Zhang Kai, chairman of Ali Damo Academy, said bluntly that 2022 is a watershed year for commercialization

Ni Yuanyun/Wen

Recently, the autonomous driving technology company Mimu Zhixing announced that its passenger car auxiliary driving mileage has exceeded 1 million kilometers, and the advanced version of the auxiliary driving system NOH (Navigation on HIPilot, intelligent pilot assistance system) will be officially released in October. In addition, in the field of low-speed terminal logistics unmanned trolleys, the official announcement of the end of the zhixing and the Ali Damo Academy "little wild donkey" cooperation.

Zhang Kai, chairman of Mamo Zhixing, and CEO Gu Weihao have repeatedly mentioned that MASC is a "start-up" and "start-up" company. Less than two years after its establishment, Zhixing was born in November 2019 from the ADAS (Assisted Driving) system research and development team within Great Wall Motors and remained independent. In February this year, Zhixing has just completed a multi-hundreds of millions of yuan Pre-A round of financing led by Shougang Fund and followed by Meituan and Hillhouse Venture Capital.

The pressure of market competition makes Miller Wisdom Walk full of the atmosphere and vitality of the entrepreneurial team from top to bottom, which may also be a step of Wei Jianjun, CEO of Great Wall Motors, to make Miller more competitive through market experience, and then use this more competitive product and technology to feed the Great Wall.

Is 2022 a watershed year for commercialization?

The other side of "sacrificing one's life to run wildly" on the road to entrepreneurship is to require the rapid landing and high-speed iteration of technology. Cheng Bo, dean of the Suzhou Automotive Research Institute of Tsinghua University, believes that "the development of the intelligent driving industry needs technology and business model verification in parallel"

For the protracted battle of AI autonomous driving, Zhang Kai, chairman of Zhixing, predicted that "2022 will be the year of the watershed in the commercialization of AI autonomous driving", and also emphasized the importance of commercialization, Zhang Kai believes that "for startups in the track of automatic driving, in 2022, we must form our own relatively stable business model", otherwise the result will be "fatal".

Although the ultimate goal is to achieve L5 level automatic driving, unlike Waymo and other "one-step in place" direct impact on L4 level, the end of the choice of 'step by step' strategy - from L1 to L5, gradually achieve the leap of each level of automatic driving, rapidly expand their own market scale and gradually improve the level of intelligence of automotive products.

It is reported that the main commercialization position of Zhixing is the passenger car field and the terminal logistics field, and both have chosen a gradual route, that is, from simple scenes to complex scenes, from local operations to full operations. Taking the automatic driving system as an example, the HWA system, which has been launched in the WEY brand mocha and tank 300 city version, has taken the lead in choosing two relatively simple scenarios of highway and urban expressway to achieve commercialization, and noH (Navigation on HIPilot, intelligent pilot auxiliary driving system) planned to be listed in October this year will further realize the coverage of two scenarios of ramp and high-speed connecting roads.

Entering the market earlier means being able to accumulate data earlier for technical iteration. According to Zhixing, the latest auxiliary driving mileage has exceeded 1 million kilometers, which is composed of two parts: the driving mileage of the owner and the test mileage of the test vehicle, of which the road test vehicle has been tested in more than 100 cities in 9 months, and has covered a variety of bad and complex weather such as rain, fog, hail and so on.

In the field of terminal logistics, the L4-level autonomous driving unmanned delivery vehicle "Magic Bag 20" co-produced by Zhixing and Meituan has been put into use in Shunyi, Beijing, and together with the products of Jingdong and Neolithic, it has become one of the first unmanned delivery vehicles to be "licensed to work" and approved to be on the road in the beijing high-level automatic driving demonstration area.

In addition, the flagship product of the unmanned delivery vehicle "Little Devil Camel" of Zhixing has also been trying in Shunyi and Wumeiduo for more than 5 months in the mode of MaaS (Mobility as a Service). According to reports, the "little devil camel" has chosen a relatively complex urban open road in the scene, and currently ensures the safety and timely response of the system by reducing the speed.

