Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Frontier stories are always magical, and trillion-scale autonomous driving is hard to escape.

Mobileye, Intel's autonomous driving subsidiary, officially landed on NASDAQ. At $21 a share, raising $861 million, it opened up 27% and closed with a market capitalisation of $23 billion, making it the fourth-largest IPO of the year.

On the same day, Argo AI, an American self-driving startup invested by Ford and Volkswagen for a total of $2.6 billion and valued at $7 billion, went bankrupt.

Over the past year, a large number of overseas companies focusing on autonomous vehicle-related technologies, especially L4 and above, have experienced varying degrees of decline in valuation or market value. Although the enthusiasm of the autonomous driving market at the global level is declining, in sharp contrast to overseas, the boom in domestic autonomous driving has not weakened, but more and more players are rubbing their hands and trying to do a big job in this field.

The players of the domestic autonomous driving track can be roughly divided into three categories, namely, the Internet big factories accustomed to the frontier fields, such as Baidu and Huawei; the "unicorns" who grew up with the help of capital, such as Xiaoma Zhixing and Wenyuan Zhixing; and the new force automobile enterprises trying to realize curve overtaking by means of automatic driving, such as Wei Xiaoli.

Just because you're on the same track doesn't mean you're your opponent. From the information currently available, players have their own direction, either to provide a full-stack solution, or to target driverless taxis, or commercial vehicles themselves.

No matter what direction they were heading, the immaturity of L3 level technology, and the impossibility of L4 level landing, the players had to face two mountains. In the process of climbing mountains, there will always be people who fall down because they have no self-hematopoietic ability, and there will always be people who realize the breakdown from technology to application, from application to commercialization maturity under the continuous influx and accumulation of a large amount of capital.

1. Automatic driving will revolutionize the entire automobile industry, and its commercial value will naturally not escape the eyes of Internet manufacturers.

Domestically, Baidu is the earliest Internet giant in the field of autonomous driving. Baidu has been "deeply engaged" in driverless driving for ten years since the establishment of an autonomous driving R & D team in 2013.

In terms of commercialization, Baidu driverless business is divided into three ways. One is to provide Apollo autonomous driving technology solutions for host manufacturers; the second is to integrate Baidu autonomous driving innovations through its integrated vehicles; and the third is to drive autonomous taxis quickly.

Under the ecological layout for many years, Baidu has made certain achievements, especially the commercialization problem of the third road "radish fast running." At the end of 2021, radish running finally began to charge for trial operation, and since this year, Baidu has been in Beijing, Wuhan, Chongqing for six consecutive years, to open pure unmanned automatic driving services to citizens.

Source: Baidu radish fast running compared to unmanned taxis, providing technical solutions and vehicle manufacturing, Baidu these two roads development is not very ideal.

Baidu has cooperated with BAIC, Great Wall, Jianghuai, Chang 'an, Chery and other five independent brands to provide L2 to L4 automatic driving system. However, cooperation with independent brands has not been smooth, and there is currently no car company to help Baidu achieve its original planning goals.

In addition, on June 8 this year, lasting 15 months, Baidu's smart car brand collection finally released the first concept car ROBO-01, but did not achieve the effect of letting consumers shine.

Mass production is the ultimate proposition that autonomous driving cannot bypass, but under the influence of many external factors such as epidemic situation, rising raw material price and shortage of supply chain, it is unknown whether the concentration can be delivered on schedule.

Among the giants, Huawei is seen as a big competitor to Baidu's driverless cars in the domestic market.

Huawei has always claimed not to build cars, only to talk about cooperation. The first, like Baidu, provides a full-stack solution for intelligent driving that includes intelligent driving applications, computing platforms and sensors. The second is to provide MDC intelligent driving computing platform, connect partners 'sensors and actuators, and support partners in developing intelligent driving software from many aspects.

