The domestic automatic driving industry once again mentioned the policy dividend: the main driver's seat does not need to sit in the safety officer.
On April 28, the Beijing Intelligent Connected Vehicle Policy Pilot Zone issued the "Unmanned Manned Test Permit", issuing the first batch of domestic autonomous driving unmanned demonstration application notices to Baidu and others, allowing autonomous vehicles to be "unmanned behind the steering wheel" for the first time.
This means that within the 60-square-kilometer demarcation of Beijing's Yizhuang Economic Development Zone, citizens may encounter a sci-fi scene with an empty main driver's seat when riding the Robotaxi (self-driving taxi) of Baidu's Radish Run platform.
Previously, domestic cities generally required the main driver's seat of autonomous vehicles to set up safety officers in order to take over the vehicle at any time to ensure driving safety. The issuance of the "Unmanned Manned Test Permit" in Beijing has made automatic driving a big step towards "unmanned".
However, the new regulations are reserved, and autonomous vehicles still need to have safety officers in the passenger seat. Moving the safety officer to the co-driver, and then to the back row, and finally completely canceled, is likely to be the evolution direction of domestic automatic driving.
The security officer seems to have been canceled, but it has not been completely canceled, making the "unmanned" color slightly insufficient. This contradiction reflects the traditional perception of autonomous driving that human drivers are still safer than machines.
On the second day after Baidu got the unmanned demonstration application license, Baidu founder, chairman and CEO Robin Li sent a circle of friends: "Driverless driving will definitely have accidents, and even fatal accidents, but this probability is much lower than that of someone driving." ”
His views were endorsed by Zhang Yaqin, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, chair professor of intelligent science at Tsinghua University, and dean of the Intelligent Industry Research Institute. The latter commented that "it should be at least an order of magnitude lower".
This is also supported by third-party data. Tesla, an active advocate of autonomous driving, released a report in January that Tesla owners would only have a traffic accident for every 7 million kilometers after turning on autopilot driving, while fuel car owners drove the same mileage, with an average of 8.9 accidents. Tesla claimed that automatic assisted driving has increased driving safety by 8.9 times.
Under the active lobbying of Tesla, Waymo and other self-driving head companies, foreign regulatory authorities have taken bigger steps and fewer restrictions when introducing autonomous driving regulatory policies; especially in the setting of safety officers, most of them do not make mandatory requirements, but leave the choice to enterprises.
In contrast, the domestic autonomous driving industry has caught up with or even surpassed the international level in technology and commercialization, but faces stricter regulation than abroad. Under the premise of safety and stability, how to further "loosen" automatic driving and give full play to the advantages of policy innovation will require the joint exploration of the whole industry.
A
The domestic autonomous driving industry is developing rapidly, and the existing regulatory system has begun to show signs of lagging behind objective reality while playing an active role.
At present, dozens of cities in China have allowed automatic driving to conduct road tests or trial operations, but few allow charges are allowed, and most of them stay in the stage of road testing or free service.
Taking Baidu Apollo as an example, it has fully opened its test ride services in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Changsha, Cangzhou, Chongqing, Yangquan, Wuzhen and other cities, but only in Beijing, Chongqing and Yangquan.
At the same time, the size of the domestic Robotaxi fleet continues to expand. At present, Baidu Apollo's daily order volume exceeds 2,000 orders; Radish Run plans to expand its business to 65 cities in 2025 and increase to 100 cities in 2030.
Ideally, robotaxi charges should be comparable to a private car. If it is impossible to charge, it is difficult for autonomous driving companies to bear high operating costs, and commercial operation and sustainable development cannot be discussed.
More importantly, the safety officer always sits in the car, which is becoming a major obstacle to the development of the autonomous driving industry.
In the initial stages of autonomous driving, there is a reasonable point in having safety officers. However, with the continuous innovation of industry technology, especially breakthroughs in segments such as bicycle intelligence, vehicle-road collaboration, cloud computing, 5G networks and high-precision maps, the actual value of security personnel has been very limited, but it still occupies the ride space.
At present, after many iterations of autonomous vehicles, the hardware configuration has been very strong. Baidu released the fifth generation of unmanned vehicles in October last year, equipped with 13 cameras, 5 millimeter wave radar, 1 main lidar, and 1 redundant lidar, which can collect a large amount of road traffic data during driving, and with the help of 800TOPS vehicle computing power, let the vehicle perceive changes in the surrounding environment, rely on basic strategies, AI algorithms and safety frameworks to make driving decisions, and then pass it on to the vehicle components through wire control technology.
