Since the end of last year, the popularity of the autonomous driving industry in the capital market has not decreased, and many autonomous driving companies, including Mo Mo Zhixing, Xiaoma Zhixing, and Wenyuan Zhixing, have recently completed different rounds of financing. Among them, the total amount of series A financing completed by Zhixing at the end of December last year reached nearly 1 billion yuan.
According to incomplete statistics from the investment community, since January this year, there have been more than 20 financing incidents in the autonomous driving industry, ranging from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of yuan.
For L4 level autonomous driving companies, the financing heat is not reduced, and hematopoiesis will take time.
L4's monetization capacity is insufficient
The biggest challenge facing the autonomous driving industry today is policy and regulatory issues. L3 can not yet land, L4 is even more distant, through L4 monetization short-term hopeless.
On April 12, 2022, in the online forum organized by Automotive Observation magazine, Zhu Xichan, professor of the School of Automotive Science and Dean of the Institute of Automotive Safety Technology of Tongji University, said: "At this stage, the development level of autonomous driving technology can already support the industrialization of L3-level automatic driving systems, and enterprises are selling products with L2+ intelligent driving functions. The mass production of L3 self-driving cars is subject to more social factors such as policies and laws and regulations. ”
Autonomous driving is a "money-burning" game. Waymo, Cruise, Zoox, Ardo AI's U.S. counterparts have each received billions of dollars in financing so far, and Waymo and Cruise have parent companies that are quite strong and willing to invest heavily in autonomous driving. These companies have not yet been able to run through the complete L4 commercialization path.
In China, which is favored by capital and has completed the D round of financing, The disclosed financing amount previously obtained by Xiaoma Zhixing is about 1.1 billion US dollars, which is far from the US players, and Chinese startups such as Yuanrong Qixing and AutoX have obtained lower financing than Xiaoma Zhixing.
Baidu Apollo, which has the strongest domestic background, is also facing funding problems. According to Baidu's financial report data, in the past 10 years, Baidu's total revenue has increased by nearly 14 times, but its research and development expenses have increased by more than 25 times. It is understood that Baidu's autonomous driving team invests more than 1 billion yuan every year.
Today, when L4 level autonomous driving cannot be commercialized on a large scale, there are two main ways for autonomous driving companies in the passenger car industry to obtain revenue: Robotaxi charges and mass production of L2+ assisted driving systems.
Baidu, Xiaoma Zhixing, Wenyuan Zhixing and other companies have begun the initial commercial operation of Robotaxi last year, and the development speed is relatively fast. According to Baidu's 2021 financial report, the order volume of Radish Fast Run in the fourth quarter of 2021 was about 213,000 orders, an increase of nearly 1 times from the previous quarter.
However, Robotaxi can provide very little revenue to enterprises at this stage. Taking Beijing as an example, at present, users only need to spend 2-5 yuan to pay for a carrot fast running Robotaxi order with an original price of more than 20 yuan. Enterprises are gradually reducing subsidies to users, but there is still a big difference from the original price. In the short term, it will be difficult for businesses to rely on Robotaxi to make a profit.
The L4 autonomous commercial vehicle sector is also having a hard time. According to Tucson's future IPO prospectus and 2021 financial report, from 2018 to 2021, Tucson's future annual losses will be 0.45 billion, 0.84 billion, 178 million and 737 million US dollars, and the loss in 2021 will exceed the total loss amount of the previous three years. From 2019 to 2021, Tucson's future losses increased by 87%, 112% and 314% year-on-year, and the loss growth rate continued to expand. Due to high R&D investment and a difficult-to-form commercial model, Tucson's future desire to turn a profit in recent years is extremely unlikely.
L4 autonomous driving companies are the main reason for the problem of funding. At present, the capital market should prefer companies that walk on two legs of L4 autonomous driving and L2 + ADAS.
L2 continues to fight in battle
From 2016 to 2018, autonomous driving has become one of the industries favored by capital. With the passage of time, the capital market has returned to rationality, and the focus of capital on the industry has gradually shifted from technology to landing.