At present, Huawei has more than 5000 R & D teams for intelligent automobile parts business, including more than 2000 R & D personnel for autonomous driving. It is understood that Huawei and BAIC, Chang 'an, GAC choose Huawei Inside cooperation mode. In addition, Huawei is also helping well-off Celis build and sell cars. From the sales volume of "asking the world," this cooperation is relatively successful.

Lively track, naturally not without Ali, Tencent figure.

Ali established Dharma Institute in October 2017 and set up automatic driving department. It selected L4 technical route, mainly in the vertical segmentation categories of logistics vehicles and passenger cars, which is highly consistent with its own business. Tencent, on the one hand, takes a stake in autonomous driving enterprises, on the other hand, constantly optimizes autonomous driving software, doing both as a "connector" without launching related hardware products.

In fact, in addition to the above several players, Xiaomi, Didi, DJI, OPPO and other Internet manufacturers, but also in the past two or three years to play automatic driving, each also has different development track and product, technical characteristics.

2. Unicorn enterprises drive themselves in groups with wide track, large market and rising enthusiasm for capital, which has also made many entrepreneurial enterprises.

At present, there are many "unicorns" on the whole track, such as Xiaoma Zhixing, Wenyuan Zhixing, Weimo Zhixing, momenta, Autox, Yuanjun Qixing, Qingzhou Zhihang, Horizon, Black Sesame, Superstar Future, Zhongzhixing, Mushroom Car Federation and other companies.

Among these "unicorns," Xiaoma Zhixing, co-founded by Peng Jun, former director architect of Baidu North American R & D, and Lou Tiancheng, the founder of Chinese programming, has attracted the most attention from the market.

Like most autonomous driving enterprises, Xiaoma Zhixing also provides full-stack autonomous driving technology in business model. At present, it has established cooperation with Toyota, Hyundai, FAW, GAC, Bosch, etc. In addition, Robotaxi, the most difficult but also the most imaginative business, was also chosen.

At present, Xiaoma Zhixing's driverless taxi has entered the preliminary stage of commercialization, and relevant technologies have also been connected to Cao Cao's special car, Ruqi and other travel platforms.

Source: Pony Zhixing is different. In the selection of automatic driving scenes, Pony Zhixing aims at heavy truck logistics. Starting from the car scene, the truck route is basically a highway, there is no mixed traffic and other complex road conditions, which also means that the technical research and development difficulty of self-driving trucks will be lower than that of cars, and commercialization will naturally land faster.

There is always a big difference between theory and reality. Although Xiaoma Zhixing has certain technical advantages and no problem in layout, it has not walked out of a commercial road that can make profits continuously. Valuations continue to climb, losses are getting bigger and bigger, and it will rely more on external blood transfusions.

When the blood transfusion was suddenly interrupted, he could only choose to cut off his arm to survive or sell himself.

Compared with Xiao Ma Zhixing, Wenyuan Zhixing, valued at $4.4 billion, has more diversified business scenarios, including autonomous taxis, autonomous freight cars, autonomous minibuses and autonomous sanitation vehicles.

Starting with subdivided scenarios, commercialization will be realized faster, revenue growth will attract continuous blood transfusion of capital, and then gradually more complex scenarios will be realized. The players who choose this transition path are not only Wenyuan Zhixing, but to be precise, it has become a helpless choice for many self-driving start-ups.

For example, the autonomous driving company owned by Great Wall Holdings is making efforts in the field of low-speed logistics distribution vehicles. "Low speed" means that even if there is a failure, the damage will not be too great. At the same time,"logistics distribution" belongs to the business model, C terminal is not the main user, but Jingdong, Meituan and Ali and other unmanned sales enterprises, logistics enterprises.

Source: rookie automatic delivery car The problem is that this path is difficult to solve the long tail data. Sensor solutions and computing platforms are getting closer and closer, with fewer suppliers. Therefore, data determines the victory or defeat of autonomous driving companies. But for unicorns, survival is more important than "technology."