On the other hand, in the past few years, various localities have accelerated the construction of intelligent transportation, promoted breakthroughs in vehicle-road collaboration technology, and greatly improved the perception ability and scope of vehicles.
For example, in special scenarios such as nighttime, rain and snow, the vehicle's own sensing system is easily disturbed by lights, raindrops, snowflakes, roadside reflections, etc., and it is difficult to make accurate judgments on real-time road conditions. In addition, for special road events such as non-motorized "ghost probes", on-board sensors are also limited by obstacles and cannot be predicted in advance.
At this time, the road sensors set up on the roadside, street lights and other locations can play a role, through the V2X vehicle networking and vehicle-road collaboration technology, to provide automatic driving vehicles with over-the-horizon perception capabilities.
In addition, in recent years, with the development of high-precision maps and 5G networks, remote vehicle takeover technology has become the focus of research and development of major autonomous driving companies. In an emergency, the driver can take over the vehicle from the cloud, forming a parallel supplement to the bicycle intelligence and vehicle-road coordination, and further improving the reliability of automatic driving.
There is already a lot of experimental data to prove that human drivers cannot be stronger than machines. CIDAS, the largest road traffic database in China, shows that compared with humans, the automatic driving perception function can detect more than 90% of the hidden dangers of traffic accidents in advance.
This also means that the safety officer sitting in the self-driving car can only provide psychological comfort. Once encountered unexpected road conditions, it is almost impossible for safety personnel to find abnormalities and make judgments to make decisions and perform operations faster and more accurately than the vehicle itself.
Security officers are difficult to play, and the corresponding policies are constantly adjusting. Regulators in Beijing and other places have asked safety officers to leave the driver's seat precisely for practical reasons. In fact, the regulatory authorities may wish to go further and cancel the mandatory requirements for the allocation of safety personnel, so that the safety and reliability of automatic driving can be further tested in practice.
B
In the eyes of industry insiders, the safety of automatic driving has reached the standard, and the key is to let more people trust.
Zhang Yaqin once said in an interview that there are still many difficulties to be overcome in the development of automatic driving, both at the technical and policy and regulatory levels. At the technical level, he believes that the most difficult points related to autonomous driving technology have been overcome and gradually matured, but large-scale application will take time; but at the policy and regulatory level, "objectively speaking, on a global scale, in fact, we are facing the same challenge - policy and supervision lag behind the development of cutting-edge technologies."
In the past few years, a series of regulatory policies for the autonomous driving industry have been introduced in China, which generally show the characteristics of sub-city pilots and "small steps and fast running".
For example, in April 2021, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly issued a notice listing six cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Changsha and Wuxi, as the first batch of pilots for the coordinated development of smart cities and intelligent connected vehicles. These cities are home to major autonomous driving companies, as well as areas with better infrastructure conditions and greater market demand.
Taking Beijing as an example, in March 2018, the local authorities issued the first batch of autonomous driving test licenses to Baidu, Weilai and other eight companies; in July of the following year, L4 autonomous vehicles were allowed to be tested on open roads.
In April 2021, Beijing opened up autonomous driving tests at night and in special weather; in October of that year, it was allowed to conduct the "main driver without people, co-drivers" tests under the condition of not carrying passengers; a month later, it opened the commercial pilot and allowed Robotaxi to charge fees. The new regulations that have just been introduced allow autonomous vehicles to carry passengers for free under the condition of no one behind the steering wheel, which has a significant breakthrough compared with the policy at the end of last year.
In Cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou, the policies issued by the relevant departments are slightly different from those issued by Beijing, but they generally follow similar principles and advance in an orderly manner in the dimensions of test areas and scenarios, security officer settings, and commercial operations.
Since the promulgation of the first batch of road test licenses in early 2018, the regulatory system of the domestic automatic driving industry has made great progress in the past 4 years, and a set of policy systems suitable for the local environment and promoting the growth of the industry have been initially constructed, which is one of the cornerstones of the healthy development of the domestic automatic driving industry.
In addition, in terms of ensuring safety, the current regulatory policy in China plays a clear role, and the hundreds of Robotaxi vehicles put into operation have not had a single major safety accident so far, which is at the leading level in the world.
At present, a complete set of autonomous vehicle road test management systems have been formed in China, and cities have also introduced landing policies suitable for local needs. According to statistics, as of November 2021, 38 provinces and cities across the country have issued management rules, built 70 test demonstration areas, opened more than 5,200 kilometers of test roads, and issued more than 1,000 test licenses.
