Lidar, the year of succumbing to cost
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Yu Jie
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Yang Guang
Produced by: Automobile Sankei
In October 1927, on the afternoon of the third day of the Fifth Solvay Conference in Brussels, Heisenberg and Bohr presented a new version of the quantum mechanical explanations they had discovered. This version was later named the "Copenhagen Interpretation".
Later, in order to refute the Copenhagen School's explanation of quantum mechanical uncertainty, Schrödinger proposed the famous "Schrödinger's cat" thought experiment. It created a cat that was both alive and dead to satirize the absurdity of the theory. However, this experiment did not shake Heisenberg's research, but it had a philosophical impact on later generations, and was extended to "uncertainty".
In 2023, almost half of the debate over the intelligent driving route in the automotive industry will be the same as the "Schrödinger's cat" around lidar.
How useful is lidar, and whether it must be used, or can it be noted? It will be determined by who will ultimately defeat whom in the future of pure vision and fusion routes.
Like Schrödinger's cat, to live or to die? is a matter of probability.
The only thing that is certain is that as the most expensive core component of intelligent driving on the car, it has become a trend to reduce the hardware allocation and "sacrifice" lidar under the situation of price war.
NO.1
[ From 4 to 0 ]
At the end of October, he participated in a new high-end automobile brand communication meeting, and one of its new cars was in the preparation stage for listing, soliciting marketing opinions from the media. Many people present suggested cutting 80,000 or 90,000 listings on the basis of the pre-sale price, and removing some unnecessary hardware configurations, such as lidar.
More than a month later, the new car was launched, and sure enough, the lidar was canceled.
Entering 2023, when the situation has taken a sharp turn for the worse, car companies are forced by the pressure of cost competition, and lidar seems to have ushered in the first year of "abandonment".
"Under 4 (LiDAR), please don't speak. ”
In 2021, when the person in charge of the Great Wall's salon mecha dragon said this, the domestic autonomous driving industry was still in a period of stacking frenzy.
At the beginning of 2023, Wu Huixiao, vice president of product intelligence at Great Wall Motors, said, "From 2020 to 2021, we are discussing what technical direction to choose lidar products, but now all senior leaders and users are putting forward a demand - whether the lidar can be removed." ”
The most radical representative is the Extreme Yue 01.
In April last year, when Jiyue 01 was warmed up, Xia Yiping and Li Xiang also discussed the impact of the location and quantity of lidar on Weibo on the air. The former believes that one lidar on the front cover and one on the bumper is better than just one on the top of the head, which has better performance and safety.
A year and a half later, the Jiyue 01, which cancelled two lidars, was listed, and the price dropped by 30,000 yuan within a month.
To make such a decision, the pole should be based on multiple considerations: first, the pole of positioning the car robot needs to have a strong selling point in intelligence, otherwise it will not be able to get out of the circle. Therefore, together with the Baidu team, Xia Yiping gave it a go, completely abandoned lidar, and fully embraced "pure vision". Second, the cost factor.
It's true that many booking users come for a purely visual selling point.
However, when it was launched, ROBO Drive Max was sold in two ways: a one-time buyout and a recurring subscription — the former was priced at 49,900 yuan (19,900 yuan for a limited time), and the latter was 980 yuan per month. Some intending users complained that "overestimating consumers' desire to buy high-end assisted driving software".
A month later, while the price of the whole Jiyue 01 series was reduced, the ROBO Drive Max high-end intelligent driving limited-time buyout discount was reduced by 30,000 yuan, and the ROBO Drive Max high-end intelligent driving limited-time free subscription was extended from 6 months to 12 months.
Once again, the priority of price-performance prevails over the priority of technology.
Another car company that uses intelligent driving as a selling point is also entangled in the use of lidar this year.
The 2024 Xpeng P5, which was launched on September 25, canceled the lidar that was once the highlight of the model, and the outside world received mixed reviews.
Some people believe that consumer groups in the 150,000 price range generally don't care about assisted driving, and it's good to remove the bells and whistles. Some people also feel that the new power car companies that have been flaunting intelligence have now had to bow to the cost.
This year, DJI Automotive, NavInfo, Momo Zhixing and other intelligent driving suppliers have successively released "thousand-yuan" intelligent driving solutions. Among them, NavInfo and DJI's solutions do not use lidar support, and Momo Zhixing only has the option to choose a lidar in the 8000 yuan urban full-scene no-map NOH plan.
In addition to the cost performance, another trend is that with the improvement of software capabilities, the number of lidars on the flagship models of various brands is decreasing.
