Autonomous driving ushered in a qualitative change node, Baidu, Pony Robotaxi is expected to achieve "vehicle unmanned"

The commercialization of autonomous driving has taken a key step.

On April 28, Beijing took the lead in liberalizing the unmanned license for autonomous driving, becoming the first city in China to open a pilot project for unmanned operation of passenger cars, and Baidu and Xiaoma Zhixing were allowed to provide the public with an autonomous driving travel service (Robotaxi) with "no safety officer for the main driver and safety officer for the co-driver".

"We expect that before the end of this year, Beijing will introduce a new policy that allows not only the co-driver to be unmanned, but also to move the co-driver safety officer to the back row, and even further to introduce the policy of no one in the whole vehicle." Zhang Ning, vice president of Xiaoma Zhixing, told the first financial reporter on April 28. Wei Dong, vice president of Baidu's intelligent driving business group, also told reporters today that the Beijing Yizhuang Management Committee began to study how to achieve a fully unmanned management method, and all unmanned autonomous driving or open at the end of this year.

Autonomous driving ushered in a qualitative change node

A research report released by CITIC Securities pointed out that autonomous driving is expected to be a trillion-level vast market, which is expected to solve many pain points such as labor cost improvement, traffic safety, and driver shortage, among which the market space of urban open scenes is the largest, including Robotaxi (self-driving taxis), sanitation services, urban distribution logistics and last-mile distribution. Among them, the Robotaxi market space is the most extensive field in the autonomous driving application scenario.

In recent years, many enterprises such as Xiaoma Zhixing, Baidu, Wenyuan Zhixing have continuously laid out in the field of Robotaxi and carried out test operations in some urban areas. Among them, Xiaoma Zhixing and Baidu have obtained unmanned road test licenses in the policy pilot zone in Beijing last year. Xiaoma Zhixing is the earliest company in China to provide Robotaxi services, and as early as the end of 2018, it took the lead in piloting the normal operation of open roads in urban areas in Nansha, Guangzhou. Baidu first launched the service in 2020, and Radish Run has now expanded to 9 cities in China. In the fourth quarter of 2021 alone, the number of orders for radish fast running manned people has reached 213,000.

"When the takeover ability of human safety officers was completely removed from the machine, there was a qualitative change in autonomous driving." Wei Dong told reporters that the core breakthrough this time is that there is no safety officer in the driver's seat, which is actually a substantial unmanned stage. Behind the unmanned fleet is not only the policy space of the government to encourage innovation, but also the parameter design of the traditional test system proposed for more subdivision and high standards for unmanned vehicles, involving information security, data security, vehicle operation safety, etc. "When the safety officer is removed from the driver's seat, it is placed in the co-pilot, which is not absolutely different from the complete unmanned technology, it is a matter of time rhythm." Wei Dong said.

In the view of Peng Jun, CEO of Xiaoma Zhixing, this time to get the license of the main driver, really let the user's feelings continue to approach the experience of completely unmanned people, this process needs to solve how users interact with the vehicle, but also can collect more scenes, in order to improve the user experience.

Safety remains the number one consideration in the current autonomous driving industry. For how to ensure safety in the state of unmanned driving, Xu Baoqiang, director of Baidu's automotive robot department, said that Baidu Apollo mainly ensures the safety of unmanned driving through a three-layer system of bicycle intelligence, monitoring redundancy and parallel driving. "In some triangle islands, sharp bends and other difficult scenes, Apollo will adopt defensive driving strategies such as blind area early deceleration to ensure the final driving safety, or when the main car feels challenged, it will carry out risk warning for cloud driving, which will be handled by remote drivers."

Pony Zhixing is also mainly through the remote assistance system to get out of trouble. Zhang Ning said that in the process of driving, in addition to some safety takeovers, there are also some obstacle avoidance takeovers for blocking traffic or bypassing obstacles, but these mainly rely on remote assistance systems to complete. In very extreme cases, when the remote assistance system has not successfully escaped the difficulty, there are still co-pilot safety officers to get out of the trap.