Occupying the end of the two ends of technology and manufacturing, in the key dimension of the terminal logistics market, it has also ushered in a new partner after Meituan and Wumart - Ali Damo Academy. It is reported that Zhixing will continue to provide joint innovation and life cycle services such as production and manufacturing, factory test verification, and large-scale mass production for the Ali intelligent logistics unmanned vehicle "Little Wild Donkey" who has just turned one year old. According to the plan, in 2021, 1,000 "little wild donkeys" will enter the Chinese campus.

Mi mo Zhi Xing did the Chinese version of the general Cruise

From the perspective of the enterprise model, it is close to GM subsidiary Cruise, an independent autonomous driving company backed by an OEMs and with Internet genes. According to public information, some of the core team members of The Wisdom Bank are from Great Wall Motors, and some are experts from the Internet and artificial intelligence team, and the company currently has 500 employees.

In the past, most of the autonomous driving companies were Waymo models, and most of the founding members came from Internet technology companies, relying on artificial intelligence and cloud technology to make a shift to concentration in the field of segmentation. The Cruise model with the car factory gene is more stable, the company is equivalent to having the ability of industrial chain coordination, quality management, cost control at the same time, and has inherent advantages in landing and scale, and the continuous and lower cost, faster speed of obtained data is the most important "source of living water" for autonomous driving companies.

Unlike Zhang Kai, a veteran of the automotive industry, Gu Weihao, CEO of Millais Intelligence, is a senior Baidu technology streamer, who was the general manager of Baidu's intelligent automobile division, and in 2017, Robin Li's famous "first driverless ticket" was Gu Weihao sitting in the main driver's seat of the same self-driving car.

The typical characteristic of leaders from Internet technology is to solve problems as the thinking orientation. Gu Weihao shared the technical layout of The Wisdom Bank in algorithms and computing power to answer the question of how to tap the value of the data collected.

At the algorithm level, in the data processing path, Zhixing uses unsupervised clustering methods to explore more similar difficult scenarios to bridge the cognitive differences between AI and humans to solve the data bias problem of AI models; in terms of improving the training speed of the system, it tends to prefer a more refined model parallel method and lays out the next generation of AI vision Transformer technology; and in the final verification link, it is accelerated by CSS cloud parallel simulation and automatically generates test cases.

At the level of computing power, according to Gu Weihao, "Great Wall Motors and Miller Zhixing jointly launched the world's highest-capacity mass-produced autonomous driving computing platform ICU 3.0", which is more well known as "Little Magic Box 3.0". It is reported that the small magic box 3.0 currently has a veneer computing power of 360TOPS, which can be continuously upgraded to 1440TOPS, which can effectively support the on-board operation of the AI visual model and the screening, cleaning, desensitization and reflux of the vehicle-side perception data.

summary

The name "Milli-Mo" comes from "Lao Tzu Chapter 64", the original text is "The Wood of The Embrace, Born in the Milli-Mo", which seems to be the same as the enterprise spirit of Great Wall Motors to "progress a little bit every day", emphasizing the positive accumulation of quantitative change before the arrival of qualitative change.

The gradual acceleration of the application of technology may also help Zhixing to usher in the data inflection point faster. According to the latest sales data shown by Great Wall Motors, Great Wall Motors' global sales from January to August 2021 reached 784,023 units, an increase of 39.3% year-on-year. In the "2025 Strategy" released at the end of June, Great Wall Motors set an annual sales target of 4 million vehicles.

The sales volume of the Great Wall is also the bottom line of the ultimate wisdom, "the Great Wall itself is a very thick leg", Gu Weihao said bluntly. According to Zhang Kai, it is expected that by the end of 2022, the Zhixing assisted driving system will land on 34 models of Great Wall Motors, accounting for about 80% of its overall models to be listed, and it is expected that the total number of passenger cars in the next three years will exceed 1 million units.