Image source @ Visual China
Wen | Zero State LT, author | Anyu, editor| Hu Zhanjia
Recently, a video brushed the circle of friends, Beijing Yizhuang, a passenger took the Baidu Robotaxi "no one behind the steering wheel", the driving process was smooth, encountered vehicle avoidance, waited for traffic lights on point, and finally arrived at the destination safely. This video also caused netizens from all over the world to exclaim, "There are no drivers on the open roads in the urban area, and the driving is smooth and eye-opening." ”
On April 27, the Beijing Intelligent connected Vehicle Policy Pilot Zone officially issued the "Unmanned Manned Test Permit" and issued the first batch of domestic autonomous driving unmanned demonstration application notices to Baidu. Under the permission of the policy, Baidu Radish Run can carry out unmanned manned demonstration application within the scope specified by Beijing Yizhuang. It is understood that Baidu Apollo invested 10 unmanned vehicles in the first batch, and the follow-up plan is to add 30 more unmanned vehicles.
This policy has a significant impact on the further opening up and development of the entire unmanned driving.
Robin Li explained the safety of driverless cars in the circle of friends
Baidu founder, chairman and CEO Robin Li explained the safety of unmanned driving in the circle of friends, "Driverless driving will definitely have accidents, and even fatal accidents, but this probability is much lower than that of someone driving." Under the circle of friends, Zhang Yaqin, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and dean of the Intelligent Industry Research Institute of Tsinghua University, also left a message saying that the probability of unmanned accidents is "at least an order of magnitude lower."
From a technical point of view, domestic unmanned driving has always occupied a leading position in the world. This is due to the deep-rooted layout of enterprises represented by large technology companies such as Baidu, in the field of 5G cloud driving, vehicle-road collaboration technology system and other autonomous driving technology fields, together with the first-mover advantage brought by a large number of excellent autonomous driving startups, making China the only country in the world that can keep pace with the United States in this regard.
At present, in order to promote the rapid landing of unmanned driving and technological refinement, it is also necessary to provide more open and innovative policy support, and an open environment is also conducive to driving the coordinated development of the entire industry.
Behind the safety, unmanned driving needs policy east wind
After a steering wheel, no one is driving on the street, and more people think of high-tech and excitement for the first time, but also worry about safety.
In fact, the emergence of autonomous driving technology is to avoid the risk of manual driving. As technology matures, although any car has an accident, the data shows that driverless cars are safer than human driving.
Look at a set of data.
According to the CIDAS (China Traffic Accident In-depth Survey) database, the driver's human factor accounted for about 81.5% of the 5664 accidents in which passenger cars were involved from 2011 to 2021. Among them, because the driver cannot identify and perceive the danger in advance, the subjective error of the driver causes 79.9% of the accident. Accidents due to failure to give way according to regulations accounted for 43.4%, followed by excessive speed, illegal use of lanes, drunk driving, violation of traffic lights and fatigue driving.
On December 16, 2021, the "White Paper on Traffic Safety for Autonomous Vehicles" compiled by the China Automotive Technology and Research Center was released, which compared the causes of human driving and autonomous driving accidents through systematic analysis, and determined that people are the most uncertain factors in traffic safety.
At the same time, the white paper also proposes that automatic driving safety is higher from three aspects.
First of all, autonomous driving relies on a comprehensive perception system, intelligent decision-making system and precise execution system to eliminate dangerous behaviors such as fatigue driving and drunk driving in human driving. At the same time, strictly abiding by traffic rules can prevent violations of traffic rules in human driving.
Secondly, autonomous driving can pre-perceive the surrounding environment from a full perspective through the fusion of multiple sensors and vehicle-road collaboration technology, which can avoid risks in advance and effectively reduce the incidence of accidents.
However, today's autonomous driving cannot be equated with the zero accident rate. The traffic environment is changing rapidly, and autonomous driving is likely to fail to deal with it in time. The white paper's analysis of the causes of accidents in self-driving cars shows that accidents caused by other road traffic participants account for 84% of the accidents, and accidents caused by self-driving cars themselves account for 16%.
In the final analysis, automatic driving is a process of continuous optimization, which requires rich travel scenarios and continuous testing on real road sections in order to optimize data and improve safety factors.
Just last month, Waymo, a Google-owned self-driving company, obtained a commercial license for self-driving taxis from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and allowed the use of self-driving cars to provide passenger services while equipped with safety officers.