At present, in addition to AVATR 11 and 12 equipped with 3 lidars, Xpeng G9, Zhiji LS7, NIO ET7, and Ideal L9 all adopt double/single configurations.
In addition, Huawei's latest ADS 2.0 has changed from a three-bay LiDAR to a single-primary LiDAR solution, which also makes single and dual LiDAR mainstream in the industry.
In addition, based on the information revealed by the media recently, the Xiaomi car SU7, which will be unveiled at the end of the year, will also be equipped with the number of lidars from the planned two to one.
NO.2
[ The "Three Forces" Affecting the Fate of LiDAR ]
The price war will not last forever, and what will ultimately affect the fate of lidar is the route choice of autonomous driving. More specifically, which giant chooses the route that ultimately has the upper hand will determine whether lidar can be landed in large quantities and put on the car in the future.
At present, Tesla's pure visual route leads the evolution of the autonomous driving route of new cars, and everyone's ultimate goal is almost unified: no map + remove radar. But in the Chinese market, there are still two companies that can wrestle with Tesla.
Huawei and BYD.
Some industry insiders pointed out that the future of the fate of lidar companies may be brought about by BYD and Huawei:
If BYD can reduce the price of LiDAR very low through self-development and make it standard, if Huawei can make good use of LiDAR and convince consumers that "cars without LiDAR are not safe".
Why these two?
On the one hand, because of its large size, it can have a catfish effect on intelligent driving routes like Tesla. On the other hand, these two companies are not only LiDAR users, but also have or are developing their own LiDAR.
Huawei is currently the only company in the world that is both a manufacturer and user of LiDAR. Self-production and self-use determine that Huawei's intelligent driving route will be strongly tied to lidar. Some people believe that this will also help to dig deeper into the value of lidar.
Huawei began to deploy automotive-grade LiDAR in 2016 and entered the intensive dissemination period before mass production in 2020.
In 2020, Wang Jun, then president of Huawei's intelligent vehicle solution BU, said that Huawei has an optoelectronic technology research center in Wuhan, with a total of more than 10,000 people developing lidar technology, and the goal is to quickly develop 100 lines of lidar in the short term. In the future, it is planned to reduce the cost of lidar to $200 or even $100.
However, there are now many domestic lidar suppliers, and lidar companies such as Hesai Technology, Tudatong, Suteng Juchuang, and Beixing have provided sufficient backup forces for China's autonomous driving industry. As a representative of the radar fusion route, Huawei's greater role lies in the demonstration and guidance of the route, just like the previous industry insiders said, "whether Huawei can use LiDAR well" is the key, not the share of LiDAR products.
Perhaps more influential than Huawei is another giant, BYD.
Regardless of whether Wang Chuanfu thinks that "unmanned driving is nonsense", BYD's investment in intelligent driving is in full swing.
It is understood that at least four departments within BYD are currently working on projects related to intelligent driving. And this year, there is continuous news that BYD is recruiting talents in the field of AI.
Another piece of information is that in March this year, some media broke the news: in order to independently control the core components and ensure the safety and reliability of the supply chain, BYD is comprehensively increasing its investment in self-research and development of lidar.
An insider once revealed that as early as 2017, BYD had planned to form a team to develop its own lidar. However, after the autonomous driving industry ushered in a "cold winter" in early 2019, the self-development plan was put on hold.
If BYD really regains its LiDAR self-development plan, there will be no fewer obstacles in front of it. This year, Bosch has announced that it has abandoned its self-developed lidar, and its spokesperson explained that the cost is too high, and no one will use it to build it.
Whether BYD can succeed in self-research and then bring down the price is a big unknown. But once successful, it will not be a problem to reduce the cost of lidar with the volume of BYD's vehicle products.
NO.3
[ Write at the end]
Up to now, the competition of intelligent driving is still in the stage of high-level assisted driving before L3. Some experts in the field of AI pointed out that for the L2+ stage, today's software algorithm mode has reached its peak.
In other words, Tesla's pure vision solution may be the ceiling of software capabilities in the L2+++ stage. But how will the intelligent driving route evolve after L3? No one can accurately judge.
The end is far from coming, and it is impossible to judge whether the lidar will be reinstalled in the car one by one in the future.
In addition, for the phenomenon that car companies are keen to reduce the allocation of hardware such as lidar, some media people have raised the following interesting questions:
Once Tesla's FSD is launched in the Chinese market, domestic automakers will be far from the ability of FSD due to hardware reductions, and car company bosses may be in a hurry to start acting immediately. In this way, it seems that only Tesla can save China's self-driving industry?
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