Wenyuan Zhixing autonomous driving commercialization is further!
On April 28, self-driving company Wenyuan Zhixing launched the first front-loading mass-produced fully driverless sanitation vehicle and announced that the fleet officially rolled off the production line.
Starting in May, Wenyuan Zhixing driverless sanitation vehicles will conduct public road tests throughout the Nansha District of Guangzhou, and the first fleet will exceed 50 units.
So far, Wenyuan Zhixing has formed four major product matrices based on autonomous taxis (Robotaxi), self-driving minibuses (Mini Robobus), self-driving freight vehicles (Robovan), and robo Street Sweeper, covering application scenarios including: smart travel, smart freight and smart sanitation, which can provide multi-scenario services such as online ride-hailing, on-demand buses, same-city freight, and intelligent sanitation.
Four major product matrices and multiple scenarios have been applied, which has allowed Wenyuan Zhixing to take a leading position in the commercialization process of automatic driving and take the lead in entering the second half of the competition for the commercialization of autonomous driving.
01
Layout of city-level unmanned sanitation
Tap the market of 100 billion
Han Xu, CEO of Wenyuan Zhixing, said a year ago: "Today's enterprises that do low-speed, slow-speed logistics parks are likely to be hit by a powerful L4 level autonomous driving company that occupies a strategic market in the next 3-5 years."
Now, enter the urban unmanned sanitation track, and apply Robotaxi technology to the scene dimension reduction - Wenyuan Zhixing is what Han Xu calls "a powerful L4 autonomous driving company that occupies a strategic market".
As a specific scenario, the sanitation field has long relied on a large number of human workers, and the market potential needs to be released urgently.
At this time, Wen Yuanzhi entered the unmanned sanitation market, and there were three considerations behind it:
First, unmanned road cleaning services and unmanned garbage removal services are a vast market of hundreds of billions of yuan.
Second, the unmanned sanitation market with a relatively fixed landing scene with the advantages of leading L4 technology can quickly achieve unmanned commercial mass production.
Third, with the development of the aging population and the continuous recurrence of the epidemic situation, urban governance has also put forward the need for unmanned.
Therefore, Wen yuanzhixing, who has always been at the forefront of commercialization, has also taken unmanned sanitation as another important territory of its commercial landing layout, and has begun to build its own unmanned sanitation team.
The unmanned sanitation vehicle launched this time is jointly developed and designed by Wenyuan Zhixing and Yutong Bus:
Fully redundant chassis development
The first cockpit-free design
Equipped with Wenyuan Zhixing L4 level full-stack automatic driving software and hardware solutions
This model is the second front-loading mass production model without steering wheel, accelerator and brake pedals after the Mini Robobus, and the first model in the industry to apply Robotaxi technology to the sanitation scene.
In the unmanned mode, unmanned sanitation vehicles can carry out road cleaning, sprinkling water and dust, spraying sanitize and other urban sanitation operations, which can achieve 7X24 hours of fully unmanned and all-weather operation.
At present, Wenyuan Zhixing's fully driverless sanitation team has been assembled in Nansha District, Guangzhou City, and will open a large-scale open road test in May, covering the entire area of Nansha District, and the first fleet will exceed 50 units.
From open scenes to specific scenarios, from manned to cargo, it is an important step for Wenyuan Zhixing L4 level automatic driving technology to achieve commercial mass production, and it is also the "dimensionality reduction release" of the universal automatic driving system platform.
02
Four product matrices
Start the multi-scenario commercialization operation model
Robotaxi has trillions of market prospects and is the crown jewel of the autonomous driving industry, but due to factors such as technological maturity and laws and regulations, it is generally considered by the industry to be the longest time from the real commercial mass production landing.
As the self-driving head company of the Robotaxi circuit, Wenyuan Zhixing has found its own way to break through.
Give full play to the advantages of huge unmanned driving technology, decided to use L4 technology to empower each vertical scene, rather than desperately betting, immersed in a scene, in the expansion of new scenarios immediately opened a new pattern, so that the star sea of technology companies can also establish their own commercialization barriers.
It turns out that Wen Yuanzhixing's set of playing styles is really useful.
With the release of unmanned sanitation vehicles, Wenyuan Zhixing has formed four major product matrices based on Robotaxi, Mini Robobus, Robovan and Robo Street Sweeper, and has entered the stage of commercial operation of autonomous driving.
Robotaxi: The foundation for Wenyuan Zhixing's downward expansion of applications, it has been fully opened to the outside world and commercialized in 2019, has the earliest chargeable self-driving taxi fleet in China, and becomes the industry's first self-driving company with an online ride-hailing license in 2021. The Middle East's first fleet to operate Robotaxi to the public was also provided by Wenyuan Zhixing.
Mini Robobus: After a year of normal pure unmanned testing last year, in January this year, Wenyuan Zhixing officially opened its doors to operate all-driverless minibuses in Guangzhou to provide driverless microcirculation bus services for citizens.
Robovan: In September 2021, Wenyuan Zhixing released the first L4 level autonomous driving light passenger, and launched a strategic cooperation with Ford Jiangling and Zhongtong Express to jointly promote the mass production and commercialization of Robovan's front-loading.
Robo street sweeper: At the beginning of 2022, Wenyuan Zhixing launched the world's first front-loading mass-produced large-tonnage unmanned sanitation vehicle, and from May this year, it began to test operation in Nansha District, Guangzhou.
