Introduction: In January 2021, Baidu, as the world's leading artificial intelligence platform company, announced the formal establishment of a smart car company.
# Baidu "Unmanned in the car" road test
Some time ago, Baidu CEO Robin Li posted a post on SNS, "Finally, we can no longer use security personnel, and the responsibility is heavy...". If you have tried Robotaxi (unmanned taxi), you should not be unfamiliar with the safety officer mentioned here.
Taxi drivers who travel along the way are in this identity. Most of the time, they don't need to control the vehicle, but only need to take over in time in danger to escort the passengers in the back seat.
The removal of the safety officer and all the driving to the machine is a key step for the maturity of unmanned driving technology and an important indicator for testing the strength of autonomous driving players.
Therefore, before it is officially put into operation, whether or not it can obtain a fully driverless road test permit is often a severe test for players.
From a reality point of view, there is no unified relevant laws and regulations in China. Regarding the issuance of drive test licenses, local policies are not interoperable, and players need to obtain authorization from local governments.
In addition, most of the players who have been licensed are still in the testing stage where there must be "people in the car", and the true driverless driving is waiting to be verified. It can be seen that, both in terms of technology and policy, "unmanned in the car" road test is quite difficult.
Baidu, a leader in autonomous driving in China, recently announced that Apollo has been the first to obtain 5 unmanned road test notices in Beijing, which means that it is one step closer to commercial landing, and even Robin Li did not restrain his excitement.
# AutoX's unmanned fleet
But it is also coincidental that at almost the same time, another autonomous driving company AutoX sent a team of 25 fully driverless vehicles to drive mightily on the open roads of Shenzhen. Compared to the well-known Baidu, this startup is still young, but its strength cannot be underestimated.
AutoX, is the US interest Zhou full license manned unmanned second winner, while the license is recognized as the world's largest technical difficulty, the highest authority, has only four holds, AutoX is the only Chinese company .
As for the other three, for example, Alphabet's Waymo won the first one in 2018, and Amazon's Zoox and GM's Cruise also won the license this year.
According to the latest report, Cruise has started a fully driverless road test. Unlike other companies, Cruise's vehicles can drive to any street in San Francisco, and the road conditions are dozens of times more complicated.
And AutoX, which has returned to China with foreign experience, has accumulated a wealth of road test data after several years of testing and polishing. From the arrangement of the fully driverless fleet on the road, it can be seen that AutoX has its own technology and safety Confident enough in the aspect.
AutoX believes that if you want to achieve true unmanned driving, stable and reliable AI driving capabilities are necessary, rather than relying on remote remote control with certain risks.
Aiming at this research and development direction, AutoX XCU built by AutoX can already provide a powerful computing platform for driverless AI.
It is worth noting that in recent years, Baidu's key promotion of 5G cloud driving has used the remote control technology questioned by AutoX. Some time ago, when Baidu's Robotaxi could only get on and off the car at designated points, AutoX already supports parking at any point.
From this, it seems to be able to feel the dark competition between competitors in the field of autonomous driving.
# Robotaxi track fiery
More than these two companies, in 2020, Robotaxi has become a hot spot in the industry, and many players have started road tests and trial operations.
Beijing, Guangzhou, Changsha, Shanghai... Citizens from many places have participated in the experience of this new service, and even regarded it as an online celebrity check-in project.
Wenyuan Zhixing, as the first domestic autonomous driving company to launch Robotaxi fully open to the outside world, has launched operations in Guangzhou as early as the end of November 2019. The first batch of 40 vehicles has been launched, covering Huangpu District, the development zone center and other areas .
According to Wenyuan Zhixing’s latest disclosure, in the past year, Robotaxi has completed nearly 150,000 trips and served more than 60,000 passengers. This is also the first domestic Robotaxi passenger survey report.
This report shows that the users of Wenyuan Zhixing Robotaxi are mainly young and middle-aged users, and nearly 30% are loyal users who use it every week, mainly for daily commuting and novel experiences.
On the whole, user satisfaction is relatively high, but there is still much room for improvement in terms of travel coverage, waiting time, and convenience of getting on and off points.
# Global in L2 stage
Indeed, as a business scenario where autonomous driving can be practically implemented, taxi services are widely optimistic.
In addition, logistics and transportation, distribution services, urban operations, etc., have also attracted a large number of players, including vehicle manufacturers, and emerging Internet companies due to predictable profit prospects.
According to the classification standard established by the American Society of Automotive Engineers, which is also the current global mainstream general rule, automatic driving can be divided into 6 levels according to the degree of control of the car and the driving range . L0 is fully human driving, and L5 is fully autonomous driving.
At present, the world as a whole is in the L2 stage, and ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System), as the basis of autonomous driving, has been developing rapidly.
ADAS currently has auxiliary functions such as adaptive navigation, collision warning, and emergency braking. However, due to the high cost, the assembly of this system is still rare in China. These vehicle manufacturers and Internet companies choose different stages when entering the research and development of autonomous driving.
The former is more inclined to proceed step by step, step by step from a low level to a high level to ensure the safety of the technology landing, while the latter tends to skip the low level and conduct research from L3 or even L4 to give full play to its own technology research and development advantages.
# Capital cooling
As we all know, new technologies are very expensive, and so is automatic driving. Whether it is sensors used to perceive the environment, a computing center that simulates brain decisions, or a controller that executes commands, huge costs are required at the software and hardware levels.
In the past ten years, autonomous driving has been favored by the capital market, and the amount of investment has been constantly refreshed. The valuation of Waymo even exceeded US$100 billion at one time.
However, with the slowdown of commercialization in recent years and the delay of the L3\L4 level landing schedule, capital's attitude towards autonomous driving has become more cautious and rational.
For example, Waymo's latest market valuation has shrunk to $30 billion, and Uber's recent move to sell its autonomous driving business in order to return blood also illustrates this point.
As the trend of the times, automatic driving has always been high expectations, and everyone is looking forward to it to improve driving safety and reduce driving manpower costs.
But the reality is that the high maturity of its technology and the large-scale production, obviously, we still have a long way to go.
# The future, we
On the way, the evolution and improvement of technology are inseparable from the running-in with humans, and harm and cost are inevitable.
In the past, some injuries have occurred. For example, the casualties caused by autonomous driving in the past two years will immediately cause huge discussions in society as soon as they hit the headlines.
Is autonomous driving safe? Is it worth trusting completely? Who should be held accountable when an accident occurs?
In the future, some costs are also disturbing, such as the ethical dilemma that has plagued human society for thousands of years.
How will the machine make a decision when it happens in autonomous driving? Should I choose to save the 5 people on the left or the 1 person on the right?
In short, whether autonomous driving brings social benefits or social crises , how we , as ordinary people, truly understand and accept it in our daily lives is actually more real.
It's not too flattering, and it's not ruthlessly attacked. Perhaps, you can start with the purchase of a new L2 car.
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