In 2021, 22.2% of passenger cars are equipped with L2 and below autonomous driving systems, and L3 and above high-level autonomous driving is the first to be applied in specific scenarios and limited areas. On this basis, automatic driving will surely usher in a higher specification of technological upgrading. But in the development of autonomous driving, the controversy over the special technical stage of L3 has not disappeared, and in 2022 it has finally evolved into an insurmountable obstacle.
L3 OR L4？ Car company factional battle
When the car companies reached the intersection of autonomous driving, the L3 road sign sent a soul torture to them: Do it, or just cross it? In the face of this metaphysical problem, everyone was divided into two factions.
A faction represented by Audi, Volvo and other car companies, they chose to skip L3 and directly develop L4/L5 autonomous driving technology.
In 2017, Audi launched the fifth generation of Audi A8, L3 is an important publicity highlight of the model, but due to policy restrictions, the L3 autonomous driving function of audi A8 is not allowed in most countries and regions, therefore, in 2020, Audi officially announced that it has abandoned L3 and transferred the technical team to the L2 and L4 technical routes; and in the view of Volvo, which is known for "safety", L3 is "unsafe", and Volvo's autonomous driving development will also skip this stage. Instead, he partnered with Uber to develop the L4.
The other faction, represented by BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Honda, insisted that they would never bypass the L3, but would make a big fuss.
In December 2021, The Drive Pilot of Mercedes-Benz's new generation of S-class and EQS pure electric vehicles was officially approved to be activated at a speed of less than 60km/h on german highways, becoming the world's first large-scale L3 autonomous driving; BMW pure electric vehicle iX has buried L3 hardware in advance, and the next generation of BMW 7 Series will be the first to be equipped with L3 automatic driving, and is expected to be officially unveiled in early 2023 at the latest Honda's new model, the Legend, also features L3 autopilot and allows drivers to take off their hands.
Great Wall, Geely, Dongfeng, GAC New Energy, Hongqi, Xiaopeng, Weima and many other domestic car companies are loyal fans of L3. In 2019, SAIC Roewe Marvel X Pro and GAC Aion LX have already equipped with L3 automatic driving functions, and in March 2020, Zhu Huarong, chairman of Changan Automobile, personally endorsed UNI-T equipped with the first mass-produced structural road L3 automatic driving system in China and announced that it has entered the L3 era.
Awkward, but imperative
In the eyes of Zhu Xichan, a professor at the School of Automotive Science and Technology of Tongji University and director of the Institute of Automotive Safety Technology, the differences between Audi and BMW are understandable, because the L3 autonomous driving function was born in a special technical background, and because of its own positioning, it was once considered an embarrassing existence.
Zhu Xichan introduced that the reason for setting L3 in the automatic driving classification was originally to set a transition period for assisted driving and automatic driving, reducing the difficulty of technological leapfrogging.
According to the current classification, L3 is a watershed between assisted driving and advanced automatic driving, defined as automatic driving under limited conditions, that is, under the operating conditions specified by the system, operations such as steering and acceleration and deceleration are completed by the vehicle itself, in which case the driver can hand over the driving right to the autonomous vehicle, but if necessary, the human driver must be able to take over in time.
This requirement raises difficulties for both technical operation and legal definition. At the technical operation level, the original intention of automatic driving should be to liberate the driver, but in the L3 condition, the driver has become more cautious because of the need to worry about the takeover problem, and the L3 automatic driving system and the human driver take over each other too often and even may lead to more accidents.
The same is true at the legal level. At present, there are still no laws and regulations in the international scope that can clearly and effectively divide the responsibility of L3 automatic driving, once a traffic accident occurs, the automatic driving system and the human driver coexist, the reminder obligation, mandatory interference obligation, improper operation and other problems are intertwined, which will make the definition of responsibility very difficult.
"Under such a birth background and technical and regulatory restrictions, L3 has experienced a dispute period of seven or eight years. But the situation is also gradually improving. At the end of last year, the Mercedes-Benz L3 automatic driving system passed the strict technical regulations of the German Federal Motor Vehicle Transport Authority (KBA), becoming the first automobile enterprise in the world to obtain the UN-R157 "Automatic Lane Keeping System" certification.
