On April 8, China Automotive Technology and Research Center Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "China Automobile Center") issued the "Automatic Driving Evaluation for the Actual Needs of Chinese Users" regulations. The evaluation procedure is led by the China Automobile Center, which organizes more than 20 enterprises to form an industry working group, and sets up a special technical expert committee to participate in the research and development process.
Qin KongJianzheng, chief expert of China Automobile Center, revealed that based on the experience accumulation of professional evaluation such as CCRT, China Automobile Center has made a stage breakthrough in automatic driving test technology, and is promoting the verification and implementation of the automatic driving evaluation procedure system for the actual needs of Chinese users.
It is understood that the regulation is the first evaluation of L3 level L3 or above in the industry, including three parts: highway automatic driving function evaluation, automatic parking evaluation and urban road automatic driving evaluation.
User-facing is significantly different from government and media evaluation standards
Qin Kongjian stressed that the evaluation standards launched by China Automobile Center as a professional third-party institution focus on the actual needs of Chinese users, mainly through four aspects: indicators, scenarios, methods and limits.
Among them, the indicators should cater to the needs of consumers to choose cars; the scene design should also conform to the actual use of Chinese consumers; the method construction should be objective and professional, worthy of user trust; at the same time, in terms of limit values, it should be in line with the current situation of the industry and moderately advanced.
"At this stage, our autonomous driving cannot be in place in one step, and all the cars in our transportation systems are switched to automatic driving, and a long stage includes assisted driving, advanced assisted driving, automatic driving, and the stage of mixed use of traditional cars." He believes that the evaluation standards that meet the actual application scenarios in China are more in line with the needs of users.
At the same time, Qin Kongjian pointed out that as an authoritative third-party institution, China Automobile Center adopts high-precision test equipment and instruments in the method of evaluation procedures, and there are many different test methods. "In addition to the evaluation of the actual road commonly used in the media, we also have tests in professional closed venues, as well as semi-physical simulation test methods supported by professional equipment."
In addition to being different from the media, he also said that the evaluation criteria are also different from the government's perspective. Government regulation focuses more on the certification of autonomous vehicles for the "safety bottom line", including the safety of driving, the function itself, etc. "Because our overall technical solution of automatic driving has not yet reached the ideal level of automatic driving, in the case of some corresponding technologies and functions, whether safety can be guaranteed is what we are more concerned about." Qin Kongjian pointed out.
It is worth mentioning that the evaluation object of the standard of China Automobile Center is vehicle products that have passed the access management certification, so there is no obstacle to laws and regulations.
The scene design fully considers the actual use characteristics in China
Specifically, in order to meet the diversified needs of consumers, it is necessary to go through repeated demonstration and big data research. Qin Kongjian revealed that in the design of the regulations, the CHINA AUTOMOBILE Center focuses on two major aspects.
First of all, from the process of designing the scene, it is necessary to ensure that the traffic elements contained in the scene are clearly layered, which can fully ensure the actual driving environment of Chinese users. To this end, the China Automobile Center collects and analyzes China's traffic scenes, and also classifies the elements of this scene, and extracts typical scenes, complex scenes and dangerous scenes that evaluate the key problems of the model.
"Simply put, we did a scene collection of hundreds of thousands of kilometers of natural driving, including not only road elements but also meteorological traffic elements." He pointed out.
Secondly, when designing the scene, it is necessary to fully consider the characteristics that can represent the driving behavior of Chinese drivers and Chinese drivers, including the evaluation conditions that reflect the two typical driving habits of conventional driving and aggressive driving.
"One is to consider our scene design from the perspective of driving environment elements, and the other is to define the parameters of our test scene and working conditions from the perspective of driving habits and characteristics, so as to meet the reality of Chinese consumer cars from these two aspects." Qin Kongjian said.
The assessment criteria must be both realistic and moderately advanced
At present, L3-class model products have been marketed abroad, and domestic products are mainly presented in the "quasi-L3" function. According to statistics, of the 711 new cars listed in the domestic market in 2021, 328 have intelligent driving functions, accounting for more than 45%, and the intelligent configuration of new cars continues to increase.
Therefore, most of the standard evaluation objects implemented by the China Automobile Center are new cars that have not yet been listed. Qin Kongjian revealed that the China Automobile Center focused on the engineering prototypes currently under research by domestic and foreign car companies and vehicles close to the performance of L3 automatic driving. "Getting a rough idea of the current state of technical status for these key indicators lays the groundwork for us to set very reasonable limits."
At the same time, the CHINA AUTOMOBILE Center has also made full communication and exchanges on the company's product development plan for the next 3-5 years or 5-10 years, and has also made some predictions on future technology trends. "We have constructed and designed the limit value system from these two aspects, so that it is in line with the current level of technology status and can represent the future technology development trend."
It is understood that more than 20 vehicle companies at home and abroad have participated in the working group of the standard evaluation of the China Automobile Center, and "the research and development enterprises that currently do automatic driving products have joined in." Qin Kongjian told Tencent Auto. (Text/Tencent Auto Zhang Cuicui)