In 2024, we are witnessing the arrival of a new round of scientific and technological revolution.
AIGC, Embodied Robots, Unmanned Vehicles, Flying Cars......
A plethora of new technologies representing new qualitative productivity are closer to us than in any previous era.
How will the new quality of productivity change the lives of each and every one of us? Moreover, are these industries and industries that represent new quality productivity always developing smoothly, and we can just "sit back and enjoy the results"?
In this issue, we visited UISEE, a representative company in the field of autonomous driving, and interviewed Wu Gansha, Chairman and CEO of UISEE.
As a trillion-level track, autonomous driving has experienced take-off, entered the cold winter, had hope, and also looked for hope in despair. Combined with Wu Gansha's narration, we will review the development of autonomous driving, which is also the story of UISEE's 8 years of autonomous driving.
Narrator: Gansha Wu, Chairman and CEO of UISEE
Editor: Weilan
来 源:正和岛(ID:zhenghedao)
1. "Bubble bursting", from peak to trough
How long does it take for an emerging industry to fall from the hot to the freezing point, from the capital to the threshold to the door?
Autonomous driving has answered this question in three years.
1. The trillion tuyere is coming
2016 is the starting point for the take-off of the autonomous driving industry.
At that time, taking advantage of the "AlphaGo's victory over Go saint Lee Sedol" incident, autonomous driving became the biggest "darling" of this outlet.
Entrepreneurs, investors, and large companies are optimistic about the commercial application and future prospects of autonomous driving.
This year, Waymo became independent from Google and became a separate self-driving company, and overnight, Waymo became a "household name" in the capital market;
That year, GM bought Cruise, which at the time had only a few prototypes and more than 40 people, for $1 billion;
At the same time, this year, Mobileye announced the development of a fifth-generation autonomous driving product, followed by Intel's acquisition of Mobileye for a whopping $15.3 billion in March 2017.
The wheels of the times are rolling, and this wave of autonomous driving has also been blown from Silicon Valley across the Pacific Ocean to the land of China.
In 2016, Gansha Wu left Intel Labs China to establish UISEE, which attracted many well-known investment institutions such as Zhongke Chuangxing, Zhen Fund, and Innovation Works.
That is, around 2016, a large number of entrepreneurs in China entered the field of autonomous driving, and Pony.ai and Horizon were established one after another.
At that time, most people in the industry were optimistic that full autonomous driving would be achieved in 3~5 years.
At the national level, there is also an attitude of embracing autonomous driving.
Germany has introduced the Eighth Amendment to the Road Traffic Act, the first law related to autonomous driving, which allows autonomous driving to replace human driving under certain conditions.
The two U.S. Secretaries of Transportation have successively promoted the implementation of the Federal Policy on Autonomous Vehicles, Autonomous Driving Systems 2.0: A Safety Vision, and Preparing for the Future of Transportation: Autonomous Vehicles 3.0 to loosen restrictions on the industry.
At the same time, China is also exploring autonomous driving:
In December 2017, the "Guiding Opinions of Beijing Municipality on Accelerating the Work Related to Road Testing of Autonomous Vehicles (Trial)" and the "Implementation Rules for the Administration of Road Testing of Autonomous Vehicles in Beijing (Trial)" were released.
Subsequently, Shanghai, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and other places have also launched local road test policies and guidelines;
On April 11, 2018, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Transport jointly issued the "Regulations for the Management of Road Testing of Intelligent Connected Vehicles (Trial)", which was finalized at the national level.
The whole track presents a scene of flowers and cooking oil.
But behind this boom, no one could have imagined that the situation would take a turn for the worse.
2. Bubble bursting
In 2015, Morgan Stanley issued a report on Waymo's predecessor, when Waymo was valued at only $8.5 billion, and in 2018, Morgan Stanley gave its valuation of $175 billion, equivalent to a quarter of Google's at the time.
At the end of 2018, an investment bank called "Jefferies" in the United States valued Waymo at as much as $250 billion.
Although this "sky-high valuation" has no shortage of eye-catching purposes, it is undeniable that the prosperity of the entire track has approached a pole.
Like an upturned hourglass, the prosperity of the industry began to tilt to the other side.
In early 2019, John Kravchik, then CEO of Waymo, publicly stated:
"Self-driving cars may never be able to drive in all road conditions."
As an enterprise known as the "first person" in the industry, Waymo's CEO statement is like a basin of cold water poured on the entire capital market.
People were surprised by this statement, but behind it, there was actually a foreshadowing.
In 2018, Uber lowered its autonomous driving operation standards and forcibly put self-driving cars on the road for testing, resulting in the world's first fatal accident caused by autonomous driving. In addition to Uber, Waymo and Tesla's self-driving have also had a number of car accidents.
