Akio Toyoda vs Musk: I can't get used to it, I can't get around | car-making evolutionary theory

Coverage of the digital economy

Define a transformed China

With the gradual deepening of the trend of electrification in the automotive industry, Akio Toyoda is also going farther and farther on the road to punching the face.

Written by | Tabor Network Liu Shuangshuang

Edit | Shikino

Recently, Toyota Motor's Woven Planet announced that it will change the previously announced multi-sensor fusion technology solution, and use low-cost cameras to collect data and develop and improve its autonomous driving system through effective training.

This means that Toyota electric vehicles have joined the "pure vision faction" instead of adopting lidar.

Compared with the new domestic car-making forces, Tesla has been actively supporting "pure visual" automatic driving, but for the addition of Toyota, Tesla's boss Musk has only replied to a string of slightly wordless ellipses.

For the old car-making aristocracy began to "electrocute", in fact, it is not surprising, the global sales of electric vehicles have risen all the way, and the replacement of oil vehicles has become a general trend. In 2021, a total of 6.5014 million new energy vehicles were registered and sold globally, with a penetration rate of 10.2%. Among them, Tesla alone occupies 14% of the market share.

With the gradual deepening of the trend of electrification in the automotive industry, Akio Toyoda is also going farther and farther on the road to punching the face.

Akio Toyoda's "True Fragrance"

The story of Toyota and Tesla is like a pair of "grumbling partners".

In 2010, when Tesla was still a startup, Toyota bought a 3.15% stake in Tesla for $50 million and announced that the two companies would work together to develop an electric version of the RAV4, and Tesla would provide Toyota with development services such as batteries and powertrains. At the time, Toyota also sold toyota's factory in California to Tesla for $42 million. With the help of Toyota, Tesla completed its listing in June 2010.

In 2012, the Toyota RAV4 electric version developed by the two sides was launched, but the market response was flat, with cumulative sales of less than 2,000 vehicles, which became the beginning of the rupture of the relationship between the two sides. In 2014, Tesla began to stop supplying lithium batteries to Toyota, and in the same year, Toyota also began to sell Tesla shares in stages. In 2017, Toyota and Tesla officially ended their cooperation.

After the end of the cooperation, Musk has publicly scolded Toyota's fuel cell technology route as "laughing stock battery" on Twitter; Toyota executives have also publicly stated to Tesla that "no one will cooperate with them again."

Akio Toyoda has repeatedly shelled Tesla and the electric vehicles it represents, while dismissively saying that Tesla's value is currently seriously overvalued, and it is far from mature enough to affect the global development trend of automobiles, especially in the field of electric vehicle technology.

However, the development trend of electric vehicles has forced Akio Toyoda, who insists that "electric vehicle environmental protection is a pseudo-concept, and only hydrogen energy vehicles are truly environmentally friendly".

Or rather, Akio Toyoda is just verbally bombarding electric vehicles, and Toyota has been trying to do electric vehicles. Although in terms of results, Musk's all-electric path may have been right in the first place.

Toyota's road to autonomous driving

In 2021, Woven Planet announced the acquisition of the L5 Autonomous Driving Division of North American ride-hailing company Lyft for a total of $550 million (about 3.5 billion yuan).

Carmera, a high-precision mapping company founded in 2015, has been working with Toyota since 2018 until it was acquired by Toyota in 2021.

In Addition, in March 2021, Toyota invested in Momenta, and it is said that it is also interested in Momenta's qualifications and capabilities related to high-precision maps - especially in China.

At this stage, in addition to the research and development of autonomous driving algorithms, Woven Planet relies on Carmera's capabilities to develop autonomous driving mapping platforms in cooperation with Isuzu, Hino, Mitsubishi, etc., in addition to hydrogen energy infrastructure and smart city projects in cooperation with local governments in Japan.

In addition, in terms of industrial layout, in addition to acquiring core technology suppliers, Woven Planet has also established an investment fund of 800 million US dollars, and the first fund was invested in Nuro, an unmanned delivery vehicle company in March 2021.

And, Toyota also invested heavily in the Pony Zhixing.

On December 14, 2021, Akio Toyoda held a strategy conference on electric vehicles.

He brought 15 new electric vehicles to the press conference and announced Toyota's strategic planning and product layout for the next 10 years. According to Toyota's plan, by 2030, Toyota will invest $35 billion in the development of pure electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles and fuel cell vehicles.

It is worth mentioning that of the 35 billion US dollars of research and development funds, the research and development cost of pure electric vehicles accounts for up to 50%, and 30 pure electric vehicle models will be launched before 2030.

According to the information disclosed by Toyota, the Toyota autonomous driving system developed by Woven Planet has the ability to drive itself beyond L3, but it is not disclosed how many cameras are used.

However, Toyota claims that the system can cover all scenarios from entrance to exit at high speed, and will be equipped with the system on future Toyota mass production vehicles.

Add the consideration of "pure vision"

The long debate on the question of whether self-driving cars should use lidar has given rise to the "lidar school" and the "pure computer vision school".

At present, a widely accepted view of the lidar faction and the general public is that, considering the lack of data form and accuracy of pure vision algorithms, autonomous passenger cars above L3 level must use lidar.

However, from Google Waymo, GM Cruise, to Baidu Apollo and domestic companies such as Pony.ai and Wenyuan Zhixing, which claim to be L4 self-driving passenger car solutions, the lidar on the roof has always been very eye-catching.

Because high-level autonomous driving has not yet been truly realized, lidar only stays in "redundancy".

An important part of the "computer vision school" is the self-driving technology solution startup, but how high the level of this solution is, in fact, there is no definite conclusion.

Usually, "expensive cost" and "technical capability" are the main reasons why many car companies and computer vision technology companies oppose the use of lidar.

From the perspective of the Toyota brand itself, cost control should be the primary consideration for Toyota to join the "pure visual school".

From the perspective of model level, Toyota's models cover a large number of mainstream users of mid-range models, and although the price of lidar is obvious, it is still a lot more expensive than the camera.

Secondly, Tesla's success has verified that the "pure vision school" has a feasible path, high-end intelligent driving in the current market share is not high, in a long period of time, "pure vision school" will not be difficult to deal with.

According to the ADAS market report released by the Gaogong Automotive Research Institute, in the domestic automotive market in 2021, 95% of the sales volume of intelligent driving are the most basic ADAS functions, and the market share of high-end intelligent driving is even less than 3%.

From a business point of view, "pure vision" and "lidar" are not opposites, but different choices taken by enterprises for different target markets.

Add group tips

LEGAL COUNSEL: Yingke Law Firm

Intensive Reading