Smart driving has taken a small step towards universal access to equality rights, and there is still a long and tortuous road ahead.
text| Toretto
At the recent Shanghai Auto Show, intelligence has become one of the well-deserved protagonists, and intelligent driving, especially high-end assisted driving, is becoming a must for various car companies.
Before the auto show, Wang Chuanfu criticized automatic driving as and foolishness, the emperor's new clothes, and ultimately a high-level assisted driving. There is nothing wrong with this, the industry is actually moving in this direction: starting from L4 and L5 looking up at the stars, focusing on more down-to-earth L2+ and other assisted driving functions.
Hou Fushen, deputy secretary-general of the Society of Automotive Engineers of China, said that in 2022, the installation rate of domestic L2 assisted driving technology in fuel vehicles will reach 32%, and the penetration rate in new energy vehicles will even reach 46%.
More and more consumers are willing to pay for smart car technology, and before the auto show, NIO announced the official launch of the assisted driving subscription charging model, followed by Huawei, and its intelligent driving system also launched a variety of options including one-time buyout and subscription services.
On the other hand, suppliers are also making efforts, and Chinese autonomous driving company Fredtech first proposed a "smart driving platform as a service" business strategy during the auto show to usher in the new consumption era of the automotive industry.
The popularization of smart driving does not mean equal rights of smart driving
The "Energy-saving and New Energy Vehicle Technology Roadmap 2.0" announced earlier sets several small goals for domestic intelligent driving: PA (partial autonomous driving), CA (conditional automatic driving) level intelligent networked vehicles account for more than 50% of annual sales by 2025, and by 2030, PA and CA new car sales account for 70%.
The mass production of assisted driving is accelerating, and the future market will be broader, and the proportion given by the above roadmap is not the ceiling.
The Xpeng G6 was officially unveiled during the auto show and was called "the last car before unmanned driving" by Xia Heng, co-founder and co-president of Xpeng Motors, and it is equipped with the already mass-produced intelligent driving assistance system XNGP. It is understood that Xpeng Motors has opened the urban NGP function in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
More and more car companies like to advertise their assisted driving functions are infinitely close to L3, and the ability to change lanes, overtake, and get on and off ramps on urban point-to-point, urban roads is the focus of publicity, but what are the real needs of consumers?
McKinsey released a previous report that for assisted driving, the function that consumers are most willing to pay and pay the most is the collision avoidance or collision warning system, followed by adaptive cruise ACC and lane keeping system. For more advanced autonomous driving, consumers prefer automatic parking and automatic following in congested sections. Another consulting company reported that 90% of consumers want vehicles to have smarter following capabilities in congested road conditions, anti-jamming, no road changes, and so on.
Many of these functions can even be implemented through a 1V1R (one camera and one radar) sensor configuration, without too many sensors and too high computing power.
However, in most cases, the richer the functionality necessarily requires more powerful hardware and software support, the higher the cost, and is not particularly consumer-friendly.
As a firm supporter of intelligent driving, He Xiaopeng, founder of Xpeng Motors, once said that 150,000 is a watershed for intelligent cars, "In the field of intelligent (automobile), it is impossible to really do a good job of intelligence without 150,000." "Smart electric vehicles below 100,000 yuan are actually just electric vehicles, and later WM Motor founder Shen Hui also made a similar statement.
However, electric vehicles that can be connected and upgraded, also have L2 assisted driving functions, just because of the low price, will they be deprived of the title of "smart"? It's not scientific.
After 360 took a stake in Nezha Automobile, its chairman Zhou Hongyi said that cars under 150,000 now account for 70% of the total sales of all models in China, and if you want to subvert the smart car industry, popularization is a must.
Zhou Shengyan, founder of MAXIEYE, also believes that from technological tinder to technological equality, the evolution and development of any new technology should ultimately focus on serving the broadest user group.
SAIC-GM-Wuling also found this problem, in their view, driving assistance functions should be closely integrated with actual use scenarios, rather than simply stacking functions. The Lingxi intelligent driving system with "parking" and "congested road conditions" as the core has landed on models priced at 87,800-102,800 yuan.
Compared to overwhelming advertising and publicity, an approachable price is a better means of popularizing a technology. After all, "affordability" is an important basis for mass consumers to use this service, which is the starting point of the road to equality.
When consumers can enjoy enough safe and convenient services at a lower price, it is the origin of the real outbreak of assisted driving.
How to make it "affordable" for users
Whether it is Xpeng, Huawei or Zhiji Automobile, the assisted driving experience of its urban roads is quite good, but the hardware such as lidar and the marginal benefits of software have not yet appeared, and the cost of purchase is actually not low.
At present, consumers' demand for assisted driving has not really been released, car companies are more willing to sell than users' purchase needs, a small number of models are even some "strong buy and sell", hardware has been pre-embedded, users have paid this part of the price when buying a car.
"Now consumers' perception and recognition of automotive technology attributes are more concentrated in the intelligent cockpit, and automatic driving is still in the stage of consumer education." Industry insiders bluntly said to HD Auto that the autonomous driving function is a plus in the car purchase process, not a must.
But on the other hand, due to the "comparison psychology", when consumers buy a car, they will include assisted driving into the comparison standard, for example, cars of the same price, some models are equipped with assisted driving functions, others do not, consumers are of course willing to buy more functional products.
The superposition of the two has caused the involution of intelligent driving, car companies have increased costs, and some users are also paying premiums for additional functions and hardware that they cannot use.
From the perspective of intelligent driving system providers, reducing costs is their inevitable choice.
Taking Fredtech as an example, the Chinese autonomous driving company released the ODIN Intelligent Driving Digital Intelligence Base last year, which continues to iterate and optimize system integration and intelligent driving technology with customers and partners with building block modular services to achieve truly platform-based, customized and cost-effective mass production solutions. At this year's Shanghai Auto Show, they released central computing platform solutions, including cost-effective integrated driving solutions and high-performance autonomous driving solutions.