This opening of "no one behind the steering wheel" Robotaxi means that in the second half of the commercial landing in China, Baidu's position has surpassed Waymo.
A fact that cannot be ignored is that on November 25, 2021, the Beijing Intelligent Connected Vehicle Policy Pilot Zone issued the "Implementation Rules for the Pilot Management of Autonomous Driving Service Commercialization in the Beijing Intelligent Connected Vehicle Policy Pilot Zone (Trial)", and issued the first batch of domestic autonomous vehicle charging notices to some enterprises. On the same day, Baidu Apollo won the first domestic automatic driving charging order, which also marked the positive significance brought by Baidu in the "second half" of autonomous driving - commercial operation stage. Subsequently, Baidu's unmanned vehicle service Radish Run officially began charging operations in Chongqing and Yangquan on February 18, 2022 and February 27, 2022.
The catch-up with Waymo occurred in the country where the road section is more complicated, which also means that the "gold content" of the Robotaxi test is also higher, so it has received widespread international attention. It can also be found that recognition at the policy level has a significant role in promoting the development of this field.
Both sides of the test site are more representative areas, and there is a significant gap in the number of traffic obstacles in the area, roughly estimating the participants and complexity of the Chinese road is 15 times that of the United States.
Professor Zhu Xichan of the Automotive College of Tongji University believes that the unknown scene is the biggest problem of unmanned driving. Self-driving cars, technology is not yet mature, laws and regulations, standards are still unable to keep up with the development of technology. Users have been able to experience the experience of autonomous driving, but there is still a risk of accidents in some edge scenarios. ”
This also requires that in the policy evaluation of various places, how to achieve the maturity of autonomous driving technology and the adaptability of liberalization policies, and at the same time, the measures to ensure the safety of unmanned vehicles on the road are diversified, and the process of commercialization is further accelerated today.
The world's driverless wrist, policy innovation is the key
At present, in the field of unmanned driving, international competition is unprecedentedly fierce, in addition to the progress of technology, the policies of various countries are constantly revised, so as to cooperate with the further landing of unmanned driving.
As early as 2018, the United States has passed the autonomous driving road test deployment without safety personnel and pilot licensing regulations for passenger services, but has also formulated strict pre-entry conditions and operating specifications. On March 10, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a 155-page "Final Rule" that removes several routine control requirements for vehicles equipped with autonomous driving systems and driverless cars.
According to the rules, under the premise of complying with other safety regulations, driverless companies can build and deploy driverless cars without steering wheels in the future.
Behind these "openings" is undoubtedly more freedom for driverless enterprises, as well as a timetable for accelerating the landing of commercialization. It is reported that the main reason for the opening may come from the long-term lobbying of US OEMs and autonomous driving companies. Back in 2016, Waymo, Lyft, Ford, Uber, and Volvo teamed up to form a lobby group, the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association (AVIA), in Washington, D.C., to lobby lawmakers as a group to pass legislation favorable to self-driving cars.
Extreme Krypton driverless vehicle Waymo One exposure Image source @ Autohome
In May 2021, the German Bundestag passed a draft Automatic Driving Law, which came into force in July. According to the law, from 2022, Germany will allow autonomous vehicles (L4 level) to travel in designated areas on public roads, including shuttles, manned cars, last-mile transport of people and goods, off-peak transport demand, etc.
Germany thus became the first country in the world to allow driverless vehicles to participate in everyday traffic and be used nationwide.
On April 20 this year, the UK Transport Department amended the Road Law to allow owners to be prepared to restore control in time when using the autonomous driving function, such as when they are about to enter and exit the highway. The new regulations also allow drivers to watch driving-independent content (TV, movies, etc.) on the built-in screen in autonomous mode, where they need to keep the car in one lane and at speeds below 60 km/h. At the same time, insurers will be financially responsible for accidents involving self-driving cars, not individual drivers.
At present, China has also formed a relatively complete road test management system for autonomous vehicles, and local governments have also successively explored the "Chinese model" of automatic driving. For example, Beijing opened the country's first pilot project for the commercialization of autonomous driving travel services; Shenzhen tried to explore local legislation in the fields of intelligent networked vehicle access management and accident liability identification; and Guangzhou launched a pilot project of mixed driving of intelligent connected vehicles and human-driven vehicles.