"At present, whether the driver is in the main driver or not, our version of autonomous driving is consistent, which means that we can use the same standards to verify safety. Since the safety is consistent, the main responsibility of the co-pilot safety officer is twofold, one is as the final safety barrier, and the other is the need to give passengers a sense of psychological security. Zhang Ning told reporters that the expected co-driver safety officer is mainly to give passengers a psychological comfort.

In addition, it is worth noting that robotaxi, which is currently uninhabited, is free to the public, but will still move in the direction of paid operation. "If you hit a Robotaxi that has no one in the main car, it is still in the free stage, and soon when there is a new breakthrough in all aspects of the policy in the next stage, the progress of charging will continue." Zhang Ning told reporters.

Large-scale commercialization remains a challenge

At present, unmanned and large-scale are the two important issues that need to be overcome in the development of autonomous driving technology. Among them, the primary factor of unmanned is safety. However, the cost of autonomous driving is still high, and there is still a long way to go before large-scale commercialization.

"In recent years, costs have been falling, technology has improved, and the inflection point in the development of autonomous driving is coming." Peng Jun told reporters that Xiaoma Zhixing and the main engine factory have in-depth cooperation to enhance mass production capabilities. Not long ago, Xiaoma Zhixing released the latest generation of autonomous driving software and hardware platform - the sixth generation of automatic driving system, which laid the foundation for future mass production. In addition, cooperation with OEMs can be further optimized in terms of cost, so that commercialization arrives earlier.

In Wei Dong's view, to achieve large-scale commercialization of autonomous driving services, two conditions should be considered, one is that the geographical coverage is wide enough, which depends on the road area opened by the government in the future. Second, the cost structure should be relatively reasonable, and when the cost structure is unreasonable, it is not conducive to the health of the enterprise. In terms of cost, it is mainly divided into two dimensions, including hardware cost and manpower (security officer) cost. The cost of vehicle hardware should continue to decline, and there must be a demand for batch orders. At present, labor costs still account for a relatively large proportion, and only by removing security personnel can unmanned people achieve subversive changes in the cost structure.

"Last year, the cost of the hardware vehicle has been 480,000 yuan, according to the 5-year depreciation apportionment, the cost of this car a month is 8,000 yuan, and there is an opportunity to start doing business in the car market, but what I want is not breakeven or capital protection, how to make a profit, the core is to continuously reduce the cost of hardware, while there is a demand for batch orders." Our goal is to get the hardware cost close enough to the existing price range for a private car. Wei Dong told reporters.

However, in terms of pricing principle, the Robotaxi standard previously launched by Baidu Apollo is higher than the existing conventional car level. After Yizhuang opened the commercialization pilot, the market preferential activities were launched in the early stage. Wei Dong believes that compared with online ride-hailing, Robotaxi's vehicles have a limited number and drive in a fixed area, and now under such conditions, they are not irreplaceable, and are more of a supplementary means of transportation. From this point of view, at this stage, the threshold is lowered through market promotion, so that more people can experience automatic driving and accept automatic driving. "It's not necessarily a high price now, if the range of services is limited, it will affect more people to try such services." At this stage, the core is still to cultivate user habits and cognition, as the demand increases, some promotional methods will be changed to explore how to achieve more sustainable commercialization. ”

Co-founder and CTO Lou Tiancheng said that large-scale commercialization needs to experience three challenges, one is to achieve sufficient security at the technical level and reduce the cost to a low enough. At the same time, when the fleet is an unmanned fleet, operation, monitoring, scheduling, remote assistance and maintenance should be established: second, the relevant laws and regulations on the large-scale application of unmanned people should be continuously promoted; third, how to make the public acceptable and can be used as a means of transportation for daily travel. In addition, the development of autonomous driving technology also requires the maturity of the entire ecosystem, while more capital and talent to promote the development of the industry.

"Safety should reach a very high altitude, in a certain area can be comparable to human drivers, and even significantly exceed the level of human drivers, which is the most intuitive performance of technological breakthroughs." Lou Tiancheng told reporters that in addition, how to allow passengers to truly accept autonomous driving products is a very important basis for policy opening.