Overall, major cities in China continue to expand the automatic driving test area, open more public roads, conditionally allow autonomous vehicles to participate in daily traffic; the position of the safety officer is moved from the main driver to the co-driver, and may be moved to the back row in the future, until it is completely cancelled; and a breakthrough has also been made in commercialization, allowing enterprises to explore the establishment of a charging system.
But at the same time, the safety officers who have been delayed in "getting off the bus" are also being questioned a lot. How to make a breakthrough on this issue as soon as possible is one of the focuses of domestic autonomous driving industry participants.
C
As the intersection of cutting-edge technology and automobile manufacturing, autonomous driving can not only enhance the strength of national science and technology, but also extend the automotive industry chain and drive the growth of upstream and downstream enterprises, which has always been the object of encouragement and development in various countries.
At present, China and the United States are leading the global competition in autonomous driving. Chinese companies are represented by Baidu Apollo, and the United States has Waymo, the originator of autonomous driving.
Waymo has a first-mover advantage for several years, but in recent years, due to the delay in finding a commercial path, Waymo has experienced company management and equity shocks, and the development momentum is not as good as ever; coupled with the natural defects of the bicycle intelligent autonomous driving route, Waymo's leading edge is no longer obvious.
In contrast, Baidu Apollo has developed rapidly in recent years, and the "car-road-cloud-map" coordinated development route is more suitable for the traffic conditions of domestic cities and performs better in high-density, high-congestion and high-complexity road environments.
In addition, in the manufacturing process, Waymo through cooperation with car companies to solve the aftermarket solution, the cost is higher, the body design is more difficult; Baidu Apollo chose to work with car companies to develop positively, the cost is compressed to 1/3 of the industry average, laying the foundation for building a business model.
At present, Waymo and Baidu Apollo have been trial operated in multiple cities. In the fourth quarter of last year, baidu radish run platform carried more than 210,000 passenger orders, equivalent to 4 to 8 times the quarterly order volume of Waymo.
But that doesn't mean that China's self-driving industry has completely left the United States and other Western countries behind.
On the one hand, the technology of American companies such as Waymo has its own unique features, and it is backed by large technology companies such as Google, and the iteration is very rapid; after reaching cooperation with geely, Volvo and other car companies, its products and landings are also expected to make breakthroughs.
On the other hand, U.S. states have looser regulations on autonomous driving, allowing companies to experiment with new technologies and models at a faster rate and at a lower cost.
For example, california in the United States has allowed testing of self-driving cars without steering wheels, foot pedals, rearview mirrors and test drivers in 2018; Texas, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and other places have followed suit, giving green lights to self-driving cars without safety officers.
In March, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued new regulations removing several restrictions on autonomous vehicles, most notably, fully autonomous vehicles will not need to be equipped with steering wheels.
The same is true of European countries. Germany passed a bill in May to allow L4 self-driving cars to drive on designated public roads, becoming the first country in the world to allow driverless vehicles to participate in daily traffic, while the United Kingdom began amending the bill in April to make the insurance company, not the individual, liable in the event of an accident involving an autonomous vehicle.
It can be said that policy innovation, which is more advanced than technological innovation, is one of the biggest advantages of companies such as Waymo. This also provides a reference for policy revisions for China's autonomous driving industry.
The reason why China's autonomous driving industry can quickly catch up with or even surpass its international counterparts is that policy innovation has always been an important driving force. In the case of rapid technological development, the timely adjustment and moderate advancement of regulatory policies will help maintain a virtuous circle of policies to guide industries and industrial impact policies, so that China can preemptively occupy the outlet of the times and cultivate autonomous driving as a new strategic commanding height.
Authoritative media such as the Economic Daily also pointed out in the commentary that guiding and supporting local governments to introduce policies, clearly supporting unmanned vehicles without safety personnel on the road, and creating a pilot zone for the manned operation policy of all unmanned autonomous vehicles is one of the four things that China's automatic driving must do well to seize the world's first place.
Industry insiders are also calling for new adjustments. During the "two sessions" in March this year, Baidu's founder, chairman and CEO Li Yanhong, SAIC Motor's party secretary and chairman Chen Hong, GAC Group's chairman Zeng Qinghong, Changan Automobile's chairman Zhu Huarong and other representatives submitted autopilot-related proposals, most of which focused on promoting policy and legal innovation and promoting industrial development.
In the face of the unprecedented opportunities of autonomous driving, how to eliminate potential policy obstacles such as safety officers, so that policies can better respond to actual needs and promote industry growth, will be a common issue in the domestic autonomous driving industry.