's first car company to obtain the L3 level of automatic driving certification of the United Nations "Automatic Lane Keeping System (ALKS)", and obtained the qualification to be legally on the road on the German highway. Recently, Mercedes-Benz once again announced that it will bear the corresponding responsibility for the accident caused by L3 automatic driving. In just three months, the relevant policies in the field of autonomous driving have ushered in epoch-making progress.
In terms of technology, most car companies have already looked at the L3 level automatic driving policy. Many car companies that already have L3 level automatic driving capabilities have been forced to suppress automatic driving technology at the L2 level due to policy problems, resulting in "L2+" and "L2.5" and other "roll-in" automatic driving levels.
Hou Fushen, deputy secretary-general of the Society of Automotive Engineers of China and executive director of the International Automotive Engineering Science and Technology Innovation Strategy Research Institute, said during the Shanghai Auto Show that China is expected to achieve 70% of the mass production of new models with L3 level automatic driving level in 2025, L4 level autonomous driving level cars began to be applied on a large scale, and by 2030 it is expected to achieve mass production of L5 level autonomous driving level cars.
However, judging from BYD's current technical reserves in automatic driving, it seems that it has not even played L2 level automatic driving, and once the mainland opens the right of way for L3-level autonomous vehicles in the future, it will already lag behind on the starting line of L3-level automatic driving.
You know, autonomous driving technology requires a lot of time, money, and experience to collect road data and accumulate experience. Obviously, the situation that BYD is facing now is that the promotion of L3-level autonomous driving technology is imminent, but it does not have so much time to develop L3-level autonomous driving technology.
On the other hand, L3 level autonomous driving technology is at the watershed between human and machine-led driving, and is a transitional technology between driver assistance and automatic driving, and its safety and necessity have always been controversial. To this end, many Robotaxi travel service companies that pursue driverless technology have chosen to skip L3 level automatic driving and directly develop L4 level or even L5 level automatic driving technology.
In Xiao Lei's view, BYD, which lacks self-driving technology on the surface, has now played a wonderful hand. It is very aware of its shortcomings, but it is also very aware of the limitations of L2 and L3 level automatic driving, which makes it difficult to make a difference in L2 and L3 level automatic driving.
As a result, it has partnered with Nvidia, the world's top supplier of autonomous driving chips, and Baidu, which has L4-level driverless technology reserves. It is hoped that with the help of these two big men, a short-term transitional autonomous driving layout will be completed at the cost of temporarily selling the soul of "autonomous driving".
After ten years of hard work, BYD's goal is to point to high-end autonomous driving
If BYD's layout is only like this, then Xiao Lei can only sigh: Lianpo is old. However, before BYD has made a short-term layout for the layout of automatic driving, it has quietly put down a long-term line of "fishing" for high-end automatic driving technology, which has always liked to be highly self-developed.
In fact, in the field of high-end automatic driving, BYD's layout is much earlier than most people think. As early as 2013, BYD signed a cooperation agreement with Beijing Institute of Technology, and the lidar test vehicle jointly developed by the two sides won the first place in that year's automatic driving competition. At this time, Xiaopeng Automobile, the leading car company in the field of automatic driving in China, has not yet been formally established.
In 2014, BYD entered into a partnership with the Institute of Communications Research (I2R) of the Singapore Bureau of Science, Technology and Research to jointly develop autonomous driving and intelligent transportation technologies. In 2015, when Baidu's driverless business unit was established, BYD took the lead in reaching cooperation with it, and BYD Chairman Wang Chuanfu was also appointed as Baidu's autonomous driving consultant at the inaugural meeting.
According to Aiqicha data, in December 2021, BYD and Momenta jointly established an intelligent driving technology company. Its registered capital is 100 million yuan, the investment ratio of the former is 60%, and the latter is 40%. In Xiao Lei's view, the significance of the establishment of this company is to develop BYD's own high-end automatic driving technology.
Material source: Aiqicha
In addition, BYD participated in a new round of strategic financing for smart lidar system developer Sagitar Juchuang this year. It is understood that BYD may be in a leading position in this round of financing. This means that BYD has a pivotal role in this strategic investment.
In summary, from 2013 to 2022, BYD has continuously invested in the field of automatic driving and cooperated continuously. When Xiaopeng Automobile delivered its first new car, the Xiaopeng G3, in 2018, BYD had been researching advanced autonomous driving technology for 5 years.
From this point of view, if there is a forward vision in the field of automatic driving, as early as 2013, BYD has been involved in automatic driving, and is good at dead technology in the past 10 years has no research results in the field of automatic driving, Xiao Lei can not believe it in any way.
If you must find a reason for BYD to fail in L2 level autonomous driving technology, it needs to rely on NVIDIA and Baidu to complete the short-term layout. Then Xiao Lei believes that rather than saying that BYD has no achievements in the field of automatic driving, it is better to say that it is the same as the current Robotaxi travel service providers, and it does not look at L2, L3 and other automatic driving technologies that are not very safe and reliable.
In Xiao Lei's view, BYD has always been a "science and engineering man" who is quite knowledgeable about current affairs, but also hopes to die of technology. He knows the pros and cons very well and knows when to do what. For example, BYD has long developed the ABS of the car, but it decisively chose a safer, more mature, and the procurement cost has reached the affordable Bosch ABS when Bosch has reduced the price for this big price.
Perhaps many readers will have a question when they see Xiao Lei's article, since BYD may have high-end autonomous driving technology, why does it not delegate technology to its own products? So Xiao Lei would like to ask rhetorically, if he knows that his products that are related to user safety cannot be safe enough, then why should users bear the risk for the product?
"Safety", "cost", and "high self-study" have always been keywords on BYD, but these keywords are not in conflict with its use at the same time. Nowadays, Baidu's L2 and L3-level autonomous driving technologies, as well as NVIDIA's autonomous driving chips, are more mature and more reliable, so the technology and chips using them are more in line with BYD's needs.
Once BYD's high-level automatic driving technology is "cultivated" mature, it is not too late to use its own self-developed automatic driving technology. In this way, BYD not only fills its own shortcomings with more mature third-party L3-level autonomous driving solutions, but also has more time and space to devote to the development of high-end automatic driving technology.
Note: The material for this article comes from the Internet