UN-R157 is the first binding international regulation for L3 vehicle automation, but also the first official regulation on automatic driving in the European Union, the current contracting states are the European Union, britain, Japan, South Korea, Australia, etc., Mercedes-Benz L3 autonomous vehicles can be sold in these countries. Although the current domestic laws and regulations can not meet the Mercedes-Benz L3 autonomous vehicles on the road, but to some extent it also provides a precedent for the industry and opens a gap.
"So from the current development trend, everyone should not hesitate any longer." Zhu Xichan made it clear that it is imperative for L3 to drive on the road automatically, but it is only a matter of time sooner or later.
Wang Guoye, professor at China Agricultural University, director of the Institute of Vehicle Engineering, and director of the Innovation Center for Vehicle Dynamics and Intelligent Control, holds the same view. He believes that the difficulty of going from L2 to L3 is not great, and it is expected that by the end of this year, domestic car companies will basically reach the L3 level. However, "going from L3 to L4 is relatively difficult and may take a long time to transition." L3 is the foundation of L4, and it is also the only way for automatic driving, which cannot be crossed. ”
L3 landed 3 roadblocks
Although L3 is the only way to automatic driving, L3 autonomous vehicles are not easy to truly embark on the road on a large scale, and they need to face various problems.
In the view of Wang Guoye, the landing of L3 depends on the computing power and cost. "The core of autonomous driving technology is also environmental recognition and perception, which mainly depends on chips and algorithms, so the landing of L3 can actually be understood as depending on chips and computing power, and there is another key factor is the cost of landing." Kingdom industry said.
Wang Guoye believes that the current autonomous driving chips and computing power have developed quite quickly. For example, Horizon launched a new generation of vehicle-grade products - Journey 5 chip, the AI computing power of a single chip can reach up to 128TOPS, support 16 camera perception calculations, and calculate frame rates of 1283FPS per second, which can meet the computing power needs of L4 automatic driving. However, Wang Guoye also admitted that although the current autonomous driving technology has been able to meet the needs of L3, it will take time to reach the level of L4. After all, wide-ranging environmental perception requires not only the algorithm itself to reach the level, but also the true fusion of images, radar, and so on.
Zhu Xichan agreed, adding that the impact of technology on the landing of autonomous driving in the first two years was very large, but in the past two years, the impact of society and government, especially the top-level design issues from the relevant national management departments, has far exceeded the technical impact.
He gave a few examples: for example, although the current road traffic safety regulations have included ADAS and other situations, there is still no clear determination of how to determine the liability for traffic accidents in higher-level autonomous driving environments such as L3 and L4; for a single model, the current China New Vehicle Evaluation Regulations (C-NCAP) although there are test scenarios such as the vehicle automatic emergency braking system (AEB), it is still a recommended industry standard, does not require certification, and is not mandatory.
This means that if an accident occurs during the driving process of an L3 autonomous vehicle, according to the current road traffic safety regulations, the traffic police will not consider whether your vehicle is under human control or autonomous driving.
Liu Yuchao, director of the National Engineering Laboratory of Integrated Command and Dispatch Technology, deputy secretary-general of the China Command and Control Society, and director of the Chinese Engineering Intelligence Society, believes that in addition to the division of autonomous driving safety responsibility subjects by laws and regulations and the environmental identification technology itself, the demand for automatic driving scenarios is equally important.
He explained in detail that in the deterministic scenario, the interactive environment and interaction mode can be relatively determined, so that the technical boundary of the realization can be relatively clear, and the controllability or safety reliability of the entire automatic driving system will be quantified concretely, under such a premise, whether it is the owner or the regulatory authority, the safety responsibility relationship between the system and the human driver can be clearly defined.
On the contrary, in the open interaction scenario, the safety and reliability of the automatic driving system is difficult to quantitatively assess, which will hinder the landing of the L3 automatic driving function.
