Author / Baked buns under the stars
Edit / Starry Sky of Spinach
Typography / Tangerine peel under the stars
May Day international labor day has just passed, but how much I hope to work less or even no work in some areas.
Like driving, freeing our hands has always been a dream thing. On this day, it seems to be getting closer and closer to us.
Two days before May Day, the background of the confrontation with the epidemic issued a notice of unmanned manned demonstration application, taking the lead in loosening the binding of unmanned vehicles. Among them, Baidu became the first batch of approved enterprises. It should be known that Baidu's Radish Run will carry out unmanned autonomous driving manned demonstration applications on open roads within 60 square kilometers of the Beijing Economic Development Zone. The first batch of 10 vehicles will be put into use, and then added according to the actual situation. (To add, as of the fourth quarter of 2021, the number of orders for turnip fast running has reached 213,000)
Robin Li's circle of friends (image from the Internet)
Li Dagang also personally stood for the unmanned platform. Indeed, safety is the biggest "roadblock" in the promotion of unmanned driving in addition to the maturity of technology.
Coincidentally, Guangzhou has also begun to provide self-driving passenger tests, and the self-driving bus is L4 level (highly autonomous driving).
The policy is favorable and the superposition technology is gradually mature, and the capital market is also ushering in a jubilation. The unmanned sector rose nearly 8% in the last three days before the holiday, and investors chose the former in the choice of whether to hold shares or hold coins.
So, after a long period of stagnation in the field of unmanned driving, is the day of free hands really coming? In this trillion-level blue ocean market, what opportunities are waiting for ordinary investors to tap? The author takes you into this market.
First, there is no dormancy, there is no bloom
Talking about automatic driving, we have to first introduce its classification, L0-L5 has a total of six levels, and each level has a clear boundary, which is also a foreshadowing for the following.
Autonomous Driving Classification (Official)
The development of automatic driving to today, everything is ready, only owe The East Wind. But reading history makes people wise, retracing the road traveled by automatic driving, the thorns and exploration along the way, only the players on the track themselves know.
Back in 2009, after the Beijing Olympics, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) used competition as an entry point to stimulate the innovation potential of players in order to promote the commercial development of autonomous driving. Google officially set up a self-driving project that year, striving to be the person who "eats crabs".
After that, Uber and Tesla were also attracted by the beautiful (money) scene of this industry, and traditional car companies also acquired technology companies one after another, and the industry entered a period of rapid development.
When countless players rush into a track with capital and ideals that are not yet mature in technology, it is easy to bubble, especially when the safety problems that have been criticized by people (such as fatal accidents in the 2018 Uber testing process), the pressure on public opinion of players has increased sharply, and autonomous driving has fallen into a low tide.
Different stages of autonomous driving
But this is ultimately just the darkness before dawn. With the recent positives of the automatic driving circle continue to be released, such as the relevant departments in China and the United States are officially opening the policy door for autonomous vehicles on the road, such as Germany's conditional release of L3 for Mercedes-Benz S-Class vehicles last year, which is undoubtedly good for the continuous iteration of technology.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration untied autonomous driving
Second, what subdivision track is worth paying attention to?
Open the industrial chain of automatic driving, you will find that the upstream of the industrial chain includes four levels: the perception layer, the execution layer, the judgment layer and the network layer. Perception, execution and judgment are the core elements of autonomous driving technology, and networking is an important way of vehicle-road collaboration.
The midstream of the industrial chain includes automakers, autonomous driving technology players and so on. Downstream is a variety of application scenarios.
Autonomous driving industry chain
With so many players coming together, the size of the entire market is no smaller. According to agency forecasts, the size of the global driverless market last year was about $7 billion. By 2040, driverless vehicles will be sold at 21 million vehicles, and the penetration rate of L4 and L5 autonomous driving is expected to reach 50%.
Driverless penetration
Such a large market, what segmentation track is worth paying attention to?
The subdivision track to appear must be lidar (located in the perception layer of the autonomous driving industry chain), as the main hardware for the advancement of autonomous driving. Compared with millimeter-wave radar, with a series of advantages such as higher resolution, better stability, and more reliable three-dimensional data, it has been applied by more and more downstream players (such as new car-making forces).
The problem of higher cost that has been criticized (the current transmission and reception modules in lidar still account for more than half of the cost), and with the continuous entry of players such as Huawei and DJI, it has opened a wave of domestic substitution, pulling the cost of lidar to less than 10,000 yuan.
Last year, also known as the first year of lidar, there are also many people in the industry predict that the global lidar market size will exceed 50 billion yuan in 2030, more than 70% of the compound annual growth rate, is it not worth looking forward to?
Lidar market size forecast
Third, trigger the butterfly effect
The gradual landing of autonomous driving may trigger the "butterfly effect". Take a chestnut, automatic driving frees the driver's hands, and will also indirectly stimulate the vitality of the entire vehicle ecology.
I remember at the launch of Model S Plaid, the horse maniac demonstrated a Cyberpunk 2077 with a car machine, and also came up with the idea of moving the entire Steam library to Tesla. At that time, L4/L5 cars may become an important driving force for entertainment consumption.
And this butterfly itself has become the object of competition between countries.
Note: This article does not constitute any investment advice. The stock market is risky, and you need to be cautious when entering the market. There is no harm in buying and selling.