In 2024, autonomous driving will still be challenging, and it is still necessary to overcome the difficulties

For the new energy vehicle industry and market, in the past 2023, autonomous driving capabilities have become a "battleground" for the entire automotive circle, but judging from the results, it is more appropriate to describe it as half seawater and half flames.

All-round assistance, accelerating the implementation of autonomous driving

According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as of the first half of 2023, the market penetration rate of intelligent connected passenger vehicles equipped with assisted autonomous driving systems in mainland China has reached 42.4%. According to the latest data from the Passenger Association, the loading rate of L2 and above assisted driving functions of new energy passenger vehicles has reached 51% in January ~ October 2023.

Taking the typical L2+ADAS function NOA (Navigate on autopilot) as an example, NOA can automatically follow and change lanes in scenarios such as highways and cities, and the technical difficulty is higher than that of L2 functions (such as ACC adaptive cruise control and LKA lane keeping). Among them, the NOA function presents two development trends: first, due to the high cost of high-precision maps, the implementation mode of NOA has gradually shifted from "heavy map and light perception" to "heavy perception and light map"; According to the data of Gaogong Intelligent Vehicle, the cumulative penetration rate of NOA standard in 5M23 domestic passenger cars has reached 2.0%, and the penetration rate has increased significantly since 2023.

Specific to car companies, in April last year, Yu Chengdong shouted the slogan that urban assisted driving should cover 45 cities in 2023, and then said at the new M7 press conference that Huawei's high-end intelligent driving system will no longer only cover 45 cities, but will be opened to the whole country in December 2023;In July, Ideal said that it would achieve urban assisted driving landing in 100 cities by the end of the year;In October, Xpeng announced that it plans to open 50 cities within the year without high-precision map urban assisted driving.

In addition to the above technologies, in terms of demonstration applications, the country has built 17 national test demonstration areas, 7 national Internet of Vehicles pilot areas, and 16 "double intelligence" pilot cities. Provinces and municipalities have issued about 50 detailed rules for the implementation of road tests, opened more than 15,000 kilometers of test roads across the country, issued more than 2,800 test licenses, and deployed more than 70 million kilometers of roadside network infrastructure.

For example, on November 17, near the end of last year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, and the Ministry of Transport jointly issued the "Notice on Carrying out the Pilot Work of Intelligent Networked Vehicle Access and Road Traffic", which took a key step in the development of the mainland's intelligent networked automobile industry; These guidelines shall apply to highways and other types of roads used for the passage of social motor vehicles, and those engaged in urban bus and tram passenger transport, taxi passenger transport, road passenger transport operations, and road cargo transport business activities.

To sum up, with the help of technology, policy, application and other all-round help, in the past year, domestic autonomous driving is accelerating the landing.

Challenges remain, but we still need to overcome them

As mentioned above, in the past 2023, domestic autonomous driving has landed, showing a rising trend, but at the same time, behind the rising wave of autonomous driving has actually cooled down.

First look overseas,As early as the beginning of 2023,Google's parent company Alphabet's autonomous driving company Waymo launched a layoff plan,Although the specific scale of layoffs was not disclosed,But the scope of layoffs is very extensive,Involving multiple departments;5month,TuSimple Future, known as the "first stock of autonomous driving", officially called "keep cash and maintain business",A new round of layoffs,The number of its American companies dropped from 550 to 220。 Shortly before this round of layoffs, TuSimple received a Nasdaq delisting warning due to its inability to submit its 2022 annual report, and in August, the San Francisco government eased restrictions on the commercial operation of autonomous driving, and Google's Waymo and Cruise were greatly encouraged and said that this was "a great process". But just a month after the restrictions were lifted, the security complaints Cruise received soared, with many academics and lawmakers calling for the restrictions to be reinstated.

Looking at China, Baidu has given up the idea of entering the vehicle manufacturing market and concentrated on the Apollo platform, Ali Damo Academy has also greatly reduced the importance of autonomous driving business, and companies focusing on L4 such as WeRide and Pony.ai have turned their direction to L2, which is easier to land, and turned to try to become a Tier1 supplier.

The reason for this is that the reality of the past few years has proved that the research and development of autonomous driving takes a long time and requires a lot of investment, and it is difficult to see profits in the short term, and the cost performance is really not high. Even Waymo, which has been providing unmanned car services in the United States for a long time, has 1,500 passengers per month, but its revenue is only more than 10,000 US dollars, which is a drop in the bucket compared with the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in research and development.

From the perspective of the capital market, in 2021, there will be 144 investment and financing events in the domestic autonomous driving industry, with a financing scale of 93.2 billion yuan, and in 2022, there will be about 128 investment and financing events in the autonomous driving industry, with a financing scale of 24 billion yuan, which is only a quarter of that in 2021. In 2023, the total amount raised in the first three quarters will be only a quarter of what it was in 2022. It can be seen that at a time when commercialization is slow to land, capital's enthusiasm for high-level autonomous driving has gradually faded, and even autonomous driving companies themselves have begun to hesitate.

Despite this, autonomous driving will still be one of the main driving forces of new energy vehicles in the future.

For example, Minsheng Securities believes that 2024 will become an important moment for intelligent driving in the consumer side from the formation of cognition to purchase transformation, and the era of "standard intelligent driving" has come, and the leading car companies that can identify differentiated selling points and lead intelligent driving technology will form differentiation in 2023~2025. According to the research report of Guojin Securities, in 2023~2025, the domestic sales of L3 intelligent driving vehicles will reach 539,000, 2.741 million and 5.917 million respectively, and by 2030, this number will exceed 16 million, accounting for 62% of the total number of passenger cars.

In this regard, some experts suggest that in order to achieve the above goals, measures need to be taken to solve the constraints of autonomous driving in terms of technology, infrastructure, data, laws and regulations.

Taking the construction of vehicle-road cooperative infrastructure as an example, it is necessary to promote the construction of vehicle wireless communication networks (such as LTE-V2X) and a new generation of vehicle wireless communication networks (such as 5G-V2X), and take the lead in applying them in some cities and highways. Gradually promote the digital transformation of municipal roads, focusing on the installation of smart cameras, lidars, smart signal lights and other infrastructure on roads in areas where high-level autonomous driving is currently being carried out, and promote the realization of vehicle-road coordination. Promote the formulation of national standards for high-precision maps, support autonomous driving enterprises, map navigation enterprises, and travel service enterprises to establish strategic alliances, share real-time road data, promote the dynamic update of high-precision maps, and provide more accurate services.

Autonomous driving is the general trend, and it is an inevitable choice to do it in the face of difficulties.