Former Waymo CEO Kravchik once had a famous verbal battle with Tesla CEO Musk:
"Google has developed a fully autonomous driving system, while Tesla's is only an assisted driving system (ADAS), which is unlikely to dramatically jump into autonomous driving."
This has triggered a dispute in the industry about the route of autonomous driving: directly landing L4-L5 in one step, or through the L2 transition with simpler technical requirements, and then marching to L4.
Yu Qian, CEO of Qingzhou Zhihang, has publicly stated, "From the perspective of sensor types and computing platforms, the application scenario data of L2 and L3 are very different from those of L4. Affected by cost, many passenger owners of L2 and L3 solutions should focus on vision and millimeter wave perception, and some have lidar assistance, and the computing power and data dimension of the program are relatively low. Such a configuration is difficult to communicate with L4 data. “
Wang Naiyan, Tucson's future chief scientist, also holds the same view, data is not a "panacea" for autonomous driving, even if there is more data L2 system will not automatically "grow" into an L4 system. A reliable L4 system requires the cooperation of engineering, algorithms, hardware, and vehicles to be created.
Many L4 self-driving startups that promote technology have shown some contempt for "laying eggs along the way". "A lot of them have been kidnapped by Google Waymo's lines and thinking." An investor who focuses on autonomous driving said in an interview with the media.
In the case of Ma Zhi's behavior, the industry knows that Lou Tiancheng is a technology maniac, and the executives who speak more frequently about Xiao Ma Zhixing are almost all engineers, which is also doomed to the company's engineer culture.
An industry insider close to the top management of Xiaoma Zhixing said: "The high-level is all from technology, and even the product has not been done, let alone commercialized." The technical atmosphere has advantages in the early days, but commercialization takes a little more time. ”
The cruel business world is not a simple technical competition, whether the technical route from L2 to L4/L5 is feasible or not, sinking ADAS can solve the problem of "surviving" the enterprise at this stage.
Among the domestic autonomous driving startups, Momenta, founded by Cao Xudong, a former researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, is the one that changed its strategy earlier. Momenta has cooperated with SAIC Motor and BYD, among which its assisted driving technology has been landed on Zhiji Car when it jointly launched the Robotaxi service with SAIC Artificial Intelligence Lab and Xiangdao Travel.
Because of this, The two-legged Movinga has received more than $1 billion in financing in 2021, and car companies including SAIC, General Motors, and Toyota have become shareholders of Momenta.
In addition, the zhixing, which has only been established for more than two years, has also become a dark horse on the track. The self-driving company completed four rounds of financing in the past year, totaling more than 1 billion yuan.
Today, when ADAS has become a new grasp of automobile consumption upgrade, the ultimate wisdom line from Great Wall Motors has the innate advantage of "laying eggs".
In May last year, the Weipai Moka equipped with the HWA driver assistance function of Miller Chi Heng was officially launched, becoming the first model of The Moo Chi Heng to land in the passenger car market. It is estimated that by the end of 2022, the 34 models of Great Wall Motors will be implemented, accounting for about 80% of its overall models to be listed, and the total number of passenger cars in the next three years is expected to exceed 1 million units.
According to the data released by The Wisdom Bank, the company has hundreds of millions of yuan in revenue by the end of 2021, and the team expects that in 2022, the number of projects from passenger car assisted driving will increase by 7 times. Previously, the official of The Wisdom Bank had said that the company planned to achieve profitability in 2022.
From a technical point of view, the L2 assisted driving system is difficult to provide fundamental support for the research and development of L4/L5 autonomous driving from the data dimension, which solves the problem of enterprise survival.
L4/L5 is still implemented by deploying Robotaxi, which remains a challenge.
On the one hand, Robotaxi's operations are still in the pilot phase worldwide, and neither the fleet size, the number of orders nor the scope of the pilot are enough to provide enterprises with enough data for R&D.
Deploying Robotaxi, on the other hand, is a significant expense. Faced with an increasingly crowded track and an increasingly tough financing environment, Robotaxi may face a funding crisis.
The landing of L4/L5 autonomous driving requires a better road, a road with a wider implementation scope, and a road that can solve the basic livelihood of enterprises.
The autonomous driving industry is in a state of upheaval, and how to survive in the rapids and stand alone is a problem that players need to face.