With the mass production of more and more assisted driving models, cost performance is the word mentioned by more and more suppliers, and the key demand of car companies is safety + high quality and low price, but at the same time, it needs to be differentiated from other companies' products.
This is a big challenge for suppliers, after all, high R&D investment needs to be diluted in scale, and the demand for differentiation often leads to incremental profits without increasing profits, and the more orders, the higher the cost.
Through the decoupling of software and hardware, providers of autonomous driving systems are investing more in the fields of system platformization and function modularization, in order to reduce costs and increase efficiency. On these foundations, Fredtech has achieved hardware pluggability and computing power expansion, which conforms to the changes in the needs of car companies.
Zhang Lin, chairman of Fredeco, said that in the era of software-defined vehicles, manufacturers and users will transform from a one-time buying and selling relationship to a full-life cycle partnership, and the business model is changing from "manufacturing" to "manufacturing + service".
Car companies are indeed making changes, among which changes in business models or charging methods may be able to give impetus to car companies in reverse.
NIO has already begun experimenting with NAD's monthly fee, and announced in April this year that NOP+ supports monthly subscriptions at a price of 380 yuan per month. Before the auto show, Huawei announced that its intelligent driver assistance system basic package and advanced package are equipped with the car as standard, and the high-end package can also choose the subscription model, the price is higher than NIO, HUAWEI ADS 1.0 and 2.0 subscription monthly price is 640 yuan and 720 yuan respectively.
Compared with the one-time fee, it is already an improvement, car companies have more confidence in the use of demand, and at the same time, the cost of using the user's software is also cheaper, reducing the capital threshold for their use.
In the future, the model of charging by time or mileage will be a more consumer-friendly way, and there is reason to believe that car companies that are confident in their own technology and user needs will increasingly adopt this model.
More than "affordable"
However, with the involution of intelligent driving, the hardware pre-embedding of assisted driving is becoming a "standard" for car companies to build new cars, and most of the software needs to be charged separately.
Some analysts told HD Auto that many consumers don't really need too many assisted driving functions, and a large number of users are paying a premium for additional features and hardware they can't use.
SAIC-GM-Wuling found that the intelligent driving rate of many new cars is not high, both due to consumer trust problems and high learning costs, so users dare not or even will not use the L2+ assisted driving function.
As Gong Min, head of automotive industry research at UBS China, said that autonomous driving is still in the stage of consumer education, partly because the current assisted driving can be engaged in relatively limited functions, only in terms of assistance, and can not do a greater degree of help and control.
In other words, even if it is forced to "afford" it, the base for the number of new cars with L2 or even L3 functions already exists, and the next step for car companies is to make consumers "use" and then "willing to use".
To make users "know" the driver assistance function, it is crucial to "first time". At present, no car company has disclosed when users first use assisted driving functions.
For a long time, when consumers came to the store for a test drive, many salespeople would introduce the vehicle's assisted driving function, and few users would turn on the relevant functions on the road to experience.
After buying a car, you may be able to watch videos or manuals to learn, but in the case of personal safety, how many car owners dare to open the assisted driving function that can automatically change lanes and overtake at high speed or in congestion?
Admittedly, the "New Energy Vehicle Consumer Insight Report" released by Roland Berger shows that Generation Z consumers (a generation born between 1995 and 2009) who have received consumer electronics education for a long time are easy to accept functions such as autonomous driving functions that look very "trendy", and this group of people is not a very small minority, accounting for about 30% of new energy vehicle consumers.
But more users do lack an "educated" process, without no guidance or teaching to open L2 or L2+ assisted driving functions require courage, especially driving safety involves the life and health of the driver and passengers, the first turn is even more psychological barriers.
How car companies should educate or help users learn to use assisted driving functions is a problem that must be faced.
Fortunately, there are more and more solutions. The first is the liberalization of high-precision map use qualifications, and in some cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, more and more vehicles are being allowed to use high-precision map assistance functions.
In addition, more and more solutions are beginning to emphasize "light maps" or even "no maps", reducing the dependence on ready-made high-definition maps, which is not only a consideration to reduce costs, but also to avoid regulations and facilitate the implementation of technology.
However, the question of whether qualifications are required to generate high-precision maps in real time has also begun to be discussed, which may become a roadblock for low-cost solutions without maps.
In any case, users who can experience advanced assisted driving while taking a test drive on a city road can increase their confidence in these features, and with the first time, there will be countless times.
Further down, even if consumers who have tried to turn on assisted driving functions are "willing to use", it is more important to make them "willing to use".
Some users said to HD Auto that because of the lack of trust in the auxiliary function, after opening it a few times, they found that the psychological pressure of the whole person was greater, and finally gave up using it.
In the layout of many car companies, the attempt to charge software starts from intelligent driving. Continuous iteration of OTA or monthly, daily, and meter-based subscription charging are new business models that car companies that want to directly establish contact points with users are trying.
Taking the vehicle system released by a company as an example, after the system was launched, every time the OTA was upgraded, about 30% of the users refused to upgrade, and only half of the users were using the new system after the two upgrades, which was a "disaster".
Presumably, car companies do not want this situation to happen again in the assisted driving system, how to make assisted driving easier and easier to operate under the condition of qualification, the prompt to exit is more obvious, and the emergency can really ensure consumer safety, etc., are all problems they need to solve.
Only when consumers are "willing to use" can they open up a new world, otherwise such "cramming" assembly and pre-embedding are simply increasing the burden on consumers.
Technology is supposed to make driving safer, easier and more comfortable, not just a simple money-making tool.
-END-