After Didi separates its autonomous driving division in 2019, the first problem it faces is to clarify the development route and point out the direction for future commercialization.
In the past two years, the commercialization of Robotaxi at home and abroad has been explored in twists and turns, and no one can provide a clear path.
Uber, also a mobility company, did autonomous driving earlier than Didi, and has proposed the idea of an open platform and welcomes all autonomous driving companies to put self-driving vehicles on Uber. However, Uber still chose to sell its self-driving business as a package.
Didi obviously thought more clearly:
Mobility companies do autonomous driving ， The core advantages are: Travel networks and Massive Road scenario advantages foundation 。Therefore, in 2019, Zhang Bo, CEO of Didi Autonomous Driving, proposed that Didi Autonomous Driving is very important in order to achieve landing: shared travel network, driverless technology, support from automobile manufacturers and Tier 1, and of course, enough money.
In the past two years, Didi has not done much in the field of automatic driving, but every time it appears, there is always a feeling of doing big things in a muffled voice.
In 2020, Didi opened its autonomous driving service to the public in Shanghai;
In 2021, Didi released a video of no one taking over for 5 consecutive hours;
At the end of 2022, Didi Autonomous Driving announced the number of R&D teams: from 200 in 2019, to 1,000 people.
Not long ago, Didi announced that users can experience Didi's autonomous driving services in Shanghai and Guangzhou autonomous driving demonstration zones. The most obvious feature is that Didi has already conducted a normalized road test in Guangzhou.
Recently, Didi autonomous driving announced more progress in its commercialization.
Robotaxi also has to serve
Over the past many years, domestic and foreign technology companies including Didi and travel companies have focused on the technical dimension and demonstrated the continuous iteration of autonomous driving technology capabilities in exploring the commercialization of Robotaxi, but in fact, there is another very important point:
Users in the process of operation ， What kind of service will you enjoy 。IN THE RECENT DIDI AUTONOMOUS DRIVING OPEN DAY, THE MOST NOTABLE WAS THE CONCEPT CAR DIDI NEURON RELEASED BY DIDI.
DIDI NEURON CONCEPT CAR Source: Network
The first feature of the driverless concept car is that the space should be comfortable, which has been reflected in the space design of Didi's customized version of the ride-hailing car. THIS TIME, DIDI NEURON REMOVED THE DRIVER'S SEAT IN THE SPACE WITH A WHEELBASE OF 3.2 METERS AND A LENGTH OF ONLY 4.5 METERS, ALLOWING THE SEATING SPACE TO BE FURTHER EXPANDED, AND THE DATA PROVIDED BY DI DI NEURON SHOWS THAT THE INTERIOR SPACE OF DIDI NEURON HAS INCREASED BY 50% COMPARED WITH ORDINARY RIDE-HAILING CARS, AND THE LEGROOM HAS INCREASED BY 86%, AND PASSENGERS CAN ALSO START "ONE-KEY LYING FLAT" IN THE CAR.
At the same time, DIDI NEURON has many details designed with great care in the whole process from passengers boarding, riding to getting off the bus.
For example, the DiDi NEURON concept car adopts the "three-door" design of top wing door + side sliding door, the side sliding door is only installed on the right side to ensure the safety of passengers, and the top wing door allows passengers to enter the cockpit without lowering their heads.
The most noteworthy is the interaction design of DiDi NEURON, the DiDi NEURON concept car body is equipped with 5 large screens, 3 of which are located at the front of the car.
Meng Xing, COO of Didi autonomous driving, said that the reason why it is not designed as lights like normal vehicles is that DiDi NEURON hopes to provide a "window" for outsiders: when there is no driver, outsiders can also understand the "thoughts" of the unmanned vehicle and pass on what the unmanned vehicle will do next to the surrounding traffic participants.
The design of the rear part of the unmanned vehicle can be said to be very suitable for the needs of travel services. DIDI NEURON installs a robotic arm in the trunk position, which can act as a butler, help passengers lift heavy objects, hand passengers a glass of water while riding, etc., and there is no similar design in the unannounced driverless concept car.
Robotic arm operation Source: Network
The design concept of Didi's autonomous driving concept vehicle reflects the service concept of Didi's unmanned vehicle: safety, comfort, and understanding of you.