It is worth mentioning that Gu Weihao, CEO of Weiwei Zhixing, was once the general manager of Baidu Intelligent Automobile Division, while Han Xu, founder of Wenyuan Zhixing, also served as chief scientist of Baidu Autonomous Driving Division.

More interestingly, according to statistics, from 2015 to 2018, more than 16 driverless senior talents left Baidu to start their own driverless field companies. Baidu's "driverless Whampoa Military Academy" is worthy of the name.

3. New force automobile enterprises accelerate self-research In the market view, passenger car intellectualization is the main way to commercialize autonomous driving. Autonomous driving has also been regarded by the outside world as the standard of cars in the era of smart cars, which is the key point for smart electric vehicles to win.

So for car companies, they must gradually master autonomous driving technology in their own hands to increase important chips for future development.

At present, the self-owned brand part has realized the mass production of L2 automatic driving vehicles. The traditional automobile factories include Chang 'an, Great Wall and Geely. However, compared with the new forces of car building and self-driving start-ups, the performance of domestic traditional automobile enterprises in the field of autonomous driving is not outstanding.

Of course, for the new forces that do not dominate "car-building," R & D capability is also an important support for their outstanding encirclement. The development of the whole process, such as the algorithm of perception and decision-making of automatic driving, vehicle control strategy, bottom system and test, will greatly increase their competitiveness in the market.

From the technical point of view, Xiaopeng and Weilai, ideal is the representative of the new force of automatic driving, Zhiji Automobile, Avita and other automobile enterprises through the deep cooperation with the head supplier, created the competitive advantage of automatic driving.

Among them, Xiaopeng has always been a new force automobile enterprise with quite positive automatic driving layout. Since its establishment, it has been dead to pure vision + perception fusion pure self-research route.

Especially in Xiaopeng's urban NGP, vehicles can complete intelligent navigation assisted driving of dynamic tasks such as cruising and following in their own lane, navigation/overtaking lane change, merging/outgoing road, traffic light recognition start and stop, intersection/roundabout/tunnel passage, avoidance of other traffic participants, etc. on urban roads.

Source: Xiaopeng Automobile As for the ideal, it has switched from the earliest supplier scheme, that is, from never doing L3 to the current deeply customized quasi-L3 supplier scheme. Wei Lai originally wanted to go straight to L4, but later switched back to the current fusion perception pure self-research route.

In addition to Wei Xiaoli, Weima, Zero Run and other new forces also have a layout in the field of autonomous driving. For example, actively cooperate with Baidu, Huawei and other solution providers, as well as configure lidar, camera and other hardware in multiple places on new models, as well as road test L3 and L4 automatic driving systems.

Autonomous driving, as the most powerful weapon for new forces to seize the market, is both halo and shackle.

In the past two years, the "automatic driving" accidents of new forces in car building have occurred frequently. The root cause lies in the propaganda and misleading of car enterprises. The core difference between autonomous driving and autonomous assisted driving is whether the control is in the person or in the machine. At present, the automatic driving technology promoted by some automobile enterprises should be accurately called assisted driving technology, which cannot be called automatic driving technology.

After many public opinions, Wei Xiaoli and other new forces car enterprises have also learned well, the previous automatic driving has become the current "intelligent assisted driving."

Frequent accidents undoubtedly cast a shadow over autonomous driving. However, this does not affect the significance of autonomous driving to the new force car enterprises, Wei Xiaoli did not slow down their pace, but is accelerating the layout.

However, in recent years, the investment in self-research autonomous driving has only increased and not decreased. How long can the new forces, who are not rich themselves, last?

On the whole, autonomous driving is a demand and an inevitable development in the future. It can be believed that under the impetus of capital, policy and other aspects, players will chase each other, there will always be someone out, and there will always be someone who will achieve a breakthrough.

This article comes from Weixin Official Accounts: Zinc Finance (ID: xincaijing), Author: Lu Shiming, Editor: Dafeng

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.