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Under the premise that the growth space of the automobile market is limited, the competition between new cars is becoming increasingly fierce. Emerging technologies, especially autonomous driving, are becoming the main selling point of new cars and becoming a hot competitive battlefield. Whether it is the new forces of car manufacturing, traditional car companies, and even Internet giants, they have joined the layout of this field and tried to get a piece of the pie.
Autonomous driving market prospects
In McKinsey's Outlook 2025 · In the "12 Disruptive Technologies that Determine the Future Economy" research report, autonomous driving ranked sixth among the twelve major disruptive technologies. Roland Berger Research predicts that by 2030, the global market size of autonomous vehicle-end systems is expected to reach 500 billion US dollars, and China will become the world's largest autonomous driving market, of which chips, sensors, and software algorithms will contribute to the main incremental market.
According to iiMedia Research data, the autonomous driving sensor market in China has experienced rapid expansion in recent years, and it is expected that the scale of China's automatic driving sensor market will exceed 150 billion yuan in 2023, and can maintain a growth rate of more than 70%.
The market prospect is bright, but the automatic driving technology ultimately needs the car as a carrier, and the travel service also needs to be implemented to the car terminal, and the rapid development of China's intelligent cars has become a golden boost for the development of the automatic driving market.
According to the "China Intelligent Connected Vehicle Development Roadmap 2.0" released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in 2020, by 2025, the sales of new cars equipped with L2 and L3 autonomous driving functions should reach more than 50%, and the assembly rate of new cars for C-V2X terminals should also reach more than 50%. By 2030, the sales of new cars equipped with L2 and L3 autonomous driving functions should reach more than 70%, the sales of new cars equipped with L4 autonomous driving functions should reach 20%, and the assembly rate of new cars in C-V2X terminals should reach more than 100%.
Last year, in China's autonomous driving research and development, Baidu's "auto robot", Polar Fox Alpha S self-driving car, Zebra Zhixing intelligent cockpit operating system and other products showed consumers a new autonomous driving experience such as speech recognition and face recognition, robot self-learning, and intelligent cockpit.
iiMedia Research analysts believe that only continuous breakthroughs in technology can accelerate the promotion of autonomous driving technology to the market, and the final pressure is still on the side of autonomous driving companies.
The "Tsinghua Gang" of Autonomous Driving
Recently, it was revealed that Zhang Jianyong, assistant vice president of autonomous driving who left Weilai Automobile, who graduated from Tsinghua University majoring in automotive engineering, gave such an evaluation in the industry: "There is no other company on the market now, and there is enough strength and corresponding seats to be able to catch him." ”
Zhang Jianyong is just a microcosm of the "Tsinghua Gang" in the field of domestic autonomous driving, and the legend that the "Tsinghua Gang" has already occupied half of China's automatic driving technology.
According to the data, in 1980, the Department of Automotive Engineering of Tsinghua University joined the research on autonomous driving technology when it was established, and for more than 40 years, Tsinghua University exported a large number of talents to the automotive industry, especially in the field of automatic driving. Tsinghua's academic leaders have become leaders in the fields of intelligent cars and autonomous driving.
In 2012, Deng Bo, a graduate of the Department of Automotive of Tsinghua University, founded Suzhou Zhihua after leaving the Changan Automobile Research Institute, which will start from L1-L2 level automatic driving and then extend to L3 and L4 level automatic driving. At present, the company's development of lane departure alarm system, forward collision warning system and other automotive intelligent and safe driving systems, has been applied to more than a dozen automobile brands such as GAC, Geely and so on.
In 2013, Li Yifan, who graduated from the Department of Precision Instruments of Tsinghua University, and Xiang Shaoqing, the senior of the same department, founded Hesai Technology in Silicon Valley, and settled in Shanghai the following year, its main business is automatic driving lidar, laser natural gas telemetry system, etc. At present, Hesai Technology's products are all over the world in many countries and regions.
In 2013, Xia Huaxia, who graduated from Tsinghua University, became the chief scientist of Meituan at the invitation of alumnus Wang Xing. The unmanned vehicle project developed by Xia Huaxia led by the technical team of Meituan has attracted nearly 20 universities, research institutes and enterprises at home and abroad, including Tsinghua, the University of California, Berkeley, Beijing Intelligent Vehicle Industry Innovation Center, etc., and has completed trial operation in Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai.
In 2014, Xia Heng and He Xiaopeng, who graduated from Tsinghua University with a major in automotive engineering, and He Tao, who is also an alumnus of Tsinghua University, co-founded Xiaopeng Motors. Xia Heng was responsible for the development of control systems for GAC new energy vehicles and intelligent vehicles at the GAC Research Institute, and He Tao was the head of R&D of GAC New Energy Intelligent Electric Vehicles. In 2019, Wu Xinzhou, the former head of Qualcomm's autonomous driving R&D team and a talented son of Tsinghua University, also joined Xiaopeng Motors, responsible for the overall technical route planning, business and team management of Xiaopeng Motors' autonomous driving in the United States and China.