As Shakespeare said, "This cruel pleasure will end in cruelty."
In 2019, the first cold winter of autonomous driving came.
On the one hand, autonomous driving companies such as Uber and Waymo are far from meeting expectations in terms of law and commercialization.
On the other hand, there are still huge technical challenges, and the mass production time of L3 products of many traditional OEMs has been delayed by three years.
The bubble of the industry is constantly being punctured. In March 2020, Starsky Robotics, a self-driving truck company, declared bankruptcy; In December 2020, Uber sold its self-driving division, ATG, to Aurora.
According to statistics, a total of 25 Chinese autonomous driving companies announced the completion of financing in 2019, a decrease of 8 compared with 2018; In addition, the total financing in this field also fell to 10.71 billion yuan in 2019, a year-on-year decrease of 34%.
It must be admitted that before the real commercialization arrives, the entire industry will endure a cold winter, and even if there is a momentary recovery during the period, it will only be a fleeting joy.
Today, with the emergence of new concepts and technologies such as AIGC, commercial aviation, and flying cars, it seems that the enthusiasm for autonomous driving in society will never return to the same as in 2016 and 2017.
So, does this mean that we don't pay attention to the autonomous driving industry?
2. Find hope in despair
"In business, it's often easy to overestimate the impact of technological change over a 3-5 year period and underestimate the impact of technological change on a 10-year or more time scale."
Wu Gansha, Chairman of UISEE, said, "This is true for long-cycle industries such as autonomous driving and artificial intelligence. ”
Wu Gansha likened the autonomous driving industry to a "Dack effect" curve.
Since AlphaGo's victory over Lee Sedol in 2016, with the dual blessing of hot money and tuyere theory, the autonomous driving industry has stood on the "top of ignorance" in a short period of time.
And when the industry comes to the "peak of ignorance", then it slides to the "valley of despair", and then climbs step by step to the slope of enlightenment.
Wu Gansha is a witness to this process, but also a witness.
1. All in
In 2016, Gansha Wu founded UISEE, All In Autonomous Driving Track, and before that, he was the president of Intel Labs China.
In 2000, Wu Gansha graduated from the Department of Computer Science of Fudan University, and became one of the ten people who received Intel Scholarship during college, and joined Intel after graduation. After that, he worked at Intel for 16 years, from the initial intern to the technical director, and then to the chief engineer, and in 2013, Wu Gansha officially became the president of Intel China Research Institute.
In the past 16 years, Wu Gansha has witnessed the Internet bubble around 2001, and also witnessed the prosperity and decline of the era from the PC Internet to the mobile Internet.
But what you need to know is that history is a train that never looks back, and if you don't get on the train this time, you have to wait for the next train.
Wu Gansha once wrote the introduction to the Chinese edition of Trinity: The Intel Legend, in which Wu Gansha wrote:
"One morning in September 1957, the 'Eight Rebellions' left the Shockley Crystal Company en masse, inadvertently unveiling a magnificent new picture of Silicon Valley. In the 12 years since, a group of 'fairchildren' have set off a storm in Silicon Valley and even the entire world's semiconductor industry. ”
(PS: Eight Rebellions refers to the resignation of eight scientists such as Noyce and Gordon Moore to found Fairchild Semiconductor, which is regarded as a symbol of the birth of Silicon Valley.) Noyce and Gordon Moore later founded Intel, and people who left Fairchild founded many semiconductor companies that drove the development of Silicon Valley.)
In 2016, at the age of forty, Wu Gansha finally chose to take that step and leave Intel. This is a response to the < of the beginning of the Trinity, and the eight rebellions>
As the author of Trinity said to all Intel people:
"If you are still as brave as you have been in the past 40 years, and you are not afraid to make mistakes, the world will still be yours, and if you become cautious, you will fail."
The departure of Wu Gansha and some of his colleagues has something in common with the departure of the "Eight Rebels", that is, they can only make history if they leave.
Whether this history ends up winning or losing, they took the most important step.
However, Wu Gansha, or this group of self-driving entrepreneurs, is in a different situation from the "eight rebels".
At that time, Intel's entry into the semiconductor field was more like finding a vacant land and building a high-rise building on the vacant land; Autonomous driving, on the other hand, is more like an attempt to subvert the structure of an existing high-rise building (traditional OEMs and industrial chains) and build another building.
Such a process is destined to be full of hardships and challenges.
UISEE's development is similar to the ups and downs of the entire autonomous driving industry.
In 2016, Wu Gansha was undoubtedly full of ambition, when he said to his family: "Don't worry, it will only take two years." Two years later, the knives and guns will definitely be put into storage, and the horses will be put in Nanshan. ”
In 2017, UISEE has developed its own driverless technology and built a dedicated driverless concept car, the Urban Mobile Box.
