Following the implementation of China's first autonomous driving regulations last month, the first batch of conditional autonomous driving (L3) highway road test licenses in China were officially issued, and six car companies, including AVATAR, Changan, Mercedes-Benz, Jihu, BMW, and Zhiji, have obtained test licenses in Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing.
Level 3 autonomous driving is not far away, and it is believed that in the near future, this feature will become the standard equipment in production vehicles. This also means that a new round of intelligent driving competition has kicked off.
Six car companies officially announced that they had obtained test licenses
On December 14, BMW received China's first L3 autonomous driving high-speed road driving test license in Shanghai. Two days later, Mercedes-Benz officially announced that it had become the first batch of enterprises to be approved for Beijing's conditional autonomous driving (L3 level) highway road test license.
Subsequently, Jihu, Zhiji, and AVATR also officially announced that they had obtained test licenses, and Chang'an even exaggerated seventeen L3 test licenses.
In addition, GAC Aion also announced that it is declaring to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology together with Ruqi Mobility, and Aion Haobo HT is expected to become the first batch of models to obtain L3 autonomous driving. Gu Huinan, general manager of GAC Aion, revealed at a recent media event: "The L4 autonomous driving in cooperation with operator Ruqi has more than 60w kilometers of test mileage, and strives to be the first to launch a truly operational L4 autonomous driving in 2025." ”
It is worth mentioning that these official announcements have obtained test licenses either from traditional car companies or from new car-making forces backed by traditional car companies, but "Wei Xiaoli", as a representative of the new car-making forces, is a collective dumb fire.
Lidar may become the mainstream configuration of intelligent driving
Judging from the first batch of car companies that have obtained test licenses, most of them use lidar in their intelligent driving solutions.
Lidar is an active remote sensing technology, which analyzes the reflected energy, amplitude, frequency and phase of the reflected spectral surface of the target object by measuring the propagation distance between the sensor and the target object by measuring the propagation distance between the sensor and the target object, so as to realize the accurate positioning, identification and detection of some characteristics of the target object, which has the advantages of high precision, high resolution and high reliability.
BMW's Personal Pilot intelligent driving solution is equipped with semi-solid-state lidar supplied by Israel Innoviz, which is the first time that BMW has installed lidar on a production model, Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot intelligent driving solution has Valeo's lidar, Zhiji uses one Sutar lidar provided by Momenta, and AVATR 11 and ARCFOX Alpha S have three lidars.
At present, almost all car companies' intelligent driving solutions rely on high-precision maps, but each company relies on high-precision maps to different degrees. Mercedes-Benz can be said to rely on high-precision maps, and one of the opening conditions of the Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot system is that "centimeter-level high-precision maps are needed to draw road conditions and information".
Although Zhiji will open the DDLD solution to remove high-precision maps in September this year, the solution is still in the public testing stage, and it may still need the support of high-precision maps. Although AVATR and JiHu, which use Huawei's ADS2.0 intelligent driving, use the phrase "NCA without maps" in their promotion, they will also bring the expression "do not rely on high-precision maps".
Level 3 is the transition period to autonomous driving
According to the national standard "Classification of Automobile Driving Automation", level 0 to level 2 is driving assistance, level 3 is conditional automatic driving, level 4 is highly automatic driving, and level 5 is full automatic driving. This roughly corresponds to the L0 to L5 classification of the International Society of Automaton Engineers.
However, from the perspective of applicable scenarios, Mercedes-Benz and BMW currently realize L3 level automatic driving is only a single lane, and the starting conditions are also very harsh, for example, the starting conditions of Mercedes-Benz L3 are: the speed is less than 60 kilometers per hour, it must be a sunny day, the light conditions are good, on the highway with identification markings, and there must also be a centimeter-level high-precision map, and the navigation data also needs to be approved by the local government.
In other words, if the speed is higher than 60 kilometers per hour, cloudy and rainy days, urban open roads, and the map accuracy is insufficient, as long as one is met, the system cannot be used.
The situation is similar for BMW, with a speed limit of 60 km/h and various opening conditions. However, BMW emphasizes that its L3 can also be opened in dark environments, which may be more advanced than Mercedes.
AVATR 11 looks more advanced, according to AVATAR's official announcement, AVATR 11 has successfully passed the L3 autonomous driving test at a cruising speed of 0-80km/h.
However, Level 3 autonomous driving is only a process of autonomous driving moving forward, that is, a transition period, realizing "autonomous driving under limited conditions". L5 autonomous driving is the ultimate goal, but in recent years, the industry has reached a consensus that it is difficult to achieve all-scenario and all-weather autonomous driving. In most cases, Level 4 autonomous driving systems are able to deal with problems that arise while driving. In contrast to Level 3, he does not require a human driver to be ready to take over at any time.
Professor Zhu Xichan, director of the Institute of Automotive Safety Technology of the School of Automotive Engineering of Tongji University, has predicted that according to the current development progress of global autonomous driving technology and the development speed of the mainland in the promotion of autonomous driving technology research and certification, unmanned driving may be able to pass the technical and certification levels in 2025, and there may be a certain scale of application by 2030.