In 2015, Yu Kai pulled Huang Chang, the main architect of the laboratory, to leave Baidu and foundEd Horizon. Chang Huang graduated from the Department of Computer Science and Technology of Tsinghua University with a Ph.D. and joined Baidu in 2012 as a senior scientist and chief R&D architect. After joining Horizon, he began to lead the research and development of the artificial intelligence processor architecture BPU independently developed by Horizon and the chip, toolchain, algorithm and other related basic technology platforms based on the architecture.
In 2015, Zhang Dezhao, who graduated from the Department of Automotive Engineering of Tsinghua University, led several division brothers into the tide of entrepreneurship and established Zhixinger. Among them, the founder Zhang Dezhao mainly attacked vehicle control, CTO Wang Xiao specialized in lidar, Li Xiaofei did AI algorithms, Zhang Fang did decision planning, and Huo Shuhao was responsible for vehicle chassis. Zhixing focuses on the "brain" research and development of driverless cars, and mainly makes intelligent cars in the field of "low-speed non-manned" and intelligent driving overall solutions in the field of "high-speed manned". It has successively obtained investment from many well-known institutions such as Houan Capital, Baidu, and JD.com, and has realized the commercialization of different products in the fields of low-speed, special vehicles and high-speed.
In 2016, regarded as the "second in command" of Baidu's L4 business unit, Peng Jun, the founding member of Baidu's self-driving project and chief architect of the autonomous driving department, pulled Lou Tiancheng, a disciple from Tsinghua University, to leave Baidu to start Xiaoma Zhixing. Now Xiaoma Zhixing, behind the two major group car investors of Toyota Motor and China FAW, has been deployed in multiple tracks such as Robotaxi and trucks, and has grown into a dark horse of autonomous driving technology with a valuation of more than 8 billion US dollars.
Also leaving From Baidu to start a business is another representative of the "Tsinghua Gang" - Ni Kai, the founder and CEO of Heduo Technology. Ni Kai has the reputation of "China's first driverless person". In Baidu, Ni Kai hopes to advance the commercialization of autonomous driving as a whole, develop in a direction that he feels is more suitable, and after discovering that the company's driving direction and his own will deviate, he chose to leave Baidu and join LeTV Automobile, and finally founded Heduo Technology.
In 2017, Li Yan, who graduated from the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University, returned from the UCAR North American R&D Center to join Wenyuan Zhixing as co-founder and CTO after creating the autonomous driving technology (L2) research and development system in the UCAR system. Today, Wenyuan Zhixing has become the first autonomous driving company in China to have the qualification to carry out online ride-hailing business.
In 2018, Liu Feilong, who graduated from Tsinghua University with rich experience in automotive engineering, decided to return from North America to build an advanced high-speed autonomous driving research and development company for mass production, so hongjing intelligent driving, a provider of full-stack automatic driving system solutions, was born. At present, in the ECU hardware design, software algorithm development, supplier system, simulation, system optimization and integration, etc., Hongjing Intelligent Driving has launched relevant programs, and last year reached cooperation with JacHuai Automobile and Horizon, and its technical products are rapidly landing in mass production models.
In 2019, Zhang Jian, who received a doctorate in artificial intelligence from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University, and Liang Shuang and Yu Chunlei, who also graduated from Tsinghua University, jointly established Superstar Future, which is committed to providing vehicle-grade software and hardware integration solutions.
Also founded in 2019, the three founders of Qingzhou Zhihang, Yu Qian, Hou Cong, and Hao Jingshan, are all from Tsinghua University. Light Boat Zhihang focused the unmanned application scenarios on the complex traffic environment of the city and launched the "Driven-by-QCraft" L4 automatic driving solution. Its first-generation solution mainly focuses on medium and low-speed scenarios with fixed routes, aiming to help create urban driverless mobile spaces and establish microcirculation systems in urban roads.
In addition, Shan Jizhang, founder and CEO of Black Sesame Technology, Qiu Wei, chief ecological innovation officer of Yishi Technology, Tan Zhangxi, founder of OURS, Zhang Tianlei, founder and CEO of Mainline Technology, Yang Ming, co-founder of Qingfei Intelligence, Wang Qicheng, co-founder of MINIEYE, and Zhu Lei, founder and CEO of Mushroom Car Union, are all xueba from Tsinghua.
Tsinghua scholars not only do their own work in their own careers, they also continue to reach cooperation and form alliances. At the same time, the follow-up students who graduated from Tsinghua university also stepped on the footprints of their brothers and masters to continue to enter the field of intelligent cars and automatic driving. The "Tsinghua Gang" is still growing, forming a strong network of people, and is forming a unique "monopoly" trend on autonomous driving and intelligent car technology.