This also means that
Didi Autonomous driving is based on technology and products ， Entered the focus on the passenger experience 、 The second phase of the operations experience 。The driverless concept car can be seen as Didi's product starting from the concept of travel service and focusing on the experience of passenger service; At the same time, in the past two years, in response to user needs, Didi autonomous driving has been continuously iterating technology to improve the operation experience.
Meng Xing introduced that in the past two years, Didi has built many technical modules for urban travel scenarios to solve three common problems in urban transportation:
More traffic, more interaction, more long-tail scenarios.For example, in order to cope with the complex problem of the flow of people at an intersection, Didi Autonomous Driving designed a perception large model and a prediction model to solve the delay caused by the system's recognition of complex people flow, and from the end-to-end understanding, through game theory to make multiple rounds of prediction, so as to achieve the understanding of complex people flow interaction and improve the accuracy of prediction.
In order to cope with the frequent occurrence of kittens and dogs on the road, as well as irregular plastic bags, Didi autonomous driving uses the creation of an "urban generalization engine" to judge and predict the behavior trajectory of these high-frequency scenarios.
The most important point for operational services is site density, which is the most responsive point in the past two years of drop-driven passenger demand.
To increase the density of stations, we must first solve the problem that autonomous vehicles can park at any time, which means that autonomous vehicles can complete parking operations at complex stations with obstacles. To this end, Didi automatic driving is introducing unlimited parking technology, unlimited parking is to turn the entire road section into a station, in the place close to the location set by the passenger, the autonomous driving car can find the parking place according to the road situation and park in, if it can't find it, it will cycle back to find the right parking again.
If you want to get close to the travel experience of online car-hailing, it is also very important that autonomous vehicles can also provide services at night, and night service tests the perception hardware recognition problem of autonomous vehicles, so Didi introduces infrared cameras into the sensor suite to improve the recognition ability of dark areas.
In the past two years, Didi autonomous vehicles have been benchmarked against online ride-hailing operation services, and after testing, the operational efficiency of Didi's autonomous vehicles is infinitely close to the operational efficiency of online ride-hailing.
Didi will use the delivery time and distance to compare with the ride-hailing experience to measure the operation effect of autonomous vehicles Source: Didi autonomous driving official
In order to ensure the quality of operations, Didi has also set up an autonomous driving operation and maintenance center "Huiju Port" in Jiading, Shanghai, to provide services for autonomous vehicles. Meng Xing said that Didi plans to set up an unmanned operation center in the operation area and provide maintenance for autonomous vehicles through robots to ensure that unmanned vehicles provide better services.
In the commercialization of many Robotaxi, we have seen too many technical landscapes, and Didi is one of the few companies that can elevate services to the same important position as technology.
From products to platform operations, Didi's goal is clear - to improve and improve
Autonomous driving commercialization services。
Hardware should not be a stumbling block
To achieve commercialization, it is necessary to continuously reduce costs.
So for many years, mainstream autonomous vehicle operators have been exploring one thing: how to reduce the cost of mass production of autonomous vehicles.
In the past, autonomous vehicles were mostly modified vehicles, and the hardware and computing units installed in modified vehicles accounted for a large amount of cost, and they tried to reduce the number of hardware and improve the capabilities of computing units to reduce costs. Subsequently, driverless vehicles developed by autonomous driving technology companies themselves or in conjunction with car companies began to appear, and the problem of cost reduction continued to be promoted on this basis.
In terms of the experience and cost of autonomous vehicles, Didi has always had its own set of ideas.
In May 2021, Didi Autonomous Driving released the Gemini platform, demonstrating the cost reduction effect of hardware modularization and software improvement. At that time, Meng Xing introduced that the new generation of platforms achieved flat costs under the condition that the number of hardware and performance were improved. 90% of the after-mounted components can be mass-produced, and 80% can choose the localization solution.
This time, Didi autonomous driving starts from the development of key hardware to further improve cost control capabilities and perception effects.
Lidar, an important perception hardware on unmanned vehicles, is also the hardware that accounts for a high proportion of costs in unmanned vehicles dominated by modified vehicles in the past.
