Technological breakthroughs and capital influx have accelerated the marketization process of autonomous driving

On May 15, Baidu Apollo made its global debut of the innovative Apollo ADFM at the Apollo Day 2024 event held in Wuhan Zhixing Valley. According to reports, this is a large model technology that supports L4 level autonomous driving, which can improve the safety standard to more than 10 times that of human drivers, and cope with complex and changeable traffic scenarios in the city. In the eyes of industry insiders, the advent of Apollo ADFM marks a new milestone in autonomous driving technology.

For the autonomous driving industry, 2024 is undoubtedly a lively year, not only in terms of technology, but also in the capital market, with frequent financing of 100 million yuan. Technological breakthroughs and capital influx are expected to make the marketization of autonomous driving possible in the short term. However, in the eyes of practitioners, "the biggest obstacle to the application of autonomous driving is neither technology, nor capital, but people's hearts".

Industry financing is booming again

"In the past few years, I begged my grandfather to sue my grandmother but couldn't get financing, but this year three companies have come to talk about cooperation." Yang Hongyu, a partner of an autonomous driving data service company in Nanjing, believes that the industry has passed the "ice age" of financing, and with sufficient "ammunition" support, the market cycle of autonomous driving will be greatly shortened. In the past few years, the problem of "financing difficulty" is a common dilemma faced by the global autonomous driving industry, and many well-known autonomous driving companies such as Embark, Locomation, and Quanergy have declared bankruptcy or bankruptcy; In China, after the autonomous driving industry hit a peak of 129 financing of 87 billion yuan in 2021, the financing situation has shown a downward trend year after year.

After entering 2024, the autonomous driving industry suddenly became lively, and financing of 100 million yuan seems to have become the "industry standard". On May 15, it was reported that Baichuan Data, an autonomous driving AI data service provider, announced the completion of a 10 million yuan angel + round of financing, with the participation of Tongchuangweiye and Xiangcheng Financial Holdings. Baichuan Data said that this round of financing funds will be mainly used for the scientific and technological research and development of intelligent data services and the continuous construction of talent teams, and continue to build a data foundation for intelligent driving.

Baichuan data is not an exception, according to the reporter's incomplete statistics, only in April this year, the domestic autonomous driving industry disclosed 17 important investment and financing events, Momo Zhixing, Weidu Technology, Yinjia Technology, this core technology have obtained 100 million yuan of financing, the total amount of financing disclosed in the month exceeded 1.5 billion yuan. Among them, the $110 million Series B financing obtained by Weidu Technology also became the largest single financing amount in the month. Not long ago, the $1.05 billion Series C financing completed by Wayve, a British artificial intelligence company, became the largest financing in the autonomous driving industry this year.

At the same time, there is also a grand queue in the autonomous driving industry. Since the beginning of this year, there have been IPOs in the industry of Black Sesame Intelligence, Horizon Robotics, and Zongmu Technology, and Pony.ai has chosen to go public in the United States. On April 29, Cao Cao submitted a listing application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and it made it clear in the prospectus that part of the raised funds will be used to invest in autonomous driving. In the view of industry insiders, the listed companies in the field of autonomous driving were mainly distributed in the upstream and midstream of the industrial chain, and there were few autonomous driving solution providers in the downstream.

The application scenarios are constantly expanding

While the problem of "financing difficulties" has been alleviated, the application scenarios of autonomous driving are also expanding. Not long ago, self-driving online car-hailing was opened in Jiangxinzhou, Nanjing, and there are 39 points on the island, including residential areas, schools, subway stations, scenic spots, etc. Each self-driving ride-hailing vehicle is equipped with a safety officer, who sits in the driver's seat but does not touch the steering wheel with both hands, and the vehicle is fully autonomous, and passengers can ride for free. Jiuzhi Intelligence has recently been awarded the qualification for intelligent networked vehicles on the road in Wuxi, and has been allowed to carry out L4 autonomous driving demonstration applications on local open roads.

"Since the beginning of this year, the application of autonomous driving in the field of public transportation has been expanding." Some R&D personnel said that L4 autonomous driving technology is still being optimized, and enterprises need to debug software and hardware by collecting a large amount of test data to solve all kinds of sudden small probability events that may be encountered in autonomous driving, so it is safer and controllable to take the lead in applying L4 autonomous driving technology in public transportation.

As domestic autonomous driving has shifted from small-scale testing and verification to a new stage of rapid technological development and accelerated ecological construction, local governments are also providing practical support for practical applications. Up to now, 51 cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou, have issued pilot demonstration policies for autonomous driving, and continue to accelerate the expansion of application scenarios. According to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, by the end of 2023, a total of 17 national-level test demonstration zones, 7 Internet of Vehicles pilot areas, and 16 pilot cities for the coordinated development of smart cities and intelligent networked vehicles will be built across the country, and more than 22,000 kilometers of test demonstration roads will be opened.

The continuous expansion of autonomous driving application scenarios will also have a negative impact on the technical level and market prospects. Debang Securities pointed out that in the context of the continuous upgrading of autonomous driving technology, the existing high-level automatic driving in China will break through to a higher level, and at the same time, some automatic driving functions will also accelerate the sinking, gradually becoming the "standard" of smart cars. At the same time, according to Huatai Securities, self-driving taxis will be commercialized on a large scale in 2026; By 2030, the cost of domestic self-driving taxis will drop to about 1 yuan/km, which is lower than the cost of manned online car-hailing services, and the domestic self-driving taxi market is expected to reach nearly 500 billion yuan.

The most difficult thing to overcome is the human heart

Although the autonomous driving market is ushering in another wave, it is still a long way from true large-scale adoption. In the eyes of industry insiders, autonomous driving is a very high threshold and requires long-term investment, and the industry is still in the stage of continuous accumulation of technical capabilities and continuous polishing of business models in the short term. In practice, autonomous driving technology is not 100% reliable. On May 11, an ideal car owner broke the news that "after his car turned on the automatic driving system, it braked sharply at high speed, resulting in a rear-end accident." In this regard, the ideal side said that the cause of the accident was that the vehicle misidentified the picture of the bulletin board on the highway as the real car, which was misidentified by the system, and the software system will be improved in the future.

At the same time, some business people believe that there are still many long-tail problems of autonomous driving that have not been solved, such as the relevant infrastructure and supporting environment have not kept up; If there is a problem with the vehicle, no insurance company is willing to provide insurance services; Self-driving taxis in China are currently all temporary licenses, and they need to be changed frequently. In addition, the long commercialization cycle will also erode the confidence of investors and practitioners, and the autonomous driving industry will fall silent again. In December 2015, Baidu officially announced the establishment of an autonomous driving division, and threw out the bold statement that it plans to commercialize autonomous vehicles in three years and achieve mass production in five years. However, Baidu has not been able to achieve this goal so far, and it is even more difficult for the majority of small and medium-sized enterprises in the industry to survive the widespread application of autonomous driving.

"The most difficult obstacle to overcome in the large-scale application of autonomous driving has never been technology, even if it is a relatively difficult visual recognition route, we also have a certain amount of technical accumulation." A researcher from the School of Mechanical and Transportation Engineering of Guangxi University of Science and Technology told reporters, "The most difficult thing is how to get the public to overcome psychological barriers and be able to trust autonomous driving." The researcher admits that in the short term, it is very difficult, "If a person is in an accident while driving, everyone will blame the person's driving skills." However, if there is a problem with autonomous driving, it is easy for people to have a sense of distrust in autonomous driving, and many people will feel that it is very likely to happen to them, causing panic. ”

Jiangsu Economic News reporter Fan Jun

Intern Ping Shiyu