Source | Deep Blue Finance
Author | Wu Ruixin
Edit | Zheng Ting
Less than a year after the Lin Wenqin incident, automatic assisted driving has another accident! This time it's Xiaopeng Motors.
Fortunately, there were no deaths this time.
1
The Lin Wenqin incident was less than a year old
Auto Assisted Driving is back!
Today, the topic of #Xiaopeng Automobile automatic assisted driving failure has suddenly appeared on Weibo hot search. According to the news report, recently a Xiaopeng car owner opened active assisted driving on the national highway, and suddenly encountered a car that overturned on the road, but the car's autonomous assisted driving system did not have any alarm, deceleration or brake, and directly hit it. The owner of the car said that he had stepped on the brakes after finding the abnormality, but there was no reflection, and the follow-up traffic police accident investigation also said that there were no traces of brakes now, but he did step on the brakes.
Fortunately, there were no other passengers on the vehicle, and the owner was only slightly injured.
According to the xiaopeng automobile after-sales experience commissioner, the automatic assisted driving has a greater probability of recognition failure in the recognition of stationary objects, which is also written in the vehicle manual.
Xiaopeng Automobile also responded that the preliminary judgment of the owner did not maintain the observation of the environment in front of the vehicle and take over the vehicle in time during the use of ACC + LCC (Adaptive Cruise & Lane Director Retention Function). And remind the user that in the process of using the assisted driving system, it is necessary to maintain an observation of the surrounding environment of the vehicle and follow the relevant function instructions in the user manual.
This is not the first accident caused by Xiaopeng Motors due to automatic driving assisted driving system. In July 2021, some car bloggers said that when a customer was test driving Xiaopeng Motors, an accident occurred when the sales staff showed the ACC function to the customer, and did not reflect on the vehicle in front of them, directly colliding with it, resulting in a rear-end collision.
More similar to Xiaopeng's accident is the death of entrepreneur Lin Wenqin in a car accident in August last year, and the cause of the accident is also the automatic assisted driving function. At that time, the NIO ES8 driven by Lin Wenqin was turned on by the NOP Automatic Pilot System (NIO Automatic Assisted Driving System) and failed to recognize the highway maintenance car that was slowly driving in front of the lane, and collided with it.
Half a month before the incident, another OWNER of WEILAI EC6 caught fire and spontaneously combusted after hitting the isolation stone pier on Lingang Avenue in Pudong New Area, Shanghai under the automatic driver assistance system, and unfortunately died.
Not only Xiaopeng and Weilai, Tesla has also had repeated accidents due to automatic assisted driving.
The first car fatality in China due to autopilot was Tesla, and it was also the first in the world. In early 2016, a Tesla sedan directly hit a road sweeper that was operating on the highway in the Handan section of the Beijing-Hong Kong-Macao Expressway in Hebei Province, and the owner died on the spot.
However, it is worth noting that before the Lin Wenqin incident, many intelligent car manufacturers generally used "automatic driving systems" to promote. But in fact, the current market is generally L2 ~ L3 level of automatic driving, not really fully automated driving, in many aspects still need to be observed and controlled by drivers.
After the Lin Wenqin incident, brands such as Ideal, Weilai, Xiaopeng, and Tesla have modified "automatic driving" on their websites to "assisted driving" and removed modifiers such as "automatic" and "advanced".
It is worth noting that in the accident of Xiaopeng Automobile, the owner of the car claimed that he had stepped on the brakes at that time, but the vehicle did not respond. In the process of rapid driving, the owner of the car in the opening of the auxiliary driving system, even if the driving environment to maintain observation, it is difficult to quickly react to take over the driving task, even if the person reacts, the car can not react, is also a problem.
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Invest heavily in research and development
Seen as a core competency
Xiaopeng Automobile has been stumbling on autonomous driving technology for many years, and invests a lot of money in the research and development of assisted driving systems every year. It can be said that automatic driving technology is the core competitiveness of Xiaopeng. In 2021, Xiaopeng invested a total of 4.11 billion yuan in research and development, and its driving assistance system XPILOT is one of the focuses of its research and development. Every year, I kept smashing it in, and the effect finally came out. In 2021, Xiaopeng surpassed Weilai and became the sales champion among the new car-making forces.