This product won the Red Dot Design Award that year, as well as various international and domestic patents for technology and appearance.
From the initial idea to the prototype, UISEE realized it in one year.
However, from prototype to mass production, UISEE became an insurmountable hurdle at that time:
The entire automobile industry ecology is still controlled by traditional car factories, and this group of veterans who have passed the baptism of the times cannot easily hand over the existing achievements to others.
"In real negotiations, the so-called experience that you previously had in a large company can only be a burden on you. No one else will work with you just because you were an executive at a large company. I'm sorry, you're Nobody. ”
This is also a problem in front of all autonomous driving companies, at least for the time being, traditional car manufacturers can do without autonomous driving, but autonomous driving without traditional car factories is tantamount to an attic in the sky.
Realizing this, Wu Gansha redefined UISEE's role by not building its own cars, but only doing its own advantageous part, providing autonomous driving capabilities for traditional car manufacturers.
And this is another challenge faced by self-driving cars, the actual difficulty of autonomous driving, the industry and capital are seriously underestimated.
In the field of autonomous driving, cars are divided into L0-L5 levels according to different technical levels, of which L3 is below assisted driving, L3 and above are autonomous driving, and L4 and L5 are unmanned.
At the beginning of the industry, the battle for the route of autonomous driving has emerged: gradual VS leapfrogging.
Tesla, represented by Tesla, advocates a gradual route, advocating a gradual transition from L2 and L3 "man-machine co-driving" to L4 unmanned driving;
The leapfrog route represented by Waymo is directly in place in one step to achieve L4 unmanned driving.
The cold winter of the entire industry in 18 and 19 years was, to a certain extent, caused by the failure of the commercialization of the L4 leapfrog route to meet expectations.
2. Evolution
In 2020, Cruise, GM's autonomous driving subsidiary, announced the dismissal of nearly 8% of its employees;
In October 2022, ibeo, the originator of lidar, declared bankruptcy;
At the end of the same year, Argo AI, which is backed by two industry giants, Ford and Volkswagen, announced its collapse, and the company, which was once valued at more than $7 billion, finally did not hold out until the moment of dawn.
An atmosphere of powerlessness and despair pervades the entire industry, but those companies that are not dead still need to persevere, continue to evolve, and find hope in despair.
"At the beginning of 2019, a major client told me, 'If there is still a safety officer on the car, this project has to be over.'" ”
These words made Wu Gansha instantly realize that UISEE needed to change again.
Previously, UISEE has experienced the cooperation of leading car manufacturers from making cars by itself to not making cars; In the second half of 2018 alone, a lot of common technologies have been precipitated, and with the continuous advancement of business, more and more models supported by these common technologies have been supported and more and more scenarios have been supported.
Now, UISEE has ushered in the third adjustment - to be "really unmanned".
"Only by really removing the safety officer can we reduce costs and increase efficiency."
Wu Gansha said that on the one hand, in the To C market, UISEE provides L2+ intelligent travel solutions to car manufacturers, so that the car has the functions of autonomous parking, memory parking, autonomous navigation of highways, and autonomous following of congested traffic.
On the other hand, in some limited scenarios (airports, factories, etc.) or limited open scenarios (sanitation, microcirculation buses, etc.), UISEE has taken the lead in realizing "de-safety personnel" and launching "truly unmanned" commercial operations for the To B and To G markets.
In December 2019, UISEE cooperated with Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) to launch unmanned logistics vehicles to provide luggage transportation services for passengers. This is also the world's first unmanned driving project to operate on a regular basis in the actual operating environment of an airport.
In the following years, UISEE brought unmanned driving technology from the airport to the field of industrial logistics, and through 8 years of continuous innovation, UISEE developed unmanned logistics products that accurately adapted to the needs of subdivided scenarios, and realized the application in a large number of factories in different industries.
In addition, UISEE realizes that the driver's unmanned driving at points A-B cannot completely reduce costs and increase efficiency.
To this end, UISEE has added functions such as automatic decoupling, automatic loading and unloading, and automatic charging to its products through innovation, so as to realize the real full-process unmanned logistics and create more value for customers.
Taking Hong Kong International Airport as an example, 41 driverless tractors have saved more than 120 laborers, and the cost will be further reduced in the future as the scale of operation expands.
After realizing the whole process without people, Wu Gansha's next goal is to achieve the three "alls" (the whole process, all-weather, and all scenarios).
To this end, on the basis of the all-scenario solution based on the general autonomous driving model, UISEE has developed an autonomous driving domain controller that can adapt to various working conditions, and actively enters the extreme weather environment for systematic testing, so as to ensure the continuous and stable operation of unmanned vehicles in the face of sudden wind, snow, rain and fog.