Sandbox regulation boosts L3 on the road
Lack of regulations, unclear division of responsibilities, high costs, limited scenarios... The road to Rome was always full of thorns, but to get there you had to have the method and courage to cut through the thorns.
Cost directly affects the landing of marketization, Zhu Xichan believes that L3 is not suitable for too many luxury configurations, because most of the L3 is mounted on private cars, and too much cost increase will inevitably lead to an increase in selling prices, "too expensive to be bought."
Tesla, for example, has reached the level of L2 autonomous driving, but a large part of its popularity is that it adopts a pure visual route, and does not carry too many lidar and millimeter wave radar, so the price is still controlled to a degree that the market can accept. Other L2 self-driving models are different, basically equipped with expensive controllers and lidar, which leads to their price being only high compared with Tesla, and losing their advantage in market practice. In view of this, according to their own needs, the appropriate choice of pure visual routes may be included in the reference range of car companies entering L3.
Wang Guoye believes that autonomous driving chips and algorithms are currently in a period of rapid development, and once these two have made a breakthrough in technology and are applied in large quantities in the market, the cost will no longer be a problem, or even "equivalent to no cost". Therefore, Wang Guoye's judgment is that in the next 2-3 years, the cost of L3 automatic driving technology will drop significantly, and the entry threshold will become lower and lower.
For the question of application scenarios raised by Liu Yuchao, Wang Guoye also gave a unique proposal. He suggested linking the division of responsibilities in L3 with vehicle-road coordination, and even considering "certifying" the traffic environment modeled on L3, L4 and L5. "L3 and above autonomous driving without road synergy is difficult to achieve, from another point of view, it is advisable to certify the road." For example, regularized roads and roads that support vehicle-road coordination can be used to run L3 cars, and if there is an accident, it is a car problem. On the other hand, if the vehicle has an accident on the irregular road, it is a human problem. ”
As for the division of safety responsibilities that car companies are most concerned about, Zhu Xichan also advised everyone to relax their minds. He said that in the past, car companies worried that once the responsibility for safety accidents is difficult to divide, it will have a huge negative impact on the brand, so although some car companies have paid a huge cost and have reached the L3 level in technology, they still take a more "modest" attitude in external publicity, and even put forward original concepts such as L2.5, L2.9, L2.99, etc., which inevitably feel "unwilling" from the depths of their hearts.
However, from the current point of view, technological development has prompted government departments to change the previous conservative regulatory model, and gradually opened up highway (highway) testing, unmanned (remote) testing, manned demonstration operations, including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and other cities have issued relevant road testing and demonstration application management regulations, and other cities have also continued to promote the relevant rules, which laid the foundation for L3 autonomous vehicles on the road.
It is particularly noteworthy that on April 1, the State Administration of Market Regulation, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Emergency Response, the General Administration of Customs and other five departments jointly issued the Notice on the Trial Implementation of the Automotive Safety Sandbox Supervision System, jointly launching the pilot work of automotive safety sandbox supervision. The so-called sandbox supervision refers to the first delineation of a scope, the enterprises in the "box" to take inclusive and prudent regulatory measures, while eliminating the spread of the problem to the outside of the "box", belongs to the implementation of fault tolerance and correction mechanism within the controllable range, and the regulatory department supervises the whole process of operation to ensure the safety of the test and make a final evaluation. Some experts pointed out that "sandbox supervision" will benefit domestic companies in the attempt of automotive autonomous driving.
Not long ago, it was reported that the mainland regulatory authorities will issue green cards for driverless vehicles, according to industry analysts, the mainland or will allow L3 autonomous passenger vehicles on the road from the policy level in the near future.
"In the past, people who did law shook their heads when they said L3, but no matter how big the obstacles, technological development will definitely go on, and government regulation is also changing." Zhu Xichan said, "When the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology officially introduces the L3 certification policy, and even the Road Traffic Law makes corresponding amendments, self-driving cars will be more legal and compliant." I believe that all car companies will give up this L2.5, L2.9, L2.99, and go directly to L3. ”