In the annual report conference call, Xiaopeng revealed that the research and development of its driving assistance system XPILOT3.5 core function city NGP (Navigation Guided Pilot) is progressing smoothly, and after obtaining the approval of the relevant authorities, it plans to launch urban NGP in the first batch of cities at the end of the second quarter of this year. He Xiaopeng also declared that from the test results, the city-level NGP effect will be better than Tesla's FSD. In Xiaopeng's upcoming XPILOT4.0 system, Xiaopeng will further upgrade the sensing system and computing platform hardware.
Most of the owners of Xiaopeng also looked at its auxiliary driving system. According to the data revealed by Xiaopeng at the Science and Technology Day on October 24, 2021:
Among the 56,404 vehicles delivered in 2021, the penetration rate of the intelligent assisted driving system of XPILOT 2.5 and above reached 89.74%, and the activation rate of XPILOT 3.0 reached more than 59.29%;
The driving mileage of intelligent assisted driving has exceeded 109 million kilometers, the cumulative number of intelligent auxiliary parking uses is 5.36 million times, and the cumulative memory route of parking memory parking is 20,731;
The cumulative mileage of high-speed NGP is 11.98 million kilometers, and in the third quarter of 2021, NGP accounted for 60% of the user's high-speed mileage under high-speed road conditions.
As you can see, most of the Xiaopeng owners have activated the XPILOT system. In terms of the utilization rate of intelligent driving systems, xiaopeng Automobile's intelligent auxiliary driving mileage has accounted for far more than 10%, which exceeds The most sold cars in Weilai.
In addition, the above data can be seen that in high-speed driving, 60% of users will use the NGP function. But the accident of Xiaopeng Automobile has sounded an alarm bell for the users of Xiaopeng Automobile, even if the Xiaopeng driving system has the same defects as Weilai and Tesla - it is difficult to identify most static obstacles.
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Manufacturers exaggerate publicity and avoid talking about defects
From the above bloody cases, it can be found that the current automatic driving assistance function of smart cars still has a great defect: static obstacles cannot be identified.
Some people will ask: why is there such a large static obstacle in front of the driving, why can't the system recognize it?
This is because the "eye" of smart cars is not the human eye, but millimeter-wave radar. At present, most L2-level assisted driving uses the technical path of camera + millimeter wave sensor. When monitoring the obstacle moving in front, video imaging is combined with the obstacle echo to make an avoidance response. But if there is a stationary or slow-moving object ahead, then the radar will be subject to angular resolution, difficult to identify obstacles, unable to react and mistakenly filter out the target in front.
This is a common defect of the current intelligent car automatic auxiliary driving system. In the user manuals of smart cars such as Weilai and Xiaopeng, it is mentioned that its automatic assisted driving system has difficulties in identifying most static obstacles, requiring users to maintain observation of the surrounding environment and take over the vehicle in time. But these considerations are hidden in hundreds of pages of user manuals, and salespeople do not proactively inform customers of these considerations during the purchase process. Even before the Lin Wenqin incident, the vast majority of smart cars directly advertised it as an "automatic driving system", and the sales staff did not tell the driving system technology of today's smart cars that was not perfect, but directly informed it with "automatic driving".
Among them, the Tesla driver assistance system AutoPilot, which directly abandons the radar sensor and only uses cameras, has repeatedly experienced traffic accidents. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NHTSA) has repeatedly investigated Tesla's driver assistance features. On August 16 last year, NHTSA officially launched a safety investigation into Tesla's assisted driving system AutoPilot, covering 765,000 Tesla vehicles in the United States, according to the relevant investigation documents disclosed by NHTSA at the time, tesla electric vehicles have had 11 major traffic accidents since January 2018, a total of 17 people have been injured and 1 person has died. All vehicles involved used assisted driving functions or traffic-aware cruise control.
The accidents caused by the assisted driving system of mainland smart cars are not less than Tesla, and there are even more cases of car owners dying. In the context of the continuous expansion of the domestic market for new energy vehicles, safety issues also need to be regulated in more aspects.