200,000 unmanned vehicles, Baidu rushed to achieve it before Tesla

AutoLab

2024-05-16 21:10Posted on the official account of Henan AutoLab

According to Musk's official announcement, Tesla will officially release Robotaxi on August 8 this year, and before Tesla, Baidu launched a Robotaxi with a price of just over 200,000.

"FSD and Robotaxi are rumored to be coming to China soon, and we are looking forward to welcoming them. However, I would like to remind you that if you take Wuhan as an example, Tesla wants to achieve the level of fully unmanned operation like Baidu, at least 3 years, and at most 5 years, don't believe it. ”

At Apollo Day 2024 held in Wuhan, Wang Yunpeng, vice president of Baidu Group and president of the intelligent driving business group, gave Musk a piece of advice, and what made him so confident was the Apollo RT6 (Yichi 06) equipped with Baidu's sixth-generation intelligent system solution.

Large models get on the bus

As the sixth generation of Baidu Apollo's unmanned car, RT6 guide price is 204,600 yuan, and the comfort is "beyond Mercedes-Benz S-class and comparable to Maybach" in PPT.

In fact, the RT6 is not a stranger to this car, I had a sneak peek experience at Baidu Apollo's autonomous driving base in Yizhuang two years ago, but it was still a concept car at that time.

The RT6, which was mass-produced two years later, didn't look much different from the exterior, and I deliberately compared the data from the concept car two years ago with the production car today. The length, width and height of the concept car are 4760mm*1870mm*1650mm, and the wheelbase is 2830mm; The length, width and height of the production car are 4765/1885/1715 mm, respectively, and the wheelbase remains the same.

Top: RT6 Concept Bottom: RT6 production car

The change in size is not too big, and the overall shape is basically restored to the design of the concept car, which has a feeling of "baby bus". The interior of the car still maintains a four-seat layout, and is available in both steering wheel and steering wheelless modes.

Top: RT6 Concept Bottom: RT6 production car

Two years ago, the interior of the concept car I experienced was a version without a steering wheel, and the driver's seat could be directly transformed into a vending machine, but now the production car is not so advanced in design, but it is still more avant-garde in terms of function than ordinary smart electric vehicles.

For example, the vehicle can realize remote monitoring of the whole process, including automatic maintenance, risk warning, automatic OTA, remote control windows, etc. If a passenger in the car suddenly feels unwell during operation, the SOS service can respond remotely to help the vehicle stop safely and dial 120 to send the passenger to the hospital.

As a pure electric vehicle, the RT6 is equipped with BYD Fodi's electric motor and Honeycomb Energy's lithium iron phosphate battery pack, and the vehicle supports battery swapping, and can automatically complete the battery swap in unmanned mode.

Moreover, the core of RT6 has reached the next level, because it has realized the landing of large models.

At the event, Baidu Apollo released the world's first large model that supports L4 autonomous driving, Apollo ADFM, in addition to the L4 unmanned vehicle RT6, Baidu Apollo ADFM large model has also been implemented in the field of L2+ intelligent driving.

We all know that at present, in addition to Tesla, the most active player in the field of intelligent driving is Baidu Apollo. Previously, they launched the pure visual city pilot assisted driving product ANP3.0, which was mass-produced on the Jiyue 01.

Now, with the empowerment of Baidu Apollo ADFM, ANP3.0 will be upgraded to ASD (Apollo Self-Driving, corresponding to Tesla's FSD), and will be mass-produced and launched in all models of Jiyue.

Based on the large model of autonomous driving, Baidu Apollo will only take half a year to complete the preparation of the full-scale autonomous driving travel service in a new city, and this verification time will continue to be shortened.

After 11 years

When I saw the RT6 again after two years, my biggest impression was the price drop.

Baidu launched a self-driving car project 11 years ago, officially launched a driverless car in the second half of 2015, and also drove a high-speed test on Beijing's Fifth Ring Road.

In March 2017, Baidu officially established the Intelligent Driving Group (IDG), and a month later Baidu Apollo was launched. At the Baidu AI Developer Conference in July, Robin Li took an unmanned car to the meeting, and he also received a fine issued by the Beijing traffic police, because according to the regulations at the time, unmanned cars were still on the road without a license.

In 2018, Beijing issued the first batch of autonomous driving road test licenses, and Baidu Apollo directly won 5, and since then unmanned vehicles can finally hold certificates to work.

Baidu Apollo's unmanned car has been launched for six generations so far, the second-generation Chery, BYD and the third-generation Lincoln are still modified cars, and the fourth-generation Hongqi has begun to the fifth-generation Jihu, Aion, and Weimar, all of which have adopted the front-loading mass production method.

Now in the sixth generation, the "flower pot" on the top of the RT6 is getting smaller and smaller, and the price is getting lower and lower. The cost of the fourth-generation Apollo Moon, which is a collaboration between Baidu and JiHu, is as high as 480,000 yuan, and when the RT6 concept car was unveiled two years ago, the cost was claimed to have dropped to 250,000 yuan.

Now, when the RT6 is officially delivered, the cost of the whole vehicle has been reduced by 60% to the level of more than 200,000 yuan. According to Baidu Apollo's official statement, the cost of each generation of unmanned vehicles will be reduced by half, and the capacity will be increased tenfold.

The reduction in the cost of a single vehicle is only half of the task for Robotaxi because there are still huge operating costs. Baidu's own radish run, at the beginning of 2023, because the scale of operation is still relatively small, every unmanned car on the road is losing a lot of money.

However, the official data shows that the current revenue of Radish Express has increased by 9 times, the loss has been reduced by half, and it is expected to break even in Wuhan by the end of this year, and enter a period of full profitability in 2025.

Whether RT6 can help Baidu Apollo achieve commercial profitability remains to be tested by time, and if Tesla's Robotaxi can really enter the Chinese market, the competition in the field of unmanned vehicles will definitely be more fierce at that time.

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