Behind these four product matrices and multi-scenario commercial applications, the key support point is the driverless technology mastered by Wenyuan Zhixing and the full-stack automatic driving software and hardware solutions independently developed and developed.
This solution has 4 major features:
A set of WeRide ONE automatic driving algorithms, which comprehensively handle automatic driving in various scenarios in the same city;
Modular design of hardware, not limited by model, can be quickly reused in the same city scene;
A fully automated big data platform that can realize the automatic collection, processing, and deployment of data, and can support multi-city, large-scale testing and operation;
Fully secure redundancy design, including computing units, networks, navigation systems, wire control systems, etc. all achieve double or even multiple redundancy.
Based on this plan, Wenyuan Zhixing announced in January this year that the autonomous driving mileage on public roads exceeded 10 million kilometers, of which the fully unmanned driving mileage exceeded 2.5 million kilometers.
It is reported that Wenyuan Zhixing's 10 million kilometer test mileage is accumulated from the continuous testing and operation of the self-driving fleet of more than 400 vehicles in 15 cities in China, the United States and the Middle East, and its test fleet includes robotaxi, Robobus, Robovan and other different models.
The specific test area is mainly laid out in China, the United States, the Middle East and other regions, and the test and operation are mixed, covering a variety of traffic scenarios such as day to night, CBD to urban villages, tunnels to highways, high temperature and heat to rain and snow, and man to cargo.
A set of autonomous driving systems, covering multiple scenario applications, this is the most efficient way for autonomous driving companies to commercialize.
However, each scenario has its own scene barriers, mainly due to the difference in the ODD area, such as trunk logistics and same-city distribution, a focus on simple high-speed scenarios, and a focus on complex scenes in urban areas, which will make the automatic driving system different in the optimization iteration of algorithms.
The new scenes expanded by Wenyuan Zhixing, the ODD area and Robotaxi are consistent, all belong to the scenes in the urban area.
This makes the data and experience accumulated in the field of Robotaxi can be well reused into new scenarios, so that the new product development cycle is short and has the ability to quickly iterate itself.
03
"Iron Triangle" mode
Decisively fight the second half of the competition for the commercialization of autonomous driving
With the intensification of competition for the commercialization of autonomous driving, the original pattern of car companies, autonomous driving companies and travel platforms fighting each other has been broken.
As the first autonomous driving enterprise to propose the "Iron Triangle" model, Wenyuan Zhixing disassembled this model into two parts:
First, autonomous driving companies like Wenyuan Zhixing cooperate with car companies to jointly develop and produce models with L4 level automatic driving capabilities and become suppliers of automatic driving capacity.
The second is that autonomous driving companies cooperate with travel or freight platforms to form an operating fleet, thus forming a capacity demand side in the Robotaxi or unmanned freight scenario.
Car companies + travel platforms + autonomous driving enterprises, the "Iron Triangle" has formed a supply and demand cycle that can be ecologically consistent, and can also promote the commercialization of autonomous driving technology faster.
At present, the industry has gradually followed suit, forming a number of "iron triangle" combinations, including:
GAC + Ruqi Travel + Pony Zhixing
JiLi + Cao Cao + Yuan Rong set off
SAIC + Xiangdao Travel + Momenta
FAW/Dongfeng/Changan+T3 Travel+Smart Walker
On April 26, Ruqi Travel, a travel platform under GAC Group, announced the completion of a round of financing of more than 1 billion yuan, which was led by GAC Group and invested by Wenyuan Zhixing, Xiaoma Zhixing and other enterprises.
In fact, as early as 2018, Wenyuan Zhixing and GAC jointly launched the first driverless taxi.
In December last year, GAC Group announced a strategic investment in Wenyuan Zhixing Series D. The D round has $400 million in the account of Wenyuan Zhixing, and the post-investment valuation reached $4.4 billion.
Wenyuan Zhixing completed series B, C and D financing in one year, with a financing amount of 1 billion US dollars.
On the basis of the cooperation between GAC and Wenyuan Zhixing, Ruqi Chuxing joined the cooperation as a travel service platform. Under the tripartite agreement, the three parties will work together to build and commercialize a Robotaxi fleet in the coming years.
From this point of view, Wenyuan Zhixing has always adhered to the route of deepening cooperation with car companies, and broke through the bottleneck of commercial mass production of autonomous driving technology in the mode of "iron triangle".
In the field of commercial vehicles, Wenyuan Zhixing's driverless light bus is based on the Ford Jiangling light bus type, and in terms of commercial landing, it is a strategic cooperation with Zhongtong Express to lay out the urban freight track.
The driverless minibus and unmanned sanitation vehicle were jointly designed and produced by Wenyuan Zhixing and Yutong Group, who participated in Wenyuan Zhixing's B1 round of strategic financing, and 200 million US dollars set a record for domestic car manufacturers to invest in autonomous driving companies at that time.
Behind the new relationship shift, we can see the urgency of L4 autonomous driving companies in commercial mass production. At the same time, this also reflects that there is no way to achieve real landing only by relying on the small-scale fleet operation of the autonomous driving company itself.
As an L4-level autonomous driving enterprise in the industry that realizes multi-scenario commercial operation faster, Wenyuan Zhixing undoubtedly sets a benchmark for the entire automatic driving industry.
Only autonomous driving companies with productization and operational capabilities can truly promote the commercial mass production of L4 level autonomous driving technology.