According to the current relevant laws and regulations, domestic enterprises still need to retain the co-driver safety officer when conducting unmanned road tests; if they need to carry out commercial operations, they still need to retain the main driver safety officer.
However, from the current point of view, China's technical level has been far ahead, under the same technical level, earlier unmanned on-road testing, complete data accumulation and iteration, the overall safety and technical level of unmanned driving can be substantially improved.
At the two sessions in recent years, representatives including Baidu Chairman and CEO Li Yanhong, SAIC Motor Party Secretary and Chairman Chen Hong, Guangzhou Automobile Group Chairman Zeng Qinghong, Changan Automobile Chairman Zhu Huarong and other representatives have submitted relevant proposals, focusing on how to innovate policies related to unmanned autonomous driving and promote the realization of large-scale commercialization of unmanned driving.
When talking about the proposal, Robin Li said that the current mainland autonomous driving has entered a critical period of landing, and the technology has been combined and even led the world, but the development of domestic high-level autonomous vehicles is still facing many problems such as not being able to enter the market, not being able to be licensed, not being able to operate charges, and difficult to determine the responsibility for accidents.
For the opening of the unmanned driver license in Beijing this time, industry experts have expressed their agreement.
Wang Xianjin, member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and vice president and chief engineer of the Scientific Research Institute of the Ministry of Transport, believes that this opening up is necessary and feasible. In the future, the policy of active driving should be liberalized, and the word "rhythm" should be grasped, and under the premise that substantial progress has been made in vehicle-road coordination and the safety and reliability of digital, automated and intelligent technologies, it should be gradually opened up in appropriate application scenarios.
The value of the second half of unmanned driving, with the economy to promote development
In the second half of autonomous driving, the driving effect on the entire industry is huge.
On the one hand, unmanned driving can promote the development of new infrastructure, improve the coordination ability of vehicles and roads, improve transportation efficiency, especially in some highway transportation and port transportation, reduce the rate of labor accidents and reduce transportation costs. At the same time, it can also drive a series of supporting industries such as chips, sensors, vehicle manufacturing, AI algorithms, and vehicle-road collaboration, which not only stimulates economic growth, but also promotes industrial structure upgrading, helps the realization of the dual-carbon goal, and is in line with the overall development plan and strategy of the national transportation field.
At the same time, unmanned driving is also an important part of the development of smart cities, and the radar of unmanned vehicles is also a mobile sensor, which can provide data and ideas for reasonable scheduling of urban traffic, thereby reducing traffic accidents and improving traffic efficiency.
The development of unmanned driving will continue to create new jobs (safety officers, cloud driving), and new industries such as car networking services, to promote the vitality of economic development, of course, for the rapid development of new energy vehicles, new car forces, etc., there is also an important auxiliary role.
In order to realize the above economic and social values, policy opening is the only way for the development of the driverless industry.
Deng Zhidong, a professor and doctoral supervisor in the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University and an expert in artificial intelligence, believes that in the second half of autonomous driving, commercial operation is very critical. It is expected that domestic policy planning and deployment will not only be able to keep up with the rapid development of autonomous driving in the United States and Europe, but also be more conducive to the commercialization of all unmanned vehicles on the road and the automatic driving industry as soon as possible, small steps and fast running, to achieve breakthroughs in the policy support level with points and areas, and at the same time to make the corresponding safety risks controllable and predictable.
At present, under the general trend of opening up technology and industrial chain, domestic manufacturers have basically been able to promote the mass production of L4 level unmanned driving, which is one step ahead of Waymo and other companies. Taking Baidu as an example, it has been cooperating with FAW since 2018 to produce L4-class driverless models. In October 2021, Baidu Apollo released the fifth generation of unmanned vehicles, including three models, namely Apollo Moon Polar Fox Edition, Weima Edition, and Ean Edition.
Among them, the cost of Apollo Moon is only 480,000 yuan, which is one-third of the average cost of the industry's L4 level autonomous driving models. If calculated according to the 5-year operating time, the average monthly cost of Apollo Moon is 8,000 yuan, which is lower than the cost of manual driving in first-tier cities, and the cost of chauffeur-drive is basically the same in second-tier cities.
Autonomous driving has gone down the high technological "altar" and seeks further landing and commercialization. Now that the policy is further liberalized and favorable, Chinese companies have the opportunity to make new breakthroughs again and occupy a more advantageous position and discourse power in the global autonomous driving industry.