In the Didi Autonomous Driving Open Day, Didi and Beixing cooperated to develop the first 2K image-level high-precision lidar in China - Beiyao beta version was officially unveiled, based on the demand for L4 autonomous driving for LiDAR, Didi Autonomous Driving must have the main functions of the jointly developed LiDAR must be high point frequency, high resolution, long distance, so as to adapt to various scenarios.
Didi and Beixing jointly develop China's first 2K image-level high-precision lidar Source: Didi autonomous driving official
Orca, the first mass-produced three-domain converged computing platform developed by Didi autonomous driving, is another key to cost reduction.
Simply put, the integration of the three domains can streamline the design of the intelligent driving domain, cockpit domain, and network domain, and optimize the core components and wiring harnesses. The Orca killer whale after the iteration not only greatly reduced in size, but also reduced the cost by 88%.
Although Didi's autonomous driving entered Robotaxi late, the progress is not the most radical. However, it is not difficult to find from Didi automatic driving in the idea of exploring services and reducing costs that Didi automatic driving has been thinking more fully about the commercial closed-loop of Robotaxi from the beginning, and there are almost no detours.
Of course, Didi autonomous driving is also expected for the mass production and delivery rhythm of autonomous vehicles.
Didi Autonomous Driving proposed that it will work with new energy vehicle companies to jointly define the mass-produced unmanned new energy network ride-hailing and carry out multi-dimensional cooperation, including product definition, model platform selection, intelligent cockpit and intelligent driving system research and development, test verification, mass production, and production, and hopes that it can enter Didi's network for services in 2025.
L4 made a profit, and Didi found a new path
When many unmanned vehicle operations are still trapped in commercialization, Didi autonomous driving has found a new way to make profits.
At the Didi Autonomous Driving Open Day, Didi's autonomous driving innovation business, Didi Autonomous Driving Cargo KargoBot, was officially unveiled, announcing for the first time that it has expanded its Level 4 autonomous passenger car solution to the field of trunk logistics and freight. Moreover, the commercialization of this part is faster than we thought.
According to Didi, KargoBot currently has more than 100 self-driving trucks and has started normal trial operation between Tianjin and Inner Mongolia. In addition, the cumulative revenue of autonomous driving reached 50 million yuan in 2022, and the number exceeded 100 million yuan at the end of the first quarter of 2023.
It is understood that in the normal operation from Inner Mongolia to Tianjin for more than 1,000 kilometers, Didi's unmanned freight logistics has achieved no takeover throughout the process.
In the commercial closed-loop of the freight scene, Didi's idea of self-driving freight is actually very similar to that of Robotaxi:
Find the right scenario —— Landing technology for scene characteristics —— Propose targeted technical solutions —— Technology empowers unmanned service ， Improve operational capabilities 。Regarding the commercialization of autonomous driving, Didi's thinking is multi-dimensional.
An interesting thing is that before the announcement of technical progress at Didi's autonomous driving open day, Meng Xing said that Didi will not release pre-trained multimodal large models today, and will not rub the hot spots of large models.
"We'll wait until it's going to be disruptive in production."
Meng Xing also said that today will not give the expectation that Robotaxi cannot be realized, but tell the real progress of Robotaxi productization.
Didi automatic driving COO Meng Xing Source: Didi automatic driving official
This shows that Didi autonomous driving is very aware of the current environment in which it is in which Robotaxi commercialization is located, and at a time when regulation and market acceptance are still facing challenges, technical bottlenecks still exist, profit expectations still have time, and unrealistic is just drawing pies to the outside world.
Meng Xing also mentioned that autonomous driving often refers to not a business, not a technological breakthrough, not a product, or even a company.
It is a new travel mode based on scenarios that improves human travel experience through the improvement of technology, services and operational capabilities. Its landing, ultimately considered by scale, is limited by ecological development, laws and regulations, and its development is destined to undergo phased evolution.
At this stage, Didi Autonomous Driving is also striving to improve in multiple dimensions, for example, Didi Autonomous Driving will soon release its own safety report to strengthen safety guidelines and standards; Didi will continue to expand its operational scope and improve its operational capabilities.
Since launching the self-driving project, Didi has also been constantly asking itself
： Autonomous driving services distance How far is the ride-hailing service?With this as an anchor, we can also have a clearer look at the thinking about the commercialization of Didi's autonomous driving.