As of March 2024, UISEE has implemented 40+ smart city mobility projects, covering 60+ factory logistics and distribution projects, and expanding 10+ civil aviation airport transportation projects.
In the book "From 0 to 1", author Peter Thiel sums it up this way:
"From 0 to 1, or from scratch, it means that enterprises should be good at creating and innovating, forming barriers through technology patents, network effects, economies of scale, brands, etc., so as to achieve qualitative vertical level leaps, so as to open up a blue ocean market that only belongs to itself and become the only one in this market, such a monopoly is enough for enterprises to enjoy huge profits."
Wu Gansha agrees with the book's point of view, because this is exactly what UISEE is doing right now: first dominating a specific niche and then expanding into a similar market.
This is undoubtedly a wise move, and until the current mass commercialization of autonomous driving arrives, pragmatism and rapid adaptation to the environment to achieve evolution is the key to survival.
3. The time will eventually come
When will the qualitative inflection point of autonomous driving come?
There is still no positive answer to this question in the industry.
"It's like climbing a mountain, the peak seems to be very close, but it feels like you will never be able to reach it. In this process, there is no scenery, only the same mountain roads and various ditches and bumps, and the cold wind is howling in your ears. ”
Wu Gansha told me about the state of the industry and himself in the past two years, "This is not a darkest moment, but a long-term, continuous, gray moment, like going to a higher place, altitude sickness comes, every step is very suffocating, making you lose the ability to think." ”
From another point of view, although it is difficult for me and UISEE to take every step, every step has reached a height that has not been reached in the past life.
Wu Gansha has no regrets about the establishment of UISEE, but he only feels that he owes it to his family and family, and Wu Gansha still misses the appointment with his family from the "two-year appointment" to the current "distant future".
Wu Gansha's WeChat avatar was a "contemplative rabbit" last year, which was a painting made by his daughter in the Year of the Rabbit, Wu Gansha used his WeChat avatar as his daughter's "little blackboard", and this year, he changed the avatar to his daughter's "spray dragon".
"Chinese entrepreneurs are like 'squirrel mandarin fish', cut by a thousand knives and fried in a frying pan."
Towards the end of the interview, Wu Gansha told me about an investor's description of Chinese entrepreneurs, and he paused before saying:
"But when it was presented to everyone, it still held its head high, its eyes wide with anger, and it would rather die than give in."
Looking back at this wave of the automotive revolution, electrification is only the prelude to the automotive revolution. Intelligent vehicles with intelligence and networking as the core will undoubtedly become the next direction of the whole industry's efforts, and it is also the focus of competition among enterprises in the next step.
History is always a train that never looks back. Just as electric vehicles are gradually replacing gasoline vehicles, the wave of autonomous driving will fall but will not recede.
This seems to be just a technological transformation, but behind it lies a huge change in the way of thinking, cooperation and business model.
If the value chain of the traditional automotive industry is very clear, each performs its own duties around the main engine factory and closely cooperates with each other. Just like a mature system architecture, it largely constrains what everyone in the value chain should and can do.
When the transformation takes place, the definition of each link in the value chain needs to be readjusted based on the past industrial division of labor, and the result will be that the boundaries of all roles in the value chain will begin to blur, such as the boundaries between suppliers (Tier 1) and foundries (OEMs).
What used to be a relatively clear chain structure has now become a mesh structure.
Behind this, in the process of the development of the intelligent automobile industry from the traditional chain to the network ecology, the breakthrough of each node will drive the occurrence of chain effects and promote the vigorous development of the industry.
Among them, in the wave of intelligent automotive changes, the autonomous driving industry is destined to become a star trendsetter.
In Wu Gansha's view, autonomous driving will continue to be one of the industries with the greatest impact on society in the next 20 years.
Because it solves the pain points of hundreds of millions of people, and it is also a trillion-level market itself.
"Autonomous driving can empower trillion-dollar markets such as automobiles, new mobility, logistics, and smart cities, and bring fundamental changes to these markets."
Wu Gansha looks forward to the day when UISEE can realize a truly universal autonomous driving model on the basis of continuous innovation, so that AI drivers can enter thousands of households and help thousands of industries achieve more prosperous development.
And at that time, just as Wu Xiaobo wrote in "Thirty Years of Turmoil":
"When the time comes, it's unstoppable. Everything grows wantonly, dust and dawn rise, rivers converge into rivers, nameless hills rise into peaks, and the world is incomparably open. ”
Typography | Edited by Shen Wangwang | Zhengfeng Rotating Editor-in-Chief | Xia Kun