In recent years, autonomous driving technology is gradually moving from science fiction to reality, becoming a major trend in the future development of automobiles, and even Wang Xiaoqiu, president of SAIC Motor, has said: "Any car company that does not do automatic driving is dead." "In the automotive industry, innovative companies led by Tesla and Xiaopeng have taken their own self-driving technology as the core selling point of their own brands, which not only brings huge benefits to the company, but also makes more investors and consumers full of expectations for its self-driving technology." However, the frequent accidents and rights protection incidents have also made some members of the public have certain doubts about automatic driving technology.
Accidents occur frequently, and there are not a few people who have lost their lives
Just recently, Xiaopeng Automobile, the leader of domestic autonomous driving, was exposed to the failure of automatic assisted driving. It is reported that a Xiaopeng P7 owner turned on the automatic auxiliary driving on the national highway for more than ten kilometers, suddenly encountered a car that overturned on the road, and then xiaopeng P7 directly crashed into it without any alarm to drink and slow down. At the same time, according to the owner, he had an emergency brake after finding the abnormality, but the car did not react at all. Xiaopeng Automobile officials also gave a formal response to the accident shortly after, saying that the cause of the accident was because 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 the ACC+LCC function. Simply put, Xiaopeng Automobile does not bear the responsibility for this accident.
According to the official website of Xiaopeng Automobile, the auxiliary driving system of Xiaopeng P7 is equipped with 14 cameras, 5 millimeter wave radars and 12 ultrasonic radars on the hardware, which is 6 more than Tesla's cameras, which can be said to be armed to the teeth, but in this accident, even if Xiaopeng uses the most cameras, it is still not good to assist driving.
In addition to Xiaopeng, Weilai has also had accidents because of the assisted driving system, and even paid for his life. In August last year, Mr. Lin Wenqin, founder of Shangshan Ruoshui Investment Management Company, founder of Yitong Tianxia Catering Management Company and founder of Meiyihao Brand Management Company, drove the WEIO ES8 car to enable automatic driving function (NOP pilot state), and unfortunately died at the age of 31 in a traffic accident in the Hanjiang section of Shenhai Expressway. The accident of Weilai was finally judged according to the rules of Weilai Automobile, and the owner was responsible for the driving safety of Weilai Automobile under the NOP state, and like Xiaopeng Automobile, Weilai did not bear the responsibility for the accident.
It is worth mentioning that in addition to these two accidents, there are not a few accidents caused by automatic driving, the vast majority of which occur in the new car-making forces, but even so, the new car-making forces have never sincerely admitted that their current automatic driving technology is not perfect. Without an accident, he bragged about how tall his self-driving technology was, and once an accident occurred, he cut the words "automatic driving" and "assisted driving", jumped between the two, and pushed the responsibility for the accident to the owner.
Excessive boasting is the biggest cause
For a long time, the automotive industry's understanding and description of automatic driving has mainly come from the classification standards for autonomous driving developed by the International Society of Automata Engineers (SAE). According to this standard, the expression of Chinese can be roughly interpreted as: human driving (L0), assisted driving (L1), partial automatic driving (L2), (with) conditional automatic driving (L3), highly automated driving (L4), and fully automated driving (L5). In simple terms, L1 and L2 drivers must control the vehicle, while L4 and L5 drivers can completely release their hands to control the vehicle, while L3 levels are in the middle of the transition between humans and computers.
In the view of the Travel Bureau, most of the current autonomous driving technology is concentrated in the two levels of L2-L3, and it has not yet achieved true automatic driving. However, in the past two years, the new forces of car-making have been constantly playing the film ball, and their own automatic driving technology has been deliberately highlighted and exaggerated, and the vast majority of consumers have a low awareness of automatic driving, resulting in many consumers being in the dark, mistakenly thinking that the automatic driving technology of the new car-making forces has reached the L4 or even L5 level, achieving real automatic driving, full of confidence in the driving process, and even completely letting go of the body and mind, which is the biggest reason for the frequent car accidents of the new car-making forces. It is worth mentioning that He Xiaopeng, CEO of Xiaopeng Automobile, also said in an interview with CCTV that the authenticity of the product is higher than the publicity and user expectations, and safety and quality are the basis of the new forces of car manufacturing. Today, it looks like the complete opposite.
Peel the skin to find the cause
In the view of the Travel Bureau, the new car-making forces are so high-profile to boast about their self-driving technology, and there are two main reasons for looking at it: One is because the new car-making forces have a thin foundation. In the manufacturing process, the new forces of car manufacturing can not be compared with the traditional car companies in the field of immersion in automobile manufacturing, there is an insurmountable gap between the two, and even now there are many new car-making forces whose products are OEM by traditional car companies. In terms of technology, the new forces of car manufacturing have no core technology moat, and the most critical power batteries for new energy vehicles are also purchased by LG, Panasonic, Ningde Times and other enterprises, and the product homogenization is serious. Based on practical reasons, the new forces of car manufacturing to attract consumers' attention and buy their own products can only start from the aspects of intelligence and high technology, so they are desperate to exaggerate their own autonomous driving technology and carry out exaggerated marketing.
The second is because capital needs good stories. As we all know, the funds needed to build cars are huge, and Weilai has suffered several lives and deaths in the early days because of financial problems, and its founder Li Bin said that there is no 20 billion yuan to build cars. However, the fact is that it is difficult to build a car for 20 billion yuan, and it is difficult to hit the water, and it is not a ripple without waves, and Dyson Motors, Gree Cars, and LeTV Cars are the best examples. Therefore, the new car-making forces need financing, need to attract capital to transfuse their own blood, in order to ensure their own survival, and the story of automatic driving fully meets the requirements of capital investment that can be scaled, commercialized, and has good prospects.
Originally, consumers' confidence in self-driving cars is relatively weak, after several new car-making accidents, the attitude of car companies to shirk responsibility and the imperfection of their own technology have made consumers' confidence in the automatic driving technology of car companies drop to the extreme, and when I asked many friends around me whether they would try the automatic driving of car companies in the highway section, most of the friends' answers were "no".
However, here the travel bureau still wants to say that although the current status of automatic driving is not optimistic about ordinary consumers, the development of autonomous vehicles is also constrained by technical maturity, traffic conditions, road conditions, driving behavior, and even we have experienced various twists and turns and difficulties in the exploration of automatic driving development, but this will never affect the fact that autonomous vehicles are the trend of the times like new energy vehicles, and the future of autonomous vehicles will become the mainstream like new energy vehicles. Then you